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

offstage 4 trumpets and 8 horns 3 trombones 4 trumpets 3 sopranos 4 trombones 2 altos 1 tuba tenor 3 timpani baritone bass drum bass cymbal boys’ choir tamtam double chorus (usually more than 200 singers) triangle double chorus (usually more than 200 singers) tubular bells double chorus (usually more than 200 singers) glockenspiel double chorus (usually more than 200 singers)

      There’s classical music and music from the Classical ‘period’ … I’m confused

      The Oxford Dictionary of Music describes the term Classical as ‘vague’, then goes on to list four completely different definitions. To clear things up, there is a particular musical period that we refer to as ‘Classical’ and there is a broad term ‘classical music’ which encompasses both the ‘Classical period’ and all of the serious music from the last thousand years.

      Mozart is an example of a composer of the Classical period (note the capital letter), so he can be accurately described as a ‘Classical composer’. His music conforms to classical principles of beauty and form. It’s music from a time when, in art and architecture, people were looking back to ‘classical antiquity’ or ancient Greece for inspiration – hence the term ‘classical’. To be pedantic, according to that definition Webern, Schumann, John Adams and Stravinsky cannot be described as ‘classical composers’.

      When I was at school, trying desperately to understand the chronology of music, my school music teacher refused to refer to any music other than that written between 1750 (the year of Bach’s death) and 1897 (the year of Schubert’s birth) as ‘Classical’. He preferred ‘serious music’ as a moniker for anything outside the popular realm. This is a useful definition as far as it goes: classical music is a serious business. But what about other forms that are equally serious: jazz, folk or ‘world’ music, for example?

      Outside the ivory towers in common parlance ‘classical music’ is everything that isn’t jazz, pop, folk or world music. It is confusing that we use the term to mean pretty much any music written in the last thousand years. But then the term ‘pop’ is too generic a term to describe adequately the commercial music of the last fifty years.

      If you wince at this double meaning every time you encounter it you’ll end up with a sore face. Accept it and move on, is my advice.

      If it’s classical does it mean it isn’t popular music?

      Calculating how many fans an art-form needs in order to call it ‘popular’ is anyone’s guess, and even within classical music there is a divide between populist material and more esoteric or specialised music. Sitting in a packed Royal Albert Hall for a Prom certainly gives off a sense of popular appeal, but how will the figures stack up against a pop music tour?

      The Arts Council³ divided the audience for musical events in the UK into broad churches⁴ (classical music performance, opera or operetta, jazz, other live music event – rock and pop, soul, R&B and hip-hop, folk, country and western, etc.) and gathered audience attendance figures for 2005/2006. It concluded that opera had the smallest reach of all music: 4 per cent of the population attended at least once a year. For classical music that figure was around 9 per cent. However, even the very broad ‘other’ category, which encompasses pop and rock, only adds up to 26 per cent of the population, again, attending a gig at least once a year.⁵

      Classical musicians tend not to crave the lifestyle that goes with mass popularity, being more dedicated to their art than to their public image. If we are going to measure by record sales or by numbers of tickets sold, then, yes, classical equals fewer sales than other forms. But there are good reasons for that: once a classical music fan has bought a recording of Symphonie Fantastique by Hector Berlioz they may well listen to that recording without need for another one for the next forty years. This is not the case in more popular forms which have innovation as one of the driving marketing forces.

      There are clearly exceptions, where a popular appetite meets the classical world. In 1994 The Three Tenors (José Carreras, Plácido Domingo and Luciano Pavarotti) achieved a level of popular success hitherto thought impossible. Not since the great recordings of Enrico Caruso in 1902 had the operatic tenor voice been such a recording sensation. The association with football must have helped it, but achieving a Guinness world record for best-selling classical music with the Three Tenors in Concert CD shows that a great tune, well sung, has mass appeal even if it is classical.

      But don’t be too heartened; the general trend doesn’t look great. A December 2010 article in the Daily Telegraph reported:

      The classical market share has now sunk from nearly 11% in 1990 to 3.2%. According to figures drawn from the major retailers, the sector has seen sales in the last twelve-month period drop by a staggering 17.6%. This contrasts starkly with a 3.5% drop in pop recordings.

      The CD market has been adversely affected by the rise of the internet and most classical fans who bought large collections of CDs in the 1990s don’t feel the need to replace them with iTunes downloads. Because I’m passionate about this music, I don’t care about numbers or sales as much as I care that there is enough of an audience to keep the art-form developing. People who are into classical music become obsessed by it and give time and hard-earned money to attend concerts. It’s popular in my house and I hope it will be in yours too. It’s not supposed to be as easy as Coronation Street, it’s meant to be deeply rewarding.

      Why do classical players need things written down? Other musicians don’t

      As with every form of music there are conventions which dictate how players train and how they learn new music. The ‘Western classical’ approach relies on over 500 years of musical notation. This enables an orchestra to play any music that is put in front of them, even at first sight. This has obvious advantages for playing new music. Of course there are exceptions. It is unusual for opera singers to use a musical score because they are expected to act and to face the audience. The same is often true of soloists in a concerto – a kind of piece that crops up a lot in classical music (see Chapter 9 on structure for a definition).

      Concertos have been around for about 400 years and involve one soloist who plays in tandem with the orchestra. The style has developed from its beginnings where the soloist was a part of the orchestra (see Handel’s Concerti Grossi or Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos) to the Romantic concerto which makes a feature of the virtuosity of the soloist, who is placed out in front of the orchestra, normally in a fancy outfit (see Rachmaninov’s piano concertos or Bruch’s violin concertos).

      It is usual for the concerto soloist to play from memory (although in very complex modern works they may be seen with a score). This requires a different sort of musicianship that, although partly a bravura display of technical wizardry, is mainly a form of sustained communication with the audience. If a player is hidden behind a music stand with their head buried in the score it can make it harder to reach the audience with the performance: there is a physical barrier. Because a concerto requires much study to perfect, a soloist might tour the world playing a few pieces from memory with different orchestras, whereas the orchestra itself will play a much wider range of music.

      Orchestras