Incomplete And Utter History Of Classical Music

CH-CH-CH-CHANGES

? paraphrase the great Robbie of Williams, let me edutain you.

Uggh. Sorry. Sorry I ever said that. Edutainment - supposedly a cross between education and entertainment - was a bit of a buzzword, recendy, but, thankfully, has fallen on hard times, as my English teacher used to say. Despite the ughism, though, let me just catch up with myself for a moment. It's hard, you see, whizzing through an entire 6000 years in just 304 pages - that means I have to average about twenty years per page. You try that, some time. In fact, I've just spent seven whole lines saying that I'm about to tell you something. Seven lines! In seven lines I should have advanced a full four years. Onward, I think.

What's happening? Who's composing, who's decomposing, to borrow a line from Monty Python? Who's leading the pack, who's following like sheep? Plus, of course, the perennial question, Who's sorry now? Well, much like any other time in history, change is the key word. Everything always has, everything always will, change. But in die early nineteenth century, the sheer rate of change was bordering on the mind-blowing. Railways, for example. They now start to pop up all over the place. In just under twenty years, die amount of rail being laid in the UK goes from a couple of hundred miles' worth to more dian 2,000. A change is gonna come, as Viscount Sam of Cooke apdy stated. Change, in die words of Lord Tears of Fears.

Ch-ch-ch-changes, to quote Earl David of Bowie. If you were to stick a pin anywhere in the map of 1831, and stick your head above die parapet, what would greet you would have been a mass of change. After the obligatory revolution in Paris last year, this year has seen a huge slave rebellion led by Nat Turner in Virginia. Lots of the change is 'social', as people are beginning to refer to it, with new groups forming the world over: Joseph Smith's Latterday Saints, for example, or Mormons, get under way in Fayett, New York State, and almost immediately commence foreign missions as far afield as Europe. It was also around this time that a twenty-three-year-old Charles Darwin got the job of naturalist on board the LLMS Beagle, setting sail for South America, New Zealand and Australia. It would be a very different mission from tiiat of Joseph Smith and his followers, and it would be one that simply wouldn't stop repercussing. There were also experiments galore: Faraday, widi light and electromagnetics, for example. It's a big time for change, you see. Hope it was wearing clean underwear.

But what about music? Is all this res novae reflected in the world of black dots and baton waving?