IN 1477, the music
theorist and composer Johannes Tinctoris, with one rhetorical
flourish, dismissed all music that was more than 40 years old. So
Howard Goodall, darling of Classic FM and national singing tsar, is
in good company when he writes off great swaths of music history in
a single breath.
Tinctoris's taste was for
the modern, while Goodall - who stated recently that not one piece
of music in the past 100 years of effort can be enjoyed by normal
people - regards modernity in music, and especially the experiments
of Schoenberg and his followers, as being at fault. But the two
share the strong desire to make a case for a particular narrative
of music history.
Certainly, Goodall's
decrees have created far more provocation than his music ever will.
But, on Start the Week (Radio 4, Monday of last week), he
was more nuanced in his language - perhaps because he was joined by
John Adams, the composer of successful scores such as Nixon in
China, who combines the musicologist's admiration for
Schoenberg et al. with an ability to write for a mainstream
classical audience. But his attitude to artistic experimentation is
still wonder-fully conservative and English: it is OK for musicians
to try things out, but could they please do it in private?
There is a subtext here,
of course. By "private" he means without the use of public funds;
and Goodall presumably will have experienced the frustration of
being a composer of tunes in a funding culture where tuneless
serialism was pre-eminent. It was interesting to hear Goodall and
Adams agreeing here on Pierre Boulez as the villain of the piece:
his advocacy of musical modernism has sometimes been exercised in
authoritarian ways.
And it took the English
singer-songwriter Barb Jungr, also a guest on the show, to remind
us that, for better or worse, we are talking about a "music
industry" where the relationship between taste and supply are as
manipulable as in any other industry.
Another person who has a
problem with modernism is Malcolm Bowden; but, as a Creationist,
Bowden has a more profound problem. His arguments with the contem-
porary world extend to relativity, heliocentricity, and, of course,
evolution. Martin Wainwright, in his interview with Bowden for
One to One (Radio 4, Tuesday of last week), wisely chose
not to interrogate Bowden's belief system per se - not
least because, at the age of 81, Bowden has no doubt developed a
robust armoury against the assaults of the casual scientific
humanist. Instead, Wainwright's strategy was to try to understand
how he interacted with the world.
Bowden would prefer not
to get the flak that he does, but his approach to examining
evidence forces him to take the line that he does. His children and
grandchildren are happy to accept that he is charmingly barmy; and
he is content to remind them that there will be less heresy to be
burned from his soul come Judgement Day.
One regret appears to be that, after his death, there will be
nobody to continue advocating his particular constellation of
beliefs; for, as with unhappy families, so with Creationists; they
are all misguided in their own way.
