There used to be an early evening programme called Nationwide on BBC television which
featured some of the more idiosyncratic stories from the various regions of
Britain. I used to watch it as a school
boy and remember one particular feature they ran in which viewers were invited
to suggest a piece of music and an accompanying image from their region; the
BBC editors would then put it together as a film sequence. I can only recall one of these; following the
course of the River Thames to the accompaniment of Vltava. It worked very well,
but only proved that Smetana’s vision of a great river was sufficiently
descriptive as it stood to obviate any associated visual images.
So it came as a real shock to me today when suddenly I was
pulled up short by a piece of music which was so perfectly suited to its
context that I found myself rooted to the spot while it played itself out. Calling into the National Museum of Scotland
in Edinburgh – a wonderful place, if ever there was one, boasting, among other
things, a tremendous display of old gramophones – I encountered the great clock
room. While the cogs of one clock were
pushed continually onwards by a giant fly, another, a real Heath-Robinson
affair, incorporated mechanical deer ringing bells, a Penny-Farthing bicycle,
all manner of weird and wonderful machines and a disturbingly alluring female
monkey constantly turning a handle. This
latter clock marked each hour by playing the third movement of Bach’s organ
transcription of Vivaldi’s A minor Concerto (BWV593). Judging from the crowds who just stopped and
stared at the clock when the organ music started. I was not the only one who
found the music arresting. It was a
touch of genius. In its original guise
(it’s the Concerto for 2 violins RV522) it would not work nearly so well, but Bach’s
transcription, with its almost relentless mechanical drive, its multi-faceted
detail (including an extended piece of writing for two independent feet) and
its sense of inexorable movement, perfectly matched the detail in the clock and
the concept of time running relentlessly onwards.
That the idea soon died a death was due, I imagine, to the extreme
difficulty of marrying music to a particular image. When, around the same time, the editor whose
job it was to select the title music for the serialised book read on the BBC
radio programme Woman’s Hour was
interviewed, the real skill in this job was vividly demonstrated. She had recently chosen to introduce a
serialisation of a book (and I can’t remember which) with a passage from
Richard Adler’s Wilderness Suite and
the two married so perfectly that listeners had written in their droves to
congratulate her. When she explained
what was involved – not being able to listen to any music without a notebook in
hand to jot down any passage which, to her, summoned up a particular mood or
image – I was amazed. This seemed to my
teenage ears like a dream job and from that day onwards, I made a note of any potentially
descriptive passages in music I heard. I
now have a vast and increasing database of suggested musical images
(tragically, largely wasted since my precious record collection has been lost
in transit from Singapore to the UK) which, if anyone ever asks, I can refer
to. Unfortunately, career choices have
never allowed me to work as a BBC editor, so my database is destined to remain
unused.
Once or twice a particular piece of music has been so
ideally suited to the images it accompanies that it sticks in the mind. I first fell in love with Rachmaninov, not
because of the syrupy pathos of the great piano melodies, but because of the
urgent and thrusting main theme of the last movement of the 1st
Symphony which was the perfect title music for the BBC’s flagship current
affairs programme, Panorama. But the fact that all these great musical
pairings belong to the distant past is not mere nostalgia on my behalf. Sadly, for most people, music now accompanies
everything from moments of passion and tragedy, to mundane things like cooking
a meal or travelling on a train, and the idea of associating music with a particular
occasion or emotion has been subverted by a blanket desire to use music to
obliterate silence.
Title music for radio and television has been diluted by the
omni-presence of music throughout the programme. A famous spat blew up a few years ago when a serious
programme about astronomy was, in many listener’s opinion, ruined by a constant
soundtrack of unrelated pop music which made the programme unbearable for those
with hearing problems (the one disability largely ignored in the current
climate of disability sympathy which is sweeping the UK) and undermined any
scientific authority it may have had for those with a real interest in the
subject matter. The response of the
presenter to the complaints was that young people cannot listen to anything unless
it has a musical background. (The
obvious extension to that is that young people cannot listen to music – they merely
hear it.)
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The Organ Music makes you stop and stare at the National Museum of Scotland's Millenium Clock |
Clocks playing music on the hour are pretty standard fare. The
Edinburgh one is something very different and, in the true sense of the phrase,
one in a million.
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