Popular
music, the music played for dancing,
heard in musicals, listened to on
records and later on the radio, continued
to be ‘dance music’, really a form
of commercialised jazz. The jazz big
band/swing era is generally considered
to have begun in 1935, when Benny
Goodman’s band played jazz in Los
Angeles to a large enthusiastic crowd
of dancers. The best of the big and
swing bands in Britain and America
dominated the record charts and air-waves
and were also very successful on stage
and when touring. Through the 1930s
and 40s the Count Basie, Duke Ellington,
Artie Shaw, Glen Miller, Stan Kenton,
Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey bands and a
number of others were all tremendously
popular. In the 1940s, with the beginning
of bebop and then free jazz and jazz-rock,
jazz, which had been primarily music
for dancing, started to be listened
to by an increasing number of musicians
and their audience as an art form,
music for its own sake. 1947 saw the
beginning of the end for the big bands.
Though Goodman, Harry James, Tommy
Dorsey and others were unable to continue
to be full-time bands, they did re-assemble
from time to time. Big band/swing
music continued to be popular in Britain
much later with Ted Heath, Lew Stone
and several other bands continuing
well into the 1960s – John Dankworth
has continued recording and at the
end of 2005 he received a knighthood,
the first time a jazz musician has
received this honour.
As
popular as the bands were their vocalists.
Most of the singers, to begin with
often called ‘crooners’, started in
one or other of the successful bands.
From Bing Crosby onwards the best
of them tended to leave the bands
and create a career for themselves
as solo artists. Generally they continued
to be successful for much longer than
the bands did. The very best of them
were outstanding artists to be compared,
in my opinion, with the finest lieder
singers. If one listens carefully
to Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald,
Rosemary Clooney, Nat King Cole and,
nearer our own time Tony Bennett,
one can hear subtlety of phrasing,
articulation and colouring of the
finest quality. Frank Sinatra and
Peggy Lee seem to me particularly
outstanding. Their interpretation
of the words often disguises their
banality and their use of dynamics,
emphasis and artful changes of crescendo,
diminuendo and timbre
could serve as a lesson for singers
and instrumentalists. I quite recently
heard a very fine recording of a song
by Hugo Wolf, one of the greatest
of the lieder composers, without
knowing who was singing: I was astounded
to find it was Barbra Streisand.
I
was born in 1925, three years after
the Marconi Company had set up the
British Broadcasting Company in May
1922, and so radio has played a very
important part in my life. It has
given me both the opportunity to learn
from hearing performances by great
artists in all fields of music and
endless hours of pleasure. And by
providing well-paid employment for
my father it allowed me to have a
comfortable middle-class childhood.
The Marconi Company having recognised
the commercial possibilities of broadcasting
brought together a consortium of radio
manufacturers with the aim of establishing
radio stations around the country.
In 1922 a new company, the British
Broadcasting Company, was
established with a radio station
and studio, 2LO – this was its calling
signal – in Marconi House in the Strand,
London. From the start the government
had been opposed to this scheme but
later that year it decided to grant
the company a licence to operate.
Funding for the programmes was to
be provided by a tax collected from
the sale of wireless sets and an annual
listener’s licence fee of ten shillings
(50p). The following year the number
of licences had risen to 500.000 and
the studio moved from Marconi House
to Savoy Hill, also in the Strand.
When at the end of 1926 the British
Broadcasting Company licence expired
a government committee decided that
the Company should be replaced by
a public authority and in 1927 the
British Broadcasting Corporation,
the BBC, was created.
Broadcasting,
which had started in America in 1920,
had already become extremely popular
by 1922 when it commenced in Britain.
To begin with there were crystal sets
that relied on a ‘cats whisker’ to
find the right spot on the crystal
for the station one wanted, but it
was not long before sets with valves
and an accumulator ( an acid-lead
battery) became available. I remember
going with my father, it was probably
1931 or 1932, to the radio shop or
garage to get the battery recharged,
and then a day or two later a boy
from the shop would usually bring
it back. By then my father was in
the BBC Symphony Orchestra but he
used to tell me about his experience
of broadcasting in the old 2LO days.
