Gareth Malone’s Guide to Classical Music: The Perfect Introduction to Classical Music

Dvořák’s Symphony No. 9 in E Minor, Op. 95, From the New World, Largo: Even though that small child stopped peddling up Gold Hill in Shaftesbury, Dorset, some time in the 1970s; even though he was accompanied by a brass band who were presumably (and incongruously) from the north of England; and even though they were playing music by a Czech composer who was writing while on tour in America, this piece is one of Britain’s favourites. Multiple Oscar winner Ridley Scott directed this piece of ersatz nostalgia for a Hovis bread commercial and through what might have been a total mess brought the piece to the attention of the wider public.

Other pieces you may already know – or which

won’t cause you much trouble if you don’t

Grieg: Peer Gynt Suites, ‘In the Hall of the Mountain King’/‘Solveig’s Song’/‘Morning’

Grieg: Lyric Pieces, ‘Wedding Day at Troldhaugen’

Tchaikovsky: Romeo and Juliet Fantasy Overture

Wagner: Ride of the Valkyries

Pachelbel: Canon in D Major

Rimsky-Korsakov, arranged by Rachmaninov: ‘Flight of the Bumblebee’

Barber: Adagio for Strings, Op. 11

Bizet: ‘Au Fond du Temple Saint’ from The Pearl Fishers

Massenet: ‘Meditation’ from Thaïs

Beethoven: Symphony No. 9 in D Minor, Op. 125, ‘Choral’, Ode an die Freude (final movement)

Beethoven: Symphony No. 5 in C Minor, Op. 67, first movement

Verdi: ‘Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves’ (‘Va’, Pensiero, Sull’ali Dorate’) from Nabucco

Tchaikovsky: Piano Concerto No. 1 in B Flat Minor, Op. 23

Berlioz: ‘March to the Scaffold’ from Symphonie Fantastique

Gershwin: Rhapsody in Blue, Andante (or the whole piece if you’ve time)

Beethoven: Piano Sonata No. 8 in C Minor, Op. 13 (‘Pathétique’)

Vivaldi: The Four Seasons, Op. 8, ‘Spring’, Allegro

Boccherini: String Quintet in E Major, Op. 11, No. 5

Verdi: Messa da Requiem, Dies Irae – Tuba Mirum (only if you are a Take That fan – it’s the beginning of ‘Never Forget’ … only it doesn’t have Robbie Williams in Verdi’s version)

Hopefully you’ve found something which you recognise on this list. Familiarity is a useful tool with all music and I advise giving new pieces a couple of listens before giving up on them. For some more starting points for broadening your listening from the mainstream classical repertoire, see Appendix I.⁵

From here on in you may not recognise the pieces I mention or if you do then you won’t have heard them on a TV advert. But just because they haven’t been plucked from obscurity to be used as a theme tune or to sell cars doesn’t mean they aren’t worth listening to. There is so much great music that you’ll already have heard … imagine how much more there is to discover.

Chapter 2

Why, Why, Why?

Baggage handling

However much you stick your head in the sand, or maintain a hermit-like existence, it is very hard not to experience some classical music in your life – even if it is while waiting for your bank to answer the telephone. Subconsciously, we all build up an impression of what this world of music is like, and the very idea of ‘classical’ begins to gather a lot of baggage and preconceptions, what with its penguin suits, clapping regulations, and people waving sticks around.

The path to understanding is riddled with such potholes. Classical music is an activity that can trip you up with unexpected difficulty or drag you down with the weight of a piece you don’t understand. Like English spelling it has its own idiosyncrasies and traditions that must simply be learnt.

That said, it may comfort you to know that there are many traditions in classical music that even some musicians don’t fully understand: Why is a violin made in that particular shape? Why do opera singers do that wobbly thing? I’ll deal with wobbly opera voices in Chapter 10 on singing, but this chapter aims to answer other bothersome questions. It’s not an exhaustive list, but these are some of the queries that most often come my way.

