dumbing down

I left early for work this morning, to allow time to unpack the plants from the car.  I clicked the radio on, as I generally do when driving, and found it was tuned to Radio 3.  Normally I'm a current affairs junkie first thing in the morning, but the music was something stately on the piano, which I liked, so I left it there.  Then we got to the end of the piece, and I discovered that it was by Handel, and I began to learn what Max Davidson was on about in Thurday's Telegraph.  I'd already found the new format Essential Classics not to my taste, but this was the first time I'd sampled the new-sound Breakfast programme.  I have no quarrel with the music, but the continuity is quite toe-curlingly awful.

I know very little about classical music.  I can't read music, and I didn't play an instrument at school. Or at least, I didn't learn to play an instrument.  Aged nine or ten, I had one or two year's piano lessons with an elderly nun, who told me to bring my fingers down like little hammers, while I practiced some piece purporting to be about little Indians.  My parents bought a piano, an upright with a couple of stuck notes and candle sconces that rattled when it was played, which never saw a piano tuner after entering our house, and probably not for some time before that.  The piano was installed in an unheated room that was used as a combination of workshop and junk store, known as 'the first room' to distinguish it from 'the far room', which was even colder and equally full of junk.  Piano practice didn't go very well, and the lessons soon stopped.  My grandmother lamented that I would regret not being able to play an instrument when I was grown up, but appealing to a nine year old's future regrets is not an effective form of motivation.  As a teenager I learnt to play the guitar slightly, and by my twenties had worked out that I was totally devoid of the talent I admired in, say, Martin Simpson or The Police, and that it would be better all round if I desisted from guitar playing.  Likewise I taught myself to play tunes on the English concertina, as long as they weren't too fast, and to put in some basic harmonies, but when I heard people jeering at musicians that only ever used three chords, I was pretty sure I was such a one.  I have a folkie's ear for a tune, but I couldn't identify a dominant fifth if it jumped up and bit me.

Nonetheless I like classical music, and I like being able to listen to the whole of a piece, without advertisements for Specsavers.  I like being told something about the music, and the circumstances in which it was written.  If the composer is blissfully in love, or crushed by the death of his children, or oppressed by awareness of the coming war in Europe, that's quite interesting.  Likewise if he recycled bits of a piece he'd alread flogged to another patron, or was using the new possibilities opened up by advances in instrument design, that's good to know.  Or if the composer was influenced by another musician, or paying homage to them, or making a musical reference or joke, I like to be told.  I love the programme that takes a piece of music and dissects it in not too technical terms, pointing out how the theme played by the violins in the first movement has returned in the third movement but given to the woodwind section, or whatever.  I really like all that stuff.

We didn't get that in the Breakfast programme.  Instead we got repeated invitations to e-mail, or tweet, or even write, with our thoughts on bits of music related to weddings that meant something to us, and nominate which classic recordings we would pay a lot of money for (this introduced by some waffle about Pink Floyd).  We got exhortations to follow the programme on Facebook.  The Essential Classics is as bad, with the presenter repeatedly assuring us that she loves receiving all of our e-mails.  It's cringe making.  It's not just the content that's awful, it's the delivery.  I have noticed when I happen to see telly aimed at young children, or overhear a school group at a garden or museum, that many adults talking to groups of primary age children adopt a special voice of overdone enthusiasm.  I don't know if children like it, but I find it dreadfully embarassing, and I suspect I would have when I was nine.  Radio 3 has started talking to their audience in that tone, and it is so, so cringe-making.  I'm quite happy with a bit of chat from presenters who know how to do it, Radcliffe and Maconie being prime examples, but when they do it they sound natural.  I could believe that if they were down in the pub, or sat in each other's kitchens, they would still pooter on in that vein.  The poor wretched R3 presenters just sound phoney.

Of course radio stations have to move with the times.  My uncle was a R3 producer, back in the days before digital recording, when a lot of R3 output was of specially commissioned concerts.  He is a proper musician, with a first class honours in music, who can play the piano.  He considers the current reliance on CDs a retrograde step, whereas I'm quite happy with them.  If I hear something I like I can go and get my own copy.  I have just bought a Stephen Hough recording of Chopin's waltzes on the basis that I heard one on the way to work the other week, and liked it, plus I wanted the one used in the soundtrack of Waltz with Bashir anyway.  A few years ago one of the Radio 4 satirical sketch shows did a very cruel piss-take of Radio 3 along the lines of 'Somebody got up and made a cup of tea in the middle.  There's always someone who has to ruin it for everybody.  Now we'll start again from the beginning and listen, very quietly'.  Radio 3 shouldn't be pompous, or stuffy, and it sometimes has been.  But couldn't the audience be given some credit for simply wanting to hear some good music, intelligently explained.  Spare us the phone-ins and the cheerleading.