...while you work
Robin Holloway
It’s been commonplace ever since the widespread dissemination of sound recording, followed by the rapid growth of broadcasting, to deplore ‘the appalling popularity of music’: its inevitable debasement, when available so easily, into something ordinary rather than special, repeatable rather than unique, cursory rather than concentrated, disposable rather than sacral. A background: ‘music while you work’ — or play, or relax, in factory
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days seem now as lost down the river of time as dancing around the maypole since the advent of personal technology, locking equally the crushed rush-hour commuter with the solitary jogger into a private world of inner bliss, whether rock’n’rave or the rarified strains of a Haydn quartet or a Schubert song.
Puritanically, I held out for years against background music. Broadcasts were by their nature one-off, requiring one’s ardent adolescent life to be built around the markedup pages of Radio Times; if you were away, or merely late, you missed it for ever. Even playing an LP needed planning and timing, appropriateness, a mood of exaltation and expectation; then religious concentration not to be interrupted by friend or phone.
I can’t reconstruct, decades later, how this juvenile severity began to crack, yield, supple up, in the end melt almost wholly away. It didn’t seem so sinful to use music originally written for diversion — to dance to, dine to, watch a passing procession, or as mere backdrop to chatter — when one had to do the ironing or fill in lots of report forms. The larger proportion of our musical legacy from the baroque, the rococo, even the classical period is exactly of this nature — frankly functional entertainment, ‘music as furniture’, part of the décor; Vivaldi and Telemann most obviously, but scarcely spurned by the Greats — the enormous divertimento output of Haydn then Mozart, Schubert’s endless sequences of dance music. Even the self-conscious loner Beethoven penned without reluctance a surprisingly substantial body of such ingratiating fare.
That some of this can be among its composer’s finest work (I’m thinking in particular of Mozart’s three most elaborate wind serenades and the extraordinary serenade in E-flat for string trio) is superfluous; depth of emotion, sublimity of style, ingenuity of workmanship are accidents incidental to humble function.
Thereafter, art and entertainment part company. Chopin’s mazurkas, Schumann’s piano medleys, utterly imbued with light popular strains, are meant to be heard in stillness and silence. And as the 19th century wears on, its music becomes more and more holy. Ironing to Tristan, filing reports to Bruckner, washing up to Mahler or Wolf, is or ought to be inconceivable. The danger wouldn’t just be the gross discrepancy. When sublimities from earlier epochs are similarly abused — Bach’s Passions, say, or the Creation, The Magic Flute, Beethoven’s symphonies, quartets, sonatas — there’s less at risk. All such music, however exalted, preserves the rhythms of normative human movement, formal and disciplined to dance or march to. Once the art is devoted to ebband-flux the senses begin to confound, the spirit soars into the empyrean or delves into uttermost darkness, sensuality writhes and seethes. Try washing up to The Poem of Ecstasy, sweeping the floor to Daphnis and Chloé, or doing your income tax to The Rite of Spring. Even Strauss’s Symphonia Domestica could lead to domestic disaster through its unbridled excess.
By contrast, I’ve just passed a week full of humdrum chores both physical and intellectual without the means of hearing a single note of music. Suitable accompaniments leap to mind — the vacuum cleaner on stairs and landings would drown the Nibelheim scene in Rhinegold, but down on hands and knees scrubbing three-storeys’worth of wooden floors would surely be helped by Billy Budd, washing and polishing cutlery and glass by anything of Messaien, acres of dusting match acres of dust-dry Hindemith ... While the hours at the desk devoted to purely mechanical copying could have been diverted by almost anything, whether chosen with careful prediliction or simply by submission to Radio Three’s unbroken roll of musical wallpaper.
Continuous saturation in the sound of music can breed either indifference or an increased appetite. The same with abstention. After my silent week I wasn’t hankering to fill the void. The first sounds to greet the ear, a wireless again within reach, was a horribly sweaty/muscular passage of struggling uplift from the finale of Brahms’s first symphony. ‘Oh God, no!’ Feeling quite faint, I switched off as decisively as, in the old William Glock days, offended listeners were supposed to switch off ‘nasty modern music’.
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