Labelling Music History

Some years ago I found myself caught up in a discussion about re-aligning the perameters of the periods of musical history.  We were all taught that music fell into four neat historical eras – Baroque, Classical, Romantic and Modern/20^th Century (in my youth we rather regarded anything before Baroque as Primitive, but now we are more generous and call it Renaissance) – and that those eras were defined by certain key musical events.  The Baroque began with the first operas around 1600 and died with Bach in 1650 and the Romantic began with Weber’s Freischütz in 1821.  The bit in the middle was called Classical (it contained just two composers, apparently, Haydn and Mozart) and everything after has been called Modern or 20^th Century.  Even as a boy in the 1950s it seemed odd to describe Debussy as “Modern” (as my teachers told me he was) and I find it appalling that students are still being told that he is a “Modern” (or – worse still – a Contemporary) composer.  Yet nobody has come up with a handy label to stick on music written since 1900, the random date given for the end of the Romantic era largely by those who were born at a time when the 20^th century still seemed to an age of disturbingly challenging ideas.  So, even to this day, anything after Romantic is Modern.

For those who have missed out on this peculiarly English approach to music education, the need to label and compartmentalise everything is seen as a basic tool in the instruction of history; hence the rote learning of the dates of the Kings and Queens of England (note the word “England” rather than “Britain”) in the history lessons of my youth.  Fortunately British schools adopt a much more enlightened approach to history teaching nowadays; sadly, music teachers do not, and it is still asked of most students; “What period does this composer belong to?” and, “What are the features of Baroque music?”.  Our old friend Wikipedia even provides us with a graphical representation of this on one of its myriad pointless pages (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dates_of_classical_music_eras).  (You will note the wonderful idea that the 20^th century runs well beyond the year 2000, as if heading towards infinity.)

So our discussion was primarily concerned with deciding when the Romantic era really ended and what to call what came next.  The death of Mahler (1911) was a preferred choice, and as Schoenberg devised his 12-note system around the 1920s, there was a strong vote in favour of 1920 as being the end of the Romantic era.  That Rachmaninov and Richard Strauss carried on writing Romantic music well into the 1940s cut no ice with those who regarded these, in any case, as insignificant composers in the course of musical history.  

Feeling that the whole thing was an utterly pointless exercise, I came up with the suggestion that we call everything after 1920 “Dysfunctional”; which got the derision it so fully deserved and, not long afterwards, my interest in the discussion waned and I headed off to more fruitful pursuits in the bar.

My former University tutor, Arnold Whittall (who was, for me, the most inspirational man in my educational history, although I did not appreciate it at the time – thanks, Arnold, if you’re reading this) preferred to define musical periods in terms of social upheavals, particular war, and while his seminal book on 20^th century music puts it in a nutshell, Music Since the First World War, I was also greatly taken by his definition of the Romantic era as being that period between the French and the Russian Revolutions.  Indeed if, as we must believe, music reflects the society in which it is created, surely wars have to be a defining moment in every musical era.  With the First World War catastrophically changing everything about society, it is little wonder that it had a similarly catastrophic effect on music.  I myself have written that the First World War “dropped a bombshell in the trenches of classical music which scattered fragments so far and wide, they have still not been collected back together into a semblance of cohesion”.  The problem we have in defining music after the Romantic era, irrespective of whether that finished in 1900, 1911, 1914 or 1920, is that there has been no stylistic unity.  The similarities for an audience between Stockhausen and Arvo Pärt are so extreme as to render any attempt to link them stylistically as irrelevant, while even the works of Stravinsky encompass such a vast stylistic range that they define single-label categorisation.

But then wasn’t it ever thus?  What possible link is there stylistically between the keyboard works of Domenico Scarlatti and those of his exact contemporary Johann Sebastian Bach?  Yet we glibly categorise them both as “Baroque” composers and search, in vain, for stylistic connections.  T

True, there were social connections - both men worked under royal patronage – and the Europe of their lifetime had certain artistic standards to which both men adhered by default rather than design.  But try and interpret Scarlatti as you would Bach, and you miss the essential character of their music.  I have heard teachers explain ornamentation in “Baroque” music as if every composer - Bach, Scarlatti, Purcell, Byrd, Lully, Rameau – needs to be approached the same way, and I have more than once came across students asking whether it is right or wrong to use notes inégales in “Baroque” music, as if there is a one-answer-fits-all solution.

