An essay on twentieth-century music...
...which I wrote years ago.
MUSIC AND THE MODERN WORLD
One of my favourite moments in music comes on the B-side of Abbey Road, when, after the music has strayed into an idle-sounding repetition of the you never give me your money theme, the trumpets suddenly blaze forth and triumphantly bring back the chorus: boy/ you're gonna carry that weight/carry that weight/ for a long time. This is the unmistakable climax to the whole B-side, which, apart from the self-standing song Something, is a continuous piece of music in which the various song ideas serve as episodes; and nothing will take from me the sense that this is a symphonic effect, typical of the thinking found from Mozart to Shostakovich in developping large-scale instrumental music.
It is not surprising to hear that it is a favourite of Sir George Martin, who produced it; but it is significant that John Lennon detested it - or rather, he detested the whole B-side, seeing in it only the scattered odds and ends of undevelopped song ideas that would have been better used in the standard pop song format. The whole conception, in fact, belonged to (Sir) Paul McCartney, and Lennon was highly critical of his writing partner on that account.
This plays up a real difference between the two men, which may have done as much as any personal problem to split them up. Lennon was not only quite happy with the standard pop song format - to the end of his life he never once tried anything more ambitious - but quite failed to see the point of any more ambitious design. McCartney, on the other hand, while having in my view more of a talent for pop tunes - the more memorable Beatle tunes tend to belong to him - had, from Abbey Road if not earlier, a musically larger intuition. We remember that Sir Paul has more than once blamed the Beatles' collapse on the fact that "everything was becoming a bit too highfalutin", and it is not hard to guess who, more than anyone else, was guilty of the attitude-striking and over-intellectualism in question; but when it comes to actual music, we find that it was John who was all for simplicity and staying away from what he saw as pretentious nonsense, and Paul who wanted to expand and experiement with the form.
In other words, John Lennon, the former art student, was disposed to load the simple form of the pop song with all the artistic, intellectual and pseudo/intellectual contents he felt able to develop. His songs are always loaded with some meaning or other, and one of the most famous, Give peace a chance, is nothing more than extended slogan chanting. Indeed, one has to wonder what would be left of any good Lennon song, from Jealous guy to Imagine, if the words were forgotten.
This is not to run down Lennon's talent. Though I consider its moral both vicious and dangerous, the world would be the poorer had Imagine never been written. But it is clear in everything he touches that he is not a musician so much as a writer with a guitar; his tunes, whatever their quality, are at their best when they go to support the content of his lyrics. The tune of Imagine would be a poor thing without the words; with the words, it is affecting and powerful. Likewise Jealous Guy, Merry Christmas, etc.: they exist for the words, and could not exist without them.
McCartney, on the other hand, is so intensely musical that words matter little or nothing to him; some of his greatest Beatles songs, and all the B-side of Abbey Road, are mere gibberish written by free association. He has told us how he composed the title song to Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band: he was just groping around for words that "sounded nice" and came up with Sergeant Pepper and with Lonely Hearts club band; he then joined them together - and found he had the first line of a song. The sound of the words was what inspired him; Lennon thought of their content. It is no surprise that his declared favourite song (and Sir George Martin's) is Here there and everywhere, with its incredibly innovative melodic line matched by lyrics that declare with every line their adventitious and improvised character.
But the less intellectual and less acidic musician, the one less disposed to hold up a finger to the world at large, was also the one who took more risks with the music itself. In this, Sir George Martin, a trained composer with fifteen film scores to his credit, was likelier than Lennon to understand McCartney's musical thought, and to appreciate it when he came closer to a classical scope and form of thought.
Later history confirms this. Sir Paul has not only tried his hand at large-scale forms, but has done so repeatedly, getting a bit further along every time. He is, indeed, a symphonist by nature and instinct, as that wonderfully symphonic passage, so thoroughly misunderstood by Lennon, proved long ago; but it took him fifty years, and thirty years as a professional musician, to approach what seems, from the evidence, a natural harbour for him.
