The Story of Music: From Babylon to the Beatles: How Music Has Shaped Civilization

by Howard Goodall

  The opening of a Sondheim musical would typically attract the kind of attention among the educated classes and in the media that a new novel, a new play, a new art exhibition or a daring new piece of architecture might expect. By the second half of the twentieth century this was certainly not the case for premières of new operas or symphonies. Classical music seemed definitively – resentfully – sidelined.

  But then, in 1970s America, a strange thing happened. Two parents, contemporary pop and contemporary classical, gave birth to a child that was a perfect mix of them both. The child’s name was minimalism, and its arrival heralded a sea change in the relationship between musical genres. It ushered in an age of musical convergence: our age.

  Minimalism had in fact begun to emerge, rather quietly, in the 1960s, but it made a louder entrance in the 1970s, spearheaded by American composers Terry Riley, Steve Reich and Philip Glass. Steve Reich has been described as the single most influential composer of the late-twentieth century, bringing fresh ideas and impetus to both popular and classical music. It is a big claim, but one that is wholly justified.

  Where The Beatles had plundered music hall, centuries-old Anglo-Celtic folk and the sounds of the 1960s electronic avant-garde, Steve Reich derived his inspirations from African drumming and Balinese gamelan music. He found that the hypnotic, seemingly repetitive and endless patterns of these drum- and mallet-based styles did not in fact stay the same: instead they changed subtly with each reiteration of the phrase. He sought to apply this developmental approach to Western music, creating pieces – initially mostly instrumental – that superficially sounded as if they were made up of a phrase being repeated hundreds of times, but which in reality altered slightly with each new cycle until the original phrase had become something quite different.

  In its crudest form, this exploitation of ‘phasing’ could be demonstrated by setting off two pendulum metronomes at exactly the same time and precisely the same speed. Because these pre-digital age instruments were subject to tiny variations in their mechanisms, minute differences in the metals used or fractional discrepancies in pendulum weights would result in the two metronomes staying exactly ‘in time’ with one another for only a short while: after thirty seconds or so, one would be ticking marginally faster than the other. Over further minutes the discrepancy would widen until the two machines were tapping out a rhythmic pattern in the difference between their two beats. This was essentially the idea that Reich pursued, albeit with more complex initial patterns. At first he used electronic techniques to make incremental transformations to a pattern, later having live players and acoustic instruments imitate this effect under his very specific and detailed configuration.

  The result of these experimental techniques was that the forward-moving logic of chords – what we called ‘harmonic progression’ or ‘musical gravity’ when we first encountered it in earnest in the seventeenth century – was stopped in its tracks. A new logic of repetition and incremental variation took its place. Stravinsky’s style – the jerky jigsaw of adjacent, unrelated musical segments – was also abandoned. Instead, Reich employed a method of driving music along through constantly evolving reiteration, which was quite alternative to the tried and tested Western formulas perfected over several hundred years. It was utterly radical and, for many musicians and listeners at the time, baffling.

  Reich was fascinated by the creative possibilities of splicing up tape recordings and putting them back together again in collage or repetitive sequence, inspiring, among others, The Beatles to do likewise. He is the godfather of the technique known as ‘sampling’, whereby a fragment of recorded sound is chopped up and recycled back into a musical pattern of some kind: it is the bedrock of practically every hip-hop track you have ever heard, and it is even more ubiquitous in dance music than the electric guitar was in the 1960s. Its genesis can be traced to Reich’s 1965 work, It’s gonna rain, in which he takes the taped sermon of a Pentecostal street preacher and chops up segments of it to make rhythmic cells that are repeated again and again.

  Bearing in mind the all-conquering nature of popular music in the twentieth century, it is important to note that Steve Reich, a classically trained composer who grew up with and was influenced by progressive rock music, handed down techniques in sound that were to feed back into popular music. A two-way relationship between musical zones was once again functional.

  And this interchange wasn’t confined to Reich: David Bowie integrated minimalist styles from Reich and his fellow New Yorker Philip Glass into his 1977 album Low, recorded at the Château d’Hérouville in France and completed in the shadow of the Berlin Wall. Fifteen years later, Glass composed a Low symphony based on material from the Bowie album. Neither Bowie nor Glass could be described as marginal figures in their respective popular and classical worlds: this was a major breakthrough for music in a century otherwise characterised by division.

  Recent decades have seen this melding of the two traditions become more permanent and profound, a process enhanced and accelerated by film music, which has become a playground for the intermingling of the DNA of minimalism and contemporary popular music. Convergence has increasingly characterised contemporary music-making of all kinds in the years since The Beatles announced an ambitious new era for mainstream pop music with Revolver. The cross-genre ventures of Frank Zappa, for example, such as Freak Out! (1966) and 200 Motels (1971), which mixed hard rock with orchestral sound and avant-garde techniques, made their impact on the fringe of the mainstream and caused considerable logistical (and legal) difficulties for Zappa and his classical collaborators. Thirty years later, cross-genre recording and performing had become so routine as barely to raise comment. Deep Purple’s founder and keyboardist, Jon Lord, turned to writing classical music in the 1990s after a long and successful career in rock. Damon Albarn, co-founder of Blur and Gorillaz, premièred his opera Dr Dee in Manchester in the summer of 2011; it was also performed at English National Opera’s London Coliseum as part of the London 2012 Festival. Coldplay’s 2008 ‘Viva la Vida’, a huge worldwide hit, prominently features a string quartet arrangement, as ‘Eleanor Rigby’ had back in 1966. In 2006 Sting released Songs from the Labyrinth, his reworking of the songs of John Dowland, whom we encountered back in the sixteenth century, in collaboration with Bosnian lutenist Edin Karamazov, and in 2010 and 2011 he undertook his Symphonicity world tour, performing his songs with a symphony orchestra.