I can see why teachers like to use these terms to help their students get to grips with the vast panoply of musical history, but I’ve long ago given them up, preferring the more arbitrary (but, ironically, more relevant) use of centuries to divide up musical history.  I find it easier to trace the development of music through the 18^th century, say, than through the “Classical” era; that certainly helps put Bach in his true place, not as the final voice of the Baroque but as the siren call of the Classical.    Understanding society and the changes in it are much more helpful to understanding music and its development than a random sequence of labelled periods which create a wholly false impression of music written within them as being stylistically related.

And it’s not mere semantics.  A huge, huge problem music examiners face when hearing recital diplomas is the completely erroneous belief that to achieve a “balanced” programme one has to draw on different stylistic periods.  So we might have a programme of Bach, Mozart, Brahms and Debussy which, from a listener’s point of view, is utterly unbalanced, but which looks good in that it covers different stylistic periods;  on the other hand, a programme of Debussy, Grieg and Rachmaninov, while perfectly balanced in the ears of the listener, is dismissed merely because all three composer lived in the same era.  Only the other day I sat through a performance of Debussy, Brahms and Percy Grainger.  When I commented to a teacher on how satisfying it had sounded, she shook her head in dismay – “But it was so unbalanced”, she told me, “All three works were written within 20 years of each other”. 

The trouble with labels is that they block our ears.  How much easier it is to see balance when it has nice clear letters and numbers than when it has that elusive and indefinable element we call music.

Surgery for Sight Singers

Deep down in the hidden recesses of a music examiner’s soul lies a dark secret; one so closely guarded that few ever divulge it, even to each other.  But we all know it’s there and have experienced the awful, creeping dread that envelops us whenever it is unleashed.  Much as we deny it, we all have a deep, horrible loathing of one particular instrument. 

Examiners scan their schedules anxiously to see if their dreaded instrument is on their day’s list, breathe a sigh of relief when it’s not and experience a fleeting moment of sheer panic when it is.  For some it’s the Electronic Keyboard, for others the Drum Kit.  It might be the early grade Double Bass or the Grade 5 Tuba (treble or bass clef. C, Bflat or Eflat?).  Many have an unspoken dread of a Snare Drum grade 3 or a Guitar grade 7.  But we all have one, whether we admit to it or not, and a disproportionate number of us dread, more than anything else, the appearance on a day’s schedule of a high grade singer.

Not that we actively dislike that strange, almost intimate sense of examining a person rather than an instrument, or that we dread writing a comment perceived to be a personal remark rather than a purely subjective musical observation.  Most of us even accept with astonishing equanimity that for singers the performance of something by Andrew Lloyd Webber is seen as a necessity rather than an option, and I know colleagues who positively relish the prospect of hearing, yet again, a Song From A Show complete with actions and props.  No, our dread of singing exams – especially high grade ones – is the inevitable, unavoidable Sight Singing which hangs, like a ghastly stench, over the exam room.  How we all hate putting on that optimistic voice as we say, “And now for some Sight Singing”.

Examiners for Trinity have it particularly bad, for they have to present their candidates with an incomprehensible sequence of dots randomly placed around a musical stave and leave them to it; at least other boards allow the examiner to blot out the awful sounds of singers attempting to read with hefty piano chords.  In over a decade of examining for Trinity I have yet to come across a high grade singer who realises that all that is wanted here is that they take the note offered to them by the piano and run with it, roughly following the ups and downs of its contours and possibly taking some notice of the comparative note values in the thing, until they end up, roughly, where they started.

The usual practice, however, is for the note given by the examiner never even to be picked up by the singer in the first place.  Most seem to prefer to scoop up a pitch out of thin air and then spend the next few minutes seeing how many micro-tones they can find within its near environment.  Rare indeed is the singer who actually finds a pitch in relatively close proximity to that being hammered out with increasing ferocity by the examiner on the piano.  Once a pitch has been decided on (at considerable length), there then follows an agonising series of odd squeaks and groans, frequently interrupted by coughs, false phlegmatic expulsions and vocalised expressions of dismay, bearing not a scintilla of relationship with the key, pulse or basic contours of the printed line.  It takes superhuman effort on behalf of any examiner to see this through to the bitter end and most decide, in the interests of both sanity and a pressing timetable, to end the agony prematurely.

That singers cannot read music at sight is an undeniable truth.  Why they cannot and, indeed, whether they should ever be expected to, is a matter of heated debate.  So let’s weigh in.

