Classical music for people who don't like classical music

The comedian and writer David Baddiel presented an interesting documentary on Radio 3 last night titled My Trouble with Classical Music. He starts off by telling us how he was brought up in an aspirational lower class family, where his parents cultivated an interest in classical music in an attempt, according to Baddiel, to improve their social status. It is never clear whether they particularly enjoyed the music. It would explain why Baddiel was thoroughly put off the music if it was forced on him by parents who never truly appreciated the value of it (only its social value). But now Baddiel has, if I may say so, reached middle age, he is becoming bored with some of the popular music he most loves. His hope is that an exploration of classical music can offer works so wondrous and with such depth that he will never tire of them -- each listen would reveal something new. The programmes documents his quest to do so.

I was mildly irritated by some of the advice given to him. When Baddiel found a section of a symphony irritating, one chap advised him to 'close your eyes, stop thinking about it, and just let if flow'. That has to the worst, laziest, most useless advise ever. Frank Skinner was eager to share his taste in 20th century music with Baddiel who obviously was not going to enjoy it. (But one can hardly blame Skinner: we're all eager, often too eager, for other people to enjoy what we enjoy.) Baddiel was consistently clear about what he likes in music, and his tastes are perfectly reasonable. He likes more modest music -- 'stripped down' I think he said. He likes melodies, and he doesn't like the way there is seldom a straightforward melody in much classical music; the way a melody is heard once then again only in fragments and altered forms -- i.e. thematic development. He seems to react against the bloat and swelling and melodrama and overindulgence he perceives in Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 5. I sympathise with all these (though I do nevertheless like Tchaikovsky a lot -- I would apply it more to Mahler).

What really annoyed me was that despite Baddiel repeatedly explaining what he likes in music nearly everyone recommended to him either capital-c Classical or Romantic or Late Romantic music. No one though thought to say to him that it is is not classical music that you dislike, but broadly a particular period or style of classical music. The trouble is that most people, including most classical music listeners and rather too many musicians, are so stuck in the 'long nineneeth century'. I like a lot of music from the period -- it encompasses some of my favourite music -- but I am perhaps more fond of so-called early music (broadly speaking, music before 1750) for some of the same reasons that motivate Baddiel. So I think that Baddiel, and indeed people like him, might find this older music, oddly enough, more familiar and attractive. I particularly recommend English song, and have made a selection for those who are interested:

Henry Lawes -- Have you e'er seen the morning sun

Philip Rosseter -- What then is love but mourning

John Dowland -- Now, o now, I needs must part

(Isn't that such a wonderful video?)

William Byrd -- Ye sacred muses

Robert Johnson -- Have you seen the white lily grow

Henry Purcell -- What power art thou

And another Purcell -- O solitude

And why not include, for variety's sake, one of Purcell's scatalogical rounds -- Young John the Gardener

Let us end with what is in my opinion the greatest English song of all time, John Dowland's In darkness let me dwell

The History Man

This is one of those novels everyone should read. Unfortunately those under a certain age (myself included) are unlikely to have even heard of it. I spotted it in a second-hand book shop and it triggered a vague memory. So I looked it up in my list of 'books to look for' (yes, I do indeed keep such a list, and it is rather long), and there it was: Bradbury, Malcolm -- The History Man. I don't recall why I included it in the list but I'm glad I did. I bought it for a mere 99p, and once I started reading it I just couldn't stop.

Set in 1972, it centres around Howard Kirk, a radical sociologist at the fictional University of Watermouth. Watermouth is a plateglass university of the sort I was only recently released from. The politics seem quite familiar to me: a one-party state, whose only intellectual diversity is on a spectrum from revolutionary to Green to Labour. There were endless political displays: protests, 'history months', banners, insufferable student union campaigns. And there were of course the seminars. I was not right-wing then, at least not by my definition; and though I had become more conservative towards the end, by then I had long since disengaged from university life. But nevertheless I do recall, for instance, being the only person in seminar who voted to leave the EU. I also recall being the only person who didn't find Roger Scruton's view on popular culture horribly elitist -- I rather agreed with him in fact, even then. But I wasn't the argumentative sort back then, and when I tried to be I rather made a fool out of myself. I was mostly happy to avoid confrontation, being constitutionally lazy, the sort of natural conservative which Michael Oakeshott describes in his essay 'On Being a Conservative'; that is, one who enjoys idleness and 'useless' pursuits.

(I must, as an aside, note that it was invariably the students, not the teachers, who were the insufferable ideologues. The teachers, at least in my experience, were generous and intellectually relaxed people.)

