OF CLASSICAL MUSIC

by Stephen Fry

  Anyway, let's take a stroll through the, let's face it, awful decade which was the 1980s/ Music, maestro, please.

  1981 - CLARKE, OF COURSE

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  ell, so much to tell, so little time. 1981, and, when Prince Charles marries Lady Diana Spencer, he does so to the strains of Jeremiah Clarke's The Prince of Denmark's March, otherwise known as the Trumpet Voluntary, at St Paul's Cathedral. The result is a rebirth for this unlikely little tune some 280 years after it was written. Couples across the country were demanding that their local organist draft in a friendly trumpeter so they could 'get married like Lady Di'. Also, the world gets the new work from Karlheinz Stockhausen, the composer who's mad, bad and dangerous to hear. It's called Donnerstag aus Licht, one day's worth of a seven-day-long cycle of operas, and the premiere, at La Scala in Milan, featured among other things trumpeters rigged up to loudspeakers, playing from the rooftops across the square in which the opera house stands.

  1982, and new concert halls go up in Toronto, Denmark and at the Barbican, in London. It's also the year Carl 'Splash it on all over' Orff dies. Actually, that's Brut, isn't it? Oh, yes, 'the mark of a man', that's it. Ah, the power of advertising. In*83, cue the Richard Wagner. fi When I say 'awful' here, I guess I'm not meaning musically, but culturally. Ponytails, Thatcher's children, mobile phones the size of telephone boxes. Red braces. Greed isgood. Dreadful.

  No, no, he's not back from the grave. It's just his centenary, that's all. One hundred years since the death of Little Richard, but sadly… NO years since the death of William Walton, who shuffles off just as the Monty Python team are pondering The Meaning of Life. It's also the year we first got CDs. Yes, 1983 saw the birth of the compact disc. And the death of the art of great cover design.

  Moving on, to '87 in fact, Margaret Thatcher becomes the first British PM in 160 years to win a third term. And the confirmed incidences of last year's new bovine plague, Mad Cow Disease, are on the increase. Also, in 1987, cue the Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

  ' No, no, he's not back from the grave. It's just that, in 1987, an original notebook containing symphonies 22 to 30, in his own handwriting, is auctioned for a staggering four million dollars. FOUR MILLION DOLLARS! He could hardly get a few gulden for his manuscripts when he was alive and in debt and now they fetch $4 million! In 1987, the music world lost Jacqueline Du Pre and, in 1938, cue the Beethoven.

  No, no, he's not back from the grave -1 must stop doing this - it's just that, in 1988, the Royal Philharmonic Society decides to premiere the work it had originally commissioned from old Ludwig before he died in 1827. All that existed, before 1988, were a few sketches. In 1988, though, a man called Barry Cooper fills in the gaps and - voila - a brand-new movement of a Beethoven symphony. I don't know if you've heard it, but, well, I'm not sure what I think of it. It's odd to hear something which sounds both unfamiliar yet clearly recognizable. Weird, really.

  1988 gone. 1989 now. Sir Michael Tippett premiered his new opera, New Tear, in Houston, Texas; communism more or less collapsed in Eastern Europe; and we lost Vladimir Horowitz and Herbert von Karajan. A year later and America is bereft of two of its greatest twentieth-century composers - Leonard Bernstein and Aaron Copland. Copland, particularly, did more than any other US composer to give America its voice, and he influenced numerous composers who came after him. You can still hear his legacy in the film composers of today - more of which later. Even on TV, you can't go very far among the schedules without hearing someone who couldn't have existed had it not been for the pioneering work of Copland - he really started from scratch and founded the all-American sound so misused today. I can't watch The West Wing without being reminded of two things: one is Copland-style harmonies and the expansive sounds of the theme tune, which, I think, unless I dreamt it, is written by somebody called Snuffy Walden. The other is, of course, will Donna ever tell Josh?

  'ESSAY QUESTION: MOVIE MUSIC - IS IT THE NEW

  CLASSICAL MUSIC? DISCUSS.' (NOT MORE THAN 500 WORDS.)

  'd Uke to start with a quick overview. Where is MUSIC? Where is its audience? Is it in crisis? And… Have I told you lately that I love you? Well, if you ask me, Classical music is…

  HERE

  and the audience is HERE. At the risk of labouring my point, let me go a step further. Look around you. You see that thing you can just see miles away on the horizon? Well, that's the audience, way over there. Classical music has, more or less, with a few notable exceptions, lost sight of them -the audience, that is. Or has it?

