Mu sic
Playing safe
Peter Phillips
Is it my imagination, or are contributors to the Spectator becoming self-conscious? There seems to have been a rash of self- and cross-quotations recently. I wonder if it was all started by the impossibility of finding an adequate definition for the word `fogey' (old or young), which has wasted more good conversation time than any other trivia known to have passed round my acquaintance in past weeks. For some reason the discussion centres on Spectator writers. Well, I am qualified to contribute further to this definition.
Here are two quotations from the issue of. 19 October. Richard Ingrams in his Diary told the Booker committee that its job was 'to promote good but little-known writers, whose works are likely to be read when drawn to the public's attention. Immediately the judges start worrying ab- out whether books are "serious", "impor- tant", or "literature", they are sunk., Kingsley Amis in his 'Sod the public' guide a number of times seemed to be promoting a kind of well-tutored popularism; in par- ticular under 'Music on radio', he distin- guished between the ordinary Radio 3 listener, who goes for music from the period 1770-1920, especially its orchestral and operatic music, and BBC producers, who 'keep up with musical developments and care a good deal for 20th-century music. The result is that most people do not want to listen to the bulk of what the producers are putting out and the produ- cers are therefore not serving the public well. Oh dear. Is it all true, then, what they say about fogeys (old and young) – that they play safe? Does the Speckie have any inclination for being forward-looking? So far as the musical part of these animadversions is concerned, I have a suspicion that although every music-lover must get something out of the 1770-1920 repertoire, all those few who sit around listening to Radio 3 also have other favourites, about which they are gra- tuitously voluble. The problem is that these favourites rarely coincide. I am constantly being attacked by friends of friends or relatives of relatives (not to be too specific) with commonplaces about the beauties of Mozart, who then switch in a moment to unburden themselves of the tensions which a recently broadcast per- formance of Berio's Sinfonia or Machaut's Mass has excited in them. Or alternatively to soliloquise on the more colourful aspects of the personal lives of Domenico Scarlatti, Thomas Weelkes or some other helpless victim of a television documentary. A boy brought up in his local parish church choir is not going to be happy with the period 1770-1920, because church music was in- tolerably bad then. A player of the oboe is not going to be content with it either, since all the great concertos for that instrument were written before then (or, in the case of Strauss's, afterwards). An enthusiast for the noble art of hocketing will find little to satisfy him in this period; nor will the lover of electronic sounds. And then there is all that ethno-music. No one I know combines an interest in all these things, but everyone I know who listens to Radio 3 would not do so if the repertoire were confined to 1770-1920. (Incidentally, why 1770 – after the deaths of Bach and Handel? I am assured that large audiences the world over have been flocking to hear these two played this year. Mr Amis is reflecting a most ancient prejudice, especially in- appropriate just now.) What is a BBC producer supposed to do? Play safe? Broadcast another classical sYmphony, which will appeal to everybody but fascinate few? Supposing that during the last century the equivalent of our producer – take Vincent Novello and his son J.Albert who set up the publishing house – had played safe with the market. For a start they would not have established their business, since to do so they had to be Innovatory and convince the public that what they would enjoy was something they had no experience of: singing part-music in score from individual octavo editions. Hav- ing established the principle they were then able to build up a catalogue of music, which they thought 'serious' and 'impor- tant'. By mixing known repertoire with experiments they carried their public with them and in this way encouraged the development of the Victorian madrigal and contemporary church music. Later their firm played a major part in the revival of interest in early music through selling sets of inexpensive copies to cathedral choirs and madrigal societies throughout the country. Now, if Novello had played up to the fogeys of the time and gone into the business of publishing piano reductions of Gounod's chamber music, then all the
rage, where would his firm be, and where would public taste be today? Nowhere; and beholden to some other entrepreneur.
The BBC should resemble Novello in making an attractive mixture of repertoire, and by leading the public, rather than bombarding it, retain their confidence. I have no means of telling whether the Radio 3 producers do, in fact, inform themselves of the drift of their listeners' opinions, as Novello would have had to do if he wanted to remain in business. But the signs are not good. Mr Amis's 'Club' and its high-handed exclusivity corroborates my experience of them exactly. To quote Richard Ingrams again (Diary, 5 October): `The critic likes to think that what he writes may have some effect but in the case of the BBC, especially, the effect is nil'. This is regrettable, because in some ways they are quite near the mark.
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