The general behaviour of students, which, as possibly in all universities, represented the culmination of the permissive society. Liberation has meant endless, shameless alcohol and drug consumption, unrestrained swearing and vulgarity, sexual 'experimentation', dreary nights out in clubs that offer hedonistic young students a reprieve from civilisation. Men prosper most of all in this society, just as Howard Kirk does, and while women strive to live in accordance with the theology of moral and sexual liberation, inevitably they are the ones who bear the heaviest burden.

But my experience of university was minimal. I was quite a different person, much more timid, thoroughly unsure of myself and without any real views of my own (though in some respects I became more conservative in reaction to those dull three years). I soon decided I did not want to be there, and from then on I did not cope at all well, and so my view of the whole thing may be askew. But nevertheless, what little I saw accords with what I read in the novel.

And this perhaps helps explain why I so disliked university: the world in the novel is quite horrid indeed. The worst people prosper, the most generous and charitable people suffer, the most vulnerable people are abused rather than helped (though often abused in the name of help -- Howard believes sex has an almost baptismal effect in correcting someone's politics), those striving to live a moral life are in the end corrupted, those seeking justice and fairness are manipulated and defeated by the radical faculty and students who have come to dominate the university hierarchy. The only comfort is the quietly mocking narrator. This is a book about about people who have no moral core, or rather who deliberately act in suspicion of and in reaction to their moral core, and who have no ethical system, only a system that tells them what to loathe. They would rather hate than love -- even their romantic relationships seem to be based on a sort of hatred, a reaction to society, an enthusiastic perversion. They hate the familiar, the old, the biological, restraint, friendliness. They hate anything fixed and permanent. They only thing they love is politics and theory. They oppress, they abuse, they manipulate, they dehumanise, they ridicule, they boast, they demean, all in the name of liberation.

The saddest victim of them all was Miss Calendar. She taught English and was a strong, implicitly conservative women. Howard made it his mission to bed her. She resisted and gently mocked him. She seemed every bit his equal in intellectual strength. But eventually, or rather almost suddenly, as up until that moment Miss Calendar seemed quite resistant to him, Howard bullied her into having sex with him. He tried to persuade her how wretched her life is and how desperately she needs to be liberated from it. In her first moment of timidity in the book, she quietly acquiesces. Acquiesces may not be the right word -- the surrender was not without pleasure and curiosity on her side. But nevertheless the sense I got was that Howard abused her. I certainly felt sick reading the passage. All that goodness and light was extinguished by a selfish man who saw sex as a moral mission to liberate.

In the novel, the conservatives and the liberals always end up either losing or giving in to the radicals. Henry Beamish, a colleague and supposedly a friend of Howard, though Howard does not treat him as such, is the most admirable person in the novel. He becomes more conservative by the end. And when Mengel, fictional geneticist, is due to deliver a lecture at the university, which students come out in masses to protest, thinking him a racist and fascist (if thinking it can be called), Henry finds himself in the position of introducing Mengel. Henry is angry at the students: he tells them, 'you're the fascists; this is a crime against free speech'. Doesn't that sound rather familiar? Poor Henry suffers, though. He is fantastically unfortunate, always enduring accidents and mishaps. And so 'inevitably' (as Howard always says) the students, in the chaos of the protest, trample over him and brake his other arm (he had already broken one a few days previous).

The appearance of Mengel, a geneticist, is rather familiar too. I immediate thought of Charles Murray, the social scientist who is often accused of being a racist because of his views regarding genetic differences, who fell victim to violent protest when he visited Middlebury University in 2017. The female professor introducing him was also injured by protesters.

Keep this mind if you are one of those people who think the left-wing lunacy of recent years is an aberration and that we will soon return to normality. Bradbury wrote this novel in 1975. And you will find similar behaviour through the centuries, though particularly after the Second World War. It has been continual and increasing. The politics and mores of the radicals have spread beyond the university. We are all cultural revolutionaries now. The academics and the students won; society lost.

O Brave New World

It may have become a cliche to say this, but Brave New World really is a prescient novel. The thing that most struck me reading it for the second time was the complete absence of private life. Referring to the misfit Bernard Marx, the narrator writes of his 'mania ... for doing things in private. Which meant, in practice, not doing anything at all. For what was there that one could do in private.' There is no sense of improving oneself, no genuine sense of the individual, no intellectual pursuits -- every body is but a replaceable cell in the greater body politic. You are socially obliged to 'have a good time', to take drugs, to engage in pornography, to attend vulgar public gatherings -- to do otherwise would be wrong and deviant. And so as Lenina tells Bernard, distressed by his unorthodox views, 'never put off till to-morrow the fun you can have to-day'. These beliefs, they are so clearly the ethic of today.

