Dead men walking
Today, I’m off to beautiful Bath to give a talk as part of the Bath Mozartfest. It’s a place close to my heart: I went to school not very far from it, and remember weekend visits as a teenager, sitting in the cinema with my friends trying to recreate that Malteasers advert where the guy pretends to be a gangster by stuffing chocolate into his cheeks, only to realise that three rows back was the chairman of the school governors. And school was also the place where I came to really learn about, and understand more about, the music of the past that spoke most directly to me. The music I am now fortunate enough to spend my life writing about, talking about, playing and listening to.
There is no denying that the majority of this repertoire is by men, and that the majority of those men are most definitely, certainly and profoundly dead. Tonight, I’m going to be outlining some of the history of how we got to this curious position in which concerts – rare, often expensive events at the time – gradually evolved from occasions dominated by the music of the present day (written by, and often performed by, people who were actually alive and in the room) to the rather more familiar line-up of historical figures who still dominate concert programming now. It’s a long, bumpy, inconsistent and fascinating road, this path from the contemporary to the deceased. And it brings with it two very particular problems in interpreting the music of the past.
One is the assumption that, since we look to history for Great Music, we can trust history itself to send all of the Geniuses who wrote the Great Music straight to the top of the pile. That the very process of time passing provides a filtering mechanism for removing all irrelevant dross and leaving us with only those worthy of true posthumous praise and reputational longevity. Be honest: at some point or other, you’ve trusted to this kind of selection process, even if you don’t now.
The second assumption, which is born in part out of the first, is that Old Things are therefore somehow better than New Things. Old Things have Stood The Test Of Time, after all. If they weren’t any good, we would have forgotten about them by now. Whereas New Things proliferate: they are noisy, and everywhere, and too numerous to keep up with. They are susceptible to the vagaries of fashion. Old Things are eternal, timeless, have lessons to teach us across the centuries. They have been scooped out of the stream of history, dusted off, put in a brightly polished frame and hung with pride in the Gallery of Masterpieces.
This is as dangerous a view of the New, of course, as it is of the Old. Of course you can’t truly see the shape of a forest if you are standing at its centre; nor, if you are fifty miles from it, can you tell what trees it consists of, and what else might live in it. Historians are increasingly interested in the details of daily life, and the aspects of culture that are not Great Art – and rightly so. Because it is these things, however small, which might shape the creation, or rejection, of what we now hold to be the most important artefacts of a given period. They might also explain why wonderful, beautiful things are lost: not everything of value bobs to the surface just because time has passed.
It also undermines the New by treating it as the only time ever in which there is no real discernment. This is a nonsense in every direction. The world is enormous, messy, vibrant, violent, inspirational, and constantly filled with new and exciting things which might only be meant to be relevant for a single day, or a single hour, or a single month in which something important (to the creators of those things) is occurring. That doesn’t make those things less valuable. It makes them a different kind of valuable.
And, in this curious cleaving of the old and the new, there is something else that falls by the wayside: the fallibility of memory. Today, 100 years on from the Battle of the Somme, in a time of enormous political uncertainty and social instability, it is imperative that we remember what has happened in the past, and how it has come to affect and shape the present. Not just the big speeches and the locations of the worst battles: but the events that lead to violence and segregation, and the tactics used to mobilise fear and hate. Not just the destruction and suffering of the First World War, but that of the Second, of Vietnam, of Iraq, of Syria, and countless other places besides. In certain areas of our lives, we choose to focus on (and in some cases, even hide in) the comfortable fictions and timeless oases we have made of history. But that is not enough, and it is just as crucial to respect the messiness and difficulties of the past as to face the challenges of the present. Lest we forget.
