Gareth Malone’s Guide to Classical Music: The Perfect Introduction to Classical Music. Gareth Malone

easy to forget that classical music used to involve a lot of improvisation. This can still be heard in certain pieces although it might not be immediately apparent that it’s made up – mostly because the musician will often practise their extemporising. Soloists in music of the eighteenth century played cadenzas (which is Italian for cadence) towards the end of a large instrumental work. This gave the soloist a chance to show off their technical skill. As American musicologist, composer and pianist Robert Levin says: ‘In the 18th century all composers were performers and virtually all performers composed. Furthermore, virtually all the music performed was new. Today’s gap in popular and art music did not exist then: each involved spontaneity within a language idiomatic to the time.’¹¹

      Mozart was one of the first great composers to have a piano in his study, and his improvising talents were noted very early in his life.¹² In his memoirs,¹³ a priest called Placidus Scharl recalls hearing the six-year-old Mozart at the keyboard:

      One had only to give him the first subject which came to mind for a fugue or an invention: he would develop it with strange variations and constantly changing passages as long as one wished; he would improvise fugally on a subject for hours, and this fantasia-playing was his greatest passion.

      Organists are still very familiar with the idea of extemporisation (in his organ recitals, my old music teacher Stephen Carleston would include improvisation on a theme brought in by a member of the audience on the day). Many composers still use improvisation as a way of generating ideas – but as classical music has tended to separate the idea of the player and composer, and has become very concerned with replicating exactly what has been notated in a score, improvisation has taken a back seat – even though it is alive and well in other music, such as jazz. Twentieth-century and contemporary composers, however, have brought back the idea of chance and improvisation, and some players schooled very heavily in faithfully reproducing the ‘dots’ enjoy the very different kind of playing improvisation offers. In some very early music, too, the notation is only part of the story, and singers are required to decorate and elaborate on what is written down in order to bring the music to life.

      Why do orchestras (mostly) wear black?

      It’s cheap and doesn’t show sweat. It also denotes smartness and comes from evening dress, which was the traditional wear of classical musicians for many years and still is at many concerts. At one time the audience too would have worn evening dress for concerts. Another reason is that musicians in an orchestra, as performers, are in service to the music rather than being exhibitionists who are promoting themselves, and in this sense black allows them a certain visual degree of anonymity. Some younger ensembles have attempted alternatives but generally it’s hard to find something that is readily available, appears fairly neutral so as not to distract from the music and looks like the orchestra have made an effort. So I think for the time being black is here to stay.

      Chapter 3

       How to Listen

      “When I speak of the gifted listener, I am thinking of the non-musician primarily, of the listener who intends to retain his amateur status. It is the thought of just such a listener that excites the composer in me.”

      AARON COPLAND, composer

      What is ‘listening’? What are you supposed to be hearing and how is it possible to change the way you listen? Why is it that classical musicians can talk endlessly about the merits of one violinist over another? Does it really affect how I listen if I know that Mozart was born in 1756 or any of the myriad of apparently pointless facts that seem to surround classical music? And finally, what on earth is ‘authentic performance’? Listening to classical music is not as simple as bunging on a CD and opening your ears.

      How we listen

      Lesson one: there is no one correct way to listen to classical music or any other kind of music because it’s an intensely personal business. That said, there are facets of the music that you may not have thought about that can direct your listening – and a little knowledge will not only give you a greater understanding but will make you sound like an expert at the bar afterwards. Most gratifying.

      In some ways our tolerance for classical music can be lessened by more immediately rewarding and popular forms. As Noël Coward, with typical acerbity, once remarked: ‘Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.’ We are raised on a musical diet of trash; everywhere we go there is ‘cheap’ music in lifts, restaurants, waiting rooms, garages, shopping centres, TV adverts, the radio, telephone call centre holding music … the list is endless. This music, as Coward points out, is potently gripping and effective. To me it can be a form of torture, but more importantly I think it affects the way we listen.

      “Any time I travel anywhere it seems I’m forced to endure an inconsiderate person’s noise. I might even normally like the song but don’t really want it imposed upon me when I have, as most commuters do, other pressing matters to think about.¹”

      CHARLEY, 26-year-old commuter, complaining about mobiles playing music on buses (from Transport for London’s website)

      “We are increasingly likely to find ourselves in places with background music. No composers have thought to write for these modern spaces, which represent 30% of our musical experience.”

      BRIAN ENO

      The Polish composer Witold Lutoslawski (1913–1994) said: ‘People whose sensibility is destroyed by music in trains, airports, lifts, cannot concentrate on a Beethoven quartet.’ My bank has had the same music on its telephone banking service since 1997. I have heard that music so many times that I wake up singing it. There is no escape: if you want to speak to the bank then you will listen to this music. The title of this masterpiece of call-centre muzak is unknown to me. (The word muzak, incidentally, is derived from the Muzak Holdings company in the US, who specialised in ways of delivering this branch of music to public environments.) I agree with Lutoslawski that this damages our ‘sensibility’ towards music. It hasn’t ruined my appreciation of classical music – but it clogs my ears and doesn’t set me up well for a symphony. Muzak trains us to block out background music and noise, which is the opposite of what is necessary when I listen to classical music, where I require calm and quiet with open ears.

      And it’s not just since the invention of beatboxes in the 1980s; our cities have been noisy for a long time. The classical musician driven mad by the noise made by music from the street was brilliantly encapsulated by the engraver William Hogarth in The Enraged Musician (1741). In the window the musician is playing the violin, a classy instrument, while the noise of the street includes baser instruments such as drums and hunting horns. The musician’s wig and attire suggest that he comes from a higher-status world than the noisy rabble outside, and he is disgusted by the appalling music of the street. I suspect part of his frustration stems from an incredulity that they don’t just stop what they are doing and listen to his infinitely superior fiddling. It looks like he has no intention of listening to them even if there is a rather pretty singer in their midst.

      There is a passionate campaign against ‘piped music’ run by an organisation called ‘Pipedown – the campaign for freedom from piped music’. It’s a rather small revolution, but one that matters to music lovers. We are assaulted by music at every step through our modern cities, and finding restaurants and pubs that don’t play music is becoming more and more difficult. You may think that this is the whingeing of a musical snob. Does this matter to ordinary people? I think it should, because not only is it an imposition but it desensitises us to music.

      If we overdose on facile forms it makes the complexities and subtleties of classical music seem laborious. The function of popular music is fundamentally different: it aims to be as immediately pleasing, as sonically gratifying and as exciting as possible, and to do all that in a very short space of time. In the time it takes to listen to a Beethoven string quartet you could have listened to well over ten different pop songs. We are used to music delivering the goods