Even before I worked as a music examiner I knew of this congenital defect in those who choose to sing for a living.  I worked for a very short time as a repététeur with a professional opera company.  Singers – some of considerable fame - would spend an hour with me as I drummed out each individual note in their part and, with agonising slowness, they would gradually be able to string first two, then three and, if they were very clever, four notes together within the hour.  It amazed me how they ever managed to master one operatic role, let alone the dozens expected of professional opera singers.  It struck me then that, were they able to read music, they would surely master their roles so much more quickly, thereby affording them the luxury of devoting time to the interpretation of their roles.  But clearly I am not a singer, and what seems logical to a mere musician, is a ridiculous concept for a singer.

Having been brought up as a chorister and sung with choirs whose repertory involved completely new programmes on an almost daily basis, I have developed an easy facility for singing at sight.  But it seems most solo singers feel such skills irrelevant. Indeed, not long after I had started examining for the ABRSM, I had a day of singers all of whom fell down badly in their final results because of their miserable attempts at sight singing.  When I raised this, in the most oblique terms, with a singing teacher, she was appalled at my ignorance and huffed haughtily; “Singers don’t have to sight read.  It’s ridiculous of the Board to force them to do this in the exam.  Pianists and violinists may have to do it, but singers don’t”. 

Wondering whether I had lived under a misapprehension I took this up with my old friend Ian Dollins who, throughout our university days, seemed set on a glittering career as a bass singer.  When I told him of this encounter he proclaimed with an almost operatic imperiousness; “She doesn’t know what she’s talking about.  Of course singers have to sight sing!”  (Perhaps Ian’s great facility at sight reading is what prevented him from taking up the career his gloriously resonant bass voice so clearly deserved on the operatic stage.  He’s now, I believe, leading a quiet and respectable life as organist of Monmouth Parish Church.)

I have to confess that I cannot come up with a single reason why sight-singing is not something which singers do, nor can I see any reason why they should feel it’s an irrelevant skill.  But then I read these words uttered by a fellow repététeur; “Singers too often develop the notion that their natural talent is everything, and so they neglect their musical education.  Compare this with the great singers of the past.  Farinelli, the great castrato, for example, had a profound understanding of harmony, counterpoint, melody and sight-reading, and he used all of them to perfect his interpretations.  It’s almost inconceivable today that a singer would have that deep an orientation to his music, whereas a serious instrumentalist is expected to be a master of all those disciplines”.

So there you have it.  If you want to sight-sing, you should be castrated.  (I’m not sure how this would work with female singers who are, in my experience, by far and away the worst sight-singers of them all!)

A Noise of Music

One of the more regular correspondents to this blog opines that - and I paraphrase him here - noise is sound which is not wanted, whereas music is sound which is wanted.  The inference is that it is the listener who defines music, not the performer.  An intriguing argument, certainly, but one with which I have the greatest difficulty in accepting.

I agree that noise is unwanted sound (although some dictionaries specifically refer to it as loud or unpleasant), but unwanted by whom?  If the musician is creating sound which he wants people to hear, is it really correct to say that those who hear him are divided between those who want to hear him (who are therefore listening to music) and those who do not (who are being subjected to noise)?  In other words can the distinction between music and noise merely be at the behest of the listener? And, indeed, are music and noise mutually incompatible?

Of course we are all guilty of dismissing some music as “noise”.  I, myself, have referred to certain musical performances as “unpleasantly noisy”; but that does not prevent them being musical as well.  For me, the word noise refers to a loud or irritating sound, but not necessarily one which is not musical.

The problem boils down, as it always does, to the impossibility of producing a clear, unequivocal definition of music which isolates it from any other kind of sound.  Without the clear perameters provided by a proper definition, we cannot say precisely what music is, so therefore cannot say when it ends and noise takes over.  I do not agree that music is “wanted” sound; there has to be more to it than that.  And I certainly do not agree that music is defined as such by those who hear it. 

Taking this as a definition – “Music uses an organised series of pitches and rhythms within a finite time-scale to communicate unspoken concepts, primarily emotional and intellectual” – one can describe music as “organised sound”, although it is, of course, much more than that.  Words like “harmonious” and “melodic” are useless in any definition simply because neither is present in all music.  I do feel that descriptions of music which highlight its spatial element get close to the nub of the matter.  Music has a definite beginning and a definite ending (even if part way through The Ring you begin to doubt that) and perhaps the clue to this comes in the quote I once read; “Music is the best way to pass the time between silences”.  I can’t remember where I read that or who wrote it, and I’ve never been able to locate it since.  However, Stokowski came up with something similar when he said;  “A painter paints pictures on canvas; musicians paint their pictures on silence”.