In 1923 the station formed an orchestra
on a part-time basis in which a number
of the players who were later to join
the BBC Symphony Orchestra in 1930
as principals played – Sidonie Goossens
(harp), Eugene Cruft (double bass)
and Frederick Thurston (clarinet)
for whom my father used to deputise.
Then in 1927 the Wireless Military
Band was created with B. Walton O’Donnell
as conductor and my father as Solo
Clarinet (the equivalent of leader
of an orchestra), until he joined
Thurston in the BBC Symphony Orchestra
as co-principal in 1930. This was
a remarkable band and had its own
arranger, Gerrard Williams. The programme
for their first broadcast gives some
idea of the diversity of their repertoire:
the March from the Crown of India
suite by Elgar, the second and third
movements from Mendelssohn’s ‘Italian’
Symphony, A Folk Song Suite by Vaughan
Williams, a selection from the opera
Cinq Mars by Gounod, Tchaikovsky’s
1812 Overture and the Symphonic Poem
Le Rouet d’Omphale by Saint-Saens.
A number of pieces were especially
written for the band including those
by Gustav Holst and Vaughan Williams.
Under
Sir John Reith’s direction the BBC
music programmes were generally of
a rather serious nature – perhaps
rather too serious for a good many
listeners. Until the end of1925 the
only dance bands that broadcast from
outside the BBC studios were the bands
at the Savoy Hotel which broadcast
three times a week. From then onwards
more and more of the bands in other
hotels and clubs were broadcast –
those at the Piccadilly and Carlton
hotels, the Kit-Cat and Embassy clubs.
Jack Payne’s first broadcast was from
the Hotel Cecil in 1925 and then in
1928 he was appointed BBC Director
of Dance Music and his orchestra became
the BBC Dance Orchestra with the signature
tune ‘Say it with Music’. When
he left the BBC his place was taken
in 1932 by Henry Hall who had first
broadcast in 1924 from the Gleneagles
Hotel in Scotland. His signature tune
was ‘Here’s to the Next Time’.
From then on until the 1950s all
the best British bands broadcast regularly:
Roy Fox, Harry Roy, Carroll Gibbons,
Jack Hylton, Lew Stone, Billy Cotton,
Geraldo and Ted Heath, either from
the venue they were performing at
or in the BBC’s studios.
In
the mid-1950s popular music underwent
yet another major change of direction.
The era of the immense popularity
of the American and British dance
and swing bands throughout the 1930s
and 40s was starting to come to an
end. However, for Bing Crosby, Frank
Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Connie Francis,
Doris Day and Pat Boone – in the late
1950s second in popularity only to
Elvis Presley – Perry Como, Nat ‘King’
Cole and Tony Bennett and so many
others, there continued to be a considerable
following.
What
was to become a full-blown cultural
revolution that would affect audiences
and musicians alike all over the world
was the arrival of pop music. Pop
aims to appeal to as many people as
possible and is essentially conservative.
It is commercial music professionally
produced and packaged by the record
companies, radio programmers and concert
promoters and central to the ‘music
industry’. To be most profitable it
is necessary for there to be a constant
series of entries into the ‘Top 10’
creating million selling hits. It
is unusual for a singles hit to remain
in the Top 10 for more than six weeks.
But there have been exceptions: Cliff
Richard and the Beatles have each
sold at least 21 million and several
others have sold over 10 million.
Albums sell in even greater numbers:
5 are listed as having sold more than
40 million, many artists have sold
20 and 30 million and nearly sixty
have sold 15 million. The record is
held by the Beatles who are reputed
to have sold over 500 million.
By
the mid-1960s the ascent of rock,
which had already begun some years
earlier, was in full swing. In the
1940s there was already rhythm and
blues and rockabilly to be followed
in 1955 by Rock and Roll, now nearly
always written rock ‘n’ roll. The
recordings Rock Around the Clock
and Shake, Rattle and Roll
made in America in the 1950s by Bill
Haley and the Comets, were massive
hits which led to this group being
the first to tour Britain. Chuck Berry
(Roll over Beethoven), the
pianist Fats Domino with Whole
Lotta Loving, and Elvis Presley,
the best-selling singer of them all
with a string of successful records:
Blue Suede Shoes, Heartbreak Hotel
and Hound Dog and many
more paved the way in Britain for
Lonnie Donegan, Tommy Steele, Billy
Fury and above all the Beatles. From
then on pop and rock music and other
genres of popular music – ska, reggae,
disco, heavy metal, rap, hip hop,
R&B, techno, dance, punk and many
more, including ‘underground’ and
electronic music of various kinds
– became dominant, with new groups
and artists each seeking to identify
themselves with their individual style
of music and performance.
