The end of history

Today saw the very last broadcast programme in Radio Four's A History of the World in 100 Objects. If you have no idea what this is, the title speaks for itself really; the curator of the British Museum has chosen 100 artefacts and narrated a radio series examining the significance of each one. Yes, there are 100 episodes. No, I've not yet heard them all. Yes, it is brilliant

I can't praise this series highly enough - where to start? An elegantly simple concept, although a massive project overall, with a knowledgeable and unobtrusive presenter (a rarity), equally appropriate and knowledgeable contributors, patient and engaging. It was intellectual without being monotonous or high-minded, and perfectly combined education and entertainment, to use Reithian terms. If the necessity of Radio Four, indeed radio in general, were ever called into doubt, this series alone would be evidence to the contrary.

One of the most enlightening things the series did was to choose a significant percentage of the objects from pre-AD periods. The first two million years of the human species tend to get dealt with fairly briskly in most histories - not ignoring the fact that we have vastly less in the way of information and surviving artefacts from these times - but also to get lumped into a few distinct periods based on the famous bits. So there's basically cavemen for, ooh, ages; then eventually there's some Egyptians building pyramids and Babylonian hanging gardens and some Jews in roughly the same region for a bit - oh, and the Chinese are doing some stuff - and then a while later the Greeks and Romans show up and history properly kicks off. What was great about AHOTWIOHO was that we got a full 35% of the objects, and thus the programming, on the pre-Christian world, which would otherwise remain monumentally under-exposed. I had no idea that anybody was even on Papua New Guinea in 2000 BC, let alone that they were producing novelty bird-shaped cookware. Yet a defaced penny from 1903 was similarly interesting.

Some of the objects were familiar, of course, even famous - the Rosetta Stone, the head of Ramesses II, the Lewis chessmen - possibly because of the requirement that all 100 objects came from the British Museum. But of course a collection that contains ancient stone sculptures or hand-made coins should not exclude credit cards and such like. They have as much historical significance, as the programme clearly set forth - I'd never read so much into Hokusai's The Great Wave before, for example.

I'm glad that AHOTWIOHO wasn't made as a television series, because it didn't need to be. The obvious weakness of having a radio series based around visual artefacts was offset by the narration, making the events and ideas signified by the object more important, and by the equally excellent website which allows high-resolution viewing of all the objects from several angles. More importantly, there was no need for the distractions that so often blight 'cultural' programming - overbearing and loud presenters, needless graphics and silly camerawork - based on the assumption that modern attention spans are inadequate for things quite interesting enough to stand on their own. In any case, who would commission a television series lasting a hundred episodes, yet with each only fifteen minutes in length? This is where radio honestly has the upper hand as a medium.

All 100 objects are on display in an exhibition at the British Museum. Best of all, all 100 radio programmes will remain available to listen to or download, hopefully in perpetuity. You can find them here.

Why the choir organ is hardcore

Has anyone noticed that the height at which musicians hold their guitars has a direct correlation to the level of hardcore-ness in the music?

Think about it for moment. At the one end of the scale - the scale being both vertical and musical - (and not the sort you get in exams, idiot!) we have country and western/folk/hillbilly guitarists, who either place said fretted instrument on their knee via a footstool, or at least have it pretty close to their chin whilst crooning about farming and how they'd rather you didn't mention Taylor Swift. Classical guitarists tend to follow the same formula in Bach and Brouwer.

Next we have the average middle-of-the-road pop guitarist. As these somewhat shy and secretive creatures tend to be session musicians in a backing band, they prefer the rear of the stage where it's darker. Thus, the guitar is held in an uncontroversial middle axis position.

Finally, the bottom end of the chart, in more ways than one, is occupied by the rock guitarist. Despite being rebellious and non-conformist, rock music has many rules and conventions, one of which is that any fretted instrument must be held as low as possible. Presumably this enables the rock musician greater slouching ability and thus to be more 'badass'.

How does this translate to other instruments, namely acoustic non-fretted ones? Obviously many musicians have no choice as to what height they hold their instruments. If you're a clarinetist there's not really a great deal of quibble on whether part of the instrument goes in your mouth or not. (In fact by the logic as explained above, observing a schalltrichter auf! marking in Mahler or Strauss actually makes you less hardcore because the instrument is held higher...right? It's the exception that proves the rule). String players theoretically could hold their violin or viola lower down on their chest, baroque-style, whilst cellists can just not use the spike. But it's all still a bit arbitrary as the argument goes.

However, after some thought, I realised there is one non-guitar instrument on which it is quite possible to play genuinely low to the floor and thus be genuinely hardcore on. And I'll bet you can't guess what it is in the next three minutes.

Time's up - it's the pipe organ.

