Radio
Lend me your ear
Michael Vestey
This year’s Reith Lectures on Radio Four (Fridays), by the musical genius Daniel Barenboim, are the most stimulating and entertaining that I can remember. Unusually, they’re also very funny as Barenboim has a great sense of the ridiculous. His theme is the importance of the ear in a world that has become overtly and obsessively visual. In his second lecture, in Chicago where he’s the music director of the city’s symphony orchestra, he made the point that a foetus starts to hear at 45 days old. To laughter, he added, ‘Seven and a half months over the eye.’ He illustrates his views by playing short pieces on a piano by the microphone. I did wonder before I listened to the first two lectures how he might sustain five but there is no problem at all because Barenboim is a thinker and there is no need for padding, as has sometimes occurred in Reith lectures.
Barenboim was a child prodigy, giving his first piano concert, in Buenos Aires, at the astonishing age of seven. He was 13 at his first London performance, where he played Chopin. He was married, of course, to the great British cellist Jacqueline du Pré, who died so tragically of multiple sclerosis. He’s now not only music director of Chicago’s symphony orchestra but also the conductor of the state opera in Berlin, where the next lecture comes from. In the first, last week, he asked why music — and he meant classical music — was so important. It wasn’t just that it was something to listen to after a hard day’s work but that it was also a weapon from which we can learn a lot about ourselves, about the human being, about politics, about society. In fact, about anything we choose to do. He was unhappy about the place of music in society.
Another member of the audience, the cellist Julian Lloyd Webber, wondered if there was a danger that educationists assume that because certain children were from ethnic backgrounds that somehow classical music was not for them. Barenboim agreed that all children were capable of liking classical music, citing his own experiences in Ramallah and other parts of the West Bank where he created the now-popular Divan Orchestra. Not a fan of popular music, he stressed that knowledge about a piece of music heightened appreciation. If you listened to a pop song — or even a Strauss waltz — you needed less knowledge than when listening to Suite Opus 23 of Schönberg. When the presenter Sue Lawley asked him if he thought pop music could have the same transcendental power as classical, he answered sardonically, ‘If you feel it, how wonderful for you!’ He touched on the theme he chose for Chicago this week, how the ear has been anaesthetised by muzak. In his hotel lift there, he hears bits of Brahms violin concerto and ‘God forbid we should be playing it that evening in the concert hall,’ because those enduring it in the lift will not hear it later that evening. He quoted a woman who complained to a lavatorycleaning company that they had played a piece from Mozart’s Requiem in a television commercial. The company’s reply was a priceless and hilarious example of failing to grasp the point. It said, ‘When we first selected Mozart’s Requiem we didn’t know of its religious significance. We actually learnt about it from a small number of customers like you ... We have decided to change it to a passage from Wagner which music experts have assured us does not have religious importance ... ’ This he thought was abominable. When Lawley suggested that everyone should walk around in silence until coming to the concert hall in the evening, he replied with humour, ‘You don’t have to become a fundamentalist of silence!’ A music student brought the house down with her question about whether music was a good job choice. ‘Well,’ said Barenboim patiently, ‘let me start from the beginning ... If you want to play music because you think it’s a good job, I think you will find easier ways to earn a living. If you love it and you want to spend your life in it and with it, you have a good chance of making a good living.’ Wonderful inspired lectures, using only notes, too.
Has the BBC abolished the mile in favour of the kilometre? I ask because its news reports of the discovery of bird flu in Scotland talked of a 2,500 square kilometre exclusion zone. In English, roughly l,500 square miles. As it happens, I’m familiar with converting kilometres because I drive in Europe each year, but many aren’t. The simple way is to divide the kilometre figure in half and add the first one, two or three digits of the kilometre distance, as above, and you arrive at a pretty good estimate of the mileage. It’s not mathematically accurate but then nor is the absurd kilometre which was invented by the French, needless to say. We know the government can’t wait to destroy all imperial measures but why should the BBC be complicit in this? We know that post-Hutton it’s become a craven tool of this government, but as the licence fee has now been assured perhaps it’s time for a little independence to reassert itself.
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