Often
the visual element at concerts and
on videos seems to have become as
important as the music itself. Those
attending rock concerts do not have
to sit or stand silent and undemonstrative.
Nor do they risk censure from those
around them if they move in response
to the music or show visible emotion,
hum along with a tune or tap their
foot in time to the rhythm. In fact
they are encouraged by the often exaggerated
gestures and movements of the artists
on stage to be active participants
in the event. Swaying, waving their
arms in the air, singing along, shouting
and cheering. This is very different
to the way those attending any kind
of classical music concert behave.
A silent, more reverential posture
is normal and movement of any kind
or a whispered word to one’s companion
quickly attracts frowns and ‘shushing’.
Whilst
I was in the profession from the mid-1940s
I frequently took part in sessions
alongside musicians who did not play
in symphony orchestras and even played
with the Beatles on their Sgt.
Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
album. To begin with, backing for
the groups was supplied by free-lance
orchestral musicians and from the
late 50s this provided very lucrative
employment for a fair number. But
by the 1980s the groups playing pop
music infrequently used any orchestral
musicians and this led to many of
those session musicians who would
not have considered playing in a theatre
becoming only too glad to find some
fairly regular employment playing
for the increasing number of musicals
that were now successful.
The
opera singers and solo instrumentalists
who wished to follow the famous artists
of the past and perform popular music
had found from the 1940s that they
had increasingly to draw on compositions
by jazz influenced composers such
as Gershwin, Cole Porter, Jerome Kern
and Richard Rodgers. The use of microphones
by popular singers and the different
vocal technique this required presented
problems for an opera singer accustomed
to singing in large opera houses and
projecting their voice and emotions.
Very few have been really successful:
as a rule they have lacked the right
vocal quality or diction and the correct
feel for the rhythm. A notable recent
exception is Bryn Terfel, a wonderful
operatic baritone who miraculously
seems to be able to combine singing
the major Wagner roles in the principal
opera houses around the world and
recording popular melodies.
World
Music
As
early as 1898 the Gramophone Company
and a few years later Odeon started
sending engineers to almost every
country in the world to record the
local folk music. Their motivation
was to sell as many gramophones as
possible. Essentially they wanted
to sell their machines into the domestic
markets everywhere they could. For
most of the early companies, the manufacture
of records themselves was not the
first consideration, but was found
necessary in order to maximise the
sale of the machines. A great many
recordings were made in each country
because it was thought that the availability
of recordings of their own music –
relatively cheap to produce – would
create new markets and increase the
sale of gramophones. These recordings
were not made to preserve the local
folk music and there was seldom any
attempt to ‘Europeanise’ the performances
or issue them outside the country
of their origin. However, they did
create an enormous volume of recordings
of ethnic music of which most of us
are entirely ignorant.
In
1966 David Lewiston, who had been
a student at Trinity College of Music
in London but was then living in New
York, decided to take off and start
recording the ethnic music of peoples
in the then still more remote parts
of the world. He was not an ethnomusicologist
nor an academic and was, it seems,
motivated solely by his interest and
delight in all the new musics he discovered.
The first of these recordings of the
Nonesuch Explorer Series was released
on vinyl in 1967. Over the next twenty
years more of his recordings were
issued. One of the records containing
excerpts of Bulgarian songs, Javanese
Court Gamelan and Japanese shakuhachi,
was sent into space by NASA on a Voyager
spacecraft in 1977 with a message
attached from the then US President
Jimmy Carter: This is a present
from a small distant world. This record
represents our hope, our determination,
and our good will in a vast and awesome
universe.
It
was not until The World of Music
and Dance (WOMAD) was conceived
in 1980, inspired to begin with by
pure enthusiasm for non-western music,
that people in the West other than
ethnomusicologists and those who had
bought the records made by David Lewiston
became aware that there were so many
other very different musical languages.
