Incomplete And Utter History Of Classical Music

BLUE IS THE COLOUR…

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hapsody in Blue, I mean, because… well, it's important, isn't it. The first really successful attempt to take the new music, jazz, into the classical concert hall. And there's that word again. Classical. Still sticking as the name for this sort of music despite the fact that it really means the music of the time from 1750 to around 1820. Never mind. If that's the biggest of our worries, then we're doing well. But of course… it isn't. Let me mention some of the other things that are bothering me about music right now, if I may.

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ou see, I've got a friend who has got themselves into a spot of bother. Yes. I know. But, you see… this friend is called… music. Mm. I know, I know… no, I know it's not the first time, but… look, just hear me out, will you?

Thank you. You see, the way I see it, it's something like this. You remember when I expressed my feelings about Mozart and, well, I said that dog years are ment to be like human years, only times seven. Something like that. So, you give a small child a puppy, and what happens? Of course, in seven years' time the small child has progressed by, yes, well done, seven years, but the dog? Well, officially, the dog is now about fifty. And, well, a fifty-year-old and a seven-year-old sometimes don't have a lot in common, do they?

Yes, yes, I'm coming to the point, right now. My point is… my point is… well, forget Mozart, now. I think MODERN MUSIC is the puppy. The small child? Well, the small child is the AUDIENCE. The two don't proceed at the same pace. Not at all. That's why, in 1925, composers like Alban Berg (a follower of S g) can put out pieces like Wozzeck - don't know if you've ever heard it? It's a tough if hugely rewarding piece - when probably what the mass audience could take was no more than, say, Lehar's operetta Paganini or at best, maybe, the more verdant shifting sounds of something from the sixty-year-old Great Dane, Carl Nielsen - maybe a symphony, like the Sinfonia Semplice, from the same year, 1925. But, that's the problem, really. Music was never going to go backwards. Not since S g left the transfigured night behind and found the moonlight. The moonlight from the puppet, I mean. By golly, that sounds clever, doesn't it? All I'm saying - in this poncy, roundabout way - is that when S g ditched any attempt at hummability, which he still had in buckets in his piece for string orchestra, Transfigured Night (1899), in favour of the 'It's music, Jim, but not as we know it' atonality of his song cycle, Pierrot Lunaire ('the moonlight from the puppet') - in which he tipped over the edge, musically, into what to a layman would seem like total cacophony - then, well, music was never going to be the same again.

Composers had, since the death of Wagner, been looking for the next place to go, the next not so much 'style' of music, but 'music' itself. They'd been looking for the next 'music', the new music that would be the next homeland, the next '-ism' if you like, that would come after Classicism and Romanticism. But, well, it never came. Not as far as the audience was concerned, at any rate. And this is the child and the puppy, back again, growing at different rates. The composers were becoming more and more intellectually stimulated by new methods - new methods that sounded, to the untrained audience's ear, like… well, like they were wrong. Music that wasn't right. I mean, when Berg's opera Wozzeck was premiered, it was greeted with utter disbelief by the German critics. As the Deutsche Zeitung put it: