Katy Hamilton

Have you ever read Penelope Fitzgerald’s wonderful, funny, deeply moving novel The Bookshop? If you haven’t, you really should – set at the end of the 1950s, it traces the attempts of the brave Florence Green to set up a shop in the midst of local objections and ‘alternative solutions’ to bring culture to the small seaside town of Hardborough. One such solution, offered by the powerful Mrs Gamart, concerns the establishment of an Arts Centre instead. As Florence muses on the potential she might have to run such an enterprise, she considers all that she would have to learn in order to do so effectively. She concludes that she would ‘have to take some sort of course in art history and music appreciation – music was always appreciated, whereas art had a history.’

I howled with laughter when I first read this. Because it is quite true, of course – even now, forty-odd years since the book was first written and over fifty since the time in which it takes place. The study of art, with or without actually engaging in the creation of it, is known as Art History. But the study of music, with or without actually engaging in the creation of it (and assuming that you don’t rise to the heights of the dreaded -ologies), is still called Music Appreciation. I should know: I teach it myself.

It is curious, this unwillingness to refer to music history unless it is within a degree course. It seems almost as if people are afraid to use the H-word for fear of putting others off. We all seem happy to accept that art largely consists of old things, of oils and tempera, mythological heroes and an abundance of semi-naked women, anachronistic clothing and people riding horses rather than motorbikes. This is the art whose history we might wish to learn, to identify the characters depicted and the significance of the Virgin Mary always wearing blue. What is a putto? Why are their floating babies’ heads with wings? And so on. The answer is invariably historical.

But music cannot express its historicism quite so openly. The slightly prim instruction that it must be ‘appreciated’ is often (though I grant you, not always) an admission that it too is old, that the musical equivalent of semi-naked women and Greek heroes on horses (in some cases, a very direct equivalent, if you choose the right opera composer) is in need of explanation. But we don’t say so. Indeed, we still talk of anything written in the last hundred years as ‘modern’. The safe bet is to leave history out of it all together, and simply be as appreciative as possible of the things we like. Most of which is at least as old as the art we find historical.

Speaking as someone who spends a great deal of their time with rolled-up sleeves, rootling around in musical times past, I find this bizarre in the extreme. When I say ‘in musical times past’, by the way, the last week has involved research into composers and performers dating from the seventeenth century up to 2016, here and now, musicians who are shaping our musical worlds with every passing day, and who I am lucky enough to get to speak with. Last week was ‘times past’. History is always with us, and if the ‘foreign country’ of October 2015 is perhaps not so unknown to us as that of May 1785, it is worth remembering that the context of both is still different from now. It’s just that we can remember something about the one we actually lived through.

You might be thinking that, if history is such an implicit part of all our cultural studies, the A-word is a better descriptor of these courses, and we should be appreciating art and science and literature just as fervently as we appreciate music. But I’m afraid I disagree. You see, I think we have a rather odd relationship with history. I think we’re a little bit scared of it. There is so very, very much of it, it’s often extremely complicated – and I certainly count myself among those whose eyes glaze over at the sort of historical writing which simply lays out a succession of kings, queens and military leaders that I’m supposed to care about. Learning about times past can take a considerable amount of time present. And let’s be honest: you can still get a pretty good idea of what’s going on in Rubens’s Massacre of the Innocents without having read the Gospel of Matthew, whilst listening blind to Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique might seem rather more confusing.

Ah, I see what you’re thinking. You’re thinking that there’s a big difference between these two. Because we’ve all daubed at a piece of paper with a paint brush, all tried to draw a scene that either the world, or our own imagination, has laid before us. We can claim some sort of connected physical experience to the act of creating art. But when was the last time someone offered you a block of manuscript paper, a quill pen and a symphony orchestra?

See, here’s the reason why we should be teaching music history. Even ten years ago, you could compose tunes from scratch on your mobile phone. (I remember painstakingly typing in the theme tune of The Simpsons) Now, music apps, open source software and, if you’re feeling flush, expensive specialist kit, give us symphony orchestras and rock bands with a few key strokes. Like Sonic Pi, if you want to learn basic coding, or MuseScore if you fancy creating printed scores.

We have a whole bucketful of preconceptions that go with our ideas of musicians past: professionally trained, writing for an elite, uninterested in the general public, hanging out with princes, art above the pursuit for filthy lucre, blah blah blah… For the record, Berlioz got to 17 years old without ever having seen a full score, made money by writing endless reviews, for which he perfected the art of filling the word count without saying anything in case he offended big-shot musicians who might one day be useful to him, attended the only conservatoire that existed in Western Europe at the time because it happened to be in Paris, and in Symphonie fantastique created an extraordinary musical depiction of being crazy in love. And, you know, on drugs. So: late starter, hated his job, wrote music about being head over heels, got high. Not so different from more recent musicians, eh?

I could keep going with the Berlioz story, and talk about the gradual emergence of a high-low musical divide, the problems of funding composition and performance, the impact of recording, and a load of other things that might help to draw The Past and The Present just a little closer together… but I’ll restrain myself. You get the point. Music history is exciting, rich, gives us context for music both ‘classical’ and ‘modern’, and is frequently enormously entertaining. (You ever heard the one about Berlioz in a dress?) Let’s make a bit more of the H-word. Not for the sake of the ‘good old days’, or nostalgic images of a past golden age. But because the history of music, art, dance, literature, tree-planting, dressmaking and a million other things, is interesting, enlightening, and endlessly relevant. Now there’s something we can all appreciate.