It was often said ‘music is a universal
language’. But, to anyone accustomed
only to what we in the West call music
the music of the Sámi people,
the music of the Australian Aborigine
or the Noh theatre music of
Japan, nohgaku and many other
musics will sound as strange and as
incomprehensible as their spoken languages.
My
own introduction to world music had
by chance occurred long before 1980.
While I was a member of the Musicians’
Union Executive Committee one of the
benefits of attending the often very
boring meetings of the committee was
that from 1967, when it was first
published, I received at each meeting
a copy of the International Music
Council (UNESCO) quarterly journal
The World of Music. Through
reading the articles in The
World of Music I became acquainted
with music I knew very little about
and a great deal I had never even
heard of: the music of the Orient,
Africa, Japan, Islam, Turkish classical
music, the Gamelan music of Bali,
to mention only a few. I found that
I enjoyed the sound of Chinese, Indian
and Gamelan music though I understood
nothing of the cultures they came
out of.
At
just about the same time I started
reading about the music of other cultures
I had the opportunity
to attend a performance of the Japanese
Noh theatre given by a visiting
Noh company from Japan. This
was my first experience of hearing
music that was completely foreign
to my ears: it was a unique experience.
The Noh plays, mostly written
six hundred years ago, still attract
large audiences in Japan today. In
fact there has been something of a
revival in recent years and for the
first time female actors have taken
part in what has always been a wholly
male preserve. The actors wear elaborate
costumes and masks to identify whether
the character they are portraying
is male or female, a ghost or a demon,
and all their movements are highly
stylised. A remarkable element of
the masks is that they are constructed
so that as the actor tilts his head
backward or forward the facial expression
can change from fierce to smiling,
happy or sad.
The
performance is accompanied by music
played usually by four musicians and
a small chorus. The musicians, who
are also elaborately costumed, sit
on one side of the stage and remain
very still except when they are playing.
Their instruments are the nohkan
– a flute which makes strange
whistling sounds, varied according
to events and characters in the play
and three types of drums: the Ko-tsuzumi,
a small drum held at the shoulder,
the O-tsuzumoi, which is larger
and held on the left hip, and the
Taiko, a large drum placed
on the floor and beaten with two thick
sticks. The smaller drums are played
with the finger tips. At various times
the drummers shout out what are called
kakegoe, calls that are signals
between the drummers and between the
drummers and the singers.
The
musicians sit motionless with their
hands tucked into the wide sleeves
of their costume and each time music
is required, with one accord and without
any obvious sign having been given,
assume a playing position and start
to play. The music is a combination
of eerie whistles on the nohkan,
different each time, and drumming,
interspersed by the kakegoe calls
from the drummers and a hishigi,
which is a very sharp tone – the highest
note the nohkan can produce. If
these musicians had been giving a
recital at the Wigmore Hall wearing
traditional evening dress and had
created a similar ‘soundscape’ even
those who enjoy the most avant-garde
music would find more than a few minutes
of this music hard to take.
The
first WOMAD festival, held in England
in 1982, and subsequent festivals
played a big part in increasing the
demand for recordings of non-western
music. WOMAD’s aim was ‘to excite,
to inform, and to create awareness
of the worth and potential of a multicultural
society and to celebrate the many
forms of music, arts and dance of
countries and cultures all over the
world.’ A few years later those record
companies that were issuing Indian,
African, Latin American music and
the music of many other countries
decided that it would be much easier
for customers at music and record
shops to find all these recordings
if they were put on one rack under
the general heading ‘World Music’.
By 1994 these recordings and the world
music festivals held around the world
had become so popular that a Rough
Guide to World Music was published.
The Guide includes virtually
every music culture, national, regional
and local and provides details of
commercial recordings (now available
in various formats) of the traditional
and contemporary music of the people
living in places as remote as the
Kathmandu Valley in Nepal, Bioko (formerly
FernandoPo) a tiny island off the
coast of Cameroon, and the nomadic
horsemen of Outer Mongolia in central
Asia.
