Music
Three cheers
Robin Holloway
nsistent reminders earlier this autumn of the 50th birthday of the Third Pro- gramme, and its successor Radio Three, brought home the fact that the distinction which has made the network 'the envy of the world' (used for his title by its historian Humphrey Carpenter) lies almost as much in the spoken word as in the dissemination of music.
The last time I reviewed the state of the channel this verbal component was a bit bedraggled. A few years later its condition, if not perfect, is much healthier. Hardy perennials continue to do well, and some innovations are a clear improvement. The surest fixture is the Saturday morning record review covering new releases and presenting comparative evaluations, of classic works, ancient and modern, that at their frequent best can unobtrusively reveal much about the piece and its performance traditions, whether or not one needs the buying recommendation that makes the final goal. The note of intellectual cheap- ness or facile hype (like the ubiquitous use of 'wonderful' which in consequence, like `award-winning', has become an automatic turn-off) is heard from time to time, and still sticks out like a sore thumb.
The other formula that cannot wholly fail, the personal choice of music made by an eminent figure from public life, is, in its latest incarnation as Private Passions, con- ducted better than ever before. I used to be hooked on Man of Action, the awkward title for a previous format, because at two hours it gave the subject such scope to ram- ify. Sometimes the result was a treasure of sensitivity and personality — for instance the autobiography in sound presented by Claude Levi-Strauss. More often the pro- gramme sprawled through lack of trajecto- ry and clear presentation. With Michael Berkeley interviewing, such dangers don't arise; his net is wide and he is sympathetic, sometimes even unto servility, to the very varying interests, moods, dispositions, of his catch. It is invariably absorbing to hear these distinguished men and women trying to formulate what music means to them and how it takes them — never more so than the most recent (to date), Oliver Sacks, venturing bravely towards articulat- ing the unutterable.
Another old friend, Composer(s) of the Week, has been refurbished. It now ranges more freely into jazz, popular and contem- porary music, and is usually presented by an expert with a real grasp of the subject and the evident desire, often achieved, to communicate it with enthusiasm, even pas- sion. Many odd corners of music's realm have been thus illumined, while the cover- age of the classic masters has gained great- ly by concentration upon one particular facet of their work at a time.
Chief among the new friends is Spirit of the Age, a peripatetic programme con- cerned with the enormously broad sweep of music that used to be covered by the omni- purpose description 'early'. By now I'm finding a real reluctance to be out or engaged on the mid-Sunday afternoons when this feature is broadcast. Many mem- orable hours come to mind: exploring the place of bells in the life of a mediaeval city; telling the in-a-nutshell history of canons and catches; liturgies in and around great churches and cathedrals. And — in mid- course as I write — the captivating account of Will Kemp's 'Nine Daies Wonder', wherein Christopher Page, Walkman in hand, follows in the footsteps of the actor who danced all the way from London to Norwich in 1600.
When, as here, a 'natural' is at the helm, the results are as good as in the past; and, so to speak, more 'natural' too — easy, spontaneous, high-spirited. Some of the archival material transmitted during the half-century season seemed positively Jurassic in its stuffy stiff-collared diction. But elsewhere on the network there can be cringe-making lapses of tone. For every presenter who does it well — a Paul GuM- ery, a Tommy Pearson, an lain Burnside (to take obvious embodiments of, respec- tively, the old-style toff, the new-style demotic, and the flagrantly regional) there are duffers in plenty, graceless and inex- pert. Tooth-brushing-time early morning and end of working-day sequences make wearisome listening (except for the music) with their facetiousness, would-be friendli- ness, the reach-me-down manner that, apparently addressed to 10-year-olds, in fact condescends to listeners of any age. Here and during the routine continuity running through the day I as musician am exasperated by the unhelpful information thought appropriate. Only rarely does it manage to say what the listener will briefly and simply need, substituting triviality, anecdote, irrelevance and sometimes little touches of personal 'careless rapture' embarrassing in their banality. It is often ignorant, or uttered ignorantly, and mis- pronounced (as if accuracy in these things were by definition pedantic and user-repel- lent). Paul Gambaccini, translated now to pastures new after almost universal vilifica- tion, seemed to me a model of how to do it. And he never fluffed his lines!
A more series loss, however, is the in- depth interview that in the inelegantly titled Third Ear (!) used to produce pearl upon pearl from makers and performers in all the arts, engaged in question and response with skill, knowledge, understand- ing. Most interviews now are shoddy, casu- al, careless — mere dead space, for all the desperate air of making it live, between the music for which we gasp like fish out of water. For too much of the day my sympa- thies go entirely with those of the great engineer Alex Moulton, as recently report- ed: 'I'll work listening to the Third Pro- gramme [sic] — but I turn it off the moment the man starts talking.'
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