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

welcomed: if you’ve ever listened to the music of the Gamelan from the Indonesian islands of Java and Bali then you may have noticed that it sounds out of tune to your ears – many Western musicians react with shock when they first hear it. A friend of mine spent a year in Bali and on returning to England found she couldn’t sing in tune because her sense of pitch had been affected by playing in a Gamelan orchestra. In Gamelan, two xylophone-like instruments sit next to each other and have almost exactly the same five notes (or seven in some cases) except that when the two instruments play together they sound marginally out of tune. This creates a shimmering effect (due to the beats created between the notes). This is the same effect as the penguin’s two-tone squawking.

      The advantage of these ‘beats’ is that they travel a long distance and can be heard through objects, clearly an advantage for the penguin trying to locate a mate on the ice. Gamelan is traditionally played outdoors and I know from personal experience that the noise can penetrate glass, steel and concrete as no other instrument can. When I worked at the LSO St Luke’s, a centre for community music, the sound of the Gamelan could be heard through the acoustic glass and soundproofing, such was its resonance. The architects had put the office next to the Gamelan room and every week I’d see the support staff sitting with headphones trying to block out the relentless ‘bonging’.

      We perceive this difference in tuning as timbre. Anyone can tell the difference between a honky-tonk piano and a Steinway grand piano tuned for a classical recital. But the technical explanation requires an understanding of harmonics.

      I have decided only to include this short explanation of harmonics as it is beyond the scope of this book. Harmonics are produced when any note is played and they resonate at frequencies higher than the fundamental, creating harmonic resonance (have I lost you yet?). Certain instruments produce sound energy at particular frequencies, which is known as formants. Aaaaaaggghhh. I’m going to leave it to you to research this yourself should you be interested. Just take it from me: harmonics are what make one sound different from another one. Simple.

      (For a more lucid explanation of the harmonics of music see How Music Works by John Powell, appropriately published by Penguin!)

      Context: listening and understanding

      Timbre is not the whole story of listening, because listening to classical music is helped by knowing the context in which the piece was written. Remember that music was written by human beings, people with children, wives, lovers, desires, their own victories and failures. They are fallible – even the great ones. We sometimes speak of composers as if it was only their work that mattered, but the whole person is of interest. Knowing that Bach was a devoutly religious man explains the serious nature of his composition. Knowing that Beethoven had a fiery personality tells you so much about his music, especially the furious pieces written after he became deaf. Knowing that Stravinsky could be very harsh in his criticism of other musicians tells us so much about the shifts in his own output, as if that incisive critical mind were turned in on itself, provoking him to reinvent his style.

      The fact that Elgar was a rather melancholy Englishman affects the way that I listen to his Cello Concerto: the melody, the sound of the orchestra, the nostalgic quality of the music and the rather grey, melancholic emotional atmosphere all suggest to me an idealised, pastoral version of Britain that no longer exists – or may never have existed – but which, living in England, I can somehow immediately identify as English. These bits of contextual information form associations which are deeply personal and make a network of information around the music. For me they attach themselves to specific bars or harmonies like Post-it notes.

      Listening doesn’t happen in a vacuum and for this reason I think that it’s very useful to know the rough time period in which a piece of music was written. When I don’t know or can’t place this period, then the ‘Post-it notes’ are highly personal and random, but as I get to know more about the piece then the associations can be shared with other people. For example it’s nice to feel that Vivaldi’s furiously energetic music makes you think of blue skies but it’s much better (I think) to know that he composed in Venice and allow images of Venetian waterways to permeate the music.

      Where you first hear a piece of music is just as important as what you know about it. Film is potent in combining powerful imagery and music, such that the two seem inseparable. Unforgettable moments for me include the use of the elegiac Barber Adagio in the film Platoon, the resolute Ride of the Valkyries in Apocalypse Now or the chilling juxtaposition of the sublimely civilised Aria from J.S. Bach’s Goldberg Variations as Hannibal Lecter casually murders his jailers. It is almost impossible to forget the potent combination of images of extreme violence accompanied by music. There was an outcry in 1973 when a girl was raped whilst the perpetrators sang the song ‘Singing in the Rain’. This was said to be a copycat crime following an infamous scene in Stanley Kubrick’s film A Clockwork Orange. As a result of this and other such crimes, Kubrick withdrew the film from release in the UK. This is more than a Post-it note – it’s like an indelible permanent marker.

      We also have our own cultural contexts for hearing music that can change from town to town, and country to country. Hearing music from the Indian classical tradition – Ravi Shankar playing the sitar, for example – I’m aware of very few of the symbolic meanings that are attached to the music. The same for me is true of the music of the Gamelan from Bali. We recognise it as music produced by human beings; it can often have similar structures to Western music – tunes, rhythm, harmony, organisation – but it doesn’t immediately have the same meaning for me as it would for someone brought up in that tradition. But if you only listened to English music then you’d be severely impoverished. The difficulty in listening to music from the Czech Republic, Russia, America, Germany, France and so on is that each country represents different attitudes and has musical styles associated with it that we may not immediately understand. That’s part of the joy of classical music – each country’s music ‘tastes’ different and has rich history to be uncovered.

      Recording has spoiled our listening

      Lieder (German for ‘songs’) is a good example of music that was at one time fresh and exciting but without knowing the context it can be difficult to understand and tedious. In Vienna during the latter years of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth there was a fashion for the salon performance which was literally chamber music, a performance in a small room (not that small room!). These salons differed from performances in a church or opera house because the scale of the music was smaller owing to the limited space, and it was in these salons that ‘art song’ or Lieder developed. Composers such as Schubert, Schumann and Brahms would have listened to and performed music in this context and consequently their songs are specifically written for that environment. They are often intimate, personal and tender songs about love, rejection and pain.

      Sitting in the same room as a singer has a musical intimacy that many people these days never experience, living as we do in the age of the recording. Two hundred years ago there would have been no opportunity to hear music unless it was performed live. Naturally the best musicians and performers flocked to musical centres such as Vienna to share ideas and hear each other’s music. Imagine the atmosphere in those soirées. Composers and poets would share their newly penned work, talented young musicians gathered to play the music, aristocracy mingled with artists and the possibility of hearing something fresh and of great merit was ever-present. It would have been a very dynamic way to listen; the audience were performers themselves; anybody might do a turn during the evening. It’s a world away from the way we listen to the songs now – as though they are preserved and sacred. A great performer knows this and attempts to recreate the freshness that would have existed in the first performance.

      Sadly there are few modern equivalents to this informal way of listening to classical music; we must buy tickets to concert halls or listen on the radio. But there are some venues that try to recreate the intimacy of those evenings, for instance the Wigmore Hall, which is small enough to create an intimate atmosphere and has a reputation for bringing together the very best musicians, who sometimes bring in historical instruments for their recitals. At the Royal Academy of Music there is an amazing room where they have all sorts of pianos dating back to the early nineteenth century. Listening