The
World of Music was published
by UNESCO in association with the
International Institute for Comparative
Music Studies and Documentation and
was in fact intended essentially for
those concerned with ethnomusicology.
Thomas Edison’s invention in 1877
of the phonograph enabled ethnomusicologists
to listen to repeated hearings of
the on-site folk music recordings
they had made. A few years later Alexander
Ellis devised a way to divide the
octave into 1200 equal parts, which
he called cents. This allowed
a proper recognition of the many non-western
scales and an understanding of music
that used other tonal systems than
the diatonic scales. They came to
realise that the Western system was
not superior, only different.
At
the beginning of the 20th century
Cecil Sharp, Percy Grainger, Béla
Bartók and Zoltan Kodály
were all recording folk musicians
in Europe and elsewhere. Many scholars
were also busy recording folk music
all over the world. The earliest recordings
of the music of the many Native-American
Indian tribes, had been made in the
USA in the 1890s by Jesse Fewkes.
None of these recordings nor the folk
music recordings reviewed in The
World of Music in the late
1960s and during the 1970s were intended
for commercial distribution. It is
clear from the reviews of the music
being studied at that time that the
sound quality of some of the early
recordings was not very good.
But
while the ethnomusicologists were
concerned with understanding the music
of cultures other than those of their
own western tradition, those who have
been attracted to World Music have
enjoyed it for its own sake because,
as Beecham put it in another context,
‘they like the noise it makes’. The
record companies quickly realised
that here was another music for which
there was an ever growing audience.
The 1994 edition of the Rough Guide
to World Music has 697 pages and
is a treasure-trove of information
with articles about hundreds of different
musics and details of recording that
are now available for each of them.
Because of the expanding reach of
the recording machine it now has to
be published in two volumes. If I
were obliged to choose one book to
have if I were left marooned on a
desert island it would be the one
volume Rough Guide to World Music.
The
arrival of the pocket-sized transistor
radio in the mid 1950s, and to an
even greater extent since 1979 the
availability of the Walkman
portable transistor cassette tape
player have, in the same way as Coco-Cola,
McDonalds and Kentucky Fried Chicken,
played their part in creating what
is now a ‘borderless’ world’. In effect
the world’s musics have become borderless
– they have all been thrown into the
melting pot. Of course, there are
still groups of aficionados who continue
to love and protect their own music
and maintain it in as pristine a condition
as possible. Lovers of western classical
music are one of them, probably the
largest. To say, as it frequently
was little more than 25 years ago
that ‘music is a universal language’,
was not true; now, to a great extent,
it is.
The
phrase crossover in music seems to
have come into use first in the 1960s
and 70s, in the first place mainly
as a marketing tool. As music became
increasingly commercialised – became
an industry – the record companies
were constantly seeking to extend
and increase their sales. One way
was by appealing to more than one
audience. By combining country (or
country and western) music with elements
of pop the multimillion-dollar music
industry centred in Nashville created
a music attractive to a much larger
audience. Another early form of crossover
in the 1960s was jazz-rock. Soon there
were so many styles and types of crossover
that the process becomes very difficult
to follow. Before long the Top 40
charts were full of recordings by
crossover artists, and albums – the
aim being to get into the Top10.
As
a result of the crossover phenomenon
there is scarcely any music that has
not been affected by crossover or
fusion. The classical music of India,
China, Japan and Europe and other
cultures, folk music and jazz, have
all been increasingly influenced and
in some cases virtually supplanted
by rock and pop. Indigenous musics
that had flourished for hundreds of
years now only have a specialised
audience of enthusiasts. The most
recent to feel the effect of crossover
has been western classical music.
We now have classical crossover music,
crossover artists, crossover albums.
On
recordings of the music of three relatively
small local communities one can listen
to their music, unknown outside their
own community until recently, as played
and sung before and after the effect
of crossover and fusion. Good examples
of what has happened everywhere are
the Celtic music of Ireland, the music
of the Sámi people, who live
in ‘Lapland’ a region in the most
northern parts of Norway, Sweden,
Finland and Russia, and the Australian
Aborigines, each with very different
musics and each belonging to a minority
community.
