Kate Chisholm

Bach breaking

Plus: why are so many podcasts American? Is it because of the stranglehold that Radio 4 has on the British market?

It’s just not what you expect to hear on Radio 3 but I happened upon Music Matters on Saturday morning and after playing us a clip from the opening chorus of St Matthew Passion Tom Service pronounced, ‘Bach is a tasteless and chaotic composer.’ I felt as if my ears had been syringed.

Service was actually repeating what one of his guests, the Bach scholar John Butt, had just asserted, as if to verify his intention. Was he really saying that the composer formerly thought of as the epitome of balanced reflection and ‘motivic organisation’ would have sounded ‘incompetent’ to his audiences in 1727? Butt insisted, on the Passion, ‘It’s a complete mess.’

As I thought back on the music we had just heard, and with Butt’s comments in mind, Bach’s choruses did sound disorganised, the singers singing across and against each other, the styles mixed up from pastoral to fugue and back again. What Bach was doing, said Butt, was not breaking the rules so much as pushing the rules to the limit and thereby making everything sound different.

His conversation with Service was being broadcast live from Gateshead as part of this year’s Free Thinking festival — concerts, talks and debates on the theme of rule-breaking. Music Matters was devoted to the question of what this might mean in musical terms. Cage’s 4’33” or Offenbach’s can-can? Pierre Boulez’s Second Piano Sonata or Strauss’s Four Last Songs (both composed in 1948)? Which were the most revolutionary?

Butt was joined by the composer Kevin Volans, who questioned whether Stravinsky was really such a rule-breaker. His Rite of Spring still sounds amazingly fresh (and we heard a clip from it just to prove its shocking qualities) but it was Mussorgsky who really broke the rules, said Volans, because he was untrained.

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