  Well, on the one hand, the modern audience for what we have always called classical music is small, elite and, for the most part, made up of the musical cognoscenti - composers themselves, ardent musical followers of composers, people who colect locomotive numbers, academics, etc. I'm talking about the people who listen to what academics would call 'new' classical music. So, people who would turn up for the premiere of a Luigi Nono piece, or buy Pierre Boulez's Pli Selon Pli, the revised version, on CD. This is, officially, what the 'serious' set see as modern, newly written classical music. To these, I get the feeling people like Tavener-13 aren't really classical music at all, but mere fripperies.

  It's as if classical music completely forgot that, well, it was also, at one time, the popular music of the day. True, there has always been change: startling new pieces - shocking even - that left the audience speechless, wanting to take their ball home. Remember Wagner, Beethoven, Bach - they all made audiences reel. Maybe not as often as they made them cheer, but it has always happened. What the avant-garde wave of composers did was, well, was to talk in a language that not so much left people shocked, but left them unaware that it was music in the first place and therefore deserving of a shocked reaction. In the same way that people could wander into an art gallery and not so much be startled by, say, a pile of bricks or a light flashing on and off as actually UNAWARE of it. So music, for a time, failed to even engage its audience. Whether it lost the power to shock or whether it was still shocking, but, like the flashing on and off light, no one even realized, well, it's a moot point. What I think is certain is that by going the way it did, modern classical music did two things. It paved the way for the obligatory backlash, which we'll come to later, but, and possibly more importantly, it allowed a whole tranche of composers, working in a specific and parallel world, to steal a march: to slip in, unnoticed, and claim the title 'the great composers' of today. More importantly, possibly, it allowed them to slip in unnoticed and claim the audience, too. So, who were these masked men and women? The Movie Composers. That's who.

  So. Let me run through a brief menu of the people who now, I think, hold the title 'People's Composers' - the movie composers. But for now, allow me to sweep up a few of the corkers that came before.

  1985, and the man who wrote the accompaniment to the moving gunsight that followed James Bond writes a gorgeous soundtrack to the Meryl Streep/Robert Redford movie, Out of Africa. The name? fijohn Tavener, a very spiritual British composer, born in 1944, and heavily influenced by Russian Orthodox music. He originally came to prominence on the Beatles' own Apple label. His music is hauntingly beautiful. Harry. John Barry. Then, in 1989… Ennio Morricone adds to his list Dl' great movie scores that include the Oscar-nominated The Mission and Once upon a Time in America with this year's oh-so-lovely noundtrack to Cinema Paradise

  1990 and John Barry is back again. The year that saw millions watch, on live TV, the release of Nelson Mandela, sees the release of another Barry classic, the delicious John Dunbar's Theme for Dances with Wolves.

  Right, we're up to 1998, the year the frequencies 100 to 102 opened up with classical music, calling itself Classic PM. Bit of a shock, it's got to be said. The man off 'game for a laugh' telling you to bet on 'Battling Beethoven' in the 2.30 at Sandown. But still, it worked. 1993, and the score is John Williams 2, Michael Nyman, 1.

  John Williams - Schindler's List. This one is a corker. John Williams couldn't really have been anything else, really, other than a film composer, cou
ld he? He has the amazing knack of being able to write the perfect music to match the film. His music always sounds like the film. That may sound obvious, but some composers don't get it, it can just sound grafted on. That's why the theme from Schindler's List SOUNDS black and white, somehow. It's a perfect match for Spielberg's film masterpiece, while something like…

  John Williams - Jurassic Park… well, this may sound daft, but I think it sounds like dinosaurs. It's… towering and lofty and epic, with undertones of 'Don't mess with me!' If you know what I mean!

  In sharp contrast to John Williams is Michael Nyman, and The Piano. Nyman is a sort of Jack Nicholson of movie composers. By that I don't mean smiling and weird, I mean he always plays himself. A Michael Nyman score is a Michael Nyman score is a Michael Nyman score. As they say in the world of triple-entry bookkeeping. As they say in the world of triple entry book-keeping. As they say in the world of triple entry book-keeping.

