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Tuesday 2 December 2008

The day English classical music died (The Times)

I have a piece in today's Times on Vaughan Williams. Here it is:

Do the names Alexander Goehr or Nicholas Maw mean anything to you? Here are two slightly better known names from the same profession: Sir Peter Maxwell Davies and Sir Harrison Birtwistle.

Still no idea? This one's the giveaway: Ralph Vaughan Williams.

They are all, as the last name will have told you, English composers. But while Vaughan Williams was and remains a household name, the other composers are known only to the coterie that now listens to contemporary music. Sir Peter is Master of the Queen's Music (the musical equivalent of Poet Laureate) and Sir Harrison is regarded by those who care about such things as the leading composer of his generation. Yet I doubt if anyone but a few people have listened to their works.

Vaughan Williams died 50 years ago tomorrow. He had a good innings - he died at 85 - but his death was symbolic of another death: that of contemporary classical music as a mainstream cultural activity.

In Vaughan Williams's day, the premiere of a new work of music was a significant event. No one would be considered culturally aware unless they were au fait with the new Vaughan Williams symphony. Today, any averagely informed person has read the latest fiction and seen the buzz films and theatre. But new music - serious rather than pop or rock - is a cult pursuit among a tiny proportion of the already small minority who are interested in culture.

Classical music took a wrong turn in the period after the death of Vaughan Williams. The ruination of music as part of mainstream culture came largely because of subsidy. Composers stopped writing for their public and wrote instead for the small clique that was responsible for commissioning pieces. The cultural commissars were obsessed with theories of music that held that melody was no longer a legitimate tool and only atonal music was appropriate to the age. Their dominance of the subsidy racket meant that not only were composers freed from any obligation to secure an audience for their music, but they were pilloried and starved of funds also if they did attempt to do that.

Vaughan Williams was the last composer to speak directly to a wide audience, with music that could be appreciated by listeners who did not have degrees in musical theory. One reason was basic: he wrote tonal music. But another was that there was something very English in his music. It wasn't just his use of folk music themes or the stories and places on which he based so much of his work - pieces such as A London Symphony, In the Fen Country, Norfolk Rhapsody, Five Tudor Portraits, Sir John in Love, A Pilgrim's Progress, the Fantasia on Greensleeves, and the Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis. It was the sound itself. His most frequently played piece, The Lark Ascending, captures the lyrical essence of the still, quiet idealised English countryside. And there is a similar, if indefinable, Englishness about almost everything he wrote.

But just as in so many areas of our lives the English often conceal passion under a calm exterior, so Vaughan Williams's music had far more to it than the lyricism of The Lark Ascending. His Symphony No. 6, for instance, which was premiered in 1948, has violent thrusts and agonised harmonies, and many of his other pieces have dark undercurrents.

The only contemporary composer who had anything close to Vaughan Williams's recognition was Benjamin Britten. Despite his avowed attempt to excise from his work what he regarded as the stultifying parochialism of the English musical scene, he too was a recognisably English composer. His breakthrough came with Peter Grimes, an opera set in a village that could easily have been his home town, Aldeburgh. And his lover and musical partner, the tenor Peter Pears, sounded as English as the Queen.

After decades in which contemporary music lived in a ghetto, a new generation of composers started to emerge in the 1990s. As the older generation lost its grip on the purse strings, so younger composers have started to write music that wider audiences can enjoy. James MacMillan, a Scottish composer, is as intellectually rigorous as any of his predecessors but has the priceless gift of connecting with audiences. The norm for performances of contemporary music was a premiere and perhaps one or two further subsidised repeats, then deserved obscurity. MacMillan's music has entered the mainstream repertoire because audiences want to hear it.

The leading young English composer is Thomas Adès, whose opera Powder Her Face won rave reviews in 1995 and has since been repeatedly performed around the world. He has been commissioned by the likes of the Royal Opera House and the Berlin Philharmonic and has produced pieces that have won instant audience acclaim.

Adès may be English but, unlike Vaughan Williams, there is almost nothing in his music to show that. Vaughan Williams may no longer be the last to write serious music for general audiences but, as a recognisably English composer, he was indeed the last of his kind.

 

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