Back
to Chapter 25
26
Where
now?
The
influence of– folk music – popular music
on classical – classical music on popular.
Acoustic and electronic instruments.
Electronic Music. The three Tenors –
‘popular’ classical music. Increasing
‘classical-crossover’ – steep decline
in symphonic recordings. Up dating opera
productions. Hope for the future.
At
neither the International Society for
Music in Education conference in Innsbruck
in 1985, when I chose as the subject
for my talk ‘The Symphony Orchestra:
into the 21st century’, nor
a year later at the Wheatland Foundation
conference, did any of us anticipate
how soon so many people would have computers
that would give them access to music
programmes and radio stations world-wide.
Or that they would be able to download
and record music so easily. By the late
1990s and the start of the 21st
century mobile phones and mp3 had become
commonplace and a few years later so
had the iPod.
Composers
have always found inspiration from,
or been influenced by, the popular
music in their environment – their own
folk music – from Haydn who drew on
Croatian and Gypsy melodies to Bartók,
Kodály, Vaughan Williams and
Charles Ives who made use of American
folk tunes and ragtime dances. Once
composed, commercial popular
music began to replace folk music as
‘the music of the people’ to some extent
popular and classical music gained inspiration
from each other.
Not
long after the beginning of the 20th
century some classical composers, though
they did not borrow melodies, started
to use the rhythms and stylistic effects
of the new popular music – ragtime and
jazz. Debussy in 1908 for the Golliwog’s
Cakewalk, Stravinsky for his Ragtime
for 11 Instruments in 1918 and Milhaud
in 1922 in La création du
monde and a Jazz Symphony
and a Jazz Sonata by George Antheil
are early examples.
Examples
of another form of crossover, that between
the popular music of the first half
of the 20th century, jazz,
and western classical music, were two
compositions premiered in the 1950s.
The Swiss composer Rolf Liebermann’s
Concerto for Jazz Band and Symphony
Orchestra, written in 1954, not
only combines jazz and symphonic music
but makes use of serialism as well.
It has had a number of performances
and was still being played in 2003 when
it was in the programme of the New York
Pops at Carnegie Hall. Another serialist
attracted to the hybrid jazz/orchestra
was Matyás Seiber who came to
England from Hungary in 1935, when he
was already 30. He had always been interested
in jazz and when he received a commission
from the London Philharmonic in 1958
decided to collaborate with John Dankworth
to compose Improvisations for Jazz
Band and Symphony Orchestra. Richard
Rodney Bennett, best known for his film
and concert music, was asked by the
great American tenor saxophonist
Stan Getz if he would compose
a concerto for him. Bennett’s wide musical
sympathies, which include both jazz
and serialism – the latter no doubt
as a result of his study in Paris with
Pierre Boulez – made him an ideal choice.
However, this was his first venture
into crossover. Unfortunately, Getz
died in 1990, before the concerto was
completed. The first performance had
to wait until 1992 when the very fine
British saxophonist John Harle played
it at the Proms.
In 1922,
George Gershwin, then only 24, composed
a short 25 minute jazz opera Blue
Monday, which was orchestrated by
Will Vodery. Paul Whiteman who had conducted
the 1922 performance was so impressed
that he asked Gershwin to compose a
symphonic jazz piece for him to conduct
at a concert he was planning. It was
for this concert in 1924 that Gershwin
composed his best known work, The
Rhapsody in Blue, which was orchestrated
by Ferde Grofé. The concert in
New York’s Aeolian Hall was a major
event and attended by amongst many Stravinsky,
Rakhmaninov, Kreisler, Heifetz, Stokowski
and other notable musicians. When the
following year Blue Monday, now
renamed 135th Street,
was given a concert performance in Carnegie
Hall, it was re-orchestrated by Ferde
Grofé. After that Gershwin went
on to compose (and orchestrate himself),
the Concerto in F for piano and orchestra,
An American in Paris and the
opera Porgy and Bess, at the
same time as he was composing popular
songs – Fascinating Rhythm, The Man
I Love, and countless other wonderful
songs and musicals – Oh Kay!,
Funny Face, Strike up the Band and
the music for Fred Astaire and Ginger
Rodgers films. All before his early
death at 39.
Gershwin,
though not a classically trained composer,
was the first to compose what might
be called symphonic jazz and has probably
been the most successful in composing
jazz orientated music for the symphony
orchestra. However, he was not the first
to compose a serious piece in the style
that had originated in the southern
states of America at the beginning of
the century. In 1911 the Negro composer
Scott Joplin, best known for his Maple
Leaf Rag and The Entertainer,
published at his own expense Treemonisha,
his attempt
to create an indigenous black opera.
It received a single concert performance
with piano accompaniment in 1915 but,
to his great disappointment, failed
to gain approval. However, a staged
revival in 1975 by the Houston Grand
Opera Company with a new orchestration
by Gunther Schuller, who also conducted
the performances, was a very considerable
success. It is reported that the finale
A Real Slow Drag had to be encored
three times. After the performances
in Houston the opera was taken on tour
and recorded in 1976 by Deutsche Grammophon.
I heard A Real Slow Drag when
it was played at the Proms, sung by
Jeíssye Norman with chorus and
orchestra, in a very exciting performance
which was enthusiastically received
by the Prom audience.
While
in the past it was classical composers
finding inspiration in popular music,
since the beginning of the 20th
century the tide has turned and it has
been popular music that has been raiding
the classical repertoire. I remember
I’m Always Chasing Rainbows, based
on the Fantasie Impromptu in C Sharp
Minor by Chopin, still being very
popular when I was a child in the late
1920s and early 1930s. Amongst many
classical compositions that were used
in popular music in the 1930s, 40s,
and 50s, were a Mozart piano sonata,
which became In an Eighteenth-Century
Drawing Room, Song of India,
Tommy Dorsey’s arrangement of one of
the themes in Scheherazade
by Rimsky-Korsakov
and Summer Moon, based on
the Berceuse from Stravinsky’s
ballet music for The Firebird,
which Lauritz Melchior sang with
considerable success. George Forrest
and Robert Wright, who had had a big
success, first in New York and then
in 1946 in London with Song of Norway,
a reworking of themes from the
music of Grieg, then plundered the music
by Borodin for Kismet, an even
bigger success. During its London run
in 1953 I played in the orchestra a
number of times. Forrest and Wright
had arranged the music tastefully, but
could not escape trivialising Borodin’s
original. The best known song Stranger
in Paradise was based on a melody
from the Polovtsian Dances in
Borodin’s opera Prince Igor and
the String Quartet in D provided
Baubles, Bangles and Beads and
And this is my Beloved , the
quartet’s lovely second movement, originally
in 3/4 time now changed to 4/4.