A reason for this came out in the interview he gave to David Frost, following on his tone poem ÂStanding stone Àand a book of memoirs, where he spoke of his father's aversion to classical music. Apparently, whenever the radio broadcast any, Mr.McCartney senior would switch it off with cheerful intolerance. But this is only a partial answer: other composers have had
fathers strongly, even violently opposed to their calling, without actually missing it. The point is in my view that the prejudice of Sir Paul's father, expressed not with bitterness or anger but with a cheerful, healthy sort of contempt, corresponded to something real; it was the verdict of an uneducated but sane and healthy Liverpool man on a whole academic culture.
However musicians may react to this, there can be no doubt that classical music has spent the last hundred years in taking itself as far from popular taste as it could. Taking the Austrian composer Anton von Webern as the standard of what this kind of composition aspires to, as he indeed has been the hero of generations of post-war composers and critics, it seems to me undeniable that his work was, in reality, aimed purely at fellow-musicians, and fellow-musicians, at that, of high and sophisticated artificiality. I am not for a minute denying value to it - after all, we have witness after witness to the thunder-striking effect his sound-world had on composers and critics of real talent, like for instance Luigi Dallapiccola - but it is hard to imagine that even he himself ever really believed that his work would ever penetrate to the consciousness of the music-buying majority. He was sincerely convinced that his harsh and incredibly compressed compositional style was a historical necessity, and was quite remarkably free of the usual affectations and arrogance of the self-selected avant-garde artist; but that he at any time imagined that the historical necessity that shaped his music would ever reach a mass market, that he ever saw himself as producing anything - anything - of broad and immediate appeal, anything that did not demand a doctorate in composition to be understood - that, I simply cannot believe.
The separation between classical and popular music is a purely modern phenomenon. For centuries, the most skilful and academic composers had not scrupled to compose simple melodies for simple people; Bach had written lovely springy dance rhythms (like the wonderful badinerie in his Second Dance Suite for orchestra) and Beethoven had arranged Scottish and Irish songs by the dozen. And any composer writing an opera had, from the beginning, aimed at the equivalent of what would be, today, a stadium concert audience. These were wholly popular works - the very fact that one is tempted to use the expression "unashamedly popular" tells its own story - intended to rouse an audience, or make it cry.
The social background to what happened to music this century has never, to my knowledge, been satisfactorily explored; and if that is the case, that shows a major flaw in academic writing about music. Because it should be simply obvious - and therefore an interesting question for musicologists and sociologists - that the relationship of music, and of those who make their living out of music, to society at large, is radically different from what it was in any previous century. It is not that any of the musicians of old, any of the vast tribe of musical Bachs and the hereditary clans of Couperins and Mozarts and Beethovens, would not have thought of music like Webern's; it is that they would not have seen its need. The pleasure and edification of the public, in varying measures, were their only principles; and while they would have agreed that some pieces were more purely aimed at the public's pleasure, while others - masses, oratorios, or the grander Beethoven symphonies - tended more to instruct and therefore made greater demands on the listener, none of them would have conceived of a kind of music that is nothing else than a commentary on music, that exists purely for other musicians.
But that is exactly what Webern did. The quality of his music is the existence of sounds purely for their own sake, to the point where he once wrote out the twelve-tone chromatic scale and, as he was writing a piece of music, crossed out the individual notes he was using and stopped: once the twelve notes have been heard, the music was over as far as he was concerned. This is a man who would probably have been quite happy making a single sound, asking his audience to hear it and then fall into silence; and some
following composers have done just that. Webern is both the purest and the most talented (so far as a musical illiterate like me can tell) exponent of a way of thinking about music that simply does not consider its effect on the listener, but regards the world of sound as interesting in itself. The public is shut out, while the ascetic worshipper of naked sound devotes himself to his object.
But away from the ivory tower there is a whole world of sounds and people who listen to sounds, make sounds, make use of sounds. And popular music goes on being made.
