Music

A decade ago, the French pianist and poly-math Pierre-Laurent Aimard announced that he was ‘very bored to live in a world that contains so much music that wants to please the masses’. It was a remark that might have dropped from the lips of the late Pierre Boulez, the part-pseud, part-genius who presided over an aristocracy of the avant-garde lavishly funded by the French government. Aimard was still in his teens when he was appointed pianist of Boulez’s Ensemble Intercontemporain in 1976. He made his name performing ruthlessly atonal music.

There have been many punk exhibitions over the years so I can’t help but chuckle at the ‘experts’ who are getting hot under the collar about the ‘sacrilege’ of housing punk memorabilia in museums. Hasn’t it always been the case that anything considered culturally significant ends up in a ‘cultural establishment’ of sorts? Joe Corré, son of Dame Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren, is even threatening to burn his punk collection in protest. Really!! The experts I know, i.e. band members, don’t seem too bothered about it. In fact, many will be turning up to do Q&As at the British Library’s tasteful if limited Punk 1976–78 exhibition.

With its loud guitar riffs and even louder fashion, heavy metal has always been ripe for ridicule. In its mid-1980s heyday, it was epitomised by the fictional rock group Spinal Tap prancing on stage next to an 18-inch polystyrene model of Stonehenge while clad in ball-crushingly tight trousers and floor-length capes. In some parts of the world, however, metal is no laughing matter. In the Middle East, for instance, the potential punishment for wearing all black while wielding an electric guitar is death. These days, against a backdrop of authoritarian suppression in countries such as Iran and China, heavy metal’s trademark theatrics and widdly guitar solos have become less an opportunity for gentle mockery than a rallying cry for artistic freedom.

He’s been billed as the new Pied Piper but it’s going to take a while for Tom Service to quite match the engaging brilliance of David Munrow, who back in the 1960s persuaded us that medieval pipes-only music was cool listening. Munrow’s series on what was then the Third Programme was aimed at six-to-12-year-olds but succeeded in drawing everyone in because of his gift for communication and his willingness to explore the wilder shores of repertoire, creating sound connections we had never heard before. Service’s new magazine programme for Radio 3, The Listening Service, may be inspired by Munrow but it’s not yet sure what it’s meant to be. How experimental? How difficult the content? It’s timetabled at 5 p.m.

BBC Proms 2016 is about as exciting as my sock drawer. But it’s unclear who exactly is to blame. The new head David Pickard claims only half the stalest socks are his — the rest inherited. The festival enjoys an incredibly privileged position. Some might even say it’s dangerously spoilt. Free from commercial pressures, free from government interference, an entire TV and radio network at its propagandistic disposal, the two-month summer blowout is a mighty musical monopoly. It can do what it wants with pretty much whomever it wants. Last year it dedicated a night to Eric Whitacre, the Noel Edmonds of contemporary music, and hosted an Ibiza prom 20 years after everyone stopped caring about Ibiza. Fine.

There’s an absolute zinger of a joke currently circulating around the London jazz scene. Miles Davis is being celebrated with a new biopic! And anything that spreads the message about jazz is undoubtedly a good thing. But – and now the punch-line – what a pity the film bogs itself down; all that sober analysis of Miles’s evolving concepts of harmony and musical structure diminishes what could otherwise have been a sure-fire commercial hit. In reality, Miles Ahead, directed by and starring Don Cheadle, is centred around a period in Miles Davis’s life between 1975 and 1979 when he was making precisely no music at all and instead spending his time binging on drugs, drink and recreational sex.

Hurrah for Radio 3 and its (long-overdue) efforts to give us music not just performed by women but composed, and conducted, by them too. Last year’s innovative day of programming for International Women’s Day introduced us to composers many of us had never heard of, such as Elisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre and Barbara Strozzi, Charlotte Bray and Anna Clyne. Yet to the surprise of even the most sceptical critics, the day was a huge success, proving that some of this music is really good. As Edwina Wolstencroft, producer last year and responsible for this year’s celebration of women in music, says, ‘We know that as many as 6,000 women composers have been identified in history.

That joke about the young bull who tells the old bull, ‘Hey, Dad, see all those cows — let’s run and get one of them,’ and the old one replies, ‘Let’s walk and we can have the lot,’ is of course far too politically incorrect to tell these days. But it did creep into my mind last week watching Birmingham Royal Ballet’s double bill of Frederick Ashton’s masterworks, The Dream and A Month in the Country. He’s the old bull, and after the Duracell rogering in Christopher Wheeldon’s Strapless the other week, the serene, sly, ceaselessly sensuous way Ashton seduces you in those ballets, with choreography that never stoops to representing sex itself, comes like a caress after a grunt.