Even that could not wholly spoil this
wonderful music. I wonder if those who
had not heard Borodin’s music before
(the large majority) will have enjoyed
it any less, in its somewhat debased
form, than those of us who had enjoyed
the original?
Few
contemporary composers seem to have
drawn on rock music for inspiration
to any extent so far though from the
late 1950s and until the present time
a surprising number of pop and rock
artists and groups have incorporated
extracts from or allusions to classical
music. Elvis Presley had two massive
hits: the first It’s Now or Never
making use of O Sole Mio, which
many years earlier had served Caruso
very well. It had another outing as
the backing for a long-running TV advert
for a well-know ice-cream. The other,
I Can’t Help Falling in Love
With You included an old favourite
Plaisir d’Amour, by the 18th
century composer Padre Giovanni Martini.
An example of classic rock’s borrowing
from another genre was Procol Harum’s
number one hit in the UK charts in the
1960s A Whiter Shade of Pale. In
this they made use of Bach’s Air
on the G String (often mistakenly
written in Internet record advertisements
as Air on a G String – a rather
unfortunate error) and Sleepers Awake,
from his Cantata no.140. Annie’s
Song, with a little help from the
big tune in the second movement of Tchaikovsky’s
5th Symphony provided both
John Denver and the flautist James Galway
with major hits and, more recently,
Muse, a hard rock band, which has quite
frequently blended classical music elements
with their own, sampled some of Rakhmaninov’s
Second Piano Concerto for their
song Space Dementia in their
album Origin of Symmetry.
In
1967 the group the Moody Blues was asked
to make a rock version of Dvorak’s New
World Symphony, but succeeded in
persuading the record company to let
them write their own composition instead.
Probably the first example of crossover
of pop group and symphony orchestra
was when this group recorded Days
of Future Past, which was orchestrated
by the well-known composer and arranger
Peter Knight, with the London Festival
Orchestra. For their subsequent adventures
into this kind of composition they used
the mellotron (a synthesiser that contains
samples of all the orchestral instruments),
which was no doubt considerably cheaper
than engaging an orchestra.
A more
interesting example of pop and symphony
crossover was when in 1969 Deep Purple,
a hard rock-group joined the Royal Philharmonic
Orchestra for a concert in the Royal
Albert Hall to play Jon Lord’s Concerto
for Group and Orchestra, conducted
by Malcolm Arnold (later Sir Malcolm).
The rehearsals did not go well – the
orchestra which had been rehearsing
Arnold’s 6th Symphony (the
first piece in the concert) were not
too happy to be working with a pop group
and it seems not too co-operative either.
It took all Malcolm’s charm plus, at
one point some extremely strong language,
to pull things together. A recording
of this concert (not including the symphony)
was issued in 1970. 30 years later,
in 1999, Deep Purple did two performances
(one now issued as a DVD) of Concerto
for Group and Orchestra, this time
with the London Symphony Orchestra..
Malcolm Arnold was to have conducted
but sadly by then he was not well enough
and Paul Mann took his place.
In 1970,
the year after their very successful
concert, Malcolm Arnold again conducted
the group, this time with the orchestra
of the Light Music Society, in another
piece by Jon Lord, his Gemini Suite,
which had been commissioned by the BBC..
It was recorded ‘live’ at the concert,
but not issued until many years later
as Gemini Suite Live. A year
after the concert a studio recording
of a revised version of the Suite
was issued under its original title.
A number
of composers have tried to combine western
classical music with that of another
culture. One of the first was John Mayer
who from the 1950s was blending Indian
and Western music. Born in India he
came to Britain as a very young man
to study violin and composition at the
Royal Academy of Music. He joined the
Royal Philharmonic Orchestra as a violinist
whilst I was in the orchestra and we
became friends. In fact, in 1960 he
composed several short exercises for
my tutor First Tunes and Studies.
A few years earlier Sir Charles Groves,
then conductor of the Liverpool Philharmonic
Orchestra, commissioned Mayer to compose
a piece for his orchestra and in 1958
they gave the first performance of Mayer’s
Dance Suite, for sitar, flute,
tabla, tambura and orchestra – it would
probably now be called ‘crossover’..
In 1966
Mayer teamed up with the great Jamaican
alto saxophonist Joe Harriott to form
an ensemble Indo-Jazz Fusions: The Joe
Harriott-John Mayer Double Quintet.
The band combined elements of classical,
jazz and Indian music, with on the Indo
side John Mayer on violin and harpsichord,
plus sitar, flute tabla and tambura,
and on the jazz side Joe Harriott on
alto plus trumpet, piano, bass, and
drums. The band had considerable success
and made some very good recordings.
When Joe Harriott died in 1973 Mayer
decided to close the band down and it
was not until more than twenty years
later that he decided in 1995 to re-form
the band again, this time as John Mayer’s
Indo-Jazz Fusions, with a group of much
younger musicians. He said that he felt
that this new group out-performed the
Harriott-era ensemble because now they
had far more familiarity and facility
with Hindustani improvisational techniques.
This group produced several CDs and
continued until Mayer’s death in 2004.
It is
not possible to write about the effect
that the cross-fertilisation of so many
varied musics has brought about without
mentioning Frank Zappa. He was one of
the most remarkably gifted and eclectic
performers and composers of our time.
In his relatively short life – he was
born in 1940 and died aged only 52 in
1993 – he played and composed in every
style from blues to avant-garde, taking
in jazz , many forms of rock, including
rock-opera, and the most contemporary
techniques of classical music of his
era on the way. In his own compositions
of orchestral music he was particularly
influenced when a very young man by
Stravinsky and Webern and in particular
by Edgard Varèse and included
sprechstimme (a kind of speaking/singing
voice) in a similar way to Arnold Schoenberg
and Alban Berg.
Zappa
recorded a programme of his own music
with the London Symphony Orchestra,
conducted by Kent Nagano and in 1992,
a year before his death, he had a tremendous
success in Frankfurt at a concert of
his own work with the Ensemble Modern.
His recorded legacy of every kind of
popular (and unpopular) music is immense.
It includes recordings with his group
The Mothers of Invention, jazz
and, quite
amazingly,
a recording he made in collaboration
with Pierre Boulez at IRCAM. On Boulez
Conducts Zappa: The Perfect Stranger
a number of the tracks are played by
the Ensemble InterContemporain, conducted
by Pierre Boulez and the rest are played
by Zappa on the synclavier (a cross
between a synthesiser and a computer,
an instrument that became a favourite
for Zappa ), under the strange name
the Barking Pumpkin Digital Gratification
Consort.
