First published , 29th August 2013
“When men are most sure and arrogant they are commonly most mistaken, giving views to passion without that proper deliberation which alone can secure them from the grossest absurdities.” ― David Hume
When the impresario, Robert Newman invited Sir Henry Wood to conduct the first promenade concerts in London in 1895, he wrote:
“I am going to run nightly concerts and train the public by easy stages. Popular at first, gradually raising the standard until I have created a public for classical and modern music”.
When the BBC decided to bring rap, grime, hip hop and reggae into this year’s Proms I found myself sort of clutching at the words of Newman and Hume as I fell off my chair and sprawled tearfully across the kitchen floor.
How easy it is to corrupt things these days…
Picking myself up, I was reminded by Hume’s wise words that initial outrage and indignation should serve only to set one off on a journey, a calm exploration of what (the fuck) is going on, a reflective analysis and an attempt to appreciate the views of those (complete wankers) who might have perfectly legitimate reasons for supporting and lauding what is, actually, a really good idea. And just because I was horrified, I should not spend this month’s blog ranting my bigotry which would only leave me looking not just grossly absurd but also rather solitary.
So who sold the idea to the BBC? Serious and Bigga Fish. In defending against whispered suggestions that perhaps the gig-concert was another example of cultural dumbing down, Claire Whitaker, director at jazz promoters Serious responded:
“I think it’s a disappointing reaction … Classical music is wonderful, but many people don’t grow up hearing it – would those critics want to stop it reaching a wider audience? The classical world is fantastic, but urban is too.”
Nii Sackey, founder of Bigga Fish. “The first time they play with a full orchestra their mouths drop open,” he said. “It’s like they’ve been eating McDonald’s and then someone gives them a six-course meal. If we are opening the doors of Maida Vale, of the Albert Hall to these artists, that has to be progress.”
Here’s the hub of the first stretch of the debate. What are these guys actually saying here about culture?
Claire Whitaker is obliged to assert that ‘classical music is wonderful’. She also seems to suggest that it should reach a wider audience. Okay, well, and then, rather oddly the truth sort of slips out: “The classical world is fantastic, but urban is too.” Sleight of hand spotted I think: this is not about getting Radio One fans into Wagner. Quite the reverse. It’s about getting all those tweedy stuffy middle-aged Radio Three bores out of their hobby sheds and green house comfort zones and into da groove because this isn’t about classical music at all it’s about class. It’s about a horribly muddled vision of British society that is as ignorantly at home in the drawing rooms of Maida Vale as it is in the post-it offices of outreach urban culture projects in Brixton.
Again, Nii Sackey of Bigga Fish: “It’s like they’ve been eating McDonald’s and then someone gives them a six-course meal.” On further inspection, it’s not clear what Mr Sackey is saying here. I mean, what’s wrong with McDonalds? Not all gang banging rappers are into Dom Pérignon and smearing Beluga into their bitches’ booties after all. Is the suggestion here that British culture/society would be a better place for throwing its elitist closed doors open to some sort of invented ‘urban’ class – a class culture that didn’t exist before this new century but now hangs out there waiting to be let in, tired of daubing the outside walls with graffiti tags and eyeing up domestic goods through the plate glass. Oh, and just by the way, whether we’re from Hampstead or Hackney, no-one’s talking here about chavs… They can just fuck off.
It’s not just about class, of course. It’s also all about money. Money comes from punters. Success is measured in ratings and ticket sales.
Why on earth are the arts being used to support mass entertainment? Well, the answer to that has a long and funny history. Freddie Mercury so wanted an opera singer’s voice. From the deliciously dreadful ‘Barcelona’ album to the likes of George Michael climbing up on stage with Luciano Pavarotti, pop singers have always quietly envied those with trained voices. It’s easy: pop music, popular music is McDonald’s. McMusic is simple, immediately gratifying, easy to consume and fun. So-called classical music (such a misnomer) is art. Bollox to art because it’s elitist and stuffy and, anyway, it forces you to think and give it time to sink in. GIVE ME IMMEDIATE GRATIFICATION YOU POSH TOSSERS! Of course, it works the other way round too. I mean, members of the elitist London orchestras do find themselves backing the likes of the Arctic Monkeys at Glastonbury etcetera. Viola players get to pay their utility bills and the bands get an extra cool vote for looking a little more arty and cerebral than, well, monkeys, I guess. By the way, the British have a strangely ambivalent attitude to elitism – whatever that is. If an elite is founded on hard work, talent and connects to upward mobility then FUCK THEM! Sure, but dare to mention anything against the Queen and her inbreds and I’LL FUCKING SMASH YER FACE IN! I apologise for the inclusion of perhaps too many gratuitous expletives, but felt they might help add a certain and rather fashionable urban quality to this month’s blog.
I digress.
That dreadful queen of fusion, Clemency Burton-Hill, wrote an article published on the BBC’s Culture website: What Pop Can Teach Classical Music. I’m quoting the article here at length because it illustrates so well this whole muddle-headed fusion confusion. Anyone who names Bach and Justin Bieber in the same sentence should be shot at birth (oops!) or at least raise serious suspicions:
“Classical and pop music often seem so alien to each other that it can be easy to forget they share identical DNA. But music is music, and everything – at least, everything we hear in the western tradition, from Bach to Bieber – is built from twelve identical building blocks: the notes of the standard chromatic scale.