Let me explain, for the benefit of non-organists. Organs, unless they're very small and weedy, have at least two keyboards ('manuals') and often three or more. These are, for obvious reason stacked on on top of each other in a gently raked fashion to enable the player to switch effortlessly (less so in my case) between them. All these keyboards have names which we don't really need to discuss, suffice to say that the lowest one is known as the Choir Organ because it's got quieter stops for accompanying the choir. (Since my church no longer has a choir, this function is somewhat moot). And it's really, genuinely low down, practically on the organist's lap, which puts it in pretty much the same vertical territory as the hardcore metal guitarist's instrument. Move over, Matt Bellamy.

Haydn seek

One of the things I often pick up from other musicians is an implicit consensus that any piece of music from, let's say, before the time of Beethoven, will essentially be pretty similar to any other piece written around the same time. On a superficial level, this seems like a reasonably forgiveable assumption: to give an example, eighteenth-century music in the galante style is invariably lightweight, in major keys and based on minuets and gavottes and things; thus few non-specialists, on a first hearing, would perceive much difference between a sonata by Stamitz and one by JC Bach. I readily confess to being unable to match any unfamiliar pieces by Schutz, Pachelbel and Buxtehude to their respective composers because my knowledge of the German Baroque does not extend particularly far beyond Bach. In the twentieth century (particularly the latter half), compositional practice suddenly seems to have exploded without warning into dozens of different 'schools' and even lone individuals, all writing very different-sounding music, yet alive at the same time. This is a rather interesting reversal of the rest of history, because everywhere else, the overall trend of the twentieth century has been homogenisation and rationalisation - communication advances meaning that everyone speaks English, every country adopts capitalism as a political philosophy and value system, so there's a McDonalds in every town and everyone drives a Ford, etc. One would think that this would cause art to follow suit as public tastes become equally homogenised and cultural values less varied. Quite the opposite - in fact as everything else starts to get more globalised and technologised, so more and more artistic niches seem to open up, increasing the diversity of artistic expression.

Anyway, whether this is actually true or whether artistic output is actually as homogenised as the rest of the world (that's if it even is, after all that preamble) and we don't realise it, is another blog post/PhD thesis/epic-length academic conference speech for another day. What I'd actually like to talk about is Joseph Haydn, he of the practical jokery and curly-locked wig.

Returning to my opening gambit, quite a few of us think Haydn is basically the same as Mozart - symphonies, operas, perfect cadences, curly wigs. Recently, however, I've had two things occur that have led me to the conclusion that nothing could be further from the truth. The first is Nimbus' brilliant two-volume set of all 104 symphonies (plus the Sinfonia Concertante; the symphonies 'A' and 'B', supposedly numbers 107 and 108; some violin concerti and some overtures to fill the last MP3 disk) by Adam Fischer and a band calling themselves the Austro-Hungarian Haydn Orchestra, which turns out to be most of his mates from the top orchestras in Central Europe. It is, I understand, the first complete set under a single conductor, all done over about 8 years when everyone had some spare days to meet up and make the recording. What's more, the entire set are recorded in the Haydnsaal in Esterházy Palace, no less, and although it's not done on period instruments the performances have an air of authenticity as a result. But what's really exciting about these disks (there are sixteen - and no, despite extensive listening time I have not yet got through all 37 hours of music) is the playing style that the musicians instinctively bring - little inflections in rhythm, a particular way of phrasing and articulation, agogic accents in the minuets - a style which is natural to the orchestra, with its mix of Germanic, Austrian, Hungarian and Slavic musical cultures. It's absolutely perfect for Haydn, and for a very simple reason: this was the music Haydn was surrounded by during his 'exile' at Esterházy. 'I was cut off from the world and forced to develop my own style' he later remarked, a style which was entirely immersed in the folk music of the region. Never mind the refined, cosmopolitan, elegant style of the Viennese Mozart; Haydn is a country Hungarian: rougher, more rhythmic, less urbane - although no less dazzling, intelligent and compositionally fluent either.

Further proof of this comes as I practice the C major Cello Concerto for a gig next week. I learnt the first movement as a teenager (not that I had particularly distinguished level of technique back then) and followed the Rostropovich /Sadlo editorial bowings without question, adding liberal dollops of Romantic vibrato to hide to dodgy bits. But recently I've become more and more convinced that the 'folk music' approach, coupled with a judicious application of points gleaned from learning about period performance (don't worry, I'm not one of those people who is obsessed with 'authenticity' (another ranty blog post for the future methinks)), is the way to bring the best out of Haydn. It doesn't matter if fast runs and figurations are rough and even scratchy; that's how Haydn probably heard stuff done out in the street. Pulling the rhythms around, double-dotting things, the very Hungarian technique of playing fast using an entire bow length with almost no pressure, all bring the music to life without ever compromising the wit or sparkle of it. What would be horribly crude in Mozart or Boccherini works marvellously here, even to the point where it helps with technical issues. In fact my only difficulty may be getting the orchestra to adopt this style as well, on just two rehearsals.

