Rough Ideas: Reflections on Music and More
3.5/5
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Music
Classical Music
Music Performance
Music Education
Music Appreciation
Power of Music
Mentorship
Fish Out of Water
Coming of Age
Struggling Artist
Tortured Artist
Genius Musician
Mentor
Mentor Figure
Search for Meaning
Piano Performance
Piano
Friendship
Religion
Perfectionism
About this ebook
A collection of essays on music and life by the famed classical pianist and composer
Stephen Hough is one of the world’s leading pianists, winning global acclaim and numerous awards, both for his concerts and his recordings. He is also a writer, composer, and painter, and has been described by The Economist as one of “Twenty Living Polymaths.”
Hough writes informally and engagingly about music and the life of a musician, from the broader aspects of what it is to walk out onto a stage or to make a recording, to specialist tips from deep inside the practice room: how to trill, how to pedal, how to practice. He also writes vividly about people he’s known, places he’s traveled to, books he’s read, paintings he’s seen; and he touches on more controversial subjects, such as assisted suicide and abortion. Even religion is there—the possibility of the existence of God, problems with some biblical texts, and the challenges involved in being a gay Catholic.
Rough Ideas is an illuminating, constantly surprising introduction to the life and mind of one of our great cultural figures.
Stephen Hough
Stephen Hough, one of the most distinctive artists of his generation, performs with the world’s major orchestras and in recital at the most prestigious concert halls. He has made more than sixty CD recordings and has composed works ranging from solo piano to orchestral. As an author, he has written articles for The Guardian and The Times (London), and he wrote a blog for The Telegraph for seven years. His first novel, The Final Retreat, was published in 2018.
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Reviews for Rough Ideas
6 ratings1 review
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5A nice collection of short pieces by the concert pianist. Many published before on a blog or in newspapers and magazines but all new to me. He's far better on music, piano playing and the life of a concert pianist than he is on catholicism which is obvioiusly a big part of his life. But he's open and thought provoking and it's good that someone with a rare talent and lifestyle takes the time to put down his. It seems an important process for him.
Book preview
Rough Ideas - Stephen Hough
Introduction
Give me a rough idea … not as in a deliberately coarse or unformed one, rather one that has a beginning but not yet an end.
I spend a lot of my life sitting around – at airports, on planes, in hotel rooms – and most of this book expands notes I have made during that dead time on the road. Many of these jottings found their way into print, on paper or online, but others remained unfinished musings on scraps of paper or saved as files on the go on my iPhone: seeds, saplings, waiting to be planted or repotted or pruned.
Mostly I’ve written about music and the life of a musician (not always the same thing), from exploring the broader aspects of what it is to walk out onto a stage or to make a recording to specialist tips from deep inside the practice room: how to trill, how to pedal, how to practise. Other subjects appear too, people I’ve known, places I’ve travelled to, books I’ve read, paintings I’ve seen. Even religion is there: the possibility of the existence of God, problems with some biblical texts and the challenge involved in being a gay Catholic, and abortion. I’ve placed these reflections in a separate section so that readers allergic to such matters can avoid them and we can remain friends.
‘How do you pronounce your name?’
‘Hough: rhymes with rough.’
FORUM
The Soul of Music
Great buildings catch the eye but great concert halls must catch the ear too – and not just as spaces in which to hear music. Rather they are meant to be musical instruments, their walls and ceilings and floors catching, mixing, projecting the vibrations, transporting them through the air to the ear. A fine acoustic does not just make the music created onstage sound better; it is part of the creative process itself. When I strike a chord, what I hear instantly affects how I will play the next chord. Pianists do not press down predetermined keys with predetermined weight; we spin plates of sound in the air, reacting with split-second reflex to their curve and quiver. Adjustments of pedalling and nuance, of rhythmic flexibility or rigidity, are as constant as the dart and dance of a juggler. We play a hall more than play in a hall.