MUSIC AND THE MODERN WORLD
One of my favourite moments in music comes on the B-side of Abbey Road, when, after the music has strayed into an idle-sounding repetition of the you never give me your money theme, the trumpets suddenly blaze forth and triumphantly bring back the chorus: boy/ you're gonna carry that weight/carry that weight/ for a long time. This is the unmistakable climax to the whole B-side, which, apart from the self-standing song Something, is a continuous piece of music in which the various song ideas serve as episodes; and nothing will take from me the sense that this is a symphonic effect, typical of the thinking found from Mozart to Shostakovich in developping large-scale instrumental music.
It is not surprising to hear that it is a favourite of Sir George Martin, who produced it; but it is significant that John Lennon detested it - or rather, he detested the whole B-side, seeing in it only the scattered odds and ends of undevelopped song ideas that would have been better used in the standard pop song format. The whole conception, in fact, belonged to (Sir) Paul McCartney, and Lennon was highly critical of his writing partner on that account.
This plays up a real difference between the two men, which may have done as much as any personal problem to split them up. Lennon was not only quite happy with the standard pop song format - to the end of his life he never once tried anything more ambitious - but quite failed to see the point of any more ambitious design. McCartney, on the other hand, while having in my view more of a talent for pop tunes - the more memorable Beatle tunes tend to belong to him - had, from Abbey Road if not earlier, a musically larger intuition. We remember that Sir Paul has more than once blamed the Beatles' collapse on the fact that "everything was becoming a bit too highfalutin", and it is not hard to guess who, more than anyone else, was guilty of the attitude-striking and over-intellectualism in question; but when it comes to actual music, we find that it was John who was all for simplicity and staying away from what he saw as pretentious nonsense, and Paul who wanted to expand and experiement with the form.
In other words, John Lennon, the former art student, was disposed to load the simple form of the pop song with all the artistic, intellectual and pseudo/intellectual contents he felt able to develop. His songs are always loaded with some meaning or other, and one of the most famous, Give peace a chance, is nothing more than extended slogan chanting. Indeed, one has to wonder what would be left of any good Lennon song, from Jealous guy to Imagine, if the words were forgotten.
This is not to run down Lennon's talent. Though I consider its moral both vicious and dangerous, the world would be the poorer had Imagine never been written. But it is clear in everything he touches that he is not a musician so much as a writer with a guitar; his tunes, whatever their quality, are at their best when they go to support the content of his lyrics. The tune of Imagine would be a poor thing without the words; with the words, it is affecting and powerful. Likewise Jealous Guy, Merry Christmas, etc.: they exist for the words, and could not exist without them.
McCartney, on the other hand, is so intensely musical that words matter little or nothing to him; some of his greatest Beatles songs, and all the B-side of Abbey Road, are mere gibberish written by free association. He has told us how he composed the title song to Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band: he was just groping around for words that "sounded nice" and came up with Sergeant Pepper and with Lonely Hearts club band; he then joined them together - and found he had the first line of a song. The sound of the words was what inspired him; Lennon thought of their content. It is no surprise that his declared favourite song (and Sir George Martin's) is Here there and everywhere, with its incredibly innovative melodic line matched by lyrics that declare with every line their adventitious and improvised character.
But the less intellectual and less acidic musician, the one less disposed to hold up a finger to the world at large, was also the one who took more risks with the music itself. In this, Sir George Martin, a trained composer with fifteen film scores to his credit, was likelier than Lennon to understand McCartney's musical thought, and to appreciate it when he came closer to a classical scope and form of thought.
Later history confirms this. Sir Paul has not only tried his hand at large-scale forms, but has done so repeatedly, getting a bit further along every time. He is, indeed, a symphonist by nature and instinct, as that wonderfully symphonic passage, so thoroughly misunderstood by Lennon, proved long ago; but it took him fifty years, and thirty years as a professional musician, to approach what seems, from the evidence, a natural harbour for him.
