Peter Phillips

Why is it so difficult to make engaging television programmes about classical music? Time and again I have watched earnest and expensive attempts fail, despite every care in the planning, coming away grateful that the effort was made but aware that nothing lasting had been achieved. I felt like this after seeing the most recent episode of Sacred Music, dedicated to Byrd and Tallis and broadcast as part of a series on BBC4, with the admirable Simon Russell Beale as presenter. Ever since it became mandatory for peak-time television to entertain more than to educate, programmes about our cultural traditions have had a big problem of definition.

Touring the more rural college campuses in the United States with Victoria’s Requiem is a very modern challenge. To be sure, the inmates of these Young People’s Homes have little experience of performers and performances which do not actively sell themselves, so I can imagine that the reality of 11 people standing more or less motionless on a stage, singing one of the most contemplative pieces of music ever written for 45 minutes, might come over as a bit novel. In fact it must count as the polar opposite of literally everything the television stations serve them up. Mindful of the difficulty, I recently introduced a performance of this Requiem at a university in Tennessee by pointing out that it was not intended as concert music, but as music for a funeral.

Never have my asseverations in this column attracted so much attention as those about the Dean and Archbishop of Sydney. If anyone were to think that Anglicanism was a dead topic, they should visit Australia. One has only to scratch the surface and out pour the most passionate arguments, though not from the employees of the brothers in charge of the archdiocese of Sydney, who fear for their jobs if they speak a word of dissent. That is where I have an advantage. I gave two formal lectures, after which I was invited on to a prime-time breakfast programme on the ABC to outline my concerns.

Eternal though they may seem, the Proms and the Edinburgh Festival are susceptible to change. Roger Wright will take over the former next year and Jonathan Mills has just assumed responsibility for the latter. New appointments do not necessarily mean that anything more up-to-date will happen, nor that the change will be for the better — the Bath Festival seems to have been all but destroyed by a recent and tactless overdose of innovation; but the signs from the two capitals are encouraging. The Edinburgh Festival has traditionally been hostile to what is still called ‘early music’, the received wisdom being that the people of Scotland would not come to hear it.

Peter Phillips on Nicholas Kenyon’s Proms swansong and a lost masterpiece Nicholas Kenyon’s swansong at the Proms this summer is surely the most elaborately complicated, one might say contrapuntally conceived, series of concerts ever staged. Just reading the blurb makes one’s head spin — so many themes, so many anniversaries, so many reasons for paying attention that there comes a point when one might, most ungratefully, just wish that a concert was there because the performers wanted to perform the music they had chosen. But I suppose that if you are to live within the hype of a series this extended (90 concerts and countless fringe activities), you have to have some binding. There really is more of everything, not least in striving to attract new audiences.

One of the most persistent and tiresome misunderstandings about how sacred music was performed in the past is that boys’ voices were always involved. In any number of places this was simply not true: male voices, yes, always; children’s voices, not at all necessarily. The country where boys seemed to have been used most standardly was England, which, typically, has encouraged us to assume that everywhere else was or should have been modelled on what we were doing. We have no licence to rush around the world insisting that Church music without boys is a debased currency. There is a study waiting to be written about this — I am not going to do it — during which the author will have fun detailing what went on in the Sistine Chapel in the 16th and 17th centuries.

It seems that the fuss which surrounded the appointment of Stephen Layton as organist and choirmaster of Trinity College, Cambridge some 15 months ago has not gone away. Rumour and Lunchtime O’Boulez have it that some of the fellows of Trinity itself have finally become queasy at the high-handedness of their colleagues, to the extent that they want to ‘roll back’ the terms of Layton’s employment. One wonders how the legality of such a move might play out, but then the whole point of this story is that Trinity gets what it wants in every situation, because it is stinking rich.