Wigmore Street is a rather dull thoroughfare. Its buildings tend to be respectable and predictable. Above the shopfronts are offices with politely yawning windows, and the cheerful if not exactly cheap restaurants seem tolerated rather than celebrated. But then we reach number 36. Another shopfront it might seem, but no. Wigmore Street’s mediocre Victoriana has lightened. There is a twinkle in the eye as you notice a glass awning. This crystal umbrella is more than a protection against occasional rain. To build with glass is architectural liberation, and to stand safely covered yet still under open skies is a form of ecstasy.
There are no bright lights outside number 36, nothing to distract one’s continuing amble towards John Lewis or Selfridge’s. Just, on both the east and west side of this glass awning, stencilled letters spelling WIGMORE HALL in one of the Arts and Crafts movement’s more sober fonts. Now you know that you are standing outside a building that has resonated with music for over a hundred years.
Passing through the swinging wooden doors, inset with polished brass panels on which is also stencilled the name of the hall, you step into the outer lobby, a funnel through which all patrons pour. At the end of this corridor is the box office. A small window, as if from a country cottage lacking only a rambling rose, appears at waist level on the left. As you walk towards it only a hand is intermittently visible, dispensing envelopes containing tickets. It’s hard to see who owns the hand, even as one reaches the aperture, for to see the face of the owner of the hand requires a rather undignified bending down, in the hope that your name is on the list, that your ticket is safely reserved, that you’ve come on the correct evening. To the right of the window is a door where a man in evening dress is usually found leaning. This is someone who can override the authority of the armless hand, someone who can make sure that reservations are honoured and that honoured guests are admitted with no reservations. Often the door appears empty until the final approach when a slim figure sidles out, smiling, knowing. He holds an envelope in his hand. The exchange is made. You’re in.
Immediately past this door to the left is a staircase going up, leading to the hall’s small balcony, which contains a mere 78 seats. I’ve sat up there a number of times and it has excellent acoustics and sight lines but it somehow has the feeling of last-minute admission, as if downstairs were oversold or you arrived late or there was a mix-up at the secret window. Or maybe it’s the opposite, and this is the place for that special guest of the performer, or that celebrity who wants to remain incognito, or that jaded music professional who wants an easy exit in the event of a tedious evening. If a concert has not sold well, a fat, red rope hangs at the bottom of the stairs, blocking entry.
After the staircase there is a choice: left or right. Two doors leading into the holy of holies; no other way inside for the public in this small auditorium. Even if I’m sitting on the left side I nearly always enter by the right door, which is directly ahead of the street entrance. To enter by the left door, at the top of the basement staircase, suggests you have been loitering, or were in the loo, or were gulping down a gin and tonic in the bar. To go down to the bar during the interval is to be sociable; to go down there before the concert is to be … available.
And so to your seat: red velvet; straight back and sides. A hand in the gap and a gentle push down. Not too comfortable, so you can focus and concentrate on the music; not too uncomfortable, so you can focus and concentrate on the music for a long time. Glance around to see if you know anyone. Oh lovely, there’s so-and-so. Oh dear, there’s so-and-so. Turn back and look down. Thank goodness you bought that substantial programme book.
The stage is the centre of Wigmore Hall, its raison d’être and point of focus. It is also the dividing line between front of house and backstage. A concert is theatre – costumes, lighting, choreography – and its habits are not just thoughtless tradition. These customs can be the best preparation for the drama of the music to unfold – a reason, too, why we set aside special places for our concerts. As with churches, we use a separate building for this activity partly because we want to create a sacred space. A concert is a feast, a liturgy … a party even. It can be bad, but it should never be drab or routine.
In 1899 the British architect Thomas Edward Collcutt, having finished Britain’s ‘first luxury hotel’, the Savoy, just over ten years earlier, was commissioned to design Wigmore Hall. It was his only concert hall. From the mid-twentieth century onwards acousticians emerged as a separate breed, commissioned by an architect to take his or her visual design and set it to music – scientists of sound. In earlier times the architect worked with the eye and hoped the ear would follow. It all appears to have been a matter of chance and tradition … and the shoebox.