Is classical music for rich people?

Children ask this, adults ask this – everyone asks this – and I wish there was a simple answer. I strongly feel that the music is simply music and can be enjoyed by anyone – but the history of music reveals a complex relationship with money and royalty.

Classical music has relied on the sponsorship and support of benefactors throughout its history. The first examples of written music (as opposed to improvised) were paid for by the Church, and indeed the Church is a source of income for musicians to this day. By the Baroque era (late 1600s to 1750) and Classical era (1750–1800) (more of which later) the most important patronages came from royalty. The ‘Sun King’ Louis XIV enlisted the services of composer Jean-Baptiste Lully; Joseph Haydn had a generous sponsor in Prince Nikolaus Esterházy; and both Mozart and Beethoven received money from Joseph II, Holy Roman Emperor and Archduke of Austria.

Musicians have always tugged at the coat tails of the rich, who have in turn enjoyed the privilege of having bespoke music on tap. In the case of Lully, he was in the pocket of his patron; the music of Lully reeks of eighteenth-century regal opulence. Some of his slower dances would allow the most bloated aristocrat to saunter around the Palace of Versailles without breaking into a sweat.

During the nineteenth century the middle classes became consumers of music as never before, at first through the dissemination of sheet music to be played on instruments at home: singing songs together or, if they could afford one, around a piano. Away from the large chambers of aristocratic homes people made their own entertainment in pubs; the local musician would have been a prized member of the community.

The fashion for public concerts increased through the nineteenth century and, with the building of purpose-built venues, such as the Royal Albert Hall built in 1871, the Queen’s Hall, 1893 (destroyed in the Blitz) and the Wigmore Hall, 1899, music’s popularity increased. In the early twentieth century the invention of the gramophone and the wireless radio democratised classical music in a way that was impossible before; now anybody could own a recording of the complete works of Mozart and listen to it in their own house. This marked a dramatic change in our relationship to music.

Before these inventions it was difficult for people to hear music without going to a concert. Believe it or not, at one time people would listen to full operas down the telephone. It can’t have sounded very good but the pace of invention during the twentieth century was startling: the wireless, a large radio receiving only a few stations, was an exciting window on to the world for my grandmother, who was born in a Welsh mining town in the 1920s, although her father chastised her for using it to listen to ‘modern rubbish’ such as Glenn Miller. Just twenty years later and my father had a record player in his home, though he had such a small collection of records in his Glasgow flat during the 1940s that as a child he would listen endlessly to the same two recordings of the tenor Beniamino Gigli. When I was a child growing up in south London in the 1970s and ’80s I had a record of Peter and the Wolf narrated by Peter Ustinov with the Philharmonia Orchestra (recorded in 1960); my version played at 33 rpm and had to be turned over halfway (remember that?). And now I have the complete symphonies of Beethoven on my mobile phone recorded at a quality that would have stunned people even ten years ago.

So where are we now? Surely anyone can access this music? With the CD-buying public as benefactors, classical music has bifurcated into the mainstream and the specialist. More complex forms are available for those interested in musical self-improvement or expanding their knowledge (maybe that’s you …) and simpler, more accessible forms are there for those looking for a less bumpy musical ride. This can be seen clearly in the difference between BBC Radio 3 and Classic FM, where one offers in-depth analysis of a broad range of specialist works and the other caters well for a more populist palate, offering more easily digestible bite-size chunks.

Those who are more affluent can afford the tickets to see music at the more complicated end of the spectrum. At the best international venues with the finest orchestras, music is painstakingly pored over by professional musicians at the height of their powers. Gaining an introduction to the more complex forms of music tends to require an investment of three things: some musical education, time to go to concerts and the money to pay for tickets. It’s little wonder that the people who attend the best concerts have these three in abundance.

“In Europe, when a rich woman has an affair with a conductor, they have a baby. In America, she endows an orchestra for him.”

