Katy Hamilton

Oh dear. As you can probably already guess from the title, this is going to get messy. Richard Taruskin’s Text and Act will be invoked. I’m going to get tetchy with oversimplified journalism. And there might be a bit of Brahms in here as well.

Yeah, I’d be hiding too.

This week I came across an article on the excellent magazine site, The Conversation, by Professor Clive Brown: We’re playing classical music all wrong – composers wanted us to improvise. Brown is a violinist, a specialist in the performing styles of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and a distinguished scholar. His piece is about 800 words long (fractionally shorter than my average post) and covers a couple of key points. Which are:

– Classical music today is seen by many as ‘stuffy, irrelevant and unappealing’. This is partly due to the conventions of contemporary programming, dry performance, and pricey tickets

– In the 1800s, leading musicians were more like popstars. They were leading figures in contemporary culture and improvised, so no two performances were the same

– Since times changed and ‘many genuinely musical people are now deterred from engaging with classical music by a perception that it is formal, rigid, and lacking in emotional vitality’, we need to do something about this

– The answer is combination of ‘family friendly, state-of-the-art concert halls’, innovative programming and recapturing this improvisatory approach, engage with music ‘more courageously’, and seek to use the past to revitalise current performance of classical music

Ok, I admit it. The thing that really put my back up was the line ‘the popstars of the 1800s’. I shudder even typing it. The reason? It is a line I have heard trotted out on countless previous occasions by a vast array of scholars and presenters; and it is ridiculously simplistic and insulting to both popstars and the 1800s. More on this in a minute.

Now then, to the rest. I don’t want to turn this into a horrible piece where I rip the article to shreds, because I respect Brown’s scholarship and point of view, even if I don’t always agree with it. But parts of this piece read as worryingly out of date; and despite his humble admission in the article comments that a short piece will inevitably result in lack of detail and oversimplification, I would suggest that to be an argument for reducing the number of the ideas presented, rather than the validity of the points made.

There are some people who undoubtedly think that classical music is ‘stuffy, irrelevant and unappealing’. There will always be people who think that. Some of them we might convince otherwise; others not. There is, I suspect, a much greater proportion who think that classical music is what you listen to in the bath, or in Café Nero early in the morning, or as a means of calming commuters and discouraging rowdy behaviour at tube stations and bus garages. Classical music is consumer music too. The fact that a goodly percentage of it happens to be by dead people doesn’t make it exempt from that.

Readers’ comments on the article neatly cover a couple of other important corrections. Not all programming, by major or small companies and ensembles, is predictable; pretty much every major concert venue has schemes for cheap tickets, student performances, kids’ workshops, family shows, discounts and behind-the-scenes and a host of great initiatives to combat the image of ‘stuffy, irrelevant and unappealing’.

I love the idea of musically courageous performances (and have been fortunate enough to witness a number myself, which I cherish), and I also applaud the dedication with which scholars and performers seek out evidence of the performance styles, instrumental configurations, programming, gestures and so on of bygone eras. But I don’t think that such research is the only way to produce great, inspiring, breath-taking music-making. There is also more than one ‘historical’ performance of any past work (Liszt playing Beethoven, for example: what might that have sounded like?). Taruskin not only pointed out back in 1996 that ‘historical’ performance is a modern invention, but also that ‘we cannot know [a composer’s] intentions… or rather, we cannot know we know them.’ Assuming the composers knew themselves, of course. The same is equally true of performers. That shouldn’t stop us trying; but it should encourage clarity in the presentation of the results that this is a creative re-imagining. And that shouldn’t detract from its value, as both performance and research.

Let’s get back to those popstars. What does this actually mean?

Here’s my take. The big-name virtuosos of the nineteenth century performed to large audiences. They commanded ludicrous ticket prices, sold out venues all over Europe, Russia and the United States of America. Crazed fans fought for their gloves and hankies, and fell madly in love with them. Of course, the majority of these guys weren’t making their cash by playing the Hammerklavier or expecting hushed silence through violin concertos. They were playing operatic paraphrases and variations sets designed explicitly to show off their talent. Resoundingly middle (and upper)-class cover versions, if you will. And the really clever ones found a way to capture a sense of that popular appeal in their compositions, whilst adding additional complexities to build in layers of meaning to which you could pay attention or ignore, as you chose. Like Brahms and his Liebeslieder Op.52. Hear it in concert, leave humming the tunes, buy the score, discover to your delight that you can play it at home because it isn’t that difficult. Commercially and artistically successful. Win.

You’ll notice, in this explanation, that the big hits by Liszt and Paganini were not being whistled by the coal man on his way to work, or hummed by the errand boys running messages from house to house. At least, if they were, we have no evidence that I know of. The nineteenth century was the period in which classical music (as we now understand it) was made available to the middle class, not all classes. There were few mechanisms to allow the kind of democratization of music that we now enjoy, or for some poor son of an AWOL merchant seaman to grab a guitar, write a song to express the feelings of his generation, and make it into an international hit. Any angsty numbers by said young man would either sink without a trace due to lack of profile, or never make it to publication because of censorship legislation.

Remember what I said earlier about classical music being consumer music? It is. It was. And so shall it ever be, assuming that the publishing and record industries don’t collapse altogether. This is why Bryn Terfel sings music theatre now and again, and why Joyce DiDonato sports fabulous frocks and hair-dos on her album covers. You’re buying a product when you see or hear them. You might long to be like them, or even declare your undying love to them. And who could blame you? They’re the romantic virtuosos of the 2000s, after all.