This rectangular shape was traditionally used for concert buildings, the stage a heel at one end. And size didn’t matter too much. As long as the proportions were right it would work. It has something to do with walls as arms embracing vibrations, enabling sound to be projected but contained. Wigmore’s shoebox is small (a slipper fit for Cinderella herself), with every sound beautifully focused. Materials are important: wood is warm, to the touch and to the ear. Wigmore’s stage is a curved cradle of wood, but out in the 545-seat auditorium are the heavier, grander materials of alabaster and marble. Indeed, despite its birth in the era of art nouveau, Wigmore Hall harks back to the Renaissance in style. There are candle sconces on the walls, and if altars were to project out between the flattened, pink-veined pillars, and oil paintings depicting the life of Christ or of the saints were to be hung above those altars, we might easily be in the private chapel of a minor Italian duke. But no, this is a solidly secular space. Indeed, the only iconography is the famous cupola above the stage, an exuberantly colourful mural entitled The Soul of Music.
This is in the Arts and Crafts style and was designed by Gerald Moira, later to become principal of the Edinburgh College of Art, and executed by the sculptor Frank Lynn Jenkins, who was much in demand as a creator of decorative friezes. The Soul of Music figure is gazing up at the ‘Genius of Harmony’ – a ball of fire with rays reflected across the world under a deep-blue but clouded sky. On the left a musician plays as if in a trance, seeking inspiration from beyond. ‘Love’ is there too, carrying roses. She apparently represents the idea that a musician’s incentive must be love for art with beauty as the sole reward. On the right side is Psyche – the human soul – who inspires the seated composer to pen musical notes onto a scroll. The tangled nest of thorns that disturbs the perfection of this vision represents the possibility of humanity failing to live up to this artistic ideal – a choking by materialism. The whole image perhaps suggests music as religion. Such a message might well have shocked the post-Victorians who first received it, if they had not already been shocked by the erotic lurch of the Soul of Music figure, portrayed as a lithe, graceful, naked young man. This frieze is an unashamed display of exuberant naturalism in the pursuit of beauty and pleasure in music. On either side of the central cupola are two simpler rectangular paintings showing musicians responding successfully to the extravagant artistic suggestion of the central image.
Returning to the stage, what about Wigmore Hall’s wings, the traditional theatrical term for the bits on the side where performers wait, often with extreme anxiety, for their moment to appear? Well, Wigmore’s wings are more like two ears. On the back wall of the stage are two symmetrical doors for entry and exit. The door on the right, as you face the stage, through which every artist walks, is mysterious. Wherever you sit in the hall it is impossible to see clearly behind the door because of a twist in the space, and then a thick crimson curtain blocks further view. But on the left there is a yet more mysterious door. It looks exactly the same, but no. This is a sort of broom cupboard leading via some precipitous steps directly up to the Green Room. It’s not used for public events. It’s too informal somehow, too cramped, too prosaic for the stage. This left door is gauche. It’s for Hilda Ogden rather than Maria Callas.
Leaving the stage and walking through the right door we reach (left, up and left again) the Green Room. I’m old enough to remember auditioning at Wigmore Hall when this was pretty much all there was backstage: a room with an upright piano and a few pieces of shabby furniture. It was merely a place to hang your hat and don your tails before playing your concert. It is a room in which I have experienced many conflicting emotions, from the tremble of nervous anticipation as I warm up on the well-worn piano to the exhilaration and relief at the end of a concert, a glass of chilled champagne in hand. ‘Darling, what a performance!’ ‘I’ve never heard that piece played like that!’ ‘How do you think it went?’ ‘Dear, I’m speechless!’ … some of the classic phrases expressing dissatisfaction or bitchy venom while still appearing to offer a crumb of praise to the hungry, self-doubting artist.
