The European classical music tradition is weighty. Not only is it the soundtrack to our lives, it pulls along some very heavy baggage too. The concert hall, the social games that are often (falsely) associated with a classical enthusiasm, the occasional snobbishness, the over-intellec-tualisation of sheer genius or the joy of a great tune. They all make life difficult.
Yet so many people still manage to rescue music from that thicket of problems and attitudes, pulling it out and removing all the thorns. Think of the Proms in the summer (excepting the odd - the very odd - Last Night). Thousands of people each night, dressed down rather than up, from every background, every age group, with one intention - to listen. It is still one of the most invigorating feelings I know. Or think of the excitement on the faces of schoolchildren when they first hear a live orchestra, or watch a musician rehearsing. The freshness - the magic of live music is undimmed.
I’ve been rediscovering the story of
classical music for Radio 4
In writing an account of music-making down the ages for BBC Radio 4 this summer I’ve been trying to rediscover some of the excitement of that story. This isn’t a musicological account, dealing with polyphony and harmonic scales and the art of the fugue, but the story of how music came to be written - who paid for it, who listened to it, how composers dealt with their surroundings, how religion and war, prosperity or poverty shaped the sounds we’ve inherited as a European tradition.
The joy of it is in remembering how persistent musical inspiration can be. How monks carried songs and plainchant down the centuries; how travelling musicians in the middle ages kept tunes in their heads and passed them on; how in the Renaissance the composers who clustered round the richest Dukes in Italy wanted to hear the news from the low countries or England about what was being played.
Above all, it’s thrilling to place genius in its context. J.S.Bach, who captured the essence of musical invention in his keyboard pieces, was a journeyman, writing to order. He once complained to the burgers of Leipzig that he was losing money because grand families were having fewer funerals, meaning fewer commissions. Yet this character who had to compose for a purpose - a wedding, a Good Friday service, a new cantata for the choir - was a brilliant innovator and, as Beethoven called him, ‘the immortal God of harmony’.
This journey through music has some wonderful stopping places, in Handel’s London (where 12,000 people once turned up in Vauxhall Gardens to hear him rehearsing with an orchestra), in the Vienna of Mozart or Schubert or Schoenberg and the radicals, in the Paris of Stravinsky, where the first night of The Rite of Spring in 1913 produced such a riot that he could hardly hear the orchestra that he was conducting and Nijinsky, who was dancing, couldn’t hear the instructions Diaghilev was shouting from the wings.
We’re the inheritors of music that people have always found necessary. In 16th century Venice they wanted to hear what Monteverdi could do in the incense-laden darkness of St Mark’s with four choirs and two orchestras. In Restoration London they wanted fun and excitement with music in the theatres after the Puritan years. In Verdi’s Italy they wanted to sing along at the opera as part of their resurgent nationalism.
All of us have these sounds - this tradition - coursing through us, whether we are conscious of it or not. They’re the sounds of our continent and our history. When Beethoven scratched Napoleon’s name from the dedication page of the Eroica symphony (because he’d made himself Emperor and therefore ‘betrayed’ the Revolution) he was revealing the passion that created the last string quartets, though they have no overt political references or ‘message’. When Shostakovich decided to stay in Stalin’s Russia was he collaborating or fighting? Music carries with it the story of everything that has made us who we are.
That power should never be undermined by a musical culture that’s either too remote or too closed. It needs to be open and free. Kids now listen to a wider range of music than has ever been available before. I for one believe that the classical story - stripped of some of the extraneous nonsense that has attached itself over the years - is part of that sound world, and one that can excite them still. Classical music is the inheritance from the Renaissance and Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and a host of others, but more than that it is the soundtrack from which we still draw inspiration, whether we realise it or not.
James Naughtie presents Today on BBC Radio 4. The first half of his series The Making of Music will be broadcast on Radio 4 on weekday afternoons in June and July, and the second half after the end of the Proms season in September. Each programme will be followed by a related programme of music on BBC Radio 3