Soul Music is already into its 11th series on Radio 4 (Tuesdays, after lunch), but it just gets better and better. On TV the idea behind it (to explore the great works of the classical repertoire as well as pop songs and their impact on us) would by now seem jaded, the graphics tired, the personalities being interviewed too self-conscious. But it’s as if in this new series (produced by Rosie Boulton) we’re only just getting to the heart of the matter.
Don’t miss this week’s programme which looks at a very familiar work, Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet, but takes us on a quite different journey as we listen to fragments of the melody threaded through the dialogue. There’s no narration; just a series of edited comments from musicians who’ve played the piece and know it inside-out and medical experts trying to work out why it has such power, such resonance.
Alex Smith, who runs the Listening Centre in Lewes, East Sussex, uses this ethereal, mellifluous chamber music as part of his work with disturbed children and adults suffering from tinnitus or other auditory problems. You can have excellent hearing, he explains, but poor listening ability. Some people are left-ear dominant, which means that when they are being spoken to the sounds of speech take longer to arrive at the speech-processing area of the brain. Others cut themselves off from listening properly because of the difficulties of their situation. Using a special electronic listening machine developed by a French ENT consultant, Alfred Tomatis, Smith retrains the ear by playing music that forces the muscles of the middle ear to stretch and then relax, turning them from flabby, useless vessels to taut and vibrant conduits of sound. The best music, he says, to thread through the machine is Mozart.
As the clarinet quintet rippled beneath the conversation it was easy to see why it has such an effect. Each instrument is in play with the others, suggesting, echoing, reminding, initiating so that the ear is forced to switch back and forth from one melodic line to another, rather like watching Federer and Nadal in battle at Wimbledon.
When Professor Paul Robertson, founder member of the Medici Quartet but also an expert on how the brain receives and interprets musical stimuli, was in a coma for several weeks after a massive health crisis, his wife played Mozart to him, and especially the clarinet quintet. After some time his eyes began to open and his consciousness of the world around him to return. The autonomic memory system, believes Robertson, remains responsive to music whether we are conscious or not. And he’s convinced that Mozart’s genius lies in the way that he was able to connect into these deep-seated responses, to tap into that which we all find universally beautiful.
The programme lasted for only half an hour, yet I’ll never hear the clarinet quintet in quite the same way again. Peter Furniss, a clarinettist, played the music to his mother as she lay dying after a long illness. He talks about the way Mozart in the quintet somehow captures in music that moment when you are both full of grief for the life that is ending but also celebrating the whole of that life for the first time.
Writing about what was said makes it sound terribly flat. It’s listening that counts. (Soul Music is repeated on Saturday, which means it’s also available for another week on iPlayer.)
Next Thursday sees the 500th edition of Melvyn Bragg’s extraordinary Radio 4 series In Our Time. I say extraordinary because on paper it sounds so dull. A group of academics, whose names are known only to the select few, talking about asteroids, Athelstan or the library at Nineveh. When Bragg launched the first series in 1998 he hardly dared hope it would last more than six months. Given ‘the death slot’ on Thursday mornings, when listening figures dropped to below 600,000, he vowed never to allow his guests to plug their own work (unlike his old slot on Start the Week). Their job was to explain to us, in words that we could understand, the complexities of their research. Within six months he had built a following that numbered more than one and a half million.
Now the series is cited as a reason why the BBC must continue to be funded by the licence fee. (To glance through the web archive is like leafing through an encyclopaedia.) It’s both a showcase for the best that our universities can produce (and these academics are awesome in their ability to articulate such difficult ideas with such fluency, in spite of having no radio experience) and the reason why our radio stations are the envy of the world.
For this special anniversary edition on Thursday Melvyn and his guests will be discussing free will. Are we free to act as we choose? Are we morally responsible for what we do? Three professors of philosophy will join Melvyn to air the subject. It’s your choice, and it’s free at the point of delivery.
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