In 1992 a major restructuring added the Gerald Moore and Geoffrey Parsons rooms, rehearsal spaces named after two great accompanists – a reminder that Wigmore Hall has always had song at its heart, and that lieder require the piano to unfold the drama of a song as an equal partner. It also emphasises that Wigmore Hall is vitally, spiritually in the centre of Europe. So many of the thousands driven from their houses by jackboots found a home at Wigmore. It became a secular synagogue for those for whom the German language was a mother tongue, even if the Fatherland had made them orphans. Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, Wolf … comforting common currency for these refugees.
The hall was built by the piano manufacturer C. Bechstein, which had its London showroom next door. This performing space was originally named Bechstein Hall. During the First World War the passing of the Trading with the Enemy Amendment Act in 1916 meant that all the assets of the Bechstein company were seized, including the hall. It eventually re-opened in 1917 as Wigmore Hall and now, a century later, it flourishes as never before.
Buildings are homes to memories. ‘If only these walls could talk,’ we say. At 36 Wigmore Street, we might wish that they could sing.
‘Our concert halls are like museums’ – Yes, isn’t that great!
I have a number of books by my bedside, ones I can dip into if only for a few minutes before I fall asleep. One of them is Rendez-vous with Art by Philippe de Montebello, Director of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art for thirty-one years until 2008, and the art critic Martin Gayford. As I leafed through it the other night, seeing photos of some favourite paintings, I was struck by how some familiar artworks seem like dear friends. As the years pass it’s as if we’ve grown old together. To contemplate these images again and again is constantly enriching and – so far – I’ve never felt jaded or bored by the repetition.
We look at a painting and it looks back at us. We stare at its detail with eyes of wonder as it strips away the varnish coating our own thoughts and memories. Great art in all its forms demands to be revisited. It requires time. To read a poem once is not to have read it properly. I opened at random at Titian’s Christ Carrying the Cross, its combination of specificity and universality – Jesus of Nazareth, yes, but also every person who has ever helped or been helped in a moment of suffering – seemed to me to have depths of richness to last more than a lifetime.
In the musical world I often hear the complaint that concert life is dying because we have made our auditoriums into museums, repeating the same old chestnuts year after year. This can be true, but is it really a problem? I’m not suggesting for a moment that it’s not important to have the opportunity to hear contemporary music or that we shouldn’t be curious and passionate about neglected works and composers, but let’s not disparage the classics in our permanent collections.
When I visit a museum, I want to be surprised and stimulated and even shocked. But I also want to see the familiar masterpieces – not because I feel comfortable with what I already know but because the greatest art will continue to surprise, stimulate and shock, time after time.
No one at London’s National Gallery would suggest that Van Eyck’s Arnolfini Wedding has outlived its interest and should spend some time in the storeroom but I have heard people say that they’d be happy never to hear a certain Beethoven work again. If a performer ever feels bored playing such well-known music then he or she is probably equally unsuited to playing newer works too. If Beethoven seems dull or old hat to us, then we need to listen to his music not less but more … more carefully, more intensely.
We might need to hang or light a painting better, display it alongside something different, rethink our education programme, communicate the painting’s beauty and significance more imaginatively, even send it to a restorer, but let’s not just remove it from the wall or apologise for it. A curator – of art or music – needs to have complete confidence in the collection. There will always be someone who is seeing a certain painting for the first time, hearing a certain piece of music for the first time, and for someone else it will be a chance to revisit a dear old friend.
Music in churches: magical ghosts or profane distractions?
Although churches were not designed for classical concerts, there is something magical about borrowing them for the evening. There are (friendly) ghosts in these buildings, smells of linen and wax, creaks from pew and sanctuary, strange shadows in cool, dusty corners, and so often, above all, acoustics that glow and pulsate, adding richness to the already rich sounds of the music. Strangely, it can be easier to lose the heavy weight of the ego where your performance is encouraged and appreciated but is not essential to the life of a building: a kind of bringing down to earth as the music itself soars to heaven.