So this might seem to offer some resolution to the issue.  For, if music is preceded by, succeeded by and continually refers to silence, that seems to differentiate it from any other kind of sound.  The blank canvas of music is silence, whereas noise is built upon pre-existing sound; which is why it is so annoying to the ear.  Noise is an accumulation of unyielding sounds, and so does not have that essential moment of preliminary repose which is a pre-requisite of music. 

Or does it?  What is an explosion other than sudden noise?  Oh dear!  Back to the drawing board.

 

(Incidentally, I've borrowed this blog post title from a book written in 1968 by Alan Ross Warwick giving a fascinating history of the musical life of London.  I imagine it's long out of print, but worth getting hold of if you can find a copy.)

Fabulous Fifths

The Rules of Harmony were, I should imagine, drawn up by an Englishman.  It seems a pretty safe bet to say that; after all it is very much an English habit to codify and organise that which, almost by definition, defies organisation.  Having spent many miserable years learning about the “correct” way to write out ornaments – eight notes, beginning on the upper auxiliary for a trill, five notes (the note, the note above, the note, the note below, the note) for a turn, and so on – the correct grouping of semiquavers to a beat in various simple and compound time-signatures, and building up an absolute horror of consecutive fifths or chords without thirds, I, like so many music students, came to despise the absolute unyielding rigidity of these basic building blocks of composition and marvelled at the way composers seemed to have taken them in their stride.  If I did happen to point out an awful solecism in Bach (he was quite fond of the odd consecutive fifth or two) or Haydn (his note groupings would not have got him a distinction in grade 5 theory) I was told that it was a sign of “greatness” that you had the confidence to “break the rules”.  Indeed, there’s a frightful English epithet which runs, “Rules are Made to be Broken”; which seems about the most ridiculous thing anyone could say; if they are made for that, then why make them in the first place?

As a student it always puzzled me that these Rules of Harmony were so explicit.  Did, I wonder, every composer sit down with the list of rules itemised on a laminated sheet of paper beside his desk (as music examiners do with their own Rules – the list of criteria they must follow in assessing every exam candidate)?   Surely such things served only to stifle creativity.  But, being English, I was faced with the inbuilt obligation to obey every rule without question (is this why I enjoy living in Singapore so much?) and so I kept such reservations to myself.

Of course it’s all nonsense.  I know that now.  The only “rules” any composer has ever followed are those of their own making and those dictated by the simple rules of physics; you can’t ask a violin to play a melody below its range, nor expect a soprano to reach down to the F below middle C.  But even then, there have been those composers who have stretched the rules by asking violins to retune and sopranos to experiment with vocal inflexions to simulate low notes. 

Ornaments, that great bugbear of grade five theory students and those obsessed with authentic performance of Baroque music, are simply what they say they are; decorations to a musical line which by their very definition are purely improvisatory.  As I tell my students, if a composer really did want eight notes of equal value beginning on the upper auxiliary, he would, have written them - practicality, context, taste and an intelligent understanding of stylistic conventions dictate how ornaments work out in performance; not sterile rules.  And as for consecutives fifths and octaves and chords without thirds, these account for some of the more tantalising elements in some of the greatest of compositions.

So what purpose do these Rules of Harmony serve, other than to fill teachers’ pockets with cash from poor students determined to sit a pointless exam covering an aspect of musical literacy which has no relevance whatsoever to real musical life?  As I wrote in this blog some years back, the Trinity theory syllabus managed to change the face of that and while their exams do necessitate the understanding of and adherence to a few sets of rules, the key words are context and musicality, and the grinding boredom of page after page of worked out ornaments and four-part harmony along pre-determined lines, are (almost) gone.  I love the new Trinity theory syllabus and wish it had been around when I was a student.  Then only problem is, without the clear and unequivocal set of rules so ingrained into previous (and other existing) theory syllabuses, a lot of teachers have great difficulty adjusting.

Following a Malaysia-wide tour some years back introducing teachers to the Trinity theory syllabus, I received a small but steady stream of queries from those who still could not grasp how to teach certain concepts when the rules seemed so vague.  And, indeed, a question has just come in from a teacher who has summoned up the courage to take the bull by the horns and start teaching the new syllabus. 

She writes; “I have tried to work out how to do the 12-bar Blues exercise, but I always end up with consecutive fifths AND octaves.  What can I do?”

