Incomplete And Utter History Of Classical Music

1981 - CLARKE, OF COURSE

W

ell, so much to tell, so little time. 1981, and, when Prince Charles marries Lady Diana Spencer, he does so to the strains of Jeremiah Clarke's The Prince of Denmark's March, otherwise known as the Trumpet Voluntary, at St Paul's Cathedral. The result is a rebirth for this unlikely little tune some 280 years after it was written. Couples across the country were demanding that their local organist draft in a friendly trumpeter so they could 'get married like Lady Di'. Also, the world gets the new work from Karlheinz Stockhausen, the composer who's mad, bad and dangerous to hear. It's called Donnerstag aus Licht, one day's worth of a seven-day-long cycle of operas, and the premiere, at La Scala in Milan, featured among other things trumpeters rigged up to loudspeakers, playing from the rooftops across the square in which the opera house stands.

1982, and new concert halls go up in Toronto, Denmark and at the Barbican, in London. It's also the year Carl 'Splash it on all over' Orff dies. Actually, that's Brut, isn't it? Oh, yes, 'the mark of a man', that's it. Ah, the power of advertising. In*83, cue the Richard Wagner. fi When I say 'awful' here, I guess I'm not meaning musically, but culturally. Ponytails, Thatcher's children, mobile phones the size of telephone boxes. Red braces. Greed isgood. Dreadful.

No, no, he's not back from the grave. It's just his centenary, that's all. One hundred years since the death of Little Richard, but sadly… NO years since the death of William Walton, who shuffles off just as the Monty Python team are pondering The Meaning of Life. It's also the year we first got CDs. Yes, 1983 saw the birth of the compact disc. And the death of the art of great cover design.

Moving on, to '87 in fact, Margaret Thatcher becomes the first British PM in 160 years to win a third term. And the confirmed incidences of last year's new bovine plague, Mad Cow Disease, are on the increase. Also, in 1987, cue the Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

' No, no, he's not back from the grave. It's just that, in 1987, an original notebook containing symphonies 22 to 30, in his own handwriting, is auctioned for a staggering four million dollars. FOUR MILLION DOLLARS! He could hardly get a few gulden for his manuscripts when he was alive and in debt and now they fetch $4 million! In 1987, the music world lost Jacqueline Du Pre and, in 1938, cue the Beethoven.

No, no, he's not back from the grave -1 must stop doing this - it's just that, in 1988, the Royal Philharmonic Society decides to premiere the work it had originally commissioned from old Ludwig before he died in 1827. All that existed, before 1988, were a few sketches. In 1988, though, a man called Barry Cooper fills in the gaps and - voila - a brand-new movement of a Beethoven symphony. I don't know if you've heard it, but, well, I'm not sure what I think of it. It's odd to hear something which sounds both unfamiliar yet clearly recognizable. Weird, really.

1988 gone. 1989 now. Sir Michael Tippett premiered his new opera, New Tear, in Houston, Texas; communism more or less collapsed in Eastern Europe; and we lost Vladimir Horowitz and Herbert von Karajan. A year later and America is bereft of two of its greatest twentieth-century composers - Leonard Bernstein and Aaron Copland. Copland, particularly, did more than any other US composer to give America its voice, and he influenced numerous composers who came after him. You can still hear his legacy in the film composers of today - more of which later. Even on TV, you can't go very far among the schedules without hearing someone who couldn't have existed had it not been for the pioneering work of Copland - he really started from scratch and founded the all-American sound so misused today. I can't watch The West Wing without being reminded of two things: one is Copland-style harmonies and the expansive sounds of the theme tune, which, I think, unless I dreamt it, is written by somebody called Snuffy Walden. The other is, of course, will Donna ever tell Josh?

'ESSAY QUESTION: MOVIE MUSIC - IS IT THE NEW