  Ah, now this is a cute one. 1994. The Channel Tunnel opens, Tony Blair is elected leader of the Labour Party, and playwright/former angry young man John Osborne dies at the age of sixty-five - all as the surprise film hit of the year produces an Oscar for the composer Luis Bacalov,? Postino, or, as it's now known, II Consignio.

  1995. An interesting year, I think. Nick Leeson single-handedly brings down Barings Bank, Nelson Mandela becomes president of South Africa, and John Major wins the Tory leadership challenge -'Oh yes'. I don't know, if only we'd known about Edwina, he might have lasted a lot longer. Also, though, the year of Patrick Doyle, with the Oscar-nominated soundtrack to Sense and Sensibility. A gorgeous score. Also in 1995 we got a taste of things to come. I remember it staying in the Classical Charts for what seemed like months. And long after the film died down, the score was still topping the charts. Yes, it was the start of the uileann pipes craze, namely… James Horner - Braveheart.

  The year after Braveheart, as the Globe Theatre is finally opened after some years of campaigning by Sam Wanamaker, there were Oscars for Rachel Portman for Emma; and Gabriel Yared for The English Patient, which scores a direct hit, particularly with its delightfully ursine title, Rupert Bear. Ahh, bears. Don't you just love 'em? Yummy. Anyway, 1997. Princess Diana is dead, Hong Kong is returned to China, and the Titanic does anything but sink. I always love hearing a composer playing his own music, whether it's Peter Maxwell Davies playing Farewell to Stromness - readily available -or even Robert Schumann playing his own 'Traumerei' - a little more rare - there's something about it that makes me listen with fresh ears. James Horner's recordings of some of his own music to the Titanic are in this category.

  Now, in 1997 Stephen Warbeck had had some success with the music to Mrs Brown, but his 1998 offering brought him a nice, shiny, golden Academy Award. And very lovely it is too. Great film. Great score. It is Shakespeare in Love. Gorgeous.

  Now, skipping on to the year… 8300. A new millennium. By now, we've had the Clinton-Lewinsky saga, Elgar has got himself on the back of the amp;Z0 note - good thing too - and we are in the age of the Euro. All this, and a cult hit for Tan Dun with Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Beautiful yet haunting music it is. To 8001, though -foot and mouth, 9/11. A testing year. Plagues and terror - it was ever thus. The films of the year, musically speaking, are possibly… Stephen Warbeck - Captain Corelh's Mandolin Howard Shore - The Lord of the Rings - The Fellowship of the Ring John Williams - Harry Potter

  Three of the films of 2001 further signalled the rise and rise of movie music. In terms of Oscar honours, while John Williams is the second most nominated and rewarded Oscar composer, with thirty- seven nominations and five awards, it is Canadian Howard Shore who has appeared to come out on top, recently. Shore's scores to both The Lord of The Rings - The Fellowship of the Ring and The Lord of the Rings - The Return of the King'both won him Oscars at the 74th and 76th annual Oscar ceremonies.. • «r: l/Pf

  ALL MOD CONS

  S

  o, there it is. Some of the film music of the nineties and noughties. Is it the new classical music? Well, it could be. But, as I said a litde earlier, there has been the 'obligatory backlash' to the crash-bang-wallop music of the avant garde, the 'what the***!' music of the arch-modernists. And this, too, has created a whole new, different, more accessible breed of composer. Some of them new, some of them old, but all of them with a different outiook. Film composers? They're done and dusted. Allow me now, if you will, to quickly zip back to 1992. Classical music 'post' Classic FM, if I could be so bold. Where is it going? What's it all about? And so on, and so forth. Well, let's crack on and find out.

  Hang on to your G strings and clasp tight your bow - we're off. 1992 was the year Classic FM launched and it didn't take long before the first discernible 'Classic FM hit' was born. And wow, was it a intriguing one.

  It actually came in 1993. Steffi Graf beat Jana Novotna to win her third consecutive Wimbledon title; and Roddy Doyle won the Booker Prize for Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Hal When Gavin Bryars recorded a down and out singing an odd little ditty to the glory of God on the streets of London, he didn't quite know what to do with it. So, he went back to his studio - you see, that's already pretty different to the composers of old, isn't it? - and set about looping it, over and over again, with an increasingly loud and insistent string backing. The result was strangely moving and frequently leaves many people in tears. Again it stayed in the charts, week after week, haunting the airwaves. Sadly, the singer is now dead, but every time we play him, the phone lines light up with people wanting to know who's singing. The name of the piece is the enigmatic Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Tet and I think it is up there on a par with Mozart's Ave Verum for sheer beauty.