  Lord, Albarn and Sting are not isolated cases: this is a trend being replicated all over the world. Whether it wants it or not, classical music’s isolation from the commercial mainstream is history. And what all these developments indicate is that the future of music is likely to produce compositions that are harder and harder to categorise: a hybrid third genre of ‘contemporary’ music will prevail that has no tribal allegiance to conservatoire or club. The specific and particular musical journey that has been labelled ‘Western’ despite its many Eastern, Northern and Southern elements and influences – from, say, Kassia of Constantinople’s ninth-century chants to John Adams’s opera Doctor Atomic of 2004 – is giving way to a World musical culture of infinite colour and possibility.

  Most of the modern music in which convergence is most active has thrived in a relatively prosperous, educated milieu, dominated by the United States and Europe, where something approaching a cultural consensus exists. But just as the Blues, ragtime and jazz emerged among the poor, disconnected communities of the American South, there is a modern-day equivalent that was likewise born in areas of deprivation: hip-hop.

  Like its predecessor forms, hip-hop grew from obscurity to ubiquity within a few decades, starting out among frustrated and alienated African-American and Latin American youngsters in the Bronx in the 1970s, but since becoming the chosen genre and musical badge of identity of marginalised youth everywhere. Though its pioneers, notably Jamaican-born DJ Kool Herc (Clive Campbell), had hoped to draw young people away from gang culture by immersion in the dance and rap craze of hip-hop – and
initially succeeded – hip-hop has never entirely rid itself of an association with gun culture, sexism, racism and a contempt for education, even if many of its iconic performers have contradicted this unfortunate aspect of its scene. Its terminology and rapped lyrics were at first intentionally impenetrable (or offensive) to uninitiated listeners – just as the Blues and jazz had once been – but with its enormous popularity among young people of all backgrounds, its language, break-beat dancing and graffiti became familiar by the 1990s. Its DJ-led techniques of song mixing, splicing and sampling gave it, from the start, an inbuilt propensity to absorb other styles, and its influence – particularly its favoured rhythmic grooves – invigorated the creativity of thousands of musicians in other branches of contemporary music, from Blondie’s 1981 hit ‘Rapture’ to the Jay-Z/Alicia Keys modern standard of 2009, ‘Empire State of Mind’.

  More intriguing still is the recent fusion of hip-hop with Bhangra – a British pop-Punjabi folk cross-genre that emerged in the 1980s – which has formed a bridge between two vast musical empires, Western and Asian, that may yet prove to have an even deeper impact on the world’s busily colliding youth cultures than its parent form. It is probably only a matter of time before one of the world’s leading classical composers premières an opera based on Dizzee Rascal’s ‘Boy in da Corner’ or writes a symphony on themes from Kanye West’s ‘My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy’.

  Of course, not everyone has welcomed the meltdown between classical music and the diverse forms of popular music. The spearhead of both fields has become unapologetically mechanised and electronic in character, a trend that alarms all those who cherish the spontaneity and humanity of unplugged music, whether classical, folk or genres from other cultures. It is not a new fear.

  Around the time of the 1930s Depression, much of the blame for the world’s problems was heaped at the door of job-threatening modern technology, a fear exploited in such films as Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936), and René Clair’s À nous la liberté (Freedom for us, 1931). The latter features a score, choruses and songs by Georges Auric, and tells the story of a mischievous protagonist, an escaped ex-convict, who steals some money, becomes rich, and sets up a record and record-player factory. Thus the technology of music, of all things, was satirically portrayed as the ultimate triumph of hard-hearted commerce over humanity.

  The danger of humankind being swallowed up by its own inventions – machines usurping the natural sound of our voices and the instruments we have crafted over the centuries – is an idea that has been explored often, even by those most intrigued by the possibilities of electronic processing. Radiohead’s haunting 2000 song ‘Kid A’, for instance, the product of a thoroughly convergent set of electronic and minimalist musical ingredients, uses an electronic instrument invented in 1928, the ondes Martenot, to articulate what might be the distressed cry of a human clone. The ondes Martenot had previously been a favourite instrument of classical composer Olivier Messiaen, featuring as a prominent solo part in his magnificent, dissonant and joyous Turangalîla-Symphonie, which was first performed in December 1949 (and conducted by a young Leonard Bernstein). Manipulating the human voice through electronic processes had been around in recording since at least 1947, when Sparky’s Magic Piano, a children’s story on shellac disc, used a device patented as the ‘Sonovox’ to create the impression of a talking or singing piano. Subsequent developments included the vocoder, a keyboard-based voice processor used prolifically in pop after Wendy (then Walter) Carlos and Robert Moog’s vocoder had been heard to disturbing effect in Stanley Kubrick’s 1971 film A Clockwork Orange – particularly in the soundtrack’s rendition of the ‘Ode to Joy’ from Beethoven’s ninth symphony. ‘Kid A’s atmosphere, rather like that of A Clockwork Orange, is of a futuristic dystopia where humanity has become lost and fearful.

