music & society
September » A survey published in September by Reader's Digest 'reveals' widespread ignorance of art music among the British public. The results of this poll were widely leaked/reported in the UK press (here, for example), and wider afield, last month, the general tone of any comment ranging from smug amusement to a mild handwringing.
In a sense, however, the figures mean very little, because the term 'classical music' (as the Digest and most people tiresomely refer to it) was not defined for respondents, meaning that familiarity with the crossover dross played daily on Classic FM or featured in the 'official' Classical Charts would have been counted as knowledge of something it isn't by a long chalk. Owners of CDs by André Rieu, for example - of which there must be an alarmingly high number in the UK - would, insanely, not belong to the "41% who don't own a single classical CD".
Nevertheless, high levels of ignorance, in both senses of the word, are undeniable. The survey found, for example, that 27% did not know Edward Elgar was a composer, despite the fact that his name and face were printed on British £20 notes for more than a decade, withdrawn from circulation only a month before the questionnaire. And allowing those who've been to a Katherine Jenkins concert or bought a CD by Only Men Aloud into the 'classical' camp means that levels of ignorance are, in fact, likely to be considerably greater than the survey indicates.
On the other hand, despite the tone of media reportage, the findings should come as a surprise to absolutely no one. The moronisation of culture by the advertising and media industries has been going on now for several decades, and art music, offering limited scope for profitability and providing few routes to frivolity, fame or fortune, was one of the earliest and biggest victims.
Gill Hudson, editor-in-chief of Reader's Digest, blames the situation on "a combination of uninspired teaching and the elitism that surrounds much of the genre", a typical media soundbite explanation which could hardly be more fatuous. Music teaching has always been of high quality in the UK in general (despite continued institutional attempts to make it 'more accessible' through asinine reductionism); the idea that it is "uninspired" has the same origin as the charge of "elitism" - postmodern academia and the media themselves, as musoc.org's Hip Pains column (see right) testifies. What it certainly is is underfunded.
In an ironic twist that won't be lost on those who consider art music an alien lifeform, most of those who do enjoy 'classical' - in the survey, 61% say they like it either "a little" or "a lot" - are fairly ignorant themselves, but are simply too complacent to realise it. Some of the more conspicuous of these have been awarded Donkey Gongs on this site - such people have 'deaf spots' or cloth ears that render them insensitive to the beauty and subtleties of certain eras (particularly pre-Classical and post-Romantic), instruments (chiefly the harpsichord!), composers or works, and do no favours to those fighting the cause of all art music.
But many more - illustrious critics, composers, performers and academics included - have spent their lives listening almost entirely to the 'standard repertoire', an orthodoxy imposed by institutionalised tradition that for reasons political, economic or variously idiosyncratic excludes vast swathes of music of impeccable merit. (Musoc.org's now discontinued Classics of Contemporary Art Music was an attempt to draw attention to this discrimination, as will be the Master Lists upon completion.)
The survey reports a (suspiciously low) figure of 40% of respondents that have never heard of Debussy and a figure (even more dubiously low) of 21% who have never heard of Vivaldi; but what of those self-declared music lovers who have never listened to a note of the outstanding music of Mieczysław Weinberg, Grażyna Bacewicz or Witold Lutosławski, to arbitrarily name just three composers from a single country from a single period?
Their access to music trapped outside the repertoire may well be restricted by time, money or some of the externalities mentioned above, but any smugness on the part of the tiny proportion of Brits who might be familiar with all of Beethoven's piano sonatas or Verdi's operas is misplaced. There are literally thousands of composers across the centuries whose life's work lies in abject neglect; all needing a monumental shift in education and culture to lift them out of obscurity.
As predictable as the Reader's Digest research is, it underlines the fact that UK society, like virtually everywhere else on the planet, is woefully benighted with regard to what was once a central pillar of Western high culture. Moreover, postmodernist thinking (if it can be called that) and neoliberalism are taking a pneumatic drill to the very foundations.
You can respond to this article at any time by emailing gro.cosum@srettel. Musoc.org may publish your comments on this site; if you want to keep them private, please mark your email 'Not for Publication' or use the gro.cosum@ofni address.