Since the entire basis of western musical harmony is built around consecutive fifths and octaves – it was the French who first described this natural inclination of untrained voices to sing in fifths and octaves when unable to sing in unison as “Organum” – to forbid them is like instructing a human being to remove all their bones.  They are absolutely vital, but as civilisation progresses the urge has been to cover them up as much as possible (although a look at some of the cadaverous creatures tottering along catwalks makes me wonder whether civilisation has missed the fashion industry by).  It was in the 18^th century that this desire to “civilise” harmony reached its apogee and composers strove to disguise the essential roots of harmony by wrapping them up in pretty chords and cleverly contrived harmonic progressions.  Since then, of course, the move has been the other way, and with jazz, minimalism and many more recent musical genres, primitivism is the order of the day.  Since the 12-bar Blues is a jazz idiom, we should see it as a celebration of consecutive fifths, not an illegal exposure of them.

Musical theory attempts to demonstrate how various composers have created their unique stylistic fingerprints by analysing and codifying their music into a set of “dos and do nots”.  So we learn that Bach tended to avoid voice parts moving together in parallel fifths and octaves while Haydn generally conceived harmony triadically – with every chord containing a third.  Somewhere along the line, however, those useful “dos and do nots” became the Rules of Harmony and people forgot their purpose and context, projecting them on to all harmony of any vintage.

My father started me off on the organ playing some pieces from Flor Peeters’ Heures Intimes, a collection of pieces I now realise were, like just about everything else Peeters wrote, a thinly-disguised attempt to Flemishise – I’ve spent time in the USA so I know how to use words like that – the music of his French contemporaries (in this case Vierne’s Pièces en style libre).  When I took these to my first organ teacher, he shuddered with horror; “What a terrible piece.  It’s all consecutive fifths” he proclaimed in a disgusted voice.  Like the Vierne Berceuse on which it is modelled, Peeters’ Lied derives its sublime beauty from the constant flow of moving parallel fifths.  Yet the Rules of Harmony had told my organ teacher that it was wrong.  Nobody had told him (as nobody ever told me) that the Rules of Harmony were not only period-specific, but utterly artificial.

So in response to my worried teacher, I must tell her that she has to forget all about those Rules when she is working through her theory syllabus, and apply them only – and even then with strict health warnings - should she have to harmonise a “chorale in the style of Bach” or a “string quartet in the style of Haydn”.  In all other contexts fifths, octaves and bare chords are not only allowed, but should be positively encouraged.  We English love out consecutive fifths; where would Vaughan Williams have been without them!

Noisy Pianos

To be without a book is to feel naked.  It’s a friend whose company you crave at any free moment of the day.  Returning to it at night makes going to bed something to be eagerly anticipated, while there is joy in the morning when a few minutes can be grabbed while the tea cools down and the story left reluctantly the night before can be briefly revisited.  The pain of travel is immeasurably eased in the company of a book, while flight delays are little more than heaven-sent opportunities to get back to where you left off earlier. 

I am sure that e-readers, Kindles and whatever else you call them have exactly the same lure, but for me one of the great joys of a book – apart from its physical presence, changing substantively with each new one picked up – is the rooting around in bookshops to find the next.  While CD emporia and record shops seem to have given up on large parts of Europe and Asia (although Hong Kong and Japan are still nirvanas for record collectors and my experiences of the USA have revealed a surprisingly rich seam to be mined, albeit only after much frustrating searching), book shops are positively thriving.  From the aluminium and glass pseudo-offices (there’s a Barnes and Noble in Baltimore which I swear was designed as a factory and turned into a bookshop only at the last minute) to tiny carpeted and clubbish backstreet hideaways - there’s the most endearing one tucked in a close behind Winchester Cathedral – you can find a bookshop just about anywhere.  (Of course, as in so many other things, Singapore is the exception where, in its mindless striving after the latest gadgetry, what ghastly skeletons of bookshops exist are merely fronts for arty cafés and Japanese Animé picture books.)  I don’t pack books when I travel; I know I shall find something in a bookshop wherever I go.

It was browsing through a branch of a mighty chain store, assailed on all sides by the nauseating stench of hideous Starbucks undrinkable coffee (unless, it seems, you add so much to it, the coffee element is all but omitted) and the glaring piles of “Three for Two” Chick Lit, that I stumbled across my latest read.  It’s a pretty unexceptional book, although I’ve only just hit chapter five; an uneasy mix between autobiography, fact and fiction.  Nevertheless, while it’s not exactly un-put-downable, it is most certainly happily-pick-uppable, and I cheerfully took it up just now whilst lazing by the pool after a lengthy swim.  My concentration, barely able to hold the book up to block out the sun let alone take in the words on the page, was suddenly lurched into top gear by the following sentence, giving the author’s childhood impressions of his first encounter with a piano;

“It seemed unimaginable to me that adults would conceive of an entire contraption, at once huge and respectable, whose sole function was to make noise.”