Frank
Zappa was, perhaps more than anyone
else, a one-man melting pot of the world’s
music – the complete crossover man.
This extraordinary and quite frequently
outrageous and satirical man, as well
as being a remarkably creative musician,
was also a virtuoso guitarist, an accomplished
commercial artist, a recording and mastering
engineer and a skilled producer of his
own work..
As long
ago as 1907 there was an interest in
how electricity could be harnessed to
increase the vocabulary of sounds that
could be used to compose music. In his
book Sketch for a New Aesthetic of
Music published that year Ferruccio
Busoni discussed the use of electrical
and other new sound sources in future
music. He wrote of the future of music:
Music as art, our so-called occidental
music, is hardly four hundred years
old; its state is one of development,
perhaps the very first stage of a development
beyond present conception. And we talk
of ‘classics’ and ‘hallowed traditions’!
And we have talked of them for a long
time! We have formulated rules, stated
principles, laid down laws — we apply
laws made for maturity to a child that
knows nothing of responsibility! This
child-music – it floats on air! It touches
not the earth with its feet. It knows
no law of gravitation. It is well nigh
incorporeal. Its material is transparent.
It is sonorous air. It is almost Nature
herself. It is free! But freedom is
something that mankind has never wholly
comprehended, never realised to the
full. Man can neither recognise nor
acknowledge it. He disavows the mission
of this child; he hangs weights upon
it. This buoyant creature must walk
decently, like anyone else. It may scarcely
be allowed to leap — when it were its
joy to follow the line of the rainbow,
and to break sunbeams with the clouds!
Varèse,
a pupil of Busoni, was influenced by
him to a great extent. When he was still
studying at the Paris Conservatoire
he was already saying ‘I refuse to submit
to sounds that have already been heard.
Rules do not make a work of art. You
have the right to compose what you want
to, in the way you want to. I long for
instruments obedient to my thought and
whim, with their contribution of a whole
new world of unsuspected sounds, which
will lend themselves to the exigencies
of my inner rhythm’
I recall that in the 1940s
while I was still a student I had one
of those small, six or seven inch, 78
rpm records with pieces by Varèse
on it. They were both extremely avant
garde – Ionisation, written for
percussion instruments, and Octandre
for woodwind and brass. Varèse
felt constrained by the conventions of
the orchestral palette and believed that
composition could be freed by the use
of electronic devices. He said, ‘The
raw material of music is sound’ and
he became so frustrated that he was unable
to continue composing with the sounds
produced by the instruments available
to him. He felt that composers were obsessed
with tradition and were limited by the
composers who had preceded them. He anticipated
that a machine would be invented that
would provide opportunities to explore
a far greater range of pitch and volume
and release us from the restrictions of
the tempered scale.
Once
the tape recorder had been perfected
in the early 1940s it was not long before
composers were splicing together a variety
of sounds, musical, mechanical and natural,
to produce what came to be called Musique
concrète, which has been used
most effectively as background music
for radio, TV and films. It has also
been used with success by both classical
and popular composers that include Pierre
Boulez, the Beatles, Karlheinz Stockhausen,
Pink Floyd and Iannis Xenakis.
For
a long time Varèse ceased to
compose until in the 1950s when composers
had started using some of the new technologies
that had become available – he was already
in his seventies – he came to life again.
Probably the first important composition
to use taped sounds and acoustic instruments
was his Deserts, composed between
1950 and 1954. His next composition
Poeme Electronique was performed
in the Philips pavilion, at the World
Fair in 1958, largely through the efforts
of the great architect Le Corbusier.
The pavilion was designed under Le Corbusier’s
direction by another composer Iannis
Xenakis (also an architect), one of
whose works was also played at this
concert.
Poeme
Electronique includes a great variety
of recorded sounds which were heard
by visitors to the pavilion from the
425 loudspeakers positioned around the
hall. It is hardly surprising that further
performances have been limited – if,
indeed, there have been any. In 2006
the Library of Congress issued a recording
using the tapes that Varese had made
for the original performance.
From
the 1950s onwards more and more devices
were invented that enabled music to
be composed entirely without instrumentalists
or with a combination of acoustic and
electronic instruments. Compositions
that combined acoustic and electronic
instruments such as Turangalîla-Symphonie
by Olivier Messiaen, first performed
in 1949, which requires a very large
orchestra and an ondes Martenot, still
remain in the orchestral repertoire.
By the 1960s synthesisers were becoming
more manageable and in the 1970s both
classical and rock musicians were making
more use of them. In 1977 IRCAM opened
at the Pompidou Centre in Paris, under
Pierre Boulez’s direction with Luciano
Berio and Vinko Globokar also involved.
By then a variety of synthesisers were
being used by virtually all rock bands.
It was already unusual to see an acoustic
instrument being played in any of the
bands and when they were they would
be electronically enhanced. They needed
to be if they were to be heard. To begin
with the groups used analogue synthesisers
but by the late 1970s a number of digital
synthesisers would become available
as well as synclaviers, samplers and
other electronic devices.
Radio,
TV and film were quick to make use of
the effects that the electronic instruments
could provide. In the 1950s the BBC
Radiophonic Workshop started to use
them to provide music and effects of
all kinds and the ever popular TV series
Dr. Who has from 1963 to the
present day always used these instruments
to provide background music. A particularly
effective use of the unearthly sounds
these instruments can produce was in
the 1971 film A Clockwork Orange.
I have
never had any involvement in playing
in any rock or pop groups. My only personal
contact with this field of music has
been through Rick Wakeman. In the late
1960s when he was a student at the Royal
College of Music – his principal study
was the piano – he came to me for clarinet
lessons, his second study. It was clear
to me from the start that his interest
in playing the clarinet was minimal,
but he was an agreeable chap and I got
him talking about what interested him.
I don’t think he learned much from me
about playing the clarinet since I doubt
that he made any attempt to play it
from one lesson to the next. However,
I did learn a good deal about pop and
rock music from him. It was not long
before he left and within a year or
two I was seeing his name as a prominent
keyboard player, first of all in 1971
with a very successful band at that
time, Yes. His use of electronic
keyboards became legendary, and on videos
I have seen him surrounded by a vast
array of keyboards, usually playing
two at a time and going swiftly from
one pair to another. He was something
of a showman, as many pop and rock stars
are, frequently appearing wearing a
silver cape.
