Music
Lost soul
Peter Phillips
The general thrust of Radio Three's recent advertising on its own account, and that of the Proms by extension, may be familiar to you. A leaflet celebrating 75 years of the BBC is headed 'Never in the history of broadcasting has one organisa- tion brought so much magnificent classical music to so many millions' (the key words here are 'classical' and 'millions). It contin- ues: 'only 75 years ago there was no radio, no TV, just scratchy old records and wind- up gramophones' (notice 'old' to describe something which had at that time just been made and the specious incredulity). 'Con- certs, operas and ballets were mostly the prerogative of the wealthy and the toffs "Just keep the common people up in the gods, there's a good chap."' (I am not making this up.) Later, in promoting BBC Music Magazine, the leaflet reads 'You will get articles about composers — including all the juicy bits of their lives' (so a round- ed interest in classical music involves pruri- ence).
The Prom prospectus is more direct and less tacky: 'Great Music for Everyone' fol- lowed by a quotation from the Minister for the Arts in 1997: 'Very good quality work must be available to as wide an audience as possible. There can be no more complete expression of that than the Proms.' The first success of the 1997 season to be listed is 'welcoming the music of Lennon and McCartney to the Proms'. So, to précis, we are being told that more and more people, presumably of all social classes, are listen- ing to and reading about 'classical' music as a result of the broadcasting of Radio Three and the continuing existence of the Proms. Publicly financed serious music is being `successful'.
Underlying these comments is the well- known fact that Radio Three's budget has been consistently cut back year on year. This may seem to sit rather oddly with what we are told of the Proms — that it attracts increasingly large audiences — but then the exact financial relationship between the two is not widely discussed. Compared with the increasingly anodyne and fragmented daily fare on the radio, the Proms still rep- resents a haven of serious music-making, even if it is those events which are not so serious which are trumpeted in the publicity.
The common link between the two has been Nicholas Kenyon's desire to broaden the broadcast repertoire, and in doing so hope to appeal to new audiences. The obvi- ous danger of this course was that Radio Three would lose its reliable audience whilst gaining numberless people who would listen to the station once or twice before going back to what they were doing before. (Goodness knows what will happen now that Kenyon is moving sideways to the new post of controller of the Proms and millennium programmes.) France Musique, I notice, often takes the opposing view and confronts its commercial rivals by putting on uncompromisingly serious programmes which seem almost to challenge listeners to take them or leave them. This is the way they have chosen to justify their fund- ing. A study of the tactics and needs of these two networks would be highly edifying.
Kenyon's broadening at the Proms, at least, has been cleverly done and was almost certainly necessary in some measure if this gigantic festival was to continue. Nothing blatantly iconoclastic is allowed to come to the surface, nothing traditionalists can really get their teeth into, since so much of it has the aura of being worthy; and yet profound changes do seem to be in train. Everything is still called 'classical music'; there are a relatively large number of 'themes' which can introduce a relatively large number of unexpected items; there are now 'Proms' all over the place — in the Park, in the V&A, for many hours (in the case of the Choral Day), for children (including the 40th birthday Blue Peter Prom), for families, for gays, for magicians, for politicians.
Perhaps most telling is the quotation from the brochure which states that there are 'more than 100 works new to the Proms'. This is really an incredible figure, especially given that only five of them are actually BBC commissions for the Proms. Over 95 are either new pieces commis- sioned elsewhere or existing pieces which have not been thought appropriate for the Proms before now, from Rameau's Zoroas- tre, to Gershwin's Porgy and Bess, to Bar- bershop songs and reggae. If anything illustrates the real nature of the revolution taking place, this is it.
More music, more concerts, more people and possibly more money. The formula seems to work well enough at the Proms; it doesn't work so well on the radio. It is true that the France Musique approach could never run 'The World's Greatest Music Festival', but then their programme has kept its soul. I wish the same could be said for Radio Three, Proms or no Proms.
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