When Bernard asks Lenina, 'Don't you wish you were free?', she replies, 'I don't know what you mean. I am free. Free to have the most wonderful time.' Isn't this what freedom and liberty has since been reduced to? One has the freedom to indulge, but not to offend. You are free from belief, free from the restrictions of morality, but you are not free to assert belief or to assert morality. You are free from judgement, but not free to judge (except to judge the judgemental). You have to simply go along with things. Go along with your most base instincts, go along with moral fashions, go along with 'progress', go along with what you have been told to think. The only people who are judged are those who have the tenacity to reflect and question. Nothing is more derided or, at best, ignored than the pursuit of truth and goodness.

Yet at the same time it is a society, like our own, where growing complexity has gone hand-in-hand with this decline in intelligence. Early in the novel, the Director tells some children of how

even in Our Ford's day most games were played without more apparatus than a ball or two and a few sticks and perhaps a bit of netting. Imagine the folly of allowing people to play elaborate games which do nothing whatever to increase consumption. It's madness. Nowadays the Controllers won't approve of any new game unless it can be shown that it requires at least as much apparatus as the most complicated of existing games.

Nothing is simple in this utopia. Even life is created by the most complex inventions of science, while the simple, straightfoward mother-father family is scorned. Of course, sex therefore is entirely separated from any notion of reproduction. The idea of becoming a father -- or worse still, a mother -- is more horrid than a disease. Most women are born infertile. Children do not have parents -- everyone belongs to everyone else. Abortion is provided on demand.

The Director, again addressing the students, said

'What I'm going to tell you now ... may sound incredible. But then, when you're not accustomed to history, most facts about the past do sound incredible.' 

He let out the amazing truth. For a very long period before the time of Our Ford, and even for some generations afterwards, erotic play between children had been regarded as abnormal (there was a roar of laughter); and not only abnormal, actually immoral (no!): and had therefore been rigorously suppressed. 

A look of astonished incredulity appeared on the faces of his listeners. Poor little kids not allowed to amuse themselves? They could not believe it. 

'Even adolescents,' the D.H.C. was saying, 'even adolescents like yourselves...' 

'Not possible!' 

'Barring a little surreptitious auto-erotism and homosexuality--absolutely nothing.' 

'Nothing?' 

'In most cases, till they were over twenty years old.' 

'Twenty years old?' echoed the students in a chorus of loud disbelief. 

'Twenty,' the Director repeated. 'I told you that you'd find it incredible.'

Fears about the sexualisation of children have abounded in the 20th century and into the 21st century, and they are always dismissed as hysterical. One inevitably thinks of Mary Whitehouse, who I have to admit I instinctively regard as a somewhat silly figure. But it is becoming harder and harder to dismiss her and her concerns when one sees what is taught in schools, at increasingly earlier ages, the media and entertainment which children eagerly consume, and the endless stories about poor confused children who are celebrated for their 'courage' in deciding they wish to change their sex. But Huxley did not predict the transgender phenomenon; perhaps even he would have considered this too wild a speculation.

It is a utopia in which everyone is told they are happy but there is no real joy. There is no meaning, no culture, just immediate sensual pleasures. Leisure is reduced to the worst sort of entertainment:

At twenty past nine they walked across the street to the newly opened Westminster Abbey Cabaret. It was a night almost without clouds, moonless and starry; but of this on the whole depressing fact Lenina and Henry were fortunately unaware. The electric sky-signs effectively shut off the outer darkness. 'CALVIN STOPES AND HIS SIXTEEN SEXOPHONISTS.' From the façade of the new Abbey the giant letters invitingly glared. 'LONDON'S FINEST SCENT AND COLOUR ORGAN. ALL THE LATEST SYNTHETIC MUSIC.'

I have a terrible feeling that I will live to see this come true. So much of the novel already has.

In Defence of NIMBYs

It is a strange modern pathology that we universalise everything. You cannot just be concerned about what happens in your own backyard -- you have to concern yourself with everyone's backyard. Otherwise, like the NIMBYs, you are selfish and a hypocritical.

But standing up for one's community, seeking to maintain its way of life, its history, its beauty, and indeed its value, social and economic -- this is the essence of conservatism. So why is Liz Truss promising to take on NIMBYs? When will its voters realise that the Conservative Party is the party of big business not conservatism? It will always, unless extraordinary pressure is placed on it, take the side of the developer over the community.

We should not be criticising NIMBYs, whatever hypocrisies they may have (when it comes to politics all of us are hypocrites in some way or another). They are trying to maintain their communities. We should be criticising the developers, the town planners, the right-to-buy advocates who have together been the ruin of housing in Britain. We should be asking how it is that a country with a significant drop in birthrates has found itself in such a housing crisis. The problem is clearer deeper than even government policy, and has very little to do with handfuls of spirited protesters in more affluent areas. Blaming NIMBYs for our problems rather feels like scapegoating.