In the past there were few secular concerts in places of worship. Strictly speaking, concerts are still banned in Roman Catholic churches – as I found out when I offered in vain to give a benefit concert in one in New York a number of years ago. However, I did play once in Bari, with the permission of the bishop, over the tomb of St Nicholas … Santa Claus himself. It was the Liszt B minor Sonata at a crushingly slow tempo owing to the extreme and resonant echo of the ancient stone. It’s a strange experience to hear bar 35 still ringing in the air when your fingers are already playing bar 42.
These days many churches are not only venues for concerts but make superb recording spaces as well. Some are deconsecrated and others still thrive as places of worship. I’ve made dozens of recordings in them – St George’s, Brandon Hill; Henry Wood Hall; Rosslyn Hill Chapel; All Saints’, Finchley; All Saints’, Tooting.
The words ‘recording studio’ conjure up the image of a soundproof room, its ceiling clad with foam, wires streaming from holes in ugly polystyrene walls, armies of microphones, triple-glazed windows – a sort of refrigerator sealed from the outside world in order to preserve the controlled sounds created within. With most pop music or electronic music the acoustic of the room should play no part in the final product; everything relies on post-production mixing. A bloom on the sound, because it varies and is unpredictable, is undesirable. But in classical music recordings the natural acoustic of the space is usually an important part of the process. Not only does a beautifully sounding hall encourage the performer(s) to play better, to relish the overtones, to savour the nuances, but it makes the final CD sound more natural. Classical music, and the instruments on which it is played, is organic – in more than one sense of the word.
Not having a sealed environment can have its drawbacks, however. The roar of a jet plane, the hum of a lawn mower, a distant car alarm have all on occasion forced me to stop in mid-flight. Years ago I was recording some Schumann in a church. We’d reached the sublime, rapt third movement of his Fantasie op. 17 when birds at the stained-glass windows began squawking with raucous pleasure. I’m sure that Robert and Clara at the height of their courtship were not so demonstrative. In the end – with ruined take after ruined take, time running out, and sanity at the point of shreds – I had to run out with a starting pistol (the engineer had thought of everything), shoot it into the air, then run back inside again to complete the recording. No glowing acoustic can compensate for such dramatic drawbacks.
On one of my CDs you can hear, if you listen very carefully, just for a few seconds, the gentle warble of external (chaste) birdsong. We left it there. It was the best take. It was unobtrusive. It was musical. It was organic.
Our wonderful, ageing audiences
Although most people turn up at concerts on their own or in couples, occasionally there can be a coachload, frequently of older people, more often than not from a nursing home. On one occasion in Canada a few years ago such a scene set me thinking.
I arrived at the venue that evening with some of the familiar worries most performers have in the hour before the curtain rises, and as I approached the stage door I saw someone being wheeled up the ramp to the front entrance from a bus parked outside. When I saw this man, my heart instantly lifted. It struck me as wonderful that he was there to hear Beethoven and I was the one who this evening was to bring that music to life. It sounds corny to talk about it being a privilege but that’s exactly what it felt like. Ultimately to be a musician is to be a ‘joy bringer’: we are Jupiters, one and all! This old man in his wheelchair was a reminder of the fact, often lamented, that audiences for classical music concerts are mainly made up of the elderly, and that it seems increasingly difficult to attract young people to join us. But on that occasion such an observation seemed like a blasphemy. Greying audiences? I love them! With old age comes wisdom, patience, subtlety, contemplation … all qualities needed to appreciate great and complex music.
