HOW
MUSIC WORKS
Sweet dreams are made of this:
Classical music is a turn-on for more
of us than ever before, whatever the
doom-mongers might claim, says the composer
HOWARD GOODALL
The
weight of history hangs heavily upon
classical music’s shoulders. In the
carefree, people-friendly world of popular
music, Sandi Thorn can sing "Oh, I wish
I was a punk rocker (with flowers in
my hair)", not batting an eyelid at
the absurdity or the historical inaccuracy
of the statement. It mars nobody’s enjoyment
of the catchy hit. But no such easy
forgiveness is available in the classical
world, where opus numbers, arcane Italian
terms, obscure jargon and —
let’s face it —
pedantry can interfere with one’s
enjoyment of the actual music. Which
is why I feel it is partly my job, on
television, to blur these boundaries
and to remove the mystique that can
prevent a normal listener from surrendering
to "older" music.
However,
it is has also been my aim to remind
those whose first love is classical
music that much popular, folk and world
music is worthy of their respect. interest
and investigation. In my Channel 4 series
How Music Works, it has been
my priority to demonstrate the techniques,
tricks and rudiments of music through
examples in every conceivable style.
A rhythmic device might be heard in
a rap by Twista or an Invention by Bach.
My hope is that musical complexity,
cleverness and sophistication should
henceforth never again be seen to "belong"
to western classical music, nor that
uncomplicated, fun, easy listening should
be seen to be the sole province of popular
music. I do not believe there is, in
fact, so mighty a gulf between the music
of the classical masters and their modem
successors in the popular field, but
the gap in public perception of the
two genres is canyon-like. And it is
widening with every year.
Any
survey of classical music’s place in
contemporary culture is hampered by
an endless supply of myths surrounding
the subject. One such piece of hokum
is the notion that "youngsters these
days don’t like, understand or appreciate
classical music". First of all, there
was never a time when all young people
were into the music beloved of their
parents, grandparents or distant ancestors.
It is part of the point of being young
to find your own music, preferably distinct
from, and definitely louder than, that
enjoyed by the previous generation.
This was as true for Beethoven and his
contemporaries as it is today. Still,
commentators bemoan the lack of classical
music in the daily diet of contemporary
youth.
This
is odd, since roughly 10 times more
young people take GCSE, AS and A-level
music than they did 40 years ago, and
a fairly hefty slice of the syllabus
is devoted to listening skills associated
with western classical music. More young
people play in orchestras, bands and
other ensembles than ever in our history
— by a long
chalk —and
much, if not most, of what they play
is classical music. In 1960, the UK
had one specialist school for music.
Now there are more than 30, as well
as roughly 300 performing arts colleges
and academies.
I would
go as far as to say that the current
generation of young people is probably
the most musical that ever lived. That
they like music from every genre is
to their great credit While classical
music enjoys — overwhelmingly
— the lion’s
share of public subsidy to music, it
is but one branch of the musical family,
and modern youngsters are right to see
it as such. Given that the taxpayers’
millions are mostly soaked up in preserving
this, the heritage department of the
music world, it is hardly surprising
that young musicians are attracted to
the grungier, more spontaneous parts
of the contemporary live music scene.
Just because a teenager doesn’t like
Jane Eyre, it doesn’t mean she doesn’t
like reading; Malone Blackman, Philip
Pullman or Tolkien will do fine. Charlotte
Bronte’s always there for later in life.
So is Mozart.
This
brings me to the second myth: that the
public at large has "gone off’ classical
music. In the 1960s, between 300,000
and 600,000 listeners might on average
tune into the BBC Third Programme to
hear a classical concert. Nowadays,
the loyal weekly audience for Radio
3 and Classic FM combined is in excess
of 8m. The idea, then, that fewer people
listen to classical music these days
is a big, absurd. out-of-all-proportion
myth. Never mind that a third of the
population hears Carl Orff providing
climactic moments for The X Factor week
in, week out.
Orchestral
managers worry that the audience for
classical concerts is dwindling or ageing,
or both. But they dare not confront
one of the reasons for this. To put
it bluntly, in the 1950s, going to an
orchestral concert was one of only a
few things you could do of an evening,
so people who wanted a night out, who
liked music, but didn’t enjoy scratchy
records, tinny gramophones or their
claustrophobic sitting rooms, trooped
off to the town hall to get a fix.