A reason for this came out in the interview he gave to David Frost, following on his tone poem ÂStanding stone Àand a book of memoirs, where he spoke of his father's aversion to classical music. Apparently, whenever the radio broadcast any, Mr.McCartney senior would switch it off with cheerful intolerance. But this is only a partial answer: other composers have had
fathers strongly, even violently opposed to their calling, without actually missing it. The point is in my view that the prejudice of Sir Paul's father, expressed not with bitterness or anger but with a cheerful, healthy sort of contempt, corresponded to something real; it was the verdict of an uneducated but sane and healthy Liverpool man on a whole academic culture.
However musicians may react to this, there can be no doubt that classical music has spent the last hundred years in taking itself as far from popular taste as it could. Taking the Austrian composer Anton von Webern as the standard of what this kind of composition aspires to, as he indeed has been the hero of generations of post-war composers and critics, it seems to me undeniable that his work was, in reality, aimed purely at fellow-musicians, and fellow-musicians, at that, of high and sophisticated artificiality. I am not for a minute denying value to it - after all, we have witness after witness to the thunder-striking effect his sound-world had on composers and critics of real talent, like for instance Luigi Dallapiccola - but it is hard to imagine that even he himself ever really believed that his work would ever penetrate to the consciousness of the music-buying majority. He was sincerely convinced that his harsh and incredibly compressed compositional style was a historical necessity, and was quite remarkably free of the usual affectations and arrogance of the self-selected avant-garde artist; but that he at any time imagined that the historical necessity that shaped his music would ever reach a mass market, that he ever saw himself as producing anything - anything - of broad and immediate appeal, anything that did not demand a doctorate in composition to be understood - that, I simply cannot believe.
The separation between classical and popular music is a purely modern phenomenon. For centuries, the most skilful and academic composers had not scrupled to compose simple melodies for simple people; Bach had written lovely springy dance rhythms (like the wonderful badinerie in his Second Dance Suite for orchestra) and Beethoven had arranged Scottish and Irish songs by the dozen. And any composer writing an opera had, from the beginning, aimed at the equivalent of what would be, today, a stadium concert audience. These were wholly popular works - the very fact that one is tempted to use the expression "unashamedly popular" tells its own story - intended to rouse an audience, or make it cry.
The social background to what happened to music this century has never, to my knowledge, been satisfactorily explored; and if that is the case, that shows a major flaw in academic writing about music. Because it should be simply obvious - and therefore an interesting question for musicologists and sociologists - that the relationship of music, and of those who make their living out of music, to society at large, is radically different from what it was in any previous century. It is not that any of the musicians of old, any of the vast tribe of musical Bachs and the hereditary clans of Couperins and Mozarts and Beethovens, would not have thought of music like Webern's; it is that they would not have seen its need. The pleasure and edification of the public, in varying measures, were their only principles; and while they would have agreed that some pieces were more purely aimed at the public's pleasure, while others - masses, oratorios, or the grander Beethoven symphonies - tended more to instruct and therefore made greater demands on the listener, none of them would have conceived of a kind of music that is nothing else than a commentary on music, that exists purely for other musicians.
But that is exactly what Webern did. The quality of his music is the existence of sounds purely for their own sake, to the point where he once wrote out the twelve-tone chromatic scale and, as he was writing a piece of music, crossed out the individual notes he was using and stopped: once the twelve notes have been heard, the music was over as far as he was concerned. This is a man who would probably have been quite happy making a single sound, asking his audience to hear it and then fall into silence; and some
following composers have done just that. Webern is both the purest and the most talented (so far as a musical illiterate like me can tell) exponent of a way of thinking about music that simply does not consider its effect on the listener, but regards the world of sound as interesting in itself. The public is shut out, while the ascetic worshipper of naked sound devotes himself to his object.
But away from the ivory tower there is a whole world of sounds and people who listen to sounds, make sounds, make use of sounds. And popular music goes on being made.