To
hear how great a change has taken
place in the performance of Celtic
traditional music in little more than
fifty years first listen to the classic
recordings made by Johnny Doran, the
great player of the uillean pipes
and Michael Coleman the Sligo fiddler
made in the first part of the 20th
century. Then to the music of the
Pogues, one of the most successful
of the Irish folk rock bands of the
1980s and 90s, who combined Irish
folk with Latin and Balkan rhythms,
or the Moving Hearts, a band which
included in its line-up such diverse
instruments as guitar and bodhran
(the large Irish frame drum), bouzouki
(the long-necked lute from Greece),
the Irish bellows-blown uilleann
pipes, alto sax and bass.
The
music of the Sámi people who
are nomadic and number in all only
about 45,000/50,000, is a good example
of what can happen to a local music
with an extremely long tradition.
The most important element in Sámi
music is the joik or yoik,
an improvised style of singing, sometimes
accompanied by a drum and fadnu
(the Sámi flute).
The joik songs often illustrate
the close relationship the Sámi
people have with their environment.
There are very few recordings of the
genuine Sámi joik. There
are two or three commercial recordings,
the British Library Sound Archive
has seven field recordings made in
1997, but by far the best opportunity
to hear this rare music sung is on
the Internet at The Sámi
of Far Northern Europe. On the
web site Sáme.etnam
one can hear a short clip of the Sámi
flute, the fadnu.
However,
there are now a great many crossover
and fusion recordings of this music.
Most well known and popular is Mari
Boine who, like the Pogues and so
many others has combined her own native
music instruments and style with those
of other cultures: jazz, rock, joik
– the traditional Sámi chant.
Her band will at times include bass,
keyboards and guitars, Sámi
and African drums, Indian flutes,
the Peruvian charango (a small guitar)
and the Arabic fiddle. In the past
the Sámi, or Lapps have been
discriminated against and made to
feel worthless. When Mari Boine, an
ardent protester, was asked to perform
at the opening ceremony of the Winter
Olympics in Lillehammer she refused
because she felt she was just being
used as an exotic decoration. In fact,
another Sámi artist, Nils-Aslak
Valkiapää, from Finland
did accept and his performance is
included on an album on which he is
accompanied by keyboards, saxophone
and flutes.
The
traditional music and culture of the
Australian Aborigines is so different
from our own that it is difficult
to take in just how dramatic a change
has taken place in the last thirty
years. Ever since the European settlers
arrived in the late 1800s the Aborigines
have suffered dispossession of their
land and the suppression of their
language and culture, which is at
least 40,000 years old and believed
to be the oldest still extant. In
the 1900s separation from the White
man and from their own Aboriginal
culture was official government policy,
even to the extent in the 1930s of
separating them from their children.
To understand how great the change
that has taken place has been it is
necessary to know something of their
past.
To
the Australian aborigines (‘the people
who were here from the beginning’),
music was an integral part of everyday
life and a unifying force in their
culture. Aboriginal mythology recalls
a time in the remote past in the Dreamtime,
when totemic spirits wandered all
over the continent singing the names
of birds, animals, plants and the
things around them. These songs brought
the world into existence and the totemic
spirits left emblems across the continent.
The paths between them are called
songline. The music is very
rhythmic with a lot of hand clapping,
body slapping, stamping and clapping
bilma (ironwood clapsticks)
or boomerangs. The only ‘instruments’
were the digeridoo (digeridu) or yadaki,
a hollowed out branch of a tree, blown
at one end and unique to the Aborigines,
a ‘bull-roarer’ (there is no translation
for the Aboriginal instrument, a slat
of wood whirled around on the end
of a piece of cord) and the gum-leaf,
which was blown in rather the same
way as children blow a piece of grass
held between the thumbs.
The
effect. of separating the Aborigines
from their own culture allowed their
music to be supplanted by western
pop and rock.. An important development
for them was the establishment of
the Institute of Aboriginal Studies
in 1964, where there is an extensive
archive of recordings of indigenous
Aboriginal music collected over the
last hundred years. Some of these
recordings and a few genuine performances
of traditional music are available
commercially.