As an afterword, it's not hard to see how one of Haydn's pupils picked up on such features as the 'misplaced' accents, pounding rhythms and general bucolic impetus of this style either. His name? Ludwig van Beethoven.

(Wikipedia happens to have a page on 'Haydn and folk music' which elaborates several points not touched upon here).

Damning with faint praise

Rather unremarkably, I was browsing the BBC News site yesterday. This is unremarkable due to this particular diaspora of silicon chips being set as my start page. Whenever Firefox loads, invariably the first thing I see is either David Cameron or Chris Moyles. These are not, admittedly, two of the people high on my list of 'faces I would ideally have pasted across my monitor immediatly following breakfast', but such is. Anyway, the point of the preamble is that on this occasion I came across this little story:

Elgar's Wolverhampton Wanderers striker anthem sung: A song by Sir Edward Elgar, which is believed to be one of the first football anthems, has been performed at a concert to raise funds for a church.

Now I probably should apologise for shoving an external link in the collective face of my readership when not even 200 words into a new blog, but I think this can be excused on the grounds of its musical specialism and the quirky-ness of the story in general. It's actually quite a touching piece detailing Britain's finest (and he IS, alright?) composer's loyal support of a particular soccer team who play in an orange-and-black home strip, resulting in a crowd-pleasing little ditty. I'm prepared to ignore the fact that the term 'football anthem' is used perhaps a little too literally here. But then I came across this paragraph:

Elgar, who was born in Broadheath, a village three miles from Worcester, is famous for a string of symphonies and concertos.

Well, not quite. In terms of completed works, Elgar wrote two symphonies, a violin concerto, and a cello concerto. He also left - but didn't complete - about half of the music for each of a Third symphony and a piano concerto, both of which have been completed (on his behalf) by Anthony Payne and Robert Walker respectively. So the grand total, depending on what your definition of an actual piece constitutes, is either 4, 5 or 6 symphonies and/or concerti. Hardly a 'string of', I'd venture. Haydn; yes, 104+ symphonies is a definately a string. Even Sibelius or Prokofiev, with a rather more modest seven apiece, could justifyably cash in their 'has done a string of' credentials. But not Elgar. One wonders why the author of this piece didn't pick up on a more suitable and incredibly obvious example, Elgar's Pomp and Circumstance marches, which form a definate 'string of' five (and a half, because yet again there's an unfinished one). Apart from anything else, the somewhat trivialising term 'string of', implying that the subject was rather unceremoniously churned out as a potboiler, suits these misleadingly jingoistic pieces rather better than symphonies that took two years to compose.

In other words, research fail. Hmm.

This sort of error might seem trivial, but it belies a general confusion over the practice of art music. Presumably the author of this piece was under the - generally correct - impression that all classical composers write symphonies and concertos, which are, admittedly, the dominant music forms in The Western Art Music Tradition. And there are a confusing myriad of forms, structures, genres and sub-genres which one cannot really expect a journalist to familiarise themself with the intricacies of, especially for the purpose of a minor regional news article. Why can't we just call everything classical a 'song', as folks are apt to do (ignoring the elephant in the room, which is instrumental music making up the majority of this tradition) and not worry about the nitty-gritty of sub-stratae?

On the other hand, it has the makings of a major error - imagine if the composer in question had been Palestrina, Faure or John Cage, none of whom even contemplated writing symphonies or concerti. And imagine if the article had actually applied the same logic to sports, citing Wolves' striker Steven Fletcher as a cricketer because, well, he plays with a ball, right? Even mis-attributing his on-field position would, presumably, unleash either howls of derision or the wrath of die-hard fans. With this in mind, I consider my foregoing complaint to be not only justified but distinctly mild-mannered. If you cannot do your research correctly, why not just play safe and describe Elgar as 'a leading British composer/birth and death dates/favourite flavour of Pringles'? He's not really that obscure a figure, especially considering his stint on the back of our second-highest denomination of paper money a few years ago. Everyone's heard of 'Land of 'ope and Glory'; it is not as if we are discussing Broadheath's 1857 pigeon-racing champion. Is it really that snobby and elitist to ask for a little knowledge of a venerable tradition which is actually quite deeply embedded in the national consciousness?

Anyway, to fob you off with another link, here's one of my favourite bloggers talking about other mis-attributions in music, although from a different tack.