  But music never ceases to surprise us with its trends and about-turns. Since the 1990s, just as – or perhaps because – we seemed to have lost ourselves in worrying about becoming slaves to machines, there has been a dramatic increase in the popularity of reflective, acoustically spacious spiritual and sacred music. This wave of contemplative, unhurried music surged into the public’s consciousness with the rediscovery of the previously little-known plainchant-inspired works of the Estonian Arvo Pärt, such as his Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten (1977). Likewise the Symphony of Sorrowful Songs by Pärt’s Polish contemporary Henryk Górecki, composed in 1976 but not a worldwide bestseller until 1992, thanks to the championing of British radio station Classic FM. More recently, in 2009, the CD that spent half a year at no. 1 in the Specialist Classical Charts was Enchanted Voices, my own setting of the New Testament’s Beatitudes, in Latin, for eight sopranos, solo cello, chamber organ and handbells: a re-imagining of ancient chant for the twenty-first century. That outcome, never mind that musical proposition, would have been inconceivable to classical composers of the 1960s, when I was a boy chorister at an Oxford college.

  What the musical past tells us is that it doesn’t do to worry too much about what happens next. For every movement there is a counter-movement, for every fear a reassuring hand on the shoulder. Even as we struggle with the existence or abolition of God, we seem to have more music than ever to answer our need for a spiritual dimension.

  In the closing years of the Victorian Age, composers and musicologists went backpacking around Europe and America recording and notating the folk music being sung, played and danced to in remote rural communities, most, if not all of whom have since disappeared, taking the rest of their music and culture to the grave with them. In the 1970s and ’80s the English explorer-composer David Fanshawe did the same for more distant peoples in developing countries, saving for ever the sounds of their voices and rituals, now silent. The endeavour of these pioneers was a noble and timely one, and much of what they heard found itself reintegrated into new musical works and styles.

  How long, then, will it be before our musical culture will be shuddering towards extinction, needing some earnest lover of the old and the ‘authentic’ to rescue our songs and symphonies from oblivion? Is the internet free-for-all going to kill off the very musical endeavour most beloved of its young pirates? After all, if someone is caught stealing from a shop in broad daylight, society unhesitatingly deems this a crime worthy of retribution, yet when music is downloaded illegally from the internet without remuneration it is seen as a harmless, victim-free ‘right’. Not paying someone for their music is what happened in the seven or so centuries before 1900, when composing was the job of a tiny handful of white men who had other ways of supporting themselves. Only a fool would want to see the return of that closed, fusty world.

  Yet the age of technology and communication has also made music a much more open exchange between maker and listener. It is gradually reassuming a role it had for thousands of years: a free-flowing, unwritten, spontaneous, aural tradition based entirely on the lives, loves, hopes and fears of ordinary people. The more complicated adventures undertaken by composers with notation, orchestras, opera singers, conductors, musicological analysis and the rest are still vital parts of music’s main body, but they are not in truth its central purpose. What used to be called ‘classical’ music has become a nursery for experiment: a fascinating, unpredictable, whimsically creative laboratory for the super-interested, funded by taxpayers the world over, feeding profusely into the general flow of musical activity.

  Throughout the last thousand years of innovation and technological development in music, at regular intervals composers at the cutting edge have found inspiration, new energy and source material from the limitless underground reservoirs of folk and popular music that were always around them, like the vast aquifers which hold so much of humanity’s water supply beneath the earth’s thin surface. Just as Bach borrowed favourite Lutheran hymn tunes – themselves derived from unholy folk songs – or as Chopin mined his native Polish dances, Scott Joplin and George Gershwin took the bar-room piano styles of t
heir day and converted them into polished gems for the concert hall, the musical language we have inherited from the past is once again being renewed by mingling in the crowded bazaar of popular music’s marketplace.

  The young musicians in modern conservatoires, music colleges and universities study in an environment that fosters respect for and engagement with a multitude of genres and traditions. They also know they need not shudder in fear at the thought of music-making that is not slavishly dependent on the printed page. J. S. Bach was probably the cleverest composer who ever lived, but he gave his performers almost no detailed instructions as to how they might play his sublime music. He hastily scribbled down the notes and left them to it. It is as if he is saying, ‘trust me, and play’.

  We, more than any previous generation, can readily identify with Bach’s request. We press ‘play’ and a million styles, sounds, aural colours, echoes and voices breeze in towards us as if through an opened window. We are like children with a thousand games at our fingertips. We have, at last, reached a point where there are no wrong or right decisions about what music we may or may not enjoy – just one gratifyingly simple instruction: ‘play’.