My initial thoughts were of utter amazement.  A piano is a musical instrument, not a machine designed for noise.  But then my conscience reminded me of what I tell all my organ students; “The organ is merely a machine to make noise.  Only a true musician can turn it into a musical instrument”.  So, the thought crossed my mind, if I believe (as I do) that the organ is a machine designed to make noise which only a musician can transform into music, is that not equally true of the piano?

It is a fact that the organ was first designed merely as a noise-making machine, and it’s equally true to say that was its sole purpose for at least 1000 years before anyone thought to look at it as a musical instrument.  To this day, the world is full of organists who still seem to regard it as a machine for making noise, while a substantial number of non-organist musicians look on it in precisely the same way. 

The piano, though, was designed to make music from the very start. In 1700, or thereabouts (we know only that it pre-dates 1711), when Signor Cristofori first hit on the idea of using a keyboard to operate a system of hammers hitting strings, his sole objective was to make a musical instrument; even if its mechanism, so scientifically labelled, seems more like the design of torture apparatus used during the Spanish Inquisition.

    
And surely the natural sound of the piano is more inherently musical than that of the organ?  Play a piano note and it dies, as all living things must; play a note on the organ and it lives to eternity unless you die first or, alternatively, decide to cut the note off in its prime.  (Is there anything less musical than the dire church organist reluctantly releasing the final chord in each verse of a hymn?)  No other musical instrument needs such care over the release of a note than the organ; even trumpeters naturally expire when the need for a pint of beer presses. 

On the piano the sound is wholly governed by what the human being in control feeds into it.  On an organ, the inevitability of ciphers and mechanical breakdowns ensures that the human being in charge is never entirely free from the tyranny of mechanical intrusion.  However, I have spent more than my fair share of days subjected to human beings who simply seem unable to extract from the piano the music they are so obviously trying to put into it.  As an examiner sitting through interminable candidates forced, by parents and well-meaning teachers, to battle their way through some trifle conceived in all innocence by harmless men like Muzio Clementi and Johann Burgmüller, I have frequently yearned for a cat to walk into the room and march arrogantly down the keyboard, preferring pussy’s purring pianism to grade three’s gut-gripping grotesqueries.   Go into a second-hand furniture store where old out-of-tune uprights adorn the walls, and from the cacophonous jangling of hideous ill-matched strings and moth-eaten felts, the last thing you think of is music.

That, though, does not really support the notion that the piano was conceived to make a noise.  Just like the hideous screeches of a Stradivarius when someone like myself gets a hold of one, or the strangled wailings of an oboe in the hands of someone busily masticating the reed, no musical instrument is really a musical instrument unless a musician is playing it.  Aren’t they all, at heart, cleverly disguised instruments of noise? 

The Book I'm reading:
The Piano Shop on the Left Bank
by Thad Carhart
published in 2000 and in this
Random House paperback in 2008

Singing With Your Supper

A burning desire to have some Italian food found me taking my seat at a table in a cavernous Italian restaurant where bottles of wine and olive oil competed with prints of Venetian gondoliers and Roman ruins on all the walls.  Not quite a pizza/pasta joint - the staff wore black aprons and could pronounce, after their own fashion, the names of the items on the menu - but with everything soaked in bog-standard olive oil and peppermills the best part of a metre high, neither was it by any means a fine dining establishment.  Food was plentiful, cheap and – inevitably – oily, and I was grateful for the mouth-grating dryness of cheap Chianti to help scrape away some of the oily residue from my Parmesan-Crusted Sole.  All the same, I was more than enjoying my food when, suddenly, I was pulled out of the kind of reverie into which all us solitary diners descend, by a glorious soprano aria from a Verdi opera (I think it was Macbeth, but it was not one of the famous showpieces for soprano) sung, unaccompanied, and at very close quarters by a passing waitress.  She had delivered the food to a table and, on her way back, simply broke into song.  The entire restaurant was silenced by her voice, and even the kitchen staff (it was one of those places where, for some wholly unaccountable reason, it is considered proper for diners to see the workshop in which their food was prepared – rather like going to the bathroom and seeing the whole sewage system revealed before your very eyes) stopped what they were doing to listen open-mouthed. This was a fine, well-trained, fully-developed voice, well able to hold its own on the operatic platform and certainly well used to commanding an audience into silence.  I was hugely impressed. 

But my reaction was nothing compared to that of the other diners.  They cheered, their hollered, they stamped their feet, they rattled their forks against their glasses of cheap Chianti, and generally behaved as if they had just witnessed a world-record-breaking performance by one of their compatriots at the Olympic Games; jubilation, wonderment and unrestrained admiration were the order of the day.

