On Desert Island Discs the other week Joan Bakewell chose a couple of discs from the Sixties because, she said, ‘the music was better then’.
On Desert Island Discs the other week Joan Bakewell chose a couple of discs from the Sixties because, she said, ‘the music was better then’. On Radio Two on Saturday we had a chance to test this out when Johnnie Walker hosted the station’s annual trip into the archives. Soundscape of 69 took as its theme the year of John and Yoko, Paul and Linda, moonwalking and Vietnam. The news clippings were less interesting than I’d anticipated; in recent weeks we’ve heard so much from the Apollo mission, Londonderry and Woodstock that it all sounded rather familiar. But the music was fantastic.
I caught the programme while in the car and found myself singing along in a totally embarrassing way — ‘Because there’s something in the air…Because the Rev-o-lu-tion’s here…We have got to get it together now’, ‘Sugar Sugar…I just can’t believe the loveliness of loving you’, or even ‘Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna’. On second thoughts, the lyrics were rubbish, but the rhythm, the beat, the subtlety and variety of those harmonics are just unbeatable. I’m biased, of course, it’s what I grew up with, but these archive programmes pin down a particular moment in time with such evocative exactitude.
Radio Two is on the up at the moment, taking 15 per cent of listeners in the latest figures (as opposed to Radio One’s 10 per cent and Radio Four’s 12 per cent). In the past, the station has struggled to keep up with the way listening habits have changed. In 1969, for example, while Radio One rocked to Hendrix and co. it was still waltzing its way through the day with Semprini, Max Jaffa and the Palm Court Orchestra.
‘It has the voice of yesteryear, when things were prettier and life more conducive to making beautiful music,’ said Julian Bream on Luting the Past (Radio Four, Saturday). He was talking to the soprano Emma Kirkby about his favourite stringed instrument, the lute, whose sound, he says, gives us back 400 years of musical wisdom. I just caught the repeat of this gem of a programme, just half an hour devoted to telling the story of an original 16th-century instrument that has been restored to playable condition.
The team of restorers, who have taken almost 15 years over the project, reckon that the wood from which this particular instrument was made — in Augsburg in about 1560 — came from a tree that was planted in 1418. The lute, with its delicate body, ‘like a pear cut up and hollowed out’, was badly damaged. The hairline cracks along its back had to be painstakingly glued back together. (At its thickest point the wood is only 1.5 mm thick.) Along the way we discovered how the lute fell out of favour in the 18th century as public performance and the piano became more popular. The quietly spoken intimacy of the lute was put aside.
In the background, the sound of the lute’s strings could be heard as they were gently plucked, rippling along, as if it were another person in the conversation. Listening to its haunting, plangent sound took us back in time to a world we have lost — quieter, less hectic, when the silences between the notes mattered just as much as the notes themselves. A couple of notes on the lute plucked by an expert musician could silence a whole court full of people in noisy merriment. Would it work just as well now that our ears have been blasted and our aural sensitivities blighted by muzak and noise disturbance? Probably, because the lute, with its rich upper harmonics, has an astonishingly long carrying power. It also touches the heart because, we discovered, its delicate sound replicates exactly the decibel of the spoken word.
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