Now there are loads of things to
do with your evening thank God.
But here’s the rub.
There are more orchestras now than then,
playing the same pieces to the same
constituency, vying for the same celebrity
soloists, competing with high quality
sound systems in every home. London
has five professional symphony orchestras.
Five. It is a myth that only old people
like classical concerts, anyway, as
you will find at any Steve Reich, John
Adams or Philip Glass performance. Younger
audiences prefer younger music, that’s
all.
There has been a trend,
in recent years, to think of a new name
for classical music, because advocates
for it sense that the label sounds old-fashioned
and frumpy. Alternatives
such as "concert" or "art" music have
been put forward from time to time,
but one current favourite is "serious"
music. This is the third myth, and it
is a dangerous one. There is a streak
of snobbery running through much discourse
on classical music, a snobbery that
looks down its nose at the paraphernalia
of popular culture —
its MP3s. downloads, iPods, samples
— as well
as the kind of folk who enjoy it, and
this snobbery has tried to claim that
classical music is more ‘serious" than
all those other frivolous forms —jazz,
hip-hop, pop, world. musicals and so
on. It is an insult to the brilliantly
skilled and committed musicians in all
these other genres, but it is an insult
that most of all damages classical music’s
own reputation, since it confirms the
prejudices of many: that classical music
is an exclusive, lah-di-dah, members-only
club, a club that apparently decides
what is musically serious and what is
not. It saddens me that the beautiful,
thrilling works of, say, Gustav Mahier,
Gabriel Fauré or Igor Stravinsky
are tarred with this hoity-toity attitude.
They are quite capable of standing on
their own two feet; they do not need
to be granted some badge of seriousness
by anyone else.
People
are afraid of the "insider knowledge"
that seems to be attached to the classical
repertoire. I have
done my best to chip away at this misconception
in my TV programmes over the past decade
or so, but it is an illuminating and
refreshing experience watching, at the
Schools Proms every year (Monday to
Wednesday of this coming week at the
Albert Hall), hundreds of young musicians
playing and hearing pieces of dizzying
variety, back to back, devoid of historical
or intellectual "context". They experience
the music without its programme-notey
baggage, its opus numbers, its "schools
of" and its isms. Because the concerts
are a deliberate mishmash of classical
and non-classical, the boundaries between
styles lose their meaning. For a composer
like myself, it is a liberating reminder
of what music at its best can be —
abstract, emotional, free and
endlessly surprising.
The
Schools Proms are the best antidote
I know to the grumpy resentment that
occasionally attaches itself to discussions
about classical music. More often than
not when a figure from the classical
world pops up in the news, it is to
complain. Funding for the arts has doubled
under Blair, but the general public
would never know it, the way
famous conductors go on. Don’t get me
wrong — complaint
has its place in the world, and many
arts organisations do struggle to make
ends meet — but
the litany of woes that we too frequently
hear about marginalisation, about how
the British are not as interested in
"high art" as the Germans, about the
prime minister liking rock (oh, crikey,
crime beyond imagination!) and so on,
only reinforce the public perception
of a group of privileged artists for
whom nothing is ever quite good enough.
By contrast, pop, jazz and world musicians
appear just to get on with the job in
hand — and,
frankly, seem to be enjoying themselves
rather more.
This
is what I have tried to capture in my
television programmes. At its simplest,
it is an everyman/woman’s rudiments
of music theory —
the nuts and bolts of musical
technique. But I wanted very much to
demonstrate that these techniques are
common to many different forms and traditions
of music. I wanted someone whose passion
was Hendrix to see what links Jimi’s
chords with medieval church music, and
for someone whose passion was Wagner
to see that unresolved suspensions,
his trademark, were still alive and
well in the songs of Coldplay. Above
all, I want music to be celebrated as
a universal gift and, especially now,
a common language whose magical vocabulary
is still in vigourous use from Soweto
to Salzburg, from Mumbai to the Rockies.
How
Music Works, a four-part series
written and presented by Howard Goodall,
starts on Sat Nov18th at 8.25pm on UK
Channel 4
This
article first appeared in The Sunday
Times Culture November 12 2006
Photo: Patrick Rowe