Enquiries to my non-singing waiter revealed that several of the waiting staff were actually music students and it was not uncommon for the ones who had studied singing spontaneously to break into some aria or other; the manager positively encouraged it.  All this brought back memories of Oxley’s floating restaurant in Brisbane which, before it was swept away by floods, boasted a large number of singularly fat waitresses, all of whom were studying music across the river at the Queensland Conservatorium and were similarly encouraged to exhibit their skills when the situation was appropriate.  It is well known that music and food (and wine) go hand in hand; but it’s still a surprise when they appear so vividly in juxtaposition.

What had me the most impressed, however, was the reaction of my fellow diners; none of whom, I imagine, had gone there expecting to hear a Verdi aria sung live by a professionally-trained opera singing waitress.  It may be patronising of me to say so, but I suspect that the vast majority of those diners, if told that the song was by Verdi, would be none the wiser.  I doubt many of them had ever gone into an opera house (the nearest was several thousand kilometres away), rented an opera DVD or even listened to one on the radio.  At best, I suspect, they would have heard a Pavarotti-soundalike singing Nessun Dorma or O Sole Mio on a TV advert.  Yet their admiration for this live piece of opera was genuine and heartfelt.

Opera has an unfortunate image.  It is perceived as being exclusive, elitist, and opera goers are seen as moneyed businessmen attending a kind of high class works’ outing.  Opera singers are seen as fat, conceited divas with more money than musical skill, and only today I caught some imbecilic radio announcer claim; “We usually think of opera as belonging to rich 19^th century dukes, but in fact it is much, much older than that, going back to the 1600s, when it was organised by the church”.  With stupidity like that at the end of the microphone, how can we expect anybody to take opera seriously? To be fair, those involved in opera do not go too far out of their way to dispel these mis-conceptions.

There is something in the sheer physical strength of an opera singer heard at close quarters which excites admiration from the most musically-disinterested of people.  I hate and detest soccer; but when I caught a nimble-footed goal on some ubiquitous sports channel showing in a non-Italian restaurant, even I had to admire the skill involved.  And that’s what my fellow diners were doing; admiring a skill which, when witnessed at close quarters, they realised to be pretty near super-human.  It crosses my mind that, if people were made aware of just how much skill and effort is involved in making music, it would be much more widely appreciated.

Television close-ups of sweating athletes crippled in pain and fatigue after some pointless run around a gravel track excites widespread admiration and has helped make sport popular among those for whom any kind of physical activity is anathema.  But we have lost out in music. Everybody believes that all singing involves is a microphone stuck so close to a mouth that one fears electrocution, and a deal of plastic surgery.  Given a glimpse of what singing is really about – sheer, superhuman effort – even the most musically inept cannot fail to be impressed.

Perhaps young singers should show off their skills at close quarters in a non-musical context.  That way they might find that they are not just building up their own reputations, but encouraging a wider audience to enjoy opera for what it is; one of mankind’s most physically demanding activities.

Whence Great Musicians?

Visiting a private music school run by an expatriate Russian lady, I had a glimpse into the kind of intense musical training which threw up so many of the iconic musical figures of the 20^th century.  Some of the most memorable occasions of my concert-going career were provided by Russians – Oistrakh stunning the Royal Festival Hall audience with a matchless Beethoven Concerto, Rubinstein leaving me breathless with a one-in-a-million Rachmaninov 2, Maxim Shostakovich directing the unforgettable non-Soviet premiere of his father’s 15^th Symphony (with Dmitri there in the Royal Box) – while Rozdhestvensky, Rostropovich and Ashkenazy are still regarded as great musical heroes by today’s concert-going public.  The music of Rachmaninov, Stravinsky, Prokofiev and Shostakovich was among the most popular written during the 20^th century, and even the “second rate” figures, such as Khachaturian (whose Spartacus was, for a time, the biggest-selling classical recording of all time) and Kabalevsky (where would young pianists have been without is music?), won over audiences who baulked at the mere mention of Schoenberg, Britten and Stockhausen.  Soviet orchestras were about the finest in the world (I recall a visit of the Leningrad Phil to the Proms which had most of us in ecstasy for the rest of the season) and only last year the Australian Limelight magazine suggested that the five “Greatest Pianists of All Time” were all Russians.

