This is a podcast from the archives of the BBC Reith Lectures.

This lecture in the series The Survival of the Symphony, given by Alexander Goer, was originally broadcast in 1987.

Music can serve all kinds of purposes, and there's absolutely no reason why it shouldn't.

The history of music can be written by simply listing the uses to which

it's been put. Song, dance, mass, national anthem, the wedding march and the international,

queuing on the telephone, discovering the right motor oil, I think that'll do. The best music survives the occasion for which

it was originally composed. The music of Bach and Handel isn't appreciated now, only for its

Christian images, nor Beethoven's pastoral symphony for its evocation of a countryside near Vienna,

nor do Marla's world-embracing psycho-programs come across,

or at least not explicitly. The intense experience of listening to music needs no justification,

and yet gives more than mere pleasure, and treating it as no more than an adjunct of gracious living does it no justice. It cannot

be glibly dismissed as the entertainment of the middle classes, nor as a kind of nostalgia for a lost

world. Music expresses the human condition, and as Mendelssohn put it, fills the soul better than words.

It offers hope and consolation, and helps each individual who can open himself to it,

to feel at one with the world. Brahms is supposed to have said to Clara Schumann that while others

have religion, we have something better.

Musicians don't have the right to ignore the profound significance of music, even if they

must inevitably fail to meet such exalted demands. Innovation and experimentation are worth little

in themselves unless they serve expressive intentions.

It then doesn't matter if they cause incomprehension or misunderstanding.

The important thing is that the artist should be prepared to stand up and be misunderstood.

In the proper sense, being willing to give the public what it wants means being able to respond to its spiritual needs, which is surely not at all the same thing as attempting to manipulate it.

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