A few
years later I received a phone call
from the BBC asking me if I would take
part in a programme they were making
about Wakeman. His fame was such that
they were making a documentary about
his life and wanted to include something
about his time at the College. As it
seems he had told them I was the only
one at the College that he had any time
for would I be willing to be interviewed
whilst giving a lesson at the Royal
College of Music? The BBC had to get
permission from the College, which they
gave, though I don’t think it did anything
to enhance my reputation there. On the
other hand when the programme was broadcast
I was able to bathe in reflected glory.
I was amazed at the number of neighbours
and acquaintances who saw the programme
and were impressed at my being in it.
In a
previous chapter I have written about
light music, the music that a great
many people enjoyed. They preferred
Ketelbey, Eric Coates, selections from
operas and ballets (‘the tuneful bits’)the
music played in restaurants, and the
BBC Music While You Work and
other light music broadcasts. I remember
when I was a young man hearing them
say, ‘I like music – but not that heavy
stuff ‘. Later light music orchestras
like those of George Melachrino, Eric
Robinson and Mantovani captured the
same audience. In the 1960s two other
groups that became very popular with
this audience were the Play Bach Trio
and the Swingle Singers.
The
Play Bach Trio, also known as the Jacques
Loussier Trio, consisted of Jacques
Loussier on piano plus double bass and
percussion. The trio used Bach’s compositions
as the basis for their tasteful jazz
improvisations which, though some serious
music lovers hated what they felt was
sacrilege and the debasing of great
music, continued to record and give
concerts until they disbanded in 1980
having sold over six million records.
The
Swingle Singers, an a cappella group
of eight singers, with bass and
drums to define the rhythm, began in
1962 when a group of freelance session
singers working in Paris became tired
of always singing background vocals
- oo’s and ah’s – behind
people like Charles Aznavour and Edith
Piaf. They decided that in their spare
time they would try out Ward Swingle’s
suggestion and read through some of
the preludes and fugues from Bach’s
Well-Tempered Clavier just to
see if they were singable. They found
that they were swinging Bach’s music
quite naturally and as there were no
words they improvised a kind of scat
singing. By 1963 they felt confident
enough to approach Philips with the
idea that they might make a record.
Philips agreed and when the recording,
Bach’s Greatest Hits came out
in the US it quickly became a great
success.
For
the next 10 years between touring they
recorded about a dozen albums covering
an extraordinary range of music, from
Bach to Berio and Mozart to the Beatles
and all sung in the same style as their
first Bach recording. The classical
music critics’ response ranged from
enthusiastic to hostile. As with the
Jacques Loussier Play Bach Trio there
were some critics and music lovers who
were appalled and one or two musicians
I knew even believed that it was a sign
of moral corruption.
In 1969
the Swingle Singers were asked by the
New York Philharmonic Orchestra if they
would premiere Sinfonia, a large
work for orchestra and 8 voices composed
by Luciano Berio. The premiere was conducted
by Berio himself and recorded live by
CBS. It was a couple of years after
Ward Swingle had decided to disband
the group in France and came to England
in 1973 that Gavin Henderson, then manager
of the Philharmonia, and I met Swingle
and some other members of the group
he had formed in Britain with the idea
of them doing a performance of Sinfonia
with the Philharmonia. At that time
the Philharmonia did not have sufficient
funds to risk putting on a concert that
might not provide a large enough audience
to cover the cost of mounting it. I
think we were rather put off because
we learned that they had tried a few
times to combine works of Berio with
their traditional repertoire and found
that although the audience accepted
arrangements of Bach, madrigals, folk
songs and jazz standards, they drew
the line at Berio. To quote Ward himself,
‘People sometimes come to a Sinfonia
performance expecting to hear something
like our ‘doo-boo-doo’ Bach – they generally
look for the nearest exit after the
first movement. Could they possibly
have been expecting the Sinfonia
from Bach’s Second Harpsichord Partita?’
In 1981
the group were asked to make another
recording of Berio’s Sinfonia
, with Pierre Boulez. conducting. In
his book Swingle Singing. Ward
Swingle recounts how Boulez, after a
very loud and dissonant orchestral passage,
stopped the orchestra and asked the
2nd bassoon player, ‘In the 9th bar
of letter I, shouldn’t that be an F-sharp?’
The bassoon player realised his mistake
but just couldn’t believe that Boulez
could have heard it. I remember similar
incidents when Boulez was conducting
the Philharmonia.
Both
the Jacques Loussier Trio and the Swingle
Singers showed yet again that the vast
majority of people wanted music with
a tune. It doesn’t matter whether it
is classical music, jazz, pop, rock
or music from another culture, if it
has a good tune, one that can be sung
or hummed, even if somewhat inaccurately,
they will be enjoyed. The multi-million
sales of the Royal Philharmonic’s
recordings proved that once
again. The first of the Hooked on
Classics series was issued in 1981
and continued successfully for a number
of years and is reputed to have sold
over ten million albums. The arrangements
were made and conducted by Louis Clark
who had been the arranger for the Electric
Light Orchestra. His arrangements consisted
mainly of adding a rhythmic beat to
extracts from well-known works by classical
composers. The beat would be fast or
slow depending on the item. This small
selection gives some idea of the eclectic
repertoire covered by the original records
issued on LPs: excerpts from; Also
Sprach Zarathustra by Richard Strauss,
the march Colonel Bogey by Kenneth
Alford, Haydn’s Trumpet Concerto,
the Rhapsody in Blue by George
Gershwin, Bach’s Ave Maria, Capriccio
Italien by Tchaikovsky, Mozart’s
Rondo Alla Turca, a Violin
Concerto by Vivaldi and the Gymnopédie
No 2 by Erik Satie.
Again,
though these recordings sold in their
millions, there were those who were
unhappy about what was being done to
classical music. A review in the All
Music Guide is a good example of
the strength of feeling these recordings
evoked: Devoid of any true musical
worth, Hooked on Classics places many
familiar classical themes to an oppressive
synthetic drum track. These medleys
are only of interest to those who always
liked the tunes in classical music but
wished there was a stronger backbeat.
By the
1990s there were so many forms of ‘popular
music’ – what should we call them –
pop, rock? Even ‘popular’ is not accurate
as some of them have a more limited
audience for their concerts and recordings
than classical music has. On the other
hand some have vast audiences. As a
musician I have always been interested
in what new music was being composed
whether it was in my own field of classical
and light music or rock and pop, but
after the 1960s I found that it was
only occasionally that I played or heard
a new work with much pleasure. I listened
if possible to the same piece several
times to see if it would become more
agreeable. In the main it did not. It
seemed to me that all music was becoming
increasingly cerebral or aggressive.
Muzak,
or elevator music as it was sometimes
called, because of its omnipresence
in America in their lifts – I remember
hearing it first when I was in the USA
in 1950 with the Royal Philharmonic
Orchestra as we zoomed up and down twenty
floors or more to our bedrooms – was
musical wallpaper, but not unpleasant.
