Radio Ga Ga
With apologies to Freddie Mercury et al.
When I’m not Zooming, Teamsing, Skyping or Sleeping, I like background music. I need background music. It’s at once company and comfort. Mostly it’s classical, but Hubby likes nostalgic pop and Greatest Hits Radio, until they sink so low as to air Fearful Sharkface. Then it’s a race to the off-button or, more apt for FS, the F off button.
I have a huge selection of classical CDs. Even huger since I inherited Mum and Dad’s. From Renaissance to Baroque, ‘Classical’, Romantic and 20th-century, I have it all. The one sub-genre I’m a bit dubious about is the ultra-modern stuff: you know, when the composer is still alive. Some contemporary stuff is great – e.g. Whitacre, MacMillan, Jenkins, Rutter – but I’ve been to far too many Proms where the seemingly pre-pubescent composer has come on stage to take a bow after the most atonal, alyrical, arhythmical, a-wful claptrap. I have literally sat on my hands and folded my arms (takes some doing) to signal my distaste for a piece of non-music and a waste of a gobsmackingly expensive ticket.
Another time I was disgusted was when Vivaldi’s Four Seasons was hanged, drawn and quartered in front of my very eyes/ears. The composer/arranger/attention-seeker obviously missed the memos that said, ‘If it ain’t broke don’t fix it’, ‘You can’t improve on perfection’ and ‘Viva Vivaldi-as-is’. I think it was a ‘jazz-fusion’ performance and, to be honest, if it had just been a jazz version I might have found it very clever. But Vivaldi’s masterpiece was somehow interspersed with the jazz, which was disruptive, jarring, clumsy, contrived and, again, a-wful.
On another occasion, Hubby and I hot tailed it down to Glyndebourne for Verdi’s Macbeth. The music was unbastardised, but the staging was an affront to artistry. The Three Witches had morphed into a modern-day Travelling community, complete with caravans and chaviness. And the Scottish warriors were cartoonishly caricatured with Vivienne Westwood tartans and tam o’shanters. I honestly had to close my eyes so that the vile visuals didn’t ruin the mellifluous music.
The previous year we had a choice of which Glyndebourne production to go to. I plumped for the one about a woman who was bitten by a dog and then went mad before she died. It seemed pretty appropriate as I’d recently been bitten by a dog while out walking. A pack of six little terriers came tearing towards us, yapping their silly heads off, as Hubby and I crossed a farm track – on a public right of way I must emphasize. One of the little bleeders lunged at my calf and chomped down hard, eliciting from me a “You little F---er!” and a well-placed kick that Norman Hunter would have been proud of. That got the little Effers even more excitable, so I whacked them with Hubby’s walking pole (I don’t have a walking pole. I’m a proper walker.) When they’d scarpered, I rolled up my trouser leg to examine a 2” diameter deep purple love bite; the skin was broken but no blood drawn. Still, Hubby drove me straight to the GP who administered a tetanus booster and antibiotics just in case. So you see, we just had to go to that particular opera about a dog bite. Except, while I might have survived going mad because of the actual bite, the sheer ruddy horror of the opera did for my mental health.
Back home and the radio. Up until just before Christmas, my choice of station was exclusively Classic FM. Over the years I’d trained my ears to block out the annoying adverts and puerile presenters to allow the actual music to take centre stage. But last December, even the music was beginning to annoy me. For one thing, Classic FM started to play too many Christmas carols and Christmas music far too early. And the same versions of the same pieces. So one day, after the third identical airing of Sleighbells, I turned to Radio 3. No adverts. No hyperactive presenters faking orgasms. No repetition, deviation or hesitation, because these are poised professionals who actually ken a crotchet from a Christmas cracker.
I said earlier that background music was company and comfort but, since discovering Radio 3 and music as opposed to theatre, it’s also solace, succour, substitution.
And a realisation, that the culture that brought the world capitalism and colonialism also produced music for the angels. Ironic then, that Sheku Kanneh-Mason should say that Rule, Britannia! shouldn’t be sung at the Proms because it “makes people feel uncomfortable”. Well, Kanneh-Mason and his family wouldn’t be where they are today if it wasn’t for music written in the same era, situated in the same culture and mindset, as Rule Britannia! If Rule, Britannia! makes him uncomfortable then, morally, so should most of the rest of the repertoire he plays.
He has a choice: accept that the music that has made him rich and famous can’t be separated from its time and culture, or put down his cello and step away. Music is God. Those who use and abuse it for politics and posturing don't deserve its privilege.
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ReplyDeleteI too have to have music on as background, even during the night the music is on quietly. Its soothing and banishes silence. I used to have Classic FM on when I was studying as classical music I found as opposed to modern music is much more condusive to studying, but those annoying adverts and over enthusiastic, pumped up presenters, yes Alexander 'amphetamine' Armstrong I'm talking about you, and when those sacharine phone ins increased, I changed to Radio 3, thank heavens for peaceful, non- grating and dignified presenters.
My music of choice though is modern, I too like Greatest Hits, Heart, and similar stations but once again, the adverts and phone ins are cringeworthy, which is why I turn to Radio 2, on the whole its brilliant but for an array of the most annoying, self absorbed, facile, oozing false sentimentality early morning presenters when I'be been forced to switch stations, we had Sarah "Kitsch" Kennedy, Vanessa "Verbal Vomit" Feltz and now some annoying little Welsh git who was actually really good as a weather presenter, should a stuck to the day job Owain. Then tjetes the Jeremy Vine show, great till he gets to the discussion topics, if I wanted to listen to bunch of self righteous individuals spouting their rhetoric I'd tune into a current affairs programme. Of course it may be I'm just an intollerant so and so.
As for bastardising classic plays, compositions, stories, traditions, where to start?
I saw the broadcast of this year's proms which this blogs author mentioned. Now I'm not strictly a classical music purist, tinkerring around with something classic, be it music, novel, story or play is one thing, but putting through a grinder so what comes out the other end is a self absorned vanity project and a traversty of the original is another matter. Now I love Charles Dickens immortal A Christmas Carol, of which there have been many, many versions from animation to modern day set in New York to a Western Take to an irreverent BBC comedy take off to musicals, all of which worked, well the jury's still out on the Western version, but the absolute traversty, which would not only have had Charles Dickens turning in his grave but exploading out of it to wreak Ghost of Christmas Past havoc on the directors was a LGBT version. I mean Bob Cratchet had a husband FFS, need I say more? I've nothing against someone making an LGBT Christmas ghost story but leave the purity of the classics uncorrupted.
Then there's the subject of taking classic, traditional characters and changing their colour or sex. I saw a production of King Lear where his daughters were black and white, Black characters now feature in productions in times and parts where they simply would not have existed in that actual time or place. I've just seen "Wicked Little Letters", three black characters feature in parts they would not have neen accepted in at the time, 1920s, a boyfriend, a judge and a police woman, the latter causing disbelief as she was a Police WOMAN, not her colour. I habe ask, would it have gone without uproar if the part of Bob Marley had been played by a white man, or white actors featured as the immigrants in the new production of The Windrush Generation?