All my adult life I have wondered how people write about music, and how their efforts are received by the public. It has always struck me as being an uncertain business, more miss than hit, and more miss than writing about other artistic endeavours. It seems to be more difficult for a writer to find an individual voice, a convincing prose style, when talking about music than when discussing painting or architecture, or even when writing across the arts. By and large the public have responded to this sense of uncertainty by putting music on one side: not by giving up on the concerts themselves, but by not elevating music books to the status of compulsory reading of the standing of, say, Gombrich’s The Story of Art or Clark’s Civilisation.
Mention of these two general histories of the arts reminds me of something else: music hardly appears in them. Clark did his best with the Viennese classics, but at one point in the television series he referred to William Purcell when he meant Henry, and no one thought it necessary to correct him. Gombrich hardly mentions music at all. The fact is that these two polymaths didn’t know enough about music to speak with any authority about it, while making it their business to know as much as could be known about the visual arts. To them and to their intended publics music was not in the same category of knowledge.
Why this division? Is it the old saw, that music of its nature cannot be described in words? Or is it that music does not attract the best writers, even academic ones, because any musician worth his salt will be playing the stuff, not writing about it? Or maybe it really is too difficult to write well about something that needs special training to read. You can print a painting (to everyone’s delight) and analyse it; to do the same with music you must print the music itself, and then only a fraction of it; at which point you lose not only many of your readers but something else alongside the interruption: fluency in prose.
The upshot tends to be quite a strict division in writing about music. The specialist journals go for the involved analysis, filling half the available space with music examples and the other half with highly technical talk about recurring motifs, modulations to the sub-mediant, 12-note series and double counterpoint. As publisher of the Musical Times, I know about these articles, but I also know from the circulation figures that someone reads them. And I am prepared to bet they are not the same people who read the other kind of music piece, the ones which are often written by non-specialists who, one senses, are very good at the historical context of a composer, but are not qualified actually to talk about his music. To my disappointment this is what tends to happen in the pages of my favourite academic journal — the London Review of Books — where, if they speak about music at all, which is rarely, they shy away from any complexity. And this is despite printing articles on branches of science which leave me standing in the first paragraph.
At a lesser level I’ve been fascinated to see what the makers of the television series The Tudors have made of their background music. The choral part — which surrounds the appearance of Thomas Tallis as a character — is really well done. Every quotation is apposite, giving those in the know an extra perspective on the unfolding history. But I’m surprised so much trouble was taken over this side of the music in a programme where elsewhere the court fiddler picks up a modern violin and duly woos Anne Boleyn with a creamy 20th-century sound. It feels as though a specialist planned the singing and a generalist the instrumental music; and the twain cannot meet, even here.
I wish they could meet more often, especially in prose. On the one hand music is held to be too specialist and technical to be worth taking risks with in writing about it; on the other, it is so readily available for listening, on every medium at any time, that it is easily mistaken for a cheap commodity. This availability seems in turn to reduce any sense of responsibility there might have been in advancing the method of its description. To be sure, there are those who can marry the chalk and cheese inherent in writing about music at the highest level, of whom Richard Taruskin is my current favourite; but essentially the world has long been content with the status quo I describe, hobbling the growth of a proper tradition. It has been a gargantuan missed opportunity.
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