I’ve been playing professionally for over thirty years now and there’s always been a sea of grey beyond the footlights. So what? A new grey has replaced the old grey. In the leisure of retirement or in the freedom from the responsibility of looking after children, people can finally find the time to go to concerts. Not that I want in any way to discourage young people from loving classical music and from joining us in the concert halls. In Asia especially it’s thrilling to see large numbers of teenagers at concerts, clutching scores and taking photographs. For the young there should be as much education, encouragement, accessibility and affordability as possible … but not at the expense of making our seniors feel less welcome, as if we tolerate them only because we can’t attract a younger, hipper audience.
Classical music should be a great equaliser, not just socially but also between the generations. The Beethoven concerto I was playing in Canada on that occasion was written two hundred years ago; there were people in the audience who were probably approaching their own century, and the conductor and leader were both showing me photographs of their infants at the post-concert dinner. Classical music across the ages: timeless, universal, ageless.
Dumping the interval
With an art so rich and cherishable it can be frustrating to be reminded of the limits to the appeal of classical music. There have been many suggestions about how people can be encouraged to discover this treasure: better education, more creative repertoire, lower pricing, ways to counteract elitism. But what about the logistics: the time a concert begins and how long it lasts?
At some point in the early twentieth century we settled into a pattern: concerts should start in the early evening and last roughly two hours with an interval in which either to drink a glass of wine or to visit the loo. Any shorter and we invite complaints from the audience; longer and we risk complaints, as well as overtime costs, from the backstage staff. I think it would be good to reconsider this convention if we want to refresh the experience of hearing great classical music live without resorting to gimmicks.
Traditionally in the UK concerts start at 7.30 p.m. and in the USA at 8 p.m. But on a recent recital tour I did in Australia the default time was 7 p.m. In Spain and Italy concerts can be at 9 p.m. or later. The St Louis Symphony has 10.30 a.m. concerts; the Atlanta Symphony has 6 p.m. concerts, and the pianist Vladimir Horowitz in later life would play only at 4 p.m. Rock around the clock indeed.
However, one thing common to them all is the interval – the fifteen-to-twenty-minute gap between the first half and the second half. For opera or ballet this is understandable: sets need to be changed, singers and dancers need to rest, the works being performed are long and have breaks written into them. But who decreed that a concert should last roughly two hours with a gap in the middle in order for us to feel we’re getting our money’s worth?
I think we should consider removing the interval and starting either earlier or later than at present: sixty to eighty minutes of music, then out. It might be objected that the interval is a time to socialise. But is this really true? Isn’t it rather a time to scramble to the bar and at best begin a conversation that has to be cut short as you scramble back to your seat before the second half begins? The Los Angeles Philharmonic has ‘Casual Friday’ concerts when the orchestra plays a shortened version of that week’s programme with no interval and no on-stage dress code. When I played one of these it felt charged with an energy that the traditional concert can sometimes lack. When you play for an appreciative, concentrating audience there can be a cumulative emotional effect in the hall as you all enter the powerful world of a composer’s mind and heart. An interval’s descent to chit-chat can bring everyone down to earth with a bump, requiring the engines to be started up all over again.
Another possibility would be to have two shorter concerts on the same evening, like sittings in a restaurant. A seventy- minute concert at 6.30 p.m. then another one at, say, 9 p.m.? It could be an exact repeat or have a slightly altered menu. It would be possible to choose to come to both concerts, with time for a proper meal in between, or to opt for the one that works best for the audience member. Concert halls with on-site restaurants could double the number of people they feed to the advantage of all, and we could have proper conversations with our friends rather than shouting a few hasty words over the hiss of the hand-dryer.
Classical music – for everyone?
I often hear it said that classical music is for everyone but I’m not sure I agree. Before I make enemies of all my friends and enrage all my colleagues, let me explain myself and explore this idea a little further. I want every door of access to music to be flung open. I don’t want one pair of ears on this planet to be denied the opportunity to experience the ecstatic world of classical music – and certainly not through social or financial exclusion.