EDGARD VARÈSE, composer

Today, American orchestras rely on donations from private sources. In Europe too it’s more likely that a lawyer, businessman or banker with a passion for music will be the ‘angel’ behind a concert, since royal patronages have all but finished. These investors can be a godsend for arts organisations but the situation is not without its problems when venues require large injections of liquid cash for upgrades. When the Royal Court Theatre fell into disrepair in 1994 the Jerwood Foundation were on hand with a large amount of money, but one of their requests was that the theatre should be renamed ‘The Jerwood Royal Court Theatre’. Thankfully the theatre resisted and the historic name remains above the door. It’s a tightrope between getting money and not surrendering your artistic independence.

In 1999 the Cuban-American philanthropist Alberto Vilar promised £10 million towards the regeneration of the Royal Opera House in London. Vilar was fêted as the most generous man in opera; the ROH named its Vilar Floral Hall after him and the Vilar Grand Tier at the Metropolitan Opera in New York was a testament to the influence of his chequebook. But this relationship turned sour in 2005 when he failed to make the final payments (he was rumoured to be around £5 million short, a not insubstantial sum for the opera house). A further shock was in store for the opera community when Vilar was jailed for fraud in 2008. It’s easy to see how this situation arose because without these sorts of donations organisations would simply not survive. Nobody could have predicted that Vilar would turn villain. His name has long since been scrubbed off the ROH’s walls and replaced with the names of other generous (and unimpeachable) organisations – the Paul Hamlyn Foundation gave its name to the Floral Hall and the Oak Foundation’s vice-chair Jette Parker gave her name to the young artist programme. Though the name of Vilar has been excised, it’s a salutary lesson for the arts world which walks a tightrope between artistic independence and financial dependence.

Music itself is, I believe, essentially classless, requiring no more than a pair of ears and a brain to comprehend it. However, to write or play this music professionally requires years of study at the best conservatoires. Who but the wealthy can afford to pay for the necessary sort of private tuition? Even if a child begins lessons at school there will come a point when somebody needs to buy an instrument and pay for music festival entries or youth orchestra subscriptions. It’s under fairly exceptional circumstances that somebody becomes a professional classical musician without any financial support from their parents.

The more complex the music, the more expensive. A 100-piece orchestra means 100 player fees, 100 chairs to set out, 100 scores to print, 100 shirts to press, etc. In orchestral circles the pay is quite modest. It’s certainly not equivalent to a professional footballer and yet the training and skill required is equivalent to that needed for brain surgery. That is what your ticket is paying for: it’s not going into the coffers of plutocrats.

Until we educate everybody in the country to the same musical standard (lovely in theory but expensive in practice) and convince schools that classical music is important regardless of class (an uphill battle in some institutions) it will remain the preserve of those who are introduced to it in the correct way.

What is a key?

This is straight in at the deep end, but we may as well get this out of the way. No way of explaining the key of a piece captures all of its subtleties, but that’s part of the beauty of music: you can’t put it into words. It’s an important concept to get your head round because it’s central to the development of classical music.

My father tells a story of entering a singing competition at a holiday camp in 1964.

‘Do you know “Always Something There to Remind Me” by Sandie Shaw?’ he asked of the resident pianist.

‘Er. Yes I think so,’ came the reply, although with a worrying hesitation.

The moment came and they faced the audience. Now if you know the song then you might recall that the tune begins low in Miss Shaw’s voice and then builds up to the high notes of the chorus. My dad was just a few notes in when he realised the song was quite simply far too high for him (a bass-baritone) – the pianist was playing in the wrong key. Family legend has it that he stood on a table to try to reach the top notes; I doubt that helped.

