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.