How did Russian musicians come to achieve the kind of world domination of which Lenin, Stalin and Khrushchev could only dream?  The answer is obvious; the education system which nurtured promising young musicians from an early age and sent them through a veritable hothouse of rigorous and unrelenting musical training.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the subsequent disbanding of so many musical organisations, musicians who had been brought up under the Soviet system suddenly found themselves not just able to travel to the west, but obliged to do so in search of employment.  Would the Malaysian Philharmonic ever have achieved the heights it did without its large contingent of East Germans and other “outcasts” from the Soviet system?  How would the Singapore Symphony have developed with out an iconic leader forced by circumstances beyond his control to find a suitable playing position far from his Russian homeland?  Indeed, for a time, it seemed that every orchestral chair in Asia was competed for by a product of the Soviet musical education system.  And, with the demise of conservatoires and universities in the former Soviet states, a flood of music educators came on to the scene, often finding themselves faced with conditions of employment and a level of student ability they must have found heart-wrenchingly awful after their privileged existence under the Soviet regime.

At Universiti Putra Malaysia, where I lectured for a while before the establishment of the MPO, we took on as a staff member Zhakid Khaknazarov who had been Professor of Music at Tashkent Conservatory (where, organists will be interested to note, his staff included Gyorgy Mushel), and it seemed as if every other private music school in Malaysia employed a Russian violin teacher.  Indeed it was one of these who gave me my first taste of just how intense the Soviet system was when she harangued me with alarming vitriol after an examiner had given one of her grade 8 students a very high distinction.  Keen to defend both my colleague and the examining board from this unusual but undeniably bitter complainant, I asked for more details and was told that the teacher had heard from outside the door (don’t they all?) the candidate play a C natural in a particularly demanding piece.  “Every time I tell her; C SHARP, C SHARP”, she railed at me in heavily accented Russio-English, “But this girl she so stupid.  She cannot play violin.  She cannot read music.  She cannot hear.  Why C natural?  Always C natural.  And this idiot examiner (call himself a musician?) give her 146 marks!”  A suggestion that one wrong note out of several hundred right ones is no reason to lower the mark, let alone fail the candidate (as the teacher was demanding) fell on deaf ears.  The fact is that it had to be perfection or nothing.  And under Soviet training system, who could blame her?  One tiny lapse, one almost unnoticed error, could be the difference between a career as a musician and one as a factory worker.

On this present occasion I was a little more forewarned and could sympathise with the teacher who despaired at the quality of students she was obliged to take.  “I much prefer Asian students.  At least they have the same work ethic as the Russians and are prepared to practice hard.  My European students are lazy, but the Americans are the worst!  They do not see any reason to take it seriously.  They are all told that music is FUN!  Fun!  I ask you, what is Fun about playing everything badly and never getting any better?”  I’m not sure I agree totally with her view; music should be fun, and if you make it too deadly serious as a teacher, you are likely to put more students off music for life than to open the doors to one of the greatest avenues of pleasure available to mankind. But she is right that music is only worthwhile when you put your heart and soul into it and aim for perfection.  In my view perfection is unattainable, but there’s a huge amount of fun to be had trying to attain it.

The teacher went on to say how much she valued the examination system as it gave her students a discipline which many were otherwise unwilling to accept.  She wouldn’t countenance my suggestions that there was sometimes as much to be learnt from taking the exam as from passing it; for her if the result is not stratospherically high, the candidate has failed and may as well give up music.

As I listened to her, it dawned on me just how huge a gap there is between the way music is taught under the western system and how it was taught in Russia; and I was not sure if, culturally, that gap could easily be crossed.  With a five year old daughter, I have been determined that her childhood should not be stolen from her in the single-minded pursuit of excellence.  I want her to become a thoroughly rounded and socially competent human being, not a total social outcast able to do one thing perfectly and, if not achieving perfection, destroying herself in the belief that she has become an abject failure. 

But am I right?  My approach denies her the chance ever to become one of the great musicians of the future; at best she will become a competent musician and an enthusiastic member of a concert audience (and, goodness knows, the musicians of the future will need those).  As a teacher, I did used to think that at best my students would appreciate music as an entertainment rather than see it as a career.  But what if every teacher thought this way?  We’d have lots of knowledgeable people for our audiences, but no great musicians to perform for them, just a whole load of mediocrities having fun while the audience drift away aware of, and dissatisfied with, such grim incompetence.

It’s a dilemma, and one which is certainly not solved by the Chinese method of hothousing its young musical talent in imitation of the Soviet model; simply put, China does not have any of the musical infrastructure Russia gave to its Soviet music educators.  Perhaps my old colleague Professor Zhakid as well as my Russian expatriate are providing the answer, the former by returning to Tashkent and the newly-reopened Conservatoire and the latter by bringing her Russian standards to bear on a new generation of non-Russian students.