SUNDAY, 9 MARCH 2025

In the unlikely event of my being invited to a soiree in Islington or Primrose Hill, I could probably hold my own in discussions about poetry or painting with aesthetes whose vowels sound like those of the old Queen in her Christmas message to the nation. But the purists among the chatterati might bar me from their dinner parties because of a huge lacuna in my cultural repertoire: I know almost nothing at all about classical music. And I am far from alone in this, I’m sure. Classical music, very much like poetry, has become something of a niche interest in the contemporary world.

For me, one of the big negatives of classical music is that it reminds me of school assemblies, even after almost sixty years. I know this is unfair, but it’s definitely true. I went to a grammar school in a working-class area and one of the aims of our headmaster was to introduce the oiks to the canon and high culture. So each morning after singing a religious dirge indoctrinating us into Christianity, we had to sit and listen in silence to a piece of classical music. On the whole, of course, this had the opposite effect to that which our headmaster sought: most of us grew to hate it, just as most working-class kids learned to hate Shakespeare and Keats in English Lit. Both were seen as medicine which we were forced to swallow because they were good for us in some way that was never explained. Our unsurprising response was boredom and sullen resentment.

And we had our own music to love instead. This was the mid-60s, when pop was flourishing, rock and soul were taking off, and the music in the charts distinguished us from our poor benighted parents. Unlike the classical pieces in assembly, pop had lyrics that spoke about our daily lives and which we understood: Dead End Street by the Kinks, with its theme of unemployment and poverty; Friday on my Mind by the Easybeats about people doing a boring job and longing for the weekend when they could go out and have fun by splashing all their wages in a night of pleasure; the far from subtle message of Let’s Spend the Night Together by the Rolling Stones. In contrast, what did we care about 1812 or the Virgin Mary? Our teachers told us how much greater Bach and Mozart and Beethoven were to the substandard trash that we adored, but the trash meant so much more to us, so much more than the symphonies and concertos that the school stuffed down our throats and told us we were just too dull to understand.

On a personal level, another important fact was that there was almost no classical music in my home: the closest we got was something titled The Dream of Olwen by someone named Charles Williams. My father listened to his generation’s popular music, which meant Jim Reeves and Winifred Atwell, (groans from me, of course), and I remember printed scores for songs like Little Brown Jug and When the Saints Come Marching In. We had a piano, which was not as surprising as it might seem nowadays, when pianos are largely the preserve of the middle classes for little Zoe and Tristan, but in those days many working class families had one, even if, like ours, they needed tuning and had a couple of dumb notes (we must remember that there was little entertainment other than the radio when I was very young, and singing around the piano was a common way of passing winter nights, twee as that might sound these days). Despite this, the absence of classical music in my home meant I needed to actively seek it out, and there was a contemporary music all around me which I was much more keen on discovering.

And for those of us who had intellectual pretensions (moi?), there was always jazz. Somewhere between the ages of sixteen and twenty, I discovered Coltrane and Coleman and Davis and Sun Ra, plus more mainstream artists like Holiday and Waller. These guys offered cachet without any association with the tedium of school assemblies. And despite my self-mockery here, I can honestly say that I responded to them more readily and naturally than to the classics, for they seemed much closer to the modern world that I lived in. They were urban and cutting-edge, while classical music, much like the novels of Hardy, seemed to come from a different world, a world where I didn’t belong.

So far this essay has been personal and anecdotal, but I’m sure I was just one of hundreds of thousands who had a very similar musical upbringing and if we multiply my personal experience by those numbers, it is clear why classical music took such a hit, and the roots of this were social, political and economic as much as purely aesthetic. At the aesthetic level, however, classical music at the same time had become ‘difficult’, following the Modernist experiments of Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Webern, Boulez, Stockhausen et al, so in a similar way to poetry, painting, architecture and ‘literary fiction’, it distanced itself from the masses. A recognisably contemporary situation emerged, where an intellectual class centred on critics and academics, rather than a class defined mainly by upbringing and money, became the setters of artistic standards. An increasing intellectualisation and theorisation of the arts took root, which left most people feeling stranded, unable to enjoy and understand the ‘avant garde’, and totally intimidated by modern developments in Art.

Film (and sometimes TV) has filled the gap this left behind, along with popular music. While it is true that there is an arthouse film circuit which features films that alienate the general public just as much as piles of bricks, there is also a prodigious mainstream film industry which is driven by demand and produces what most of the public want to see. The evenings gathered around the piano have become trips to the local multiplex. Social and technological changes have consolidated this move from print to music to video. When they weren’t being pale and interesting and covering up their chair legs, the Victorians spent their spare time reading; hence the chunky novels and their relative love and awareness of poetry compared to what exists nowadays. Classical music had its heyday in the days of radio before TV. But in what is an increasingly visual and technological age, film and recorded popular music have become the dominant art forms of our society.

Some people argue that classical music is superior to popular forms because it is more complex. I don’t know enough about music to give a confident response to this idea, but I can talk a bit about poetry, where greater complexity does not necessarily mean greater art in my opinion, with Blake’s Innocence and Experience as the perfect example. Another common idea is that classical music requires superior technical ability, so Maria Callas, for example, is necessarily a greater artist than Billie Holiday. But technical ability is only one part of what makes any work of art great: sincerity matters as much or even more. Art is also not just the output of gifted, creative individuals: it is an expression of a society and a culture and cannot be separated from this. It generally springs up from the grass roots, as blues, jazz and a lot of 60s pop did.

Complexity is often then added to these grass-roots art forms as they are influenced by other cultures, both domestic and foreign, as, for example, when Japanese prints began to arrive in Europe in the 19^th century and inspired the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists, or indeed when pop itself began to borrow from the classics and from jazz in the late 60s and 70s. The increase in complexity that results from these infusions may lead to a concomitant gain in subtlety and skill, but often something of value gets lost at the same time, as arguably happened with blues and jazz as they evolved and spread beyond their immediate social background and took on the mantle of ‘serious’ musical genres.

I also mistrust the tendency to judge the value of a work of art by its scope or ambition. The simplicity of pop, the fact that in its purest form it is crystallised into a mere three or four minutes, can be a virtue as well as a limitation, and, just as a haiku can require as much artistry as an epic poem, a short piano piece by Satie can speak to us as much as a symphony that lasts longer than an hour. In Art, for me at least, less is often more, and this frequent valorisation of intent over final result owes much to the feeling I’ve already mentioned, that Art is somehow good for us, a spoonful of linctus that is morally and intellectually uplifting.

The passage of Time often does much to add to a work’s cultural reputation, of course. Just as Shakespeare’s plays have gone from mass entertainment in his own day to Culture about which we whisper in hushed tones, it is possible that contemporary pop may one day be much more secure in its ultimate standing than it is at the moment, as it gains the patina of age and is transformed into high culture. Alternatively, the contemporary classical pieces which are largely ignored by the general public may become recognised for the great art they are, as the famous pop and rock bands recede into the background and become little more than footnotes in musical history. Who knows?

In short, none of us can have any sure knowledge of how the music of our age will be regarded in the future. Since I get annoyed when people who think they are being smart declare that painting is dead in an age of installation and computer art, it would be hypocritical of me to say the same about classical music, especially since I have so little knowledge of it. I would reiterate, though, that the pop of the 1960s spoke to me and my peers in a language that we recognised and cherished, and, even if it ends up with a reputation closer to that of Victorian melodrama than that of Bach or Mozart, it was a genuine reflection of a time and a place, and an entire generation for whom it provided an authentic voice. I’m not sure that what we label classical music can do that any more.