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

game of pass the parcel. Technical terms can be daunting but I make no apologies for taking you through the first few layers and teaching the basics that you need to enhance your understanding. You need them because they stand for concepts for which there is no other word: harmony, melody, sonata, symphony, concerto, etc. But wherever possible I will explain any terms, avoid overly technical language and use everyday alternatives where they exist.

      There are many books available which attempt to explain everything there is to know about how music functions but which for the beginner are utterly bewildering in their depth and density of language: it’s not necessary to be a mechanic to drive a car. Music is at once incredibly simple – a child can appreciate and perform it – and also complex – philosophers, scientists and musicians are still perplexed by many of the mysteries of music; for example, why exactly are we moved by certain pieces and not others? Why exactly do some people love Bach while others cannot abide him? Despite years of study and masses of knowledge, these are still matters for debate. Some technical aspects of music can be left unexplained without impairing your appreciation.

      Over-familiarity breeds contempt

      These days I wouldn’t choose to go to a concert of Ravel’s Boléro despite it having a terrific melody and for many years being one of my favourites. I first heard it when it was about seven years old when Torvill and Dean were at the Olympics: I thought it was very stirring. It was then used on television programmes for the next ten years, almost on a loop; when I got to secondary school we studied it for GSCE; when I started to work at the LSO it was part of an education concert to show the different sections of the orchestra. It’s a pretty simple piece: the melody repeats itself around the entire band before building to a grand finale for full orchestra. Ravel issued a warning about the piece before its first performance: ‘a piece lasting seventeen minutes and consisting wholly of orchestral tissue without music … There are no contrasts, and there is practically no invention except in the plan and the manner of execution.’² I still feel that it’s a great piece of music, but I just can’t listen to it any more because not only is the Boléro itself repetitive but I’ve also heard it repeated everywhere from lifts to restaurants.

      If pressed, most experts will acknowledge that such familiar pieces are in many ways wondrous compositions; it’s just that they wouldn’t pay money to hear them again because over-familiarity has set in and hardened minds. I am guilty of this attitude because I’ve been listening to classical music for most of my life, and I think that regardless of the musical genre people take a similar position towards music they think of as less complicated or lower-brow. It’s a matter of perspective: after listening to heavy rock music, pop-rock might seem rather tame; likewise if you’ve just been listening to a Mahler symphony, which may have a profoundly intense and emotional effect on you, then a waltz by Johann Strauss may feel light and frivolous and less than satisfying.

      Making a discovery of a piece of music is a very personal business. The first time you hear a melody and it connects with you can be highly significant; I can recall the first hearing of all my favourite music with startling immediacy. It’s extremely discouraging to discover that a piece you have fallen in love with is not considered ‘great’. For example my friend Aaron when he was about twenty had one piece of ‘serious’ (i.e. classical) music in his collection: Má Vlast by Smetana. It’s a glorious piece of music whose second movement describes the River Vltava from its early springs to the confluence of the river as it flows towards Prague. The structure is simple but effective, the melody (based on a folksong) is appealing and the orchestration is stirring, plus it was a piece he liked.

      We sat in our university halls and listened to it, and I found it incredibly moving, not having heard the piece for many years (my primary school music teacher Mr Naylor played it to me in 1986). However, Aaron was humiliated when speaking to a music student of ‘serious classical music’ about Smetana, who somewhat sniffily said they ‘considered Má Vlast to be rather lowbrow’. I can imagine the avant-garde music that this music student was being exposed to in music college and I suppose that Aaron’s Smetana CD must have seemed naïve by comparison.

      Don’t let this put you off. If you like a piece then that’s just fine. Perhaps by the time you have listened to The 100 Greatest Classical Hits in the Universe … Ever a few times you’ll be screaming for something different. Until that time, just enjoy.

      Film scores

      If you watch films then you probably know more classical music than you think you do. Many directors edit their films to existing works. The most famous example of this was Stanley Kubrick, who was a musical magpie. 2001: A Space Odyssey, Eyes Wide Shut, The Shining, Barry Lyndon and A Clockwork Orange, among others, contain classical music used to piercing effect. Nevertheless many composers have created original works for the cinema and great composers of the twentieth century took up the challenge of composing for film.

      However, composing for film is a very different business. Film composers are not in charge of their own work; the director is the boss. In 1948 the Englishman Ralph Vaughan Williams wrote the score for Scott of the Antarctic. In a salutary lesson to all students of film composition, he wrote the music before seeing the film. The result was that much of the music never made it on to the screen because the film that the director had made did not require all of the music that Vaughan Williams had written. But no matter, because Vaughan Williams used it to create his Seventh Symphony, Sinfonia Antarctica.

      Despite music playing second fiddle (pun intended) to the drama, some scores have become well known in their own right, and are written by composers who have made careers out of writing for film and neglecting concert music. The scores for Psycho and Cape Fear by Bernard Hermann, Batman by Danny Elfman, The Great Escape by Elmer Bernstein, Jerry Goldsmith’s stridently modern Planet of the Apes and the many scores of John Williams can compete with music written for the concert platform. Many ‘straight’ or ‘legit’ composers have also been drawn to the world of film, especially in its early days. The 1938 score for Alexander Nevsky by the Russian composer Sergei Prokofiev is a great example of a piece that transcends the constrictions of the genre. In the 1990s the film score was performed in a concert version with the film projected behind the orchestra. This sort of meeting of the film world and the orchestral world is a mark of their mutual respect, although a more cynical view would be that orchestral musicians like film work because it pays well and film directors like orchestras because they elevate banal stories.

      Because of the technical demands of film composition it has now become a separate discipline requiring pinpoint timing and an understanding of how music and image combine to create cinema. Too much scoring can overpower a scene; not enough and the scene can lack meaning. For a film score to earn the respect of classical musicians it must stand up to the same scrutiny as concert music which does not have the benefit of a moving image and must hold the audience’s attention on purely musical grounds. But there are examples of pieces that have stood out from the film and had me whistling for weeks after leaving the cinema.

      

Action: If you like things dark and moody then Don Davies’s eerie The Matrix from 1999 displays brilliant use of brass and John Powell’s The Bourne Identity has a haunting bassoon solo (a large woodwind instrument) and a much-imitated string pattern or ostinato (short repeated phrase), although Powell’s score does contain synthesisers so it’s unlikely to make it into the concert hall. But how could I leave out the Arnold Schwarzenegger classic Conan the Barbarian by Basil Poledouris from 1982? A more pompous, melodramatic score does not exist – it ripples with pure Hollywood magic; the horns of the orchestra have never worked as hard.

      

Shakespeare: If you were a student of drama in the 1990s then you must have been transfixed, as I was, by Patrick Doyle’s score for Kenneth Branagh’s film of Henry V, in particular the stirring Non nobis domine sung on the battlefield by the composer himself.³ Listening