Many famous songs build to similar perilous climaxes: songs like Bon Jovi’s ‘Living on a Prayer’, Liverpool FC’s ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’ and anything by Michael Jackson have busted many a larynx when sung at a karaoke bar. These songs are written in a key that is comfortable for the original performer but which may not suit lesser mortals. Also we are born with a particular voice, either high – soprano/tenor; medium – mezzo-soprano/ baritone; or low – alto/bass. There’s nothing you can do to change this.

It wouldn’t matter if you were only singing in the shower, but if you have foolishly agreed to perform at your friend’s wedding you need to work out a way of being able to hit those high notes. Mel Brooks used to tell a story of a singer who started a song on a key note that was too high and ended with a gut-wrenching high note and a hernia. Beware – singing can damage your health. If you start a bit lower in pitch, that will allow you to hit that high note at the end of the tune (which will also be correspondingly lower). Problem is, when it comes to the wedding, how will you remember which note you have to start on? You could sing the note, find the note on the piano that sounds the same, and that will help you find the ‘key’. The ‘key’ is the musical area where your tune lies.

KEYS, SCHMEES

Each note on the piano has a name and that can be the name of a key. So we name C major after the note ‘C’ because pieces in that key feel related to that note. They seem to orbit around that tonal centre (another way of describing key) like planets orbiting the Sun. In the key of C major the note ‘C’ is the Sun and all the other notes are still there but in orbit. If we change to the key of G then the note ‘G’ becomes the Sun, and the centre of the Solar System. Keys are held together by natural forces like gravity. There are twelve keys in total named after all the notes of the scale.

But hang on, you say, there are 88 keys on a piano, not 12. Yes, but if you look at a piano keyboard it has a pattern that repeats as you go from left to right. It’s a bit like a clock face, returning to the same starting point: C, D, E, F, G, A, B … then you are back to C. So there are lots of Cs on the piano, but there is only one ‘key’ of C.

The thing to remember is the idea of labelling the starting notes of your tune. At the risk of sounding like the late great Humph milking his metaphors on I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue, your tune is like a mobile home, which needs a place to sit. Your mobile home can be moved up or down the mountain (hopefully along with the lovely Samantha). And just as in life, if you move your home, it is quite dramatic. That is called a ‘key change’. If you listen to Stevie Wonder’s ‘I Just Called to Say I Love You’, you will hear him change the key of the piece at the end.

What is a composer?

Speaking of Stevie Wonder, why is it that he is mostly called a songwriter, or someone who writes great tunes, but Haydn is called a ‘composer’? Composition is the art of organising sound in time. I’m being that vague because there are composers such as John Cage (1912–1992), who wrote a piece called 4’ 33” which is entirely silent. Yes, silent – except it isn’t really, because although the performer is told not to make any sound, it makes you realise that there is always some sound going on, even in a room full of people trying desperately not to cough, which I think was Cage’s point. Next time you are in a ‘silent’ place, count the number of sounds you can hear. You’ll be amazed. (In December 2010 the work reached number 21 in the pop charts as a protest purchase by people angry at Simon Cowell’s X-Factor machine.) Another of Cage’s pieces involves only metal instruments and it sounds much like my attempts at cooking. So in the end there are as many strange examples of what people define as music as there are examples of what people consider to be art.

In the traditional sense a composer is somebody who writes down notes for other people to play. Sometimes composers imagine the notes in their head and then pour them out on to paper. Mozart was said to have been able to do this, as was the French composer Ravel (1875–1937), who wrote the famous Boléro, until he suffered from a degeneration of his brain which tragically left him unable to put pen to paper, a condition known as agraphia. ‘The opera is in my head,’ he said. ‘I hear it, but I will never write it down.’¹ Many people have music inside them, but it takes great discipline and skill to be able to translate that on to the page for somebody else to play and it takes years of practice to write it down in such a way that you can have it played exactly as you imagined.