Nor was ska, which became reggae in
the late 1960s, or, as far as I was
concerned the pop music into the 60s.
But from the 1970s onwards I found the
bewildering variety of genres and sub-genres
of rock, with a few exceptions each
louder and more aggressive than the
last, less and less agreeable. Was this
just because I was getting older – I
was still only in my early fifties then
– or because the environment was becoming
more violent and producing a music that
reflected the anger and resentment that
seemed to be growing ever stronger?
First punk rock and then hip hop and
rap, part of a culture that includes
graffiti, break-dancing and a particular
attitude to dress, often seems to be
one of the most aggressive.
Hip
hop and many of the versions of rock
that appeared from the late1980s, various
electric dance musics –techno, rave,
trance, drum and bass and ambient music,
to name but a few – used
samplers, which allow sounds already
recorded, whether music, mechanical
or natural, to be re-recorded and made
into a ‘composition’, sometimes by over-recording,
over-lapping, adding new elements from
an instrumentalist and a number of other
techniques.
I had
for sometime wondered why quite a few
young men wore their trousers hanging
from their hips in a way that I found
less than attractive. It was a long
time before I learned the reason for
this fashion favoured by devotees of
breakdancing to hip hop music, that
includes jazz-rap and gangsta-rap. Breakdancing
requires a great deal of energy and
freedom of movement calling for clothes
that are loose fitting. Baggy trousers
are important. But why did they have
to be worn as if they were about to
fall down? I found out later that this
form of dancing originated in the Bronx,
in the 1980s a derelict and violent
area of New York where gang warfare
was rife. Many of the young men and
some young women had at one time or
another served a prison sentence during
which their belts had been removed for
obvious reasons. No doubt a combination
of old habits and the wish to be comfortable
when dancing – it is suggested that
gang wars developed into gang dancing
contests – resulted in this style of
dress.
The
heading ‘Music’ in British newspapers
and magazines now nearly always refers
only to pop and rock music. The New
York Times also lists its news items
about music in this way. Jazz, which
had been such an influence on the early
rock musicians and has continued to
be an influence, now has a long enough
history to cohabit with classical music
on BBC Radio 3 and is often reviewed
on the same page as classical music
in up-market newspapers. Every month
The Observer includes a colour
supplement of about seventy-five pages
called the Observer Music Monthly.
It covers most forms of popular music
and sometimes the rock influenced world
music, but very seldom mentions classical
and jazz.
The
BBC’s magazine Radio Times, with
sales of 1.1 million each week, has
the second largest distribution of any
magazine in Britain and is therefore
seen, if not read, by a very large number
of people. In July, during the 2006
BBC Prom season, nowhere throughout
its 138 pages was there a section, or
even a paragraph, about what is now
called Classical music, a genre that
also includes so much else that is not
rock or pop. On the page headed MUSIC,
now solely concerned with rock music,
there was a highlighted section ‘This
Week’s Music Choices’. The six choices
for one week were: programmes about
a new pop artist and her group; the
Queen of Hip-Hop Soul; the Art of Pop;
the Cambridge Folk Festival; the Queens
of Heartache and a programme about a
rock star whose behaviour as a result
of his taking psychedelic drugs such
as LSD led him to behave in such a disruptive
and erratic way that his group had to
engage another guitarist to back him
up when he was hardly able to play.
To realise
the extent that attitudes have changed
one needs to recall that in1927, when
Chappell's withdrew its financial support
for the Promenade Concerts, the newly
established British Broadcasting Corporation
– the BBC – with Sir John Reith’s slogan
‘to inform, educate and entertain’,
took over the promotion of the Proms.
For the next three years the concerts
were given by 'Sir Henry Wood and his
Symphony Orchestra', until in 1930 the
BBC established the BBC Symphony Orchestra,
the first full-time symphony orchestra
in Britain, and subsequently created
a number of regional orchestras. The
BBC has, to its very great credit, continued
to promote the Proms for over seventy
five years. But, clearly the spirit
of Sir John no longer inhabits the Radio
Times.
Of course
rock is now no longer an infant or an
adolescent music having been with us
for over fifty years. Everyone under
the age of sixty born into every economic
class will have lived in an environment
surrounded by this genre of music. Evidence
for the effect this has had is provided
by two excellent long-running programmes
on BBC radio and TV.
The
basis of the Radio 4 programme Desert
Island Discs, which has been running
for over sixty years, is that someone
who has distinguished themselves in
some way in politics, industry, business,
sport, the arts or one of the professions
is interviewed and chooses eight records
they would wish to take if they were
marooned on a desert island. In the
past the choices were usually of classical
and light music, some songs from musicals
and jazz. Now it is predominantly of
contemporary popular music of some kind.
University
Challenge broadcast on BBC 2 pits
two teams from different universities
against each other to answer a number
of wide-ranging difficult questions.
These require considerable knowledge
in many subjects that include the sciences,
history, geography, politics, music
and the arts. The average age of the
four person teams is about twenty-one.
These programmes have been so successful
that they now do some programmes called
University Challenge: the Professionals.
Again two teams, average age forty-five
to fifty-five,are pitted against each
other to answer similar questions. When
questions on music require answers it
is clear that both age groups in general
are poorly informed, but usually better
informed about popular than classical
music. Extracts that are selected from
classical music that have been used
as backing for TV advertisements are
more likely to be correctly answered
than others.
Can
it be that, as well as being tuneful,
compositions such as the Verdi Requiem,
Copland’s ballet music for Rodeo,
Carmina Burana by Carl Orff, Dvorak’s
New World Symphony,and
one of Mozart’s piano concertos, which
was used as background music for the
film Elvira Madigan and which
is now often called by the title of
the film, rather than the boring ‘No.21’,
were chosen because they are all
out of copyright and incur no royalties?
The
concert held the evening before the
1990 FIFA World Cup in Rome, held to
raise money for José Carreras’s
International Leukaemia Foundation –
he had recently recovered from leukaemia
– also gave his friends Plácido
Domingo and Luciano Pavarotti the opportunity
to welcome him back after his successful
treatment. It was a great success and
was the start of The Three Tenors phenomenon.
They repeated their success at subsequent
Cup Finals in Los Angeles (1994), Paris
(1998) and Yokohama (2002). They also
gave concerts in other towns to enormous
audiences, usually in large out-door
venues and did not restrict their repertoire
to only operatic extracts. They included
items as varied as Torero Quiera
by Manuel Panella Miguel Roai, You’ll
Never Walk Alone by Rodgers and
Hammerstein, Granada by Augustín
Lara, I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas
and Amazing Grace. These concerts
shown on TV and available on recordings
appealed to the world-wide audiences
that enjoyed concerts put on by Raymond
Gubbay and others, the Classic FM type
broadcasts and the recordings and concerts
by artists such as the Jacques Loussier
Trio and the Swingle Singers.
