Howard Goodall's The Story of Music
Bravo to the BBC on an enjoyable, educational programme
Martin Cullingford 4:48pm GMT 31st January 2013
I watch very little television. The brash, braying frenzy of so much of what I have caught has long left me seeking sanctuary in the discipline of radio: there, all sound - or silence - must be meaningful. The BBC of course has a noble tradition of bucking the trend with its cultural offerings, and its latest is on a mainstream channel (BBC 2) on primetime television (Saturday evening). People had said good things about Howard Goodall's new series The Story of Music, and so I logged on to the iPlayer catch-up service and, indeed, caught up.
I was impressed with what I found. With a script both wise and witty, with nods to modernity, Goodall, in episode one, traced the history of music from a time before we know what it sounded like, to Monteverdi's ground-breaking opera L'Orfeo. We pass swiftly, but clearly, through the invention of notation and the history of harmony, complexity given clarity at every turn. Goodall delivers the programme almost entirely from a studio, explaining and enthusing. He sometimes sits down at his keyboard to demonstrate various points: I can’t imagine the concept of the imperfect third being explained more succinctly. When something needs illustrating, the camera cuts away to a painting or manuscript from the time - there's little resorting, as does many a factual programme, to the costume cupboard. There is a sometimes overenthusiastic use of a superimposed flickering flame to indicate eras of conflict and tension, but that's a small gripe. The one exception to the above is when Goodall visits a barber’s shop to illustrate the once ubiquity of popular ballads, but everyone needs their hair cut at some point, and if Goodall can get it done on the job, good luck to him.
I've often felt sad that while other disciplines and subjects have advocates among their own that the wider world welcomes into their living rooms, when it comes to classical music people have so often looked for an outside celebrity to bridge the perceived (and false) gap between them and us. Sometimes this works very well of course, but Goodall – best known as a choral, musical and television composer - offers another option. Those who know nothing, little or even a fair amount about the story of music would all have enjoyed this. I hope, and am sure it will, encourage many on new journeys of discovery.
Episode two of The Story of Music is broadcast on Saturday - or available soon after on the iPlayer.
Comments
Radio 3 is giving excerpts of the programme followed by performances of the work Goodall discusses. I heard the one on Palestrina and enjoyed it. I didn't know it was a TV series. My worry was that the programme preserved a tired model of the grand narrative of Western classical music and called it the story of music as such. I think that narrative of 'classical music' is artificial, and I would prefer to see something that responded more to the question of geographies and social locations of music. That opinion is derived from what I heard Goodall say about Palestrina, which was informative and useful but in its shaping grand-narrative assumptions required, I thought, more testing. Also on aesthetics, Goodall told us the Missa Papae Marcelli was 'beautiful' but not quite why. Bit safe maybe, however welcome? i'd like a revisionist history, not the classical music equivalent of jazz's up-the-river narrative.
Howard Goodall will talk about his book and new series at Kings Place on Monday 11 February, 7.00 pm. A good opportunity to discuss his choices. http://www.kingsplace.co.uk/whats-on-book-tickets/spoken-word/howard-goodall-the-story-of-music
Just liked the music !!
I watched with growing dismay the episode of "How Music Works" where Howard Goodall delivers his slick understanding of the historical and practical evolution of modern music via the Blues.
I understand quite clearly that the female input into the writing of music over the centuries has been restricted, both by the, misogynist possessiveness applied to all women's creative works, and by women themselves who have traditionally shied away from expressing their own creativity through the drive to maintain the family and work towards what are more practical ends.
What I fail to understand is how Mr Goodall managed to complete a whole episode of his programme about the evolution of the Blues from the awful working conditions endured by black men at the time, without referring once to the huge body of blues music attributed to female singers (and dare I say, writers) living out an unimaginably awful existence in brothels before the genre truly became popular.
I probably have unduly high expectations of the programme in that I do expect it to reflect both a balance of gender, and in fact to make a point of explaining why the creation and particularly the ownership of music has been such an obsessively male preserve - much more so than any physical activity - throughout history.
As a musician (but not particularly a singer) who daily still experiences this "blankness" when I talk to male colleagues about anything musical, from inspiration, harmonic sequence, or indeed music history, I experience this as a kind of torture - something I always felt we would have long ago left behind - this sort of unwritten assumption that music is for men. I also work in music with my husband, who is himself a musician. When I pointed out the bias of such an otherwise entertaining programme to him, he could see it immediately, and found it disturbing - but I am sure that if I had kept quiet, the penny would not have dropped! So I fear it is pretty much universal in the heterosexual community.
Never mind, Mr Goodall is very entertaining - and that is what make a good TV programme I am led to believe!