Not all composers can just put it straight on to the page like that. In some cases, composers use a piano to work things out, although some composers claim this makes what they write sound like piano music – rather than, say, a flute piece. If you are writing for a flute, they say, it’s better to imagine the sound of a flute playing than to listen to the sound of a piano impersonating the flute. Having little pianistic ability is not necessarily a block to becoming a composer: Irving Berlin, the great American song-writer who gave us ‘White Christmas’ and ‘How Deep is the Ocean’, was famously bad at the piano and would only play the black notes. ‘The key of C,’ he said, ‘is only for people who study music.’² (You get the key of C if you play on the white notes.) He even had a piano made with a special lever to change keys.

Some composers are professional musicians, some of them are also conductors and others just do it in their spare time. There is no one rule. Composers are often consumed by their desire to write music; some are meticulous about detail, concentrating on a small output, while other composers are prolific, producing works to order. Henri Duparc (1848–1933) was so self-critical that he destroyed most of his own compositions, leaving only thirteen songs with which he was satisfied. Compare that to the output of Joseph Haydn (1732–1809) who wrote 106 symphonies.

Recent technological advances have meant that many composers now use computers to print the music physically, a process that took hours in the past. Preparing 100 parts for the musicians can now be done at the touch of a button and the computer even allows the composer to hear a version of their score as they are composing. How different from when Bach was writing his music for the weekly church services in Leipzig from 1723 to 1750. He would only have a week to compose, write, prepare parts and then rehearse an entirely new work. Imagine what a computer could have done for him! I’ve heard musicians complain that computers lead to a lack of rigour in the writing of scores as young composers become lazy and allow the computer to do too much of the work. I believe the same is said of university essays, many of which have been copied from the internet. Either way, we have come a long way from quills, parchment and candlewax.

As for how composers choose those notes, the techniques are almost as varied as the musicians themselves. People have used maths, chance, improvisation, philosophical schemes and systems galore to create new sounds and musical ideas. Thankfully a lot of the process remains mysterious. As film-maker and scriptwriter David Mamet once said when asked where his ideas came from, ‘Oh, I just think of them.’

I’ll talk about how composers write melody and harmony, along with how they structure their work, in later chapters.

How strange, the change …

Musicians always talk about ‘major and minor’. What are they? How do I know if a piece is ‘minor’? Firstly there’s an important distinction to be made between ‘a major work’ or a ‘minor work’ and pieces in a major or minor key. Major/minor has nothing to do with importance. It’s about the musical character of the piece. You can have C major and C minor, just as you might have ‘Gareth cheery’ or ‘Gareth contemplative’. Simply put, pieces in ‘major keys’ are more sunny and bright, those in a ‘minor key’ tend to be more moody and dark.

These aren’t random associations but they are reinforced by the music we are used to hearing. Minor keys sound more unsettling than major keys because they contain barely perceptible dissonance (notes that clash). To the untrained ear this is hard to hear but without going into the science of harmonics (and feel free to look into this yourself) I think that’s really all that is necessary to understand at this point.

Beethoven’s ‘Moonlight’ Sonata, first movement – minor key

Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 3 in G Major, first movement – major key

Who decided which instruments made up an orchestra?

Nobody sat down and planned the orchestra, and even now it’s not absolutely fixed. Each time a composer writes a piece they are at liberty to use pretty much whatever instruments they like (within reason and subject to the confines of budget: those cannons in the 1812 Overture aren’t cheap!) The orchestra is like a greatest hits of the instrumental world, because there have been countless instruments created in the history of music but the orchestra is a condensation of all those variations into the best modern examples.

A large modern symphony orchestra will have a certain number of musicians in its employ: on average about 60 strings, 13 woodwind, 12 brass and some percussionists. Music from earlier periods used fewer instruments; conversely, modern composers can use an extremely large number (more than 100). For large-scale works this orchestra might employ ‘extras’, such as a piano or harp, that aren’t used by every composer in every piece, or something more exotic such as an electric guitar, saxophone or theremin (an eerie electronic instrument popular in 1940s–1960s sci-fi and mystery films such as Spellbound and The Day the Earth Stood Still).