As might
be expected there were opera buffs who
scorned the selection of bits out of
the operas, torn from their proper settings
and sometimes sung by all three tenors
at the same time, while there were others
who felt that these concerts brought
opera to many who had previously had
no contact with it before, though there
is no evidence that the audiences at
opera houses increased as a result of
this exposure. Rather it proved, once
again, that what the majority of people
enjoy is ‘a good tune’. Not long before
he died Sir Thomas Beecham put it more
succinctly: he is quoted as saying,
‘The function of music is to release
us from the tyranny of conscious thought.’
Recent enquiries into whether the
sound of music can actually help those
experiencing pain seem to suggest that
it can. At the same time there is sufficient
evidence that some forms of rock have
very much the opposite effect. Perhaps
neither of these phenomena should surprise
us: mothers have been singing lullabies
to their infants, lovers serenading
and warriors singing, dancing and marching
to victory or defeat, as far back in
time as we have any information.
The vastly
greater profits made by the record company,
in spite of the tremendous fees paid
to the three tenors and their conductors
Zubin Mehta and James Levine, accelerated
the classical record industry’s decision
to follow the path taken by popular
music, which had shown for at least
thirty years that the crossover of genres
increased sales. It was around this
time that I first became aware of the
phrase Classical Crossover. The sale
of classical recordings, however successful
even in the halcyon times from the 1950s
into the 1980s, had never matched in
number and therefore profitability that
of other more popular music recordings.
The up-front cost of engaging a symphony
orchestra, a famous conductor and perhaps
a soloist is so much greater than for
other music,
and more sessions are required to produce
a symphony lasting anything from thirty
to fifty minutes or longer; furthermore,
as a rule, because
of its complexity, less music can be
successfully recorded in each three
hour session. This has always been reflected
in the recording fees the Musicians’
Union has agreed for the members of
symphony orchestras, which from the
start of recording have always been
lower than for the recording of all
other forms of music, which require
fewer musicians, take less time to record
and sell in greater numbers.
The
tradition of symphony orchestras playing
non-symphonic music goes back a long
way. Four years after the formation
of the Boston Symphony Orchestra in
1881 the Boston Pops Orchestra was founded
as an off-shoot of the symphony orchestra
– in effect the symphony orchestra without
its principal players, what in America
they call their ‘first chair men’. The
major orchestras all had co- principals,
as the BBC Symphony Orchestra had in
1930 when my father was the co-principal
clarinet with Frederick Thurston. The
Pops Orchestra’s programmes consisted
of light classical music, tunes from
the current hit musicals, and sometimes
a novelty piece. The Pops programs are
much the same now except that the items
from musicals and the novelty pieces
have changed. From 1930, when Arthur
Fiedler became its principal conductor,
the orchestra is reputed to have sold
the most recordings of any orchestra
– in total over 50 million, in a variety
of formats. The most popular has been
Sleigh Ride by Leroy Anderson,
not a piece usually found in a symphony
orchestra’s repertoire. Since 1980 John
Williams, famous for his film music
that includes Star Wars and Indiana
Jones, has been their principal
conductor. Of a number of other Pops
orchestras in America the Cincinnati
Pops Orchestra, under its conductor
Erich Kunzel, has since 1977 probably
been the most successful and like the
Boston Pops has made many recordings.
The
continuing success of the Three Tenors
throughout the 1990s led the record
companies to search for other recordings
that would sell in their millions –
The Three Tenors in Concert sold
ten million copies. In 1992 the recording
of the contemporary Polish composer
Henryk Górecki’s Third Symphony,
for soprano and orchestra, sold more
than 1 million CDs and for a time was
played regularly on Classic FM. Even
more remarkable was the success of Chant,
a record of Gregorian chant sung by
Benedictine monks in northern Spain,
which achieved sales of over four million
copies.
Increasing
numbers of easy listening albums of
extracts from the most popular classical
music and opera and recordings of lighter
music played by outstanding artists
like Itzhak Perlman and Joshua Bell
began to appear in place of new recordings
by the orchestras. In 1995 the young
violinist Vanessa Mae released an album
The Violin Player that featured
her playing a fusion of classics, pop,
rock and techno – compositions that
ranged from Bach to rock. She was also
featured emerging from the sea with
her dress wet and clinging to her shapely
body. Being young, attractive, and if
possible sexy, became a feature of what
was by then becoming known as Classical
Crossover.
For
many years the Grammy Awards for Classical
Music had been the most prestigious
prizes for classical music and musicians.
In 1999 a new category was added – Best
Classical Crossover Album. The first
one was awarded to the cellist Yo-Yo
Ma for his recording of Soul of the
Tango - The Music of Astor Piazzolla.
Some of the most recent winners
have been the violinist Joshua Bell
with the percussionist Evelyn Glennie
and others for Perpetual Motion,
André Previn with the London
Symphony Orchestra for Previn Conducts
Korngold (the film music for Sea Hawk;
Captain Blood, etc.) and in 2006 The
Turtle Island String Quartet and the
Ying Quartet for 4+four. This
is one of the most interesting awards
so far. Turtle Island String Quartet,
an innovative string group, improvises
and arranges an extraordinary range
of music that includes jazz standards
classical, country, rock, New Age, swing,
Latin and Middle Eastern music. On this
particular album they have collaborated
with the Ying Quartet and include their
usual variety of sources plus a re-arranged
version of Darius Milhaud’s La Création
du Monde.
A year
later, in 2000, the British Phonographic
Industry (BPI), the organisation of
record companies, decided to start the
Classical Brit. awards. The Brit Awards,
the pop industry’s awards, had for many
years been a very successful marketing
device and it was hoped that the Classical
Brits would do the same for the ailing
classical market. Until then there had
only been the Gramophone Awards for
classical music. Voting for the awards
was by a committee that included industry
executives, representatives from the
media, the British Association of Record
Dealers, members of the Musicians Union,
lawyers, promoters, and orchestra leaders.
I have always been interested in who
the ‘orchestra leaders’ have been as
I have never come across anyone who
admitted being involved in the voting,
The categories in the first year were:
British Artist of the Year, Female Artist
of the Year, Album of the Year, Young
British Classical Performer and Outstanding
Contribution to Music. The award for
Best Album of the Year is voted for
by listeners to Classic FM.