But the problem is not really with access. In Britain our auditoriums, orchestras and festivals put on concerts for every conceivable audience group, at every time of the day, sometimes in the most unlikely venues, streamed on multiple digital platforms, at prices that are more affordable than ever. Our broadcasters constantly play and explain music with energy and wit. On the phone in my pocket right now, in a matter of seconds, I could begin to listen to just about any symphony ever recorded, free of charge, in superb sound. The sheer accessibility of music today is mind-boggling. But in the end some people will just not respond to this art form we love – and that’s just fine. There’s nothing wrong with them and – more important – there’s nothing wrong with the music.
Education, exposure, enthusiasm all play a part in developing new audiences, and many musicians and musical organisations are tireless and passionate in their determination to do so, but listening to great music requires an effort. People understand that playing an instrument, like excelling in sport, requires years of work and dedication to reach a level of expertise. What they might not realise is that, unlike with sport, when you can crack open your fifth beer, lie on the sofa and still enjoy the Wimbledon Finals on the telly, a Mahler symphony requires utter concentration to make its impact. It explores the most complex ideas and emotions. If the work is going to make any sense, the blood, sweat and tears of the composer must trickle down to the performers … and to the listeners.
Classical music audiences are not and should not be passive. They are an essential part of a performance; their attention amplifies the atmosphere on stage. It’s a kind of psychic soundboard for the musicians. When we invite someone to come with us to a concert it’s more like asking them to play a game of tennis rather than to watch a match. I do think we sometimes undersell classical music, especially to young people. We invite them to climb Primrose Hill when they are ready for Ben Nevis. Young people are, and always have been, attracted by complexity and a challenge. When I was at school I remember asking the English teacher, ‘Which is the hardest book to read?’ Finnegans Wake soon formed an impressive bulge in my satchel.
Classical music might not be for everybody but it is for millions more across the world than presently attend our concerts. What if each of us asked a couple of newbies to join us next time we go? Anyone for tennis?
Poking bows and spitting mouthpieces
I’m used to my profession being thought of as a luxury, something in which to indulge after the serious business of real life has been taken care of. Politicians in Britain – left, right and centre – have nodded at the arts with respect over the years (one even conducted symphony orchestras), but usually as a sideline to the main event, a cherry on top of the cake rather than deep in the very mix of the dough.
I know I’m biased but I think learning something about the history of the arts in schools is as important as learning about the history of kings and queens and presidents. How people live their imaginative, creative lives is vital in understanding how they make their brief time on the planet meaningful.
So much for theory; what about practice? Not so much ‘music appreciation’ classes, but rosin on a bow, reed in a mouth, fingers on keys. Many studies are now discovering that learning a musical instrument is something positive in itself – a discipline that helps a person to acquire skills of co-ordination, concentration and perseverance. It shares these with sport, of course, but there is more. What makes playing a musical instrument worthy of special attention is that its physical and mental complexities are a springboard to something beyond the tangible or the measurable. Unlike sport, music is not about winning, or keeping fit, or promoting your town or your school; it’s about celebrating, to a level approaching ecstasy, the deepest human longings. At moments of acute joy or sorrow, men and women throughout history have sung or reached for musical instruments to express the inexpressible. When minds are taut with emotion, there seems to be an inner compulsive instinct to release and harness this tension through the measured vibrations in the air that we call music.
We can learn to draw, but our relationship with Rembrandt exists across a rope inside a gallery. We might understand a book, we might mutter its more melodious words under our breath, but reading, too, is a passive engagement. But playing a musical instrument allows us to touch the cloak of Beethoven. Without our fingers on the keys, his sonatas remain mere dots on a page – a soulless, soundless, unbroken code. Music flares into life only when you or I dare to strike the match. Our libraries, our museums, are sacred temples to be preserved with all our might, but the ability to play a musical instrument allows us to create a cathedral in any room where we might bow a violin or blow an oboe.