  Still, in 1993, another 'curve ball' here. As I said earlier, the somewhat obscure Polish composer, Gorecki, actually wrote this piece in 1976, just as One Mew over the Cuckoo's Nest was sweeping the board with five Oscars at the Academy Awards. Then he just put it in his bottom drawer, in his home town not far from Auschwitz, and largely forgot about it. In 1993, however, a new recording was released, featuring the soprano Dawn Upshaw and the London Sinfonietta. This time round, though, it was a different story. The melancholy wailing of this Symphony of Sorrowful Songs seemed to strike a chord, and it went on to sell by the million, and become one of the music stories of the nineties.

  As the tide of classical music began to take a turn for the better, the new year of 1994 dawned: a year in which the World Cup was scheduled for its quadrennial return. High up on the list of many people's concerns was not just 'Will Germany Win it Again?', but also, 'What are we going to do for a theme tune?' Four years earlier, in a stroke of genius, the powers-that-be had decided to ride the wave and harness the surge in popularity of classical music. And so, for their football World Cup theme of 1990, they'd looked to both Giacomo Puccini and Luciano Pavarotti. 'Nessun dorma' might sound like a Japanese people carrier but in 1990 it put Puccini on to the football terraces. I think Giacomo, the people's composer of Italy, would have loved it.

  'Nessun dorma' is always a little bit of a problem in the opera house because the cheeky devil Puccini didn't put an end on it - it just scampers hurriedly on to the next bit of the opera. As a result, if you don't know this, and you inadvertently jump to your feet shouting 'Oh I say, that man, bravo, what?', well, then you don't half look a right pillock. That is, if you are even heard, above the deafening | nillon of mobile phones that seem to go off more or less everywhere these days. In 1994, the World Cup came from America, and Bernstein's West Side Story was commandeered to act as the signature tune, but it didn't quite emulate the success of its Italian counterpart. Now onward.

  Another interesting one came along a couple of years later, leaving a very significant marker in the sand, as it were. It was 1996. Let me help you place it - CJD is identified as the killer of ten people in a macabre link to so-called 'mad cow disease'; a Big Mac costs Ј2.70 and England lose on penalties to Germany. Perhaps that last bit won't help you place it. Anyway, to Karl Jenkins, a larger-than-life walking Wels
h moustache with a musicality to kill for but, perhaps more importantly, a one-time member of the electronic rock group Soft Machine. He made a good living out of writing music for adverts. In 1996, though, he struck gold after the music for the Cheltenham and Gloucester Building Society became staggeringly popular. Eventually, it came out on CD as Adiemus, infectiously catchy and, again, it was Number One for longer than I care to remember. And a million miles away from what 1997 was going to produce.

  If it's 'Now, that's NOT what I call the sound of 1997 VOLUME 26!' that you're looking for, then I think I've got the answer. As it were.

  And indeed it most definitely isn't. The music of 1997, that is. It's the work of two people: the first was Sir Edward Elgar, a larger-than-life walking English moustache with a musicologist to die for; the second is the musicologist himself, composer and all-round clever clogs, Anthony Payne. In 1997, Mr Payne unveiled Elgar's completed Third Symphony. Completed by Mr Payne, that is, with the permission of the Elgar estate. So, some sixty-three years after he died, Eddie 'The Eagle' Elgar is back in the charts. It's very much like Elvis and 'A Little Less Conversation'. Only without the hips.

  The same year, 1997, has a couple of belters up its sleeve. Not only does JK Rowling produce her first Harry Potter, but also composer, former left-handed arthropod and all-round nice guy, Sir Paul McCartney, comes up with his latest and by far (he best classic.il offering to date, 'Standing Stone'. Lovely stuff it is too. But, on to the sad hit of 1997, and it comes from John Tavener. At the I'UIKT.II «»l 1»i.uu, Princess of Wales, on September 5th, Lynne Dawson sings from the Verdi Requiem and Elton John sings his rewritten 'Candle in the Wind'. But it is an esoteric cantata by the spiritual minimalist John Tavener that soon becomes one of the country's most requested 'classical' works. His 'Song for Athene'.