That
year the British Artist of the Year
Award was given to the fourteen year
old Charlotte Church whose recording
Voice of an Angel, on which she
sang arias, sacred and traditional songs
had been a big success. Three years
later on Dream a Dream she sang
mostly Christmas carols and pop songs.
This was the start of her future career
as a pop singer. The other awards were
received by Martha Argerich, Bryn Terfel,
Andrea Bocelli (for Sacred Arias,
the Album of the Year), Daniel Harding
and Nigel Kennedy. In the following
years the categories changed and additional
categories were added. In 2001 the Album
of the Year was Russell Watson’s The
Voice; in 2002 the Biggest-selling
Classical Album was Russell Watson’s
Encore and the Outstanding Contribution
to Music went Andrea Bocelli who in
1993 won the Album of the Year with
Sentimento; the 1994 Album of
the Year was won by Bryn Terfel with
Bryn; in 2005 and 2006 the Album
of the Year went to Katherine Jenkins.
When
Peter Gelb, then the President of Sony
Classical, said in 1997 ‘For the classical
record industry, the writing is already
on the wall’, I wonder if he foresaw
the extent to which this would have
come true by 2006? By then the major
labels were only infrequently producing
new recordings. The smaller companies,
Harmonia Mundi, Hyperion, Chandos, Opera
Rara and the low-cost phenomenon Naxos
continued to be more successful.
By 2006
a number of major orchestras in Europe
and the USA – the first in Britain had
been the London Symphony Orchestra in
1999 – began issuing recordings on their
own labels. The Musicians’ Union was
obliged to allow the orchestras to record
their concert performances without any
additional fee to the musicians on the
understanding that when the sales provided
sufficient profit the musicians would
receive a share. This did away with
the cost previously incurred of paying
a large number of musicians for recording
the music in the studio and, of course
it reduced the income earned by the
musicians. As the average sales for
each recording has been in the 8000/12,000
range the profit required to pay an
orchestra of eighty has yet to be reached.
However, in the circumstances the musicians
are glad if the recordings act as a
spur to audiences attending their concerts.
It is now even possible at the end of
some concerts to buy a recording of
the first part of the concert you have
just attended.
There
is not a lot that can be done to change
the format of the symphony concert in
order to make it more attractive to
those who have been affected by the
popular music with which they have been
surrounded all their lives and the changed
listening habits that the new means
of communication have brought about.
Various attempts have been made – by
the orchestra wearing a more contemporary
style of dress; changing the time the
concerts are held so as to make it easier
for the audience to come straight from
work or having a shorter, one hour concert
at lunch time; creating a more friendly,
intimate atmosphere by the conductor
talking to the audience about the programme;
having a glass of wine before or after
the concert with an opportunity to meet
and talk to members of the orchestra
– but nothing has made any real difference.
It has
been much easier in the opera house
to bring productions more up to date
. Among Jonathan Miller’s many opera
productions both his 1982 production
of Verdi’s Rigoletto for which
the setting of the opera is changed
from Mantua to Little Italy, with the
Mafia replacing the Duke’s court, and
his version of Bizet’s Carmen
which he up-dated to Franco’s Spain,
were extremely successful. The American
Peter Sellars’s productions have been
rather more radical (though some of
Miller’s later productions followed
suit). Sellars set Mozart’s Così
fan tutte in a diner on Cape Cod,
The Marriage of Figaro in a grand
apartment in Trump Tower in New York
and Don Giovanni in New York’s
Spanish Harlem. His production of Don
Giovanni that I saw, with sub-titles
in English, so changed not only the
milieu but changed the characters in
such a way that it seemed to me the
nature of the work became distorted.
But
this was as nothing compared with what
Glyndebourne decided to do as part of
their education programme. For several
years they have tried to stimulate an
interest in opera in children, believing
that if you catch them young enough
a future audience will be created. Misper,
for the under twelves, and Zoei
intended for teenagers are both
original works by John Lunn. They were
written for and performed by the children
themselves, in collaboration with professionals.
They received praise from the critics
but have not maintained a place in Glyndebourne’s
repertoire nor been put on elsewhere.
Zoe was shown on Channel 4 but
had poor viewing figures. Then in 2005
an ‘operatic thriller’ in three acts,
Tangier Tattoo, again by John
Lunn was mounted, this time aimed at
an older audience, the eighteen to thirty
year olds. The general director David
Pickard said ‘It’s quite racy – that’s
partly because we wanted to create a
piece that that particular age group
could relate to’. Like the previous
two Lunn operas the story had similar
ingredients to many TV series and plays
– sex, violence, intrigue and mystery.
Depending on the age range of the audience
the degree of each element has varied.
The music for Tangier Tango is
very loud, making use of elements of
pop music and electronic samples, so
that the singers had to be ‘miked’.
Even though operas have sometimes failed
because the story and libretto have
been unsatisfactory, in the end if the
music is really good even a stupid story
will not wreck it. Lunn’s music does
not seem to have been strong enough
to attract a young or an older audience.
I was
saddened, remembering the wonderful
performances I had been so fortunate
to take part in at Glyndebourne, to
read that the following year, in yet
another endeavour to attract a younger
audience, Glyndebourne had asked the
rapper Paradise to create a hip hop
opera from Mozart’s Così fan
tutte. When he was asked how he
came to be involved in this project
he said ‘…they wanted to reach the
youth, because they felt their target
audience was too narrow, about 65 and
over. They wanted to tap into the youth
culture as well, and a guy in Germany
actually came up with the idea of ‘hip
h’opera’, fusing elements of hip hop
and opera…’. In March 2006. the
transformation of Così fan
tutte into School 4 Lovers by
rapper Paradise and the producer and
saxophonist Charlie Parker changed the
setting from Naples to an inner city
estate and the role of Don Alfonso was
played by the rapper Paradise who said
this fusion was ‘ neither culture
shock, nor culture clash – this is cultural
evolution!’
The
comments in the press, before the opera
was actually produced, about the kind
of ‘street’ language co-opted into the
adaptation called Hip-Hop Così:
‘School 4 Lovers’ were unfavourable.
I have been unable to find out whether
any of the three performances that the
opera house told me were sold out were
attended by the critics, as there seem
to have been no reviews. However, it
seems to me we do not need to be worried
on Mozart’s or his librettist Da Ponte’s
behalf. This masterpiece has survived
several centuries and even though it
had to wait until 1910 for Beecham to
give its first unexpurgated performance
in Britain it has lost none of its beauty
and insight. What is so worrying is
that because no work of our own time
is attractive enough to entice an audience
it was considered necessary to distort
and even cannibalise one of the most
beautiful operas in order to provide
contemporary entertainment.