Mahler’s Symphony No. 8, ‘Symphony of a Thousand’, uses a huge orchestra and is only performed on special occasions. Its subtitle is due to the huge personnel required to mount a performance. This is the apotheosis of the nineteenth-century orchestra.

SYMPHONY OF A THOUSAND

There’s classical music and music from the Classical ‘period’ … I’m confused

The Oxford Dictionary of Music describes the term Classical as ‘vague’, then goes on to list four completely different definitions. To clear things up, there is a particular musical period that we refer to as ‘Classical’ and there is a broad term ‘classical music’ which encompasses both the ‘Classical period’ and all of the serious music from the last thousand years.

Mozart is an example of a composer of the Classical period (note the capital letter), so he can be accurately described as a ‘Classical composer’. His music conforms to classical principles of beauty and form. It’s music from a time when, in art and architecture, people were looking back to ‘classical antiquity’ or ancient Greece for inspiration – hence the term ‘classical’. To be pedantic, according to that definition Webern, Schumann, John Adams and Stravinsky cannot be described as ‘classical composers’.

When I was at school, trying desperately to understand the chronology of music, my school music teacher refused to refer to any music other than that written between 1750 (the year of Bach’s death) and 1897 (the year of Schubert’s birth) as ‘Classical’. He preferred ‘serious music’ as a moniker for anything outside the popular realm. This is a useful definition as far as it goes: classical music is a serious business. But what about other forms that are equally serious: jazz, folk or ‘world’ music, for example?

Outside the ivory towers in common parlance ‘classical music’ is everything that isn’t jazz, pop, folk or world music. It is confusing that we use the term to mean pretty much any music written in the last thousand years. But then the term ‘pop’ is too generic a term to describe adequately the commercial music of the last fifty years.

If you wince at this double meaning every time you encounter it you’ll end up with a sore face. Accept it and move on, is my advice.

If it’s classical does it mean it isn’t popular music?

Calculating how many fans an art-form needs in order to call it ‘popular’ is anyone’s guess, and even within classical music there is a divide between populist material and more esoteric or specialised music. Sitting in a packed Royal Albert Hall for a Prom certainly gives off a sense of popular appeal, but how will the figures stack up against a pop music tour?

The Arts Council³ divided the audience for musical events in the UK into broad churches⁴ (classical music performance, opera or operetta, jazz, other live music event – rock and pop, soul, R&B and hip-hop, folk, country and western, etc.) and gathered audience attendance figures for 2005/2006. It concluded that opera had the smallest reach of all music: 4 per cent of the population attended at least once a year. For classical music that figure was around 9 per cent. However, even the very broad ‘other’ category, which encompasses pop and rock, only adds up to 26 per cent of the population, again, attending a gig at least once a year.⁵

Classical musicians tend not to crave the lifestyle that goes with mass popularity, being more dedicated to their art than to their public image. If we are going to measure by record sales or by numbers of tickets sold, then, yes, classical equals fewer sales than other forms. But there are good reasons for that: once a classical music fan has bought a recording of Symphonie Fantastique by Hector Berlioz they may well listen to that recording without need for another one for the next forty years. This is not the case in more popular forms which have innovation as one of the driving marketing forces.

There are clearly exceptions, where a popular appetite meets the classical world. In 1994 The Three Tenors (José Carreras, Plácido Domingo and Luciano Pavarotti) achieved a level of popular success hitherto thought impossible. Not since the great recordings of Enrico Caruso in 1902 had the operatic tenor voice been such a recording sensation. The association with football must have helped it, but achieving a Guinness world record for best-selling classical music with the Three Tenors in Concert CD shows that a great tune, well sung, has mass appeal even if it is classical.

But don’t be too heartened; the general trend doesn’t look great. A December 2010 article in the Daily Telegraph reported: