A Note on Classical Music
When Stormzy finished his Glastonbury set, everyone watching felt as if they had experienced something transcendental. Stormzy thought he had crashed; his earpiece was broken and he felt he had squandered his most important gig to date - but he had done something monumental. That same feeling of awe – of being blinded by grace – applies to all genres, but especially, I think, to classical music.
I don’t need to defend classical music: with streaming services and radio, accessibility to classical music is at its height. Cheap tickets also mean that live music is not reserved for the elite. However, as demonstrated by a rather strange recent article in The Guardian which claimed that classical music is elitist, the genre still falls on deaf ears. And not just Beethoven’s. Yet, despite this, classical music is heard everywhere and it is important to not reduce it to its ‘function’ in society. No kind of art – especially music – is created simply for its ‘usefulness’. The point is that it is often without function, superfluous, and that is exactly why it endures. Your Sunday morning would be, I am sure, just as peaceful without Alexander Armstrong’s dulcet tones stretching into your room through Classic FM, but then again – would it really?
I think classical music is brilliant for its ability to move people. I mean this in two senses: it can be emotionally overwhelming, but can also – and probably because of this - transport the listener back to a certain place or time. For The Open Ears Project podcast in December 2019, Tom Hiddleston revisited Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker score. He described how the Russian Dancers piece, which he returned to again and again throughout his childhood, still invigorates him as actor.
The genre is powerful because it excavates emotions which are dormant within the self. In the film adaptation of A Room with a View, the heroine Lucy Honeychurch is an ardent piano player, to the extent that in the film a listener exclaims ‘I believe that if Miss Honeychurch ever takes to live as she plays, it will be very exciting indeed’. The piano is an instrument which enables expression. In the film The Piano classical music is the only means of escape for Ada, a young woman trapped in an abusive marriage. She is mute: the music first replaces and then becomes her speech. Her husband comes to loathe the piano and cuts off her hand in an horrific act of censorship. Such is the power of the music Ada plays that she is thought to have become dangerous, uncontrollable.
Classical music is rooted in English culture because pieces were written to evoke the texture of the landscape. Vaughan Williams, Elgar and Benjamin Britten are several composers whose music seems born of the land it is written for, contains the rise of the hills and valleys or the raging tide in the score. Hearing an orchestra can be as bracing and as liberating as taking a walk outdoors.
In film, so many scenes are made complete with the addition of classical music – it tips the moment over the edge. There’s a reason why Alex listens to Beethoven in A Clockwork Orange: the orchestra seems to feed something inside of him, making him more alive in a world potent of death. The infamous scene in Apocalypse Now where the US army attacks a small village in Vietnam is made all the more terrifying because of Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries which booms out of the approaching helicopters. In this instance, Wagner’s score indicates impending doom. Which other genre of music can inspire fear at the same time as being beautiful? Even more immense are the Handel chords which open Barry Lyndon– if it wasn’t clear enough already, Kubrick has taste.
If that isn’t enough, classic music is still developing. There’s a Reworks playlist on Spotify which does just that: famous pieces of classical music are mixed with synth creating a new type of liquid. It’s weird and futuristic. It’s also helps you to imagine how classical music was the exciting music of its time, in the same way as jazz was the dangerous music of the twenties.
There are so many good things about classical music, I could write you a Liszt. I’ll leave you with some of my favourite pieces:
The last scene of Wagner’s opera Götterdämmerung
[https://open.spotify.com/track/2rH3aDumvWw3DE4jCKGdQP?si=1mfKjFOaSjy31F1lyE4nFA]
The Nutcracker: The Prince and The Sugar Plum Fairy pas de deux
[https://open.spotify.com/track/4YQaUX8tQLaOmBvjWq9nOp?si=BOWL-ij_SQy2dCLZ99PEuQ]
The Dream Pantomime from Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel
[https://open.spotify.com/track/1lJP4Tv9VcOvNlLNbdFTAt?si=Gxm06U9WRjqfKRuT46mrbQ]
The Sorcerer’s Apprentice by Stokowski
[https://open.spotify.com/track/3ZyiP5QfUXMMo6XJyjonMi?si=bxKNgrPIRVW-Pggagt3F5w]
Sarastro’s Aria from Mozart’s The Magic Flute
[https://open.spotify.com/track/5a8kvqq8mA1Owk7JSVCSp1?si=87uBq6LNRf6229RKmfEIsg]
Mozart’s Piano Concerto No.21 in C major
[https://open.spotify.com/track/2YarjDYjBJuH63dUIh9OWv?si=pitJWNcSQyeZkfUXSIl06g]
Janáček’s Orchestral Suite 2: Andante from The Cunning Little Vixen
[https://open.spotify.com/track/5rLwjaJcLVGgB5HXpMugrb?si=iUfucAVvR4-PVN5IM89h0w]
Chopin’s Nocturne No.1 in B Flat minor
[https://open.spotify.com/track/2d6ml9Qkx8r4EjuUyrdpRV?si=X7BRuLmGS-mTrEqnXSukSg]
Link to reworks playlist: https://open.spotify.com/album/2hfzcziOuaZXs4H3gZSbRv?si=VmVyH1pXSoatrDwOPzIn8g
Link to Guardian article:
Written by Esther Bancroft
A recent graduate of Bristol university, Esther has returned to the pen to write a little bit about a little bit of everything. When not staring at a screen trying to be creative, she likes to buy books without reading them and paint pictures of the sea - which is her healthy obsession.