Somehow, and I don’t know where the decades went, I will be marking 50 years as a music critic later this summer. I won’t bore you with a calculation of how many hours I’ve spent sitting in concert halls and opera houses, or how many words of reviews and features I have typed during that half-century. Oh, all right, since you insist, I reckon it’s around 25,000 hours and eight million words. Put like that it seems like hard labour, but it never has been. Being paid (modestly) to listen to mostly wonderful music played by mostly superb musicians? It beats working for a living.
Classical music in the past 50 years... thriving orchestras old and new
What has surprised me, looking back to 1976 (when I started writing for a tiny magazine that sadly went out of business this year) is how much of the classical music landscape has survived, despite the economic pressures that you don’t need reminding about. All the major British orchestras are still alive and sort-of-flourishing, despite annual predictions of one or more going bust. And along the way excellent newcomers have come along – the Britten Sinfonia, Manchester Camerata, Aurora – with fresh ideas about reaching young audiences or presenting music differently.
The opera scene is more problematic, with both English and Welsh National Operas much diminished from their 1980s heydays. But again, I see plenty of enterprising work from new, shoestring companies and privately financed summer festivals. At least they are keeping British opera alive.
British composers over the past 50 years
Meanwhile, the current crop of British composers is producing far more varied and listenable new works than their predecessors did 50 years ago, when the pressure to follow the diktats of Pierre Boulez and churn out serialist music was joyless, unremitting and harmful. There’s a lot more hopping across genres these days too, by composers and audiences alike. It’s no longer an intellectual crime to enjoy Hans Zimmer as well as Thomas Adès.
The biggest change in the past 50 years... the advancement of women conductors and composers
And the biggest revolution? It’s that half the population can now take part fully in musical life, for the first time in history. I mean women. It’s extraordinary to recall that, back in the mid-1970s, the London Symphony Orchestra was still overwhelmingly an all-male outfit, and you could attend an entire Proms season without hearing a single note written by a woman or a concert conducted by one. And it’s even weirder to re-read the ‘erudite’ musicological treatises of those days, explaining that women’s brains were ‘not musically creative’. I’m sure there’s still work to be done in some sexist strongholds of the classical music world, but the transformation in my lifetime has been remarkable.
The decline in musical education
One change, however, has not been for the better. British state schools in the post-war era (roughly the 1950s to 1980s), undoubtedly provided far more opportunities to study and excel in music than they do today. Music also had a much more secure place in universities. I shudder to think how much outstanding talent is now left undeveloped, unnoticed and untrained. It’s as if the politicians and educational experts who decide what gets taught in schools are determined to make classical music even more elitist than they say it already is. True, the present government has pledged to remedy this lamentable bias against arts education. But in 50 years I’ve watched similar promises broken many times.
From LPs to streaming... huge changes in recorded music in 50 years
What about the changes in how recorded music is delivered to the public? They have been massive too. In 1976 we were still in the world of LPs and cassette tapes. The Compact Disc was six years away. The internet, streaming and websites lay decades into the future. Nobody in 1976 would have predicted how such sci-fi fantasies would revolutionise the dissemination of music and at the same time all but destroy the economic model that had comfortably supported orchestras, publishers, soloists, conductors, music shops and record stores through the 20th century.
But musicians, especially British musicians, are virtuosos not just on their instruments but in the dark arts of survival too. They adapted, just as they had adapted to the arrival of the gramophone and wireless more than a century earlier. I just hope someone can find a way for them to make a bit more money from the internet.
AI and the future...
Now we face the challenge of artificial intelligence (AI), which is already pumping out passable pop songs and soundtracks for video games and may yet produce a worthwhile symphony – played by robots, of course, and possibly reviewed by one as well. Or perhaps not. I wish I could be around in 50 years to see how that works out.