Periodically, Radio Three sails into stormy waters, a section of its listeners taking a dislike to some new policy intiative and crying ‘dumbed down’. Off the top of my head, I can remember the phasing out of the old talks department; the threat to the regional BBC orchestras; the greater emphasis on jazz; the general move from informing people to entertaining them; the retirement of Patricia Hughes. Long gone are the days of 26-part series specialising in music written for the court of Cyprus. But hanging over almost all of these debates has been the question of how much of the music which is broadcast should be live, as opposed to prerecorded in one format or another.

The recently concluded Kandinsky exhibition at Tate Modern was widely appreciated for showing how music influenced the artist’s move towards abstraction. Two concerts featuring seminal compositions by Schoenberg were held alongside talks which explained how abstract forms hit painting and music at about the same time. What was not so fully explored was the blissfully eccentric international movement devoted to synaesthesia, the scientific name for the condition in which the senses are confused with one another, which preceded Kandinsky’s work and gave it a context. The vogue for Colour-Music was thoroughly a child of its time.

These have been trying times for itinerant musicians. Anybody who had already built up a dislike for the way airport staff are entitled to treat their customers would have found the recent situation testing to the point of phobia. To be fair, my fellow-citizens showed remarkable good humour in those endless and often directionless queues at Heathrow (our plane to Chicago took off six hours after I first presented myself at the terminal the other day); the staff were less accommodating, buffeted by conflicting and sometimes unjustifiable instructions, obliged to be inflexible and inclined to be stony-faced. The restrictions on hand-luggage didn’t inconvenience us as much as some, since singers’ instruments go into the cabin whether the authorities like it or not.

Listing page content here Killing time in Beverley Minster the other day I caught sight of the list of past organists painted up on a board. Within the past 200 years this magnificent building, which has no choir-school of its own, has played host to John Camidge, A.H. Mann and H.K. Andrews. All three went from there to the very top of the cathedral organists’ ladder: Camidge to York Minster; Mann to King’s, Cambridge, where he presided over the first broadcast of Nine Lessons and Carols in the Twenties; and Andrews to New College, Oxford, where he pioneered the music of Byrd (and died a famous death while giving the inaugural recital on the new organ at Trinity).

Listing page content here The war on terror means little to a lot of people, but to the itinerant musician at an airport it means ever-increasing hassle, rough treatment and delay. In case you didn’t know, the Americans have just invented a new queue the traveller must stand in: in addition to being photographed and fingerprinted on the way into the US, you are now required to be photographed and fingerprinted on the way out of it as well. I won’t claim that this is the last straw, because there can be no last straw. We have to make part of our living in the US, therefore we must negotiate all the procedures it throws at us.

Why, exactly, are we celebrating Mozart this year? Because the anniversarial numbers have trapped us (he was born in January 1756)? Because there is something new to be said about him? Because we cannot live without his music and want to pay tribute to that fact? Whatever the answer, we are in for a media extravaganza which only an ostrich is going to be able to ignore, so it might be strengthening to work out in what spirit we approach the party. The benefits are very straightforward: there will be a lot of glorious music to listen to, some of which we may not have heard before, especially in the case of the stage works that will be receiving new productions.

In a recent article in the Times, Matthew Parris wrote stirringly about the inspiration which may come from listening to buskers: ‘Amazing how a snatch of music heard in passing can lift the imagination and spirit.’ To him the essence of this snatch is hummable or whistle-able melody, and we are told that the ‘superior’ musicians who ignore such a simple ingredient are ‘the parasites on a beast whose lifeblood is melody’. He went on to have a go at Sir John Tavener, who apparently has written new music to ‘Away In A Manger’ because he found the existing tune trite.

When I am asked what I do, I say I am a musician. The response is invariably, ‘Which instrument do you play?’ When I say I conduct, I am aware that I have passed beyond the easy into the more difficult, but I know at the same moment that I have not lost my audience. They know that instrumentalists need conductors and everyone has seen them, it is just that such figures of authority are rather austere and hard to talk to. But should I be asked what I conduct, and should I say, ‘Singers,’ then I have surely blown it. ‘Musicians’ are not associated with singers and above all not with music which consists only of singing.