Past and Present

The Reith Lectures

BBC

Society & Culture, Science

4.2 • 770 Ratings

🗓️ 2 December 1987

⏱️ 29 minutes

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Summary

Professor of Music at the University of Cambridge and English composer Alexander Goehr gives his third Reith Lecture from his series 'The Survival of the Symphony'. He diagnoses the stifling and possibly fatal pressures of contemporary music-making.

In this lecture entitled 'Past and Present', Alexander Goehr explains that despite the near ubiquity of music, there is a drastic shortage of major new works available in the concert halls. He explores how tradition and innovation, previously necessary in forming new music, do not always create what the public are demanding.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is a podcast from the archives of the BBC Reith Lectures. This lecture in the series,
0:05.4	The Survival of the Symphony, given by Alexander Goer, was originally broadcast in 1987.
0:12.4	The very ubiquity of music, the probability that organised noise will always be with us,
0:18.8	endangers the concentrated listening which music demands.
0:22.9	There's not a musician who doesn't shrink from soft music with the soup,
0:27.7	but someone has to supply this commodity, and they get paid for writing and playing it.
0:32.8	There are jobs in it.
0:34.4	The situation is somewhat paradoxical.
0:37.2	More and better quality music results in trivialisation.
0:42.0	Of its nature, the public concert is a kind of ceremony, and its values resemble those of church,
0:48.7	theatre and public speaking. Respect for complex material clearly presented,
0:57.0	subtlety and variety, smooth and logical transitions and meaningful surprise are good.
1:00.0	Banality, needless repetition, garrulousness, crude rhetoric and vulgarity are to be avoided.
1:08.0	A lot of what composers believe to be innovatory is nothing other than the rejection of these same bad qualities.
1:15.6	Modern artists are impatient of sterile old-fashioned formulae and exaggerated and false homage to yesterday's ways.
1:24.6	Tradition is slumperae, traditionist slovenliness, Marla is alleged to have remarked,
1:31.3	but what he probably meant was that the very people who were outraged by any lapse from the good old ways
1:37.5	were in fact betraying what they thought they were defending. Tradition isn't a matter of hard and fast rules, and innovation occurs within it, gradually
1:48.6	and gently modifying its character.
1:51.5	Again and again, the great innovators of the past claimed to defend tradition against its
1:57.7	misuse by lesser men, Monteverdi and Gluck, Mendelssohn and Schumann, as well as Wagner and Schoenberg, all in their differing ways believed that they were rescuing music from the dissipations of their own contemporaries. Tradition is entirely different from habit, even from an excellent habit, since habit is by definition an unconscious acquisition and tends to become mechanical, whereas tradition results from a conscious and deliberate acceptance.
2:29.3	A real tradition is not the relic of a past that is irretrievably gone.
	...

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