In a period of economic difficulty or social strife the arts don’t just help us to cope, they call into question the way we live our lives. What makes a society happy, fulfilled, creative, law-abiding? Few would suggest that money can do this by itself. Discovering how to spend leisure time well could be as important in the effort to reduce crime as having extra police on the streets; increasing the population of concert halls might actually help decrease the population of prisons. As Pascal put it, ‘The sole cause of man’s unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room.’ Few occupations pass the solitary hours more fruitfully than the playing of a musical instrument.
Children with genius levels of musical talent will always find a way to flourish, despite opposition or deprivation. Those from families where music is already present will have countless opportunities – even if a little coercion is sometimes involved – to learn an instrument. But what about all the other children? Political leaders need to be proactive here because change will not happen by itself. The ubiquity of low culture, the inaccessibility of instruments and teachers, peer pressure, schoolwork demands, the blare and glare of technology’s latest gadgets – all of these make it more difficult for children to begin studying the cello or the horn, and to persevere beyond discouragement or boredom.
The most cursory glance at a music history textbook will contradict any nonsense about classical music being for the rich or privileged in society. In fact, most of the great musicians came from modest or often even seriously disadvantaged backgrounds. It is possible to combine an unflinching demand for excellence with a passionate insistence on equality of opportunity. This should become a norm in the early years of a child’s schooling: a vast youth orchestra, a finely tuned machine for social improvement and enrichment, fuelled by communal cooperation. Up to a hundred individual personalities sitting within reach of a poking bow or spitting mouthpiece, forced to put aside their egos for the sake of a greater good.
Can you be a musician and not write music?
I have often written and spoken about the issue of pianist–composers, pointing out that until the Second World War it was virtually unheard of for someone to play the piano and not to write music as well. In the nineteenth century, arriving in a town to play only someone else’s compositions would have provoked a raised and not entirely approving eyebrow. Every great instrumentalist was not a great composer, but each one wrote music, published music, performed his or her own music. Learning how to compose musical notes is no more difficult than learning how to write words; it is a technique. Actually it is something that is generally required at any music college in the form of harmony and counterpoint, and it is only a small step from harmonising a Bach chorale to writing one of your own.
When you reach Act III of Wagner’s opera Die Meistersinger von Nürnburg you realise that the contest was not about winning the prize as a singer but as a composer … and, indeed, as a poet too. It is Walther’s creative originality and daring that exclude him from being accepted as a Master in Act I, just as it is the same qualities, finally recognised when the walls of prejudice are dismantled, that gain him the prize and the bride in Act III. The only character in the opera who is solely a performer is the buffoon Beckmesser, who steals someone else’s song and is unable to make sense of it, mangling it to great comic effect.
I hate the piling up of obligations but I do think that music students should be required to write music. We look at other composers’ notes on the page in a different way when we have struggled to write our own. If we have spent time debating where exactly to place a certain dynamic marking or how to space a chord, I think we will look at those same issues in the music we play by others in a different, more intelligent way.
To answer the question in the title above: yes! I think it’s obvious that there are many great musicians who have not written music. But I’m not convinced that they couldn’t have; and if they haven’t, I think they should have.
Can you be a musician and not play or read music?
Now, moving the argument in a different direction, do you have to play or sing in order to call yourself a musician? I mentioned this point to a friend once and he replied instantly, ‘Of course! A musician is someone who plays music.’ I’m not sure it’s as simple as that, and I think this realisation could change the way thousands of people attend concerts or listen to recordings.
Everything hinges on how you define the word ‘musician’ of course. I have come across people whom I would happily call musicians, even though they might not even be able to read music. Unlike sport, where someone who has never sweated in action could hardly be called a sportsperson, the essence of music is something invisible, intangible. The playing of notes on an instrument is only the beginning of a connection with the inner world of the sounds. I have come across people whose profound alertness to music, whose instinctive, sympathetic resonance with its inner vibrations, is so acute that they seem to me to be not only musicians but great ones. Critics, novelists, poets, painters, actors, scientists, doctors … and many members of an audience can fit into this