Katy Hamilton

In 2004, full of trepidation that it wasn’t going to be good enough, I submitted my first paid programme note job to the staff of Lakeside Arts, Nottingham. I was a Masters student at the university there, and they needed someone to write about some of the Bartók string quartets – talk about baptism of fire. I adored doing it, automatically assumed that everyone in the audience knew twenty times as much about the repertoire I did, and was in equal parts thrilled and embarrassed to see my initials at the bottom of the printed text, because most of the other notes were provided by my lecturers and I couldn’t quite understand why they had seen fit to ask me to help when I quite patently knew diddly-squat in comparison with them.

Eleven years later – last summer – I found myself sharing the stage with the Doric and Heath String Quartets in a series of performance of quartets by Haydn and Bartók at the Ryedale Festival. Before each concert, I had the chance to give a half-hour overview of the music we were about to hear, with the help of those willing quartet players to come on with me and demonstrate melodies, motives and performance techniques to our audience. It was an unforgettable experience, and a wonderful way in which to return to Bartók’s music and present it to people in a different format.

Eleven years older and, nominally anyway, eleven years wiser, I found my approach to the material rather different. I read more, and more widely; I engaged in much more extensive analysis and close listening than I had before. But the language in which I couched my findings turned out to be less… formal than the programme notes from 2004. I re-read my earlier efforts as part of my research, of course. I don’t disagree with anything I wrote then. I don’t think the 2004 note comes across as being particularly pompous, but I certainly read it now and sense that I was trying very hard to write in a way that would be taken seriously. For example, I write at one point, of the First Quartet: ‘This first movement “dirge” combines a Romantic, almost Wagnerian poignancy with echoes of Beethovenian late quartet writing in its contrapuntal texture and voicing, and a homophonic central section that is harmonically reminiscent of Ravel – in other words, it brings together an astonishing array of styles and influences in a fluid and deeply moving lament.’

OK, nothing disastrously wrong with that. It’s a long sentence. It demands a fair knowledge of styles and technical language. It also does something which I now loathe when I encounter it in other peoples’ notes: it tells you how you’re supposed to feel about what you’re listening to. And there’s a whiff of postgraduate insecurity in it: look at all the stuff I know! Look, Beethoven and Wagner and counterpoint and homophony… this is difficult music, and I can give you learned terms to explain how clever Bartók is being. I don’t feel it to be particularly pretentious because I know that I wasn’t a particularly pretentious kind of person back then. But perhaps if you encountered this sentence in a note by someone you didn’t know, you might think they were a bit too keen to show off?

Not so in Ryedale. There, the language I used was less dense, partly because I was speaking, and partly because I didn’t feel the need to cram every sentence with analytical terminology. And yet I can honestly say that by the time I got to introduce those concerts, I understood far better what it was that Bartók was up to in those quartets. Structurally, texturally, technically, in terms of folk influence and non-diatonic scale patterns and rhythmic devices, historical influences and artistic development… it was the difference between gazing at a beautiful car and finding all the best adjectives to describe what you could see from standing next to it (me in 2004), and sitting comfortably on the bonnet in the sure and certain knowledge that you could rummage through the engine and point almost at once to any specific component, as well as noting the high-class body paint and quality of the leather seats (me in 2015).

Why am I telling you all of this? Because last week, a fellow programme note writer alerted me to an exchange that went in on Classical Music Magazine earlier this year about the ‘dumbing down’ of note writing. It began with an ‘Insiders Anonymous’ piece in January, in which a writer bemoaned the terrible pay and the dumbing down of notes, the ‘deskilling’ of audiences through the veto on terms like ‘flattened submediant’. A polite letter from Christopher Morley followed in February, disagreeing wholeheartedly and insisting that ‘the reader must never be made to feel inferior, inadequate or ignorant,’ and that ‘self-congratulatory jargon’ must be avoided at all costs. Finally, in March, Andrew Mellor wrote an article stating that ‘Writing programme notes is some of the best-paid work around.’

Well chaps, perhaps unsurprisingly, I don’t completely agree with any of you. The Anonymous Insider sounds sufficiently disillusioned that I’m not sure there’s any chance of a rescue: but having notes as ‘a real-time guide’, as he suggests, is a problem when the auditorium is usually dark during the performance, and part of the reason for going to a live concert is so that you can see the musicians as well as hear them. Technical language or its lack is not a mark of a collapsing civilisation. And if the music ‘speaks for itself’, then we’re all out of a job, because that makes notes entirely superfluous, does it not? Expecting your notes to ‘convey the exhilaration of the listening experience’, as Christopher Morley suggests, seems to put the writer in serious danger of telling the listener how to feel, and thanks all the same, but I think I, and others, can figure that out all on our own. And programme note writing is, I’m sure, superbly well-paid if you’re writing for some of the biggest orchestras and venues in the UK, but we’re not all Andrew Mellor and it should be remembered that ensemble and venue budgets vary, as does the extent to which notes and talks around an event are valued (conceptually and financially) by the management.

However, all three writers seem to view readers’ knowledge as an entirely binary thing. Either an audience member will know what a word means, an indication that culture is not going to the dogs… or doesn’t, and therefore requires a certain amount of explanation or hand-holding so that they don’t immediately burst into tears or flounce out of the concert. That is, on all sides, stupendously patronising to readers. Are you honestly telling me that when you read a novel, or a newspaper article, or a non-fiction work, you always know what every word in it means without recourse to a dictionary or Google search? We all have intellectual agency, and that must be respected. Of course you shouldn’t empty sackfuls of florid terminology into every text – that is totally unnecessary and will more likely leave readers with the impression that you’re an ass, rather than that they’re stupid. But if you write a note and it turns out that one term – or, heavens, even two! – is unknown to your reader, then make it ok for them to look it up or ask. If you’re high-handed you’ll isolate them; if you’re molly-coddling you’ll probably hack them off. If you can find that magic balance where they enjoy what they read, trust your authority, and find a term they don’t understand, they might just get out their mobile phones (on silent, of course, ahead of the main event) and look it up.

Last week, whilst teaching an adult education class, we reached a passage in a piece that was laden with hemiolas. ‘Do we all know what a hemiola is?’ I asked. Most nodded. I was just drawing breath to continue when someone said, ‘No, I don’t – and he doesn’t either. What’s a hemiola?’ I explained – a bit ham-fistedly, it has to be said. One of my other students raised her hand, and said, ‘I don’t know if this helps, but I find the easiest way to explain it is…’ and gave a beautifully eloquent definition which cleared up all confusion and allowed us to move on, at ease with the term and its meaning. Trust your readers and listeners. They have brains too, and they have spent their hard-earned cash coming to the concert and buying your programme notes. Show them some respect. And maybe we can all learn something.