The
Spanish director Calixto Bieito’s staging,
first for Barcelona and then for English
National Opera, of Un ballo in maschera
by Verdi, in which in the opening scene
the conspirators are found sitting on
the toilet with their trousers down
was even more disagreeable than School
4 Lovers. Still, we must be grateful
that so far we have been spared his
violation of Mozart’s The Abduction
from the Seraglio for the Komische
Oper in Berlin. He decided that this
opera is about prostitution, drug abuse
and sadistic violence. The details are
too disgusting to describe and would
certainly have received an x certificate
if it had been a film.
The
changes in life style and listening
habits referred to earlier have over
the past twenty years or so had an increasing
effect on the music profession. By the
end of the 1990s the reduction in the
amount of work available and the earning
capacity of musicians in Britain had
declined sufficiently for the Musicians’
Union to commission a survey of musicians’
employment in the period between 1978
and 1998. The report of the research
carried out at Westminster University,
Nice Work if you can get it!
A survey of Musicians’ Employment,
was published in 2000. In comparing
the situation with twenty years earlier
the researchers found that less work
was available in all sectors of the
profession – less live performance,
broadcasting, recording and teaching
than previously and that fees in general
were worth less in real terms. It was
also noted that in a number of orchestras
fewer musicians were now being employed.
The
decline had been felt most keenly by
orchestral musicians for whom broadcasting
and recording had been an important
source of income for both those in the
London orchestras and free-lance players.
The report showed that not only had
there had been a reduction in employment
but also that the number of players
engaged full-time in the contract orchestras,
in which average salaries remained pitifully
low, had also declined over the previous
twenty years. Since the end of the 1990s
more young free-lance classical musicians
had been obliged to create their own
small chamber groups and become far
more entrepreneurial and self-promoting
than had been necessary in the past.
The number leaving the conservatoires
has continued to be far greater than
the profession can absorb so that quite
a number have had to find additional
employment outside performing and teaching
in order to survive financially.
I use
the term orchestral musician to mean
all those who are not jazz, pop or rock
musicians of any kind. By the nature
of the number of years required before
entering the profession orchestral and
chamber musicians hope from the start
to remain professional performers throughout
their lives. This has rarely been the
case for pop and rock musicians because
the nature of their music is far more
ephemeral. With the notable exception
of a few groups such as the Rolling
Stones and the Who and some individual
artists who have been exceptionally
successful the great majority of pop
and rock musicians remain working for
only a few years. For those who compose
their own music and lyrics it is difficult
to continue to be creative over many
years and performers in this genre need
to be able to reinvent themselves as
fashion changes. Many who set out seeking
fame and fortune abandon their quest
within quite a short time when they
find it eludes them. Even the Beatles,
probably the most successful and influential
group – they are credited with having
sold over a billion records before 1990
– remained together for less than ten
years.
While
attendance at art galleries for exhibitions
of masterpieces of the past are increasing
and those for contemporary painting,
sculpture, installations and light shows
are attracting even larger crowds, why
is it that concert attendance continues
to decline and cause concern and programmes
of contemporary music appear to still
drive the average music lover away?
Not
only is going to a concert so much more
expensive than going to an art gallery,
but going to a concert has become unnecessary:
One can now listen to music whenever
and wherever one is so much more conveniently
and cheaply. Perhaps even more important
is the freedom that a visit to any form
of art provides in contrast to the need
to commit oneself to two hours of passive
concentration when attending a concert.
At a concert one cannot go back and
forth to a phrase or passage one has
enjoyed as one can go back and look
at a picture or a piece of sculpture
– nor as one can when listening to a
recording.
A piece
of contemporary art in whatever form
can be ignored or passed by quite quickly
whereas if one is listening to a piece
of music in a concert hall it requires
considerable courage to get up in the
middle of a performance, disturb one’s
neighbours and walk out. While new classical
music composers have been addressing
an ever decreasing audience, the music
of the past has for the last fifty years
been trying to reinvent itself. On the
one hand there are those who play Mozart
in a style that purports to be ‘authentic’
and on what pretend to be ‘original
instruments’, though they are reproductions,
with improved intonation without which
they would be unacceptable to a modern
audience. On the other there are those
willing to turn classical music into
‘easy listening’ and happy to change
the story, the words and the culture
of operas so as to imitate our own contemporary
culture.
Having
been involved in the music profession,
the music business and now the music
industry for over sixty years I am saddened
that the profession I have known is
being swept away and that the music
I love and which in the first twenty
years as a player seemed to be growing
in popularity has fallen on such hard
times. But I am not surprised. As Chairman
of the Philharmonia, in the mid-1970s
I suggested to my colleagues, who were
already becoming concerned for the future,
that as much as we all loved the music
we played and the life we were lucky
enough to enjoy, it would not go on
for ever – nothing ever has or ever
will. We had seen other thriving industries
disappear; coal mines closed, the steel
industry collapse, shipbuilding and
fishing ...
The
Musicians’ Union, in the past, when
I had been involved in negotiating with
employers at every level from night
club owners to representatives of the
BBC, ITV and the major record companies,
had then been able to be effective on
behalf of its members and could rely
on their support because it represented
their wishes. With the changes in the
law that made the ‘closed-shop’ illegal
together with a reduction in employment
opportunities and sufficient financial
support for symphony orchestras and
opera houses, the Musicians’ Union ability
to bargain on behalf of its members
has been substantially reduced
A
time when everything is valued in terms
of how much money it can make is not
one that is good for the performing
arts and this is especially so for classical
music, which is so labour intensive.
While popular music, responding to the
current mood throughout the world, becomes
either more aggressive or maudlin, classical
music and jazz have become increasingly
more cerebral. And while the advances
in communication technology have made
the commercialisation of popular music
one of the most profitable industries,
classical music is attempting to fight
a rearguard action.
In a
world rife with conflict of every kind
and when it seems we are bent on destroying
our own environment it is difficult
to be optimistic. But out of the old
something new always grows. There is
so much new technology young people
are using in remarkably inventive ways
that perhaps this is the way music will
go. No doubt in the 17th
century when musicians were playing
recorders, natural trumpets and viols
and before the well tempered scale which
adjusted the notes within an octave
so it became possible to modulate from
one key to another, they would be astounded
to see the instruments we play and the
music we take for granted. However music
is provided and whatever it will sound
like, I hope it will provide as much
pleasure and inspiration as the music
I have known has given me. For thinking
and feeling people, contemplating the
future is not easy. But of one thing
we can be absolutely certain: as long
as there are men and women there will
be music.
