BBC Proms... the much-alleged atrocity of 'dumbing down'
To the list of rituals that herald the British summer – from the first hosepipe ban of the year to the two-hour queue to get through airport security – may I suggest adding another hardy annual that crops up without fail every May or June? It’s the arrival of a newspaper column written by someone steaming from the ears about the ‘dumbing down’ of the BBC Proms. The evidence for this alleged atrocity? It’s always the same. The outraged writer has spotted what he or she thinks is an unprecedented infiltration of pop, jazz and other unworthy genres into this summer’s edition of Britain’s great annual feast of classical music.
I don’t want to be rude about the journalists who churn out these torrid rants, because in the right mood I am quite partial to a torrid rant myself. But I wish people would stop barking up this particular wrong tree. There are nearly 90 concerts in this year’s Proms season, which (commendably) now stretches far outside London to encompass concerts in Gateshead and Bristol as well as several other towns and cities. Around a dozen of those 90 concerts include rock, jazz, soul or music from films and musicals. So, it’s not exactly a populist takeover.
Non-classical genres of music are every bit as worthy of celebration
I would argue that the composers and performers celebrated in those concerts – people like Miles Davis, John Coltrane and Paul Simon (whose seminal Graceland album, paying homage to Africa, is being recreated on its 40th anniversary) – are by any standards significant figures in music history. And surely even the fustiest of music critics would agree that the pulsating soundtracks composed for the James Bond movies, or Alan Menken’s brilliantly crafted film scores for Disney, are every bit as worthy of celebration as, say, the waltzes of Johann Strauss or the operettas of Gilbert and Sullivan, which have long been regular repertoire pieces at the Proms.
What, though, about the inclusion of a Prog Rock Prom, paying homage to pioneering 1960s and ’70s bands such as Genesis, Jethro Tull and Emerson, Lake & Palmer. Should that be a cause of distress or anger for the traditionalists?
Rock has appeared at the BBC Proms for over 50 years
Well, those who really know their Proms history will recall that prog rock actually first appeared at the festival 56 years ago. I should know. Just turned 16, I was there on the momentous night in August 1970 when the English ‘psychedelic rock’ band Soft Machine appeared alongside the BBC Symphony Orchestra. Perhaps aware of the stir they were causing, the band even included a track from their latest album called ‘Out-Bloody-Rageous’.
Yet the sky didn’t fall in and, as far as I can remember, nobody walked out in protest (unlike, say, at the notorious Proms premiere of Peter Maxwell Davies’s Worldes Blis the previous year). ‘The whole concert was a successful exercise in boundary-breaking,’ The Times’s critic reported the next day, adding that it was probably the first Prom in history ‘where the musicians’ instruments were set up by “roadies”’. And, I should imagine, the first time the word ‘roadie’ had appeared in the pages of an august broadsheet newspaper.
In the early years of the Proms, there was room for Victorian ballads and operetta
But that 1970 Prom certainly wasn’t the first to include the popular music of its day. Look back at the programmes put together by the Proms’ founder Henry Wood, especially in the 1890s and early 1900s, and you find Victorian ballads and operetta hits shuffled in among the symphonies and concertos. Today’s ‘pop’ Proms, far from being a dumbing down of tradition, are actually only an extension of Wood’s belief that his groundbreaking concert series could encompass all sorts of music yet still retain its integrity and quality.
It’s true that his eclectic approach to programming was partly about ‘playing to the gallery’, quite literally – filling the hall’s standing areas with people who perhaps had less erudite musical tastes and certainly less disposable income. But the philosophy went far deeper than that, and it still does. It’s about discovering truth, beauty, fun, profundity, joy – or whatever it is you seek from music – in genres that are new to you, as well as those you know well.
The poet Louis Macneice once wrote that the world is ‘crazier and more of it than we think, incorrigibly plural’. After 60 years of going to the Proms, that sentence perfectly describes what I find most compelling about this annual musical gathering. A festival that can go from Marvin Gaye to Berlioz’s Requiem in 24 hours may indeed seem a little crazy, and definitely ‘incorrigibly plural’. But it’s also unmissable.