From
the end of the 1960s and increasingly
in the 1970s when the Aborigines increased
their campaign for indigenous land
rights and as some of them became
aware of their music heritage it became
a vehicle for social protest. By the
mid-1980s very many Aboriginal rock
bands had been formed and were playing
all over the country with politics
always a part of their music. There
are now a considerable number of commercial
recordings. Formed in 1986 Yothu Yindi’s
pop success came as a surprise and
helped bring many Aboriginal issues
into mainstream Australian affairs.
Other popular Aboriginal music bands
have been the Desert Oaks Band, the
Warumpi Band, Blackstorm, and Archie
Roach (voice and guitar). As well
as traditional Aboriginal instruments
bands now frequently include synthesiser,
a number of western percussion and
other instruments.
The
folk music of other much larger communities
have all become part of mainstream
popular music, in particular reggae
from Jamaica, the hillbilly music
from the Appalachian mountains, that
became bluegrass and country and western,
and the many offshoots and combinations
of music from Cuba, Puerto Rico, Colombia
and other south American countries
that, mixed with big-band jazz, we
call Latin American. All these musics
had in the beginning helped primitive
man alleviate the weariness and tedium
of manual labour, prepare warriors
to face their enemies in battle, placate
the gods and give thanks for a good
harvest. Most religions have always
recognised the importance of communal
participation and have given their
congregations an opportunity to take
part, with chanting and hymn-singing
as an aid to escape from themselves
and the real world and enter into
another more spiritual state of mind.
Folk
music, for many hundreds of years
– in some cases thousands of years
– remained the only popular music
with characteristics that until recent
times distinguished it from professional
musical performance in that it allows
ordinary people a form of self-expression
and in some way involves their participation,
with singing, hand clapping, dancing,
singing or playing an instrument.
As
a result of increasing industrialisation,
first in Britain around 1850 and before
long in the USA and Europe, large
numbers of the rural population migrated
to the towns and cities. During the
first half of the 20th century this
was to occur throughout the rest of
the world. Urban life allowed more
leisure time and provided new more
sophisticated forms of entertainment.
In a different environment and away
from their former cultural roots it
was in the Music Halls in particular
that the recently created industrial
working class first heard a new kind
of popular song. The artist would
sing a couple of verses and choruses
and then encourage the audience to
join in singing the chorus with them.
With their easily learned catchy melodies
they soon became extremely popular
and within a short time had replaced
the old folk tunes in their affection.
It was not long before increasing
affluence enabled working class families
to acquire a cheap piano and purchase
sheet music copies of the most popular
of the songs they heard at the music
hall and the bandstand. This was the
first step towards an increasing commercialisation
of music.
Earlier
I described how the ability to record
music has resulted in performers losing
some control over their own performances,
and how it has reduced employment
opportunities for orchestral musicians;
the effect it has had on audiences
and their expectations, and on the
actual style of musical performance
itself. But above all recording made
it possible for a performance to become
a commercial object, something that
can be bought and sold – and that
can become an extremely valuable commodity.
As well as the quality of both the
recordings and playback equipment
reaching a very high standard it has
become easy to hold extremely large
amounts of music on one artefact.
Wherever
you go there is music of some kind.
It is now difficult to avoid. It accompanies
virtually every TV and radio advert
and is very frequently played constantly
in super markets, shops and restaurants.
Mobile phones use a snatch of music
– Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, the Beatles
or the latest pop hit. Music is also
increasingly being used in news bulletins
to raise the tension (in a similar
way to how it is used in films) as
background when conflict of any kind
is being reported. Even so it seems
that many of us cannot get enough
music. We choose to listen to it on
our own a great deal of the time,
at home, either on CDs, the radio,
TV or on the Internet, and now frequently
on mp3s and iPods when we are on the
move – walking about, or on public
transport, and even when at work..
There is one major difference in
that this vast
amount of music is ingested without
any participation on the listener’s
part – it is an entirely passive experience.
Yet the many millions who have been
listening to the pop and rock related
music on CDs and radios, or, more
recently, downloaded it from the Internet
and other sources – legally or otherwise
– still flock in their tens of thousands
to concerts where they can see and
hear their favourite performers and
to a limited extent participate in
the event. Perhaps this is also why
the Proms continues to attract such
large audiences each year, even to
those concerts that include contemporary
music that as a rule drives audiences
away.
Chapter
26