While a modern pop listener may not be aware of the sonic echoes that resonate across the centuries, pop music has always acknowledged a great harmonic and melodic debt to its older, sometimes stuffier-seeming relation. Without Bach’s musical architecture there would be no jazz and therefore no soul, funk or hip-hop, let alone The Prodigy; Schubert’s knack for nailing the three-minute, verse-chorus pop gives any Lennon, McCartney or Adele a run for their money; and Beethoven was an early model for the trope of the tortured creative genius: his music expressed an inner turmoil just as much as, say, Kurt Cobain’s.
Then there’s Mozart, the original pop star, who had a preternatural gift for instantly catchy melodies that kept audiences coming back again and again, and whose preferred chord progressions have formed the basis of pretty much every great pop song ever since. So whether you prefer a certain type of music to another comes down to taste: there is nothing inherently different about what goes into an operatic aria or a pop song. Like two sculptors working with the same clay, it’s all in the execution.
Yet, for all the common genetic material, when it comes to market share and revenues, classical music now looks like pop’s weak and impoverished relation. Some apologists for classical music would be appalled at the suggestion it might have something to learn from its younger, cooler cousin: they tend to view ‘pop’ as a dirty word and any attempt to find commonalities as ‘dumbing down’. Witness recently the storm over Nicola Benedetti, one of the most outstanding British violinists of her generation, because she is young and beautiful and chooses to wear glamorous dresses when she performs. Many in the classical world bemoan that she is ‘forced’ to do this to sell records. While it is legitimate to say no performer of any stripe should be compelled to do or wear anything, I suspect this actually masks a deeper prejudice of anything that sniffs of ‘commercial’ or ‘populist’ intentions. God forbid people should actually buy records and come to gigs…”
I don’t know where to begin! Do I need to pull this whole piece apart here? No. The air-headed nonsense speaks for itself. Surely? ‘Sonic echoes that resonate across the centuries…’ Sorry but WTF?!
Okay, look, I know there have been countless attempts to fuse musical traditions. Some have worked, many haven’t. I’m not really writing here about, I don’t know, Yoyo Ma’s work, or Menuhin’s wooden efforts alongside Grapelli. These experiments have little to do with my present rant over the Proms.
There is a simple sort of thought experiment relating to the stupidity of bringing so-called urban music into something like the Proms. It’s this: Imagine the furore and confusion if the BBC controllers decided to bring Mozart (who was, by the way, nothing remotely like a ‘pop’ star) into the Radio One Road Show or that the organisers of the Glastonbury festival decided there should be one night devoted to Bach, Beethoven and Brahms. You know, I’ve always felt that pop music enthusiasts are far more religious about their music than the likes of myself. My i-Tunes collection is borderless across genres but, I’d like to think, exclusively intelligent.
I digress slightly. No, if the likes of Ms Burton-Hill were right, genuine and honest, they wouldn’t even blink at the counter suggestions and would surely leap with joy to hear that the Reading rock festival would now always begin with The Four Last Songs. But they would be horrified. I’m fairly certain of that. There is an assymetry in attitudes and thinking here that points to the real and insidious nature of the cultural dumbing down program.
I return to the Ruskinite aims of the founder of the Proms, Robert Newman, to raise the standard of musical appreciation from the simple immediacy of popular music to at least a willingness to include some snippets of the intellectually more demanding art of so-called classical music, music that is only old because it has the qualities to make it last so long (and isn’t stuck with four beats to a bar). Art transcends our commercial culture and that it is not popular says far more about consumerism than anything else. I am critical of the likes of Bernadette McNulty who gushingly writes:
“The way you could tell something was literally afoot in SW7 on Saturday night was the style of the prommers’ shoes. Instead of the usual padding of sensible Ecco or Clarks soles, the corridors of the Albert Hall clanged with the trot of vertiginous platform heels or the squeak of box-fresh trainers. Old-timers had either managed to drag their kids along or were simply out-numbered by a dolled-up crowd of excited first-timers, presenting the kind of audience age-profile drop that a BBC controller would weep tears of joy over.
The reason for this culture shift – a first venture into urban music for the Proms – could have been a dog’s dinner but turned out instead to be a joyous and inspiring collision of musical worlds. While the classical festival was putting on prog rockers Soft Machine 43 years ago, and has dallied with TV theme tunes, musical theatre and world music, this was the first time that street styles such as grime, hip hop and reggae had been staged under the burnished bust of Sir Henry Wood. You imagine the old proselytiser would have approved.”
– Telegraph 11th August
No he wouldn’t have. All this is depressing beyond words. So universal is the apparent joy and delight over Prom 37 that here I write not so much about dumbing down so much as the steady and continued decline of western post-industrial culture. Beethoven and Kurt Cobain on an equal angst footing? Lots of nodding heads … Jesus holy Christ…