Incomplete And Utter History Of Classical Music

IF IT'S NOT BAROQUE…

ow, sorry to make this book nigh on interactive, but would you just help me a moment. Close your eyes, again, and imagine if you will a huge 1950s post-war British factory. Are you there?

Bugger. Actually you can't read this if you close your eyes, can you? OK, open them again, and I'll do the imagining.

I'm seeing a aircraft hangar-sized factory in the fifties. Lots of people are working - only not on anything vaguely mechanical. They are writing… with quill pens and parchment manuscript. Suddenly, a huge, almost air-raid-siren-like hooter goes off, and, immediately, many of them down quills. Then a voice booms over the loudspeaker: 'Ladies and gentlemen, it is now 1600. It is now 1600. The Renaissance shift is now at an end. Will composers please remember to take all their belongings with them when leaving, so that the baroque shift can get to work immediately, and we won't have any complaints. I repeat, the Renaissance shift is now finished. Anyone who's working a double shift and staying on for baroque is entitled to five minutes to stretch their legs. Thank you.' BING BONG.

OK, OK, so it never happened like that, I know. Why do you think I did it? It just shows, in a way, how useless these labels are… Renaissance, baroque, etc. People just… composed. True, music evolved over time, but not in one year. So maybe that's why many scholars have even had difficulty in agreeing where one period ends and another one begins. Most plump for baroque as starting around 1600, but then this becomes meaningless when you see that composers such as Dowland, Gibbons and Monteverdi - all of them hardly contenders for the tide 'Mr Baroque of Morecambe Bay, 2004' - were working long into the seventeenth century. Still, as politicians are wont to say, where do you draw the line? Well, here, as it happens, so I guess we've got to lump it.

Now, let me take you by the hand and lead you through the streets of the early seventeenth century - I'll show you something that'll make you change your pants.

1607. Good year? Bad year? Well, bad year if you were Guy Fawkes, I suppose. Bad in that you were dead, I mean, your head satayed with peanut sauce just a year earlier, after you'd been caught in the House of Lords, walking backwards with a carelessly leaking keg of gunpowder. 1607 means the new play from everybody's favourite bard, William Shakespeare, namely Antony and Cleopatra. It means the new gadget from Galileo, a compass, so now you could see your way through the stench and fog of south London to go and see Mr Shakespeare's play. And what else have we got? Let's see… Oh yes, we've got opera, as I said earlier. Opera. What more could you want?

Well, opera singers, I suppose: we haven't got them yet. Well, that's not fair, actually. We have got opera singers, we just haven't got women opera singers. Not yet, anyway. It's still all blokes. Ever since St Paul, no less, said that women should stay silent in church, they've become as rare as a witch at a diocesan coffee morning. So, if we don't have women, who is going to sing the high bits? Who is going to hit the top Cs? Well, looks like someone will be going to the ball, after all. If you get my drift. Well, OK, someone is going to the ball, but it turns out it's going to be your personal surgeon - now remove your trousers, please! Yes, along with opera came the meanest men in all Italy - and you can't deny they've got good reason to be - THE CASTRATOS. Mmm, could be a great series on Channel 4, produced by HBO.

I would seriously have loved to hear a good castrato, just to see how different they were from today's counter tenors. The idea, most common in Italy, it's got to be said, was to castrate a boy soprano, thus preserving the boy's voice, and combining it with the chest, lungs and therefore range of an adult. One of the most famous castrati who ever lived was a man called Farinelli (1705-82) who, it is said, was employed by Philip V of Spain to sing him the same four songs every evening. Check out the film about him - very good.