Soundtracks

I do enjoy a good rant, and a while ago there was an excellent one in the Guardian from Tom Service of BBC Radio 3 (the classical music and "serious stuff" channel), "Why Max Richter's Hamnet needle-drop left me cold". I haven't yet read the book or seen the film of Hamnet myself, and may well not do either (although my partner did rave about the book), but that's not the point. If you, too, are annoyed by the way certain pieces of music get exhausted by overuse as mere mood-enhancing soundtrack, then it's worth reading Tom's piece anyway. A clear case of "what oft was thought, but ne'er so well expressed" (Alexander Pope, Essay on Criticism).

It is surely regrettable that a handful of atmospheric pieces by the likes of Max Richter do get played to death as background music. I'd bet that many more people are familiar with Richter's "On the Nature of Daylight" [1] or his "recomposed" version of Vivaldi's Four Seasons, for example, than have ever even wondered about the name of the pieces or their composer. Oh, it's that nice music again! Ditto bits of Arvo Pärt, Phillip Glass, and doubtless many others I am too musically ignorant to have spotted; they have all just become oddly familiar ambient sounds. Such extracts from larger works are not easily identifiable, either, unless you're sufficiently nerdy to watch, pause, and read the credits at the end of a film or TV programme. With an advert or a radio programme, though, you're on your own.

A large part of the problem, of course, is the profoundly inconsiderate habit of composers and musicians asking to be paid for their labours. The cheek of it! Don't they know that content wants to be free? I don't have the figures to back this up, but – at least until the concept of copyright has been completely swept aside by AI engines that have gobbled up everything in sight, and can spit out instant collaged pastiches of "music" – I'm assuming it's cheaper and less risky to license an existing piece of music that will do the job reliably – that is, making sure you know how to feel about what you're seeing – than it it is to commission something new. You probably need to be on an A-list Hollywood-scale budget to contemplate hiring an established film-score maestro like John Williams or Hans Zimmer to ladle freshly-cooked emotional sauce over your cinematography. So I suppose that reaching for one of the usual off-the-shelf suspects is the better alternative to slotting in a few yards of cheap "on hold"-style muzak; but not by much, especially when you've had your feelings wrung dry by "On the Nature of Daylight" for the umpteenth time.

Amusingly, a few years back there was a campaign on BBC Radio 4's Feedback programme to stop Phillip Glass's haunting Facades being used as "atmosphere" more than, say, twice a week. Heh... I haven't heard that particular piece since, so perhaps some lazy people at the Beeb were shamed into doing something about it. Although to my mind all subliminal, mood-tweaking music is annoying, particularly on the radio, and the reliance on its use has actually been getting worse. It would be so much better if they would simply stop putting any incidental music at all burbling away beneath the voices on documentary programmes, for example. We really do not need an aural nudge to realise that this is the tragic bit, this is the exciting twist, but this bit is just narrative filler. I blame podcasts. You're better than this, BBC!

It is a curious fact that so much of the more accessible contemporary "serious" music (I don't know why we persist in calling this music "classical") actually already is, in effect, ambient mood music, perfectly suited to use as movie soundtrack. I'm sure there are good musicological reasons for this that I do not have the competence to unravel. As the conductor Sir Thomas Beecham is reputed to have said, "The English may not like music, but they absolutely love the noise it makes": assuming that by "like" he meant "understand", then guilty as charged. Perhaps many modern composers have seen where the big money is; certainly not in the tiny rooms where the rebarbative, academic work of ultra-serious composers – who clearly would rather die than appeal to a wide audience – is played by and to a hard-core of black-clad enthusiasts who do "understand" music.

Or perhaps it's more that the stranglehold that rock and pop have had on our personal soundtracks for half a century has held back our emotional maturity as a society, and moody minimalist noodling is all we can handle. Certainly, although I have tried to "raise" my own musical tastes, my deepest affections are still for the thoughtful singer-songwriters of my youth, not to mention the guitars, drums, and hysterical vocals of rock. So if I'm in the mood to crank my emotions up a few notches, I'll put on, say, the 6m 6s of Jackson Browne's "Sky Blue and Black" rather than an hour or two of Wagner, and if I want to lively up myself then Led Zeppelin's "Rock and Roll" will always do the trick, and I would never resort, I'm afraid, to a Chopin mazurka. In many ways I am just another middle-aged elderly dude in stretch-denim jeans and a Steely Dan tee-shirt, but – like those jeans, sadly – most of the music of my younger years is not really an adequate fit for or expressive of the person I have since become. But then neither is Max Richter.

I sometimes imagine established musical genres as a series of museums strung along a city road we'll call Musical Way. I enjoy visiting the ones dedicated to "classical", "jazz", "blues", "folk", and "rock and roll", but not as often as I once did: apart from anything else, tinnitus and partial deafness have robbed me of much of the pleasure of listening to music of any sort. But my point is that these are all museums: the music they contain has settled into certain shapes that – like a CRT TV, or a dial-and-handset telephone – are just right, a proper match of form and function, but one which now belongs to the past. I enjoy Renaissance and baroque music, for example, and admire the people who play it, even the "authentic instrument" crowd, but the fact is that no-one – not even the most enthusiastic enthusiasts – is still composing such music today. Once it was all brand spanking new, of course, possibly even intimidatingly strange – have you ever seen the films Tous les matins du monde or Gesualdo: death for five voices? – but is now self-evidently rather formulaic museum music.

Generally speaking, attempts to "update" an established, museum-grade genre are misguided: each one has evolved to do what it does perfectly, and its fans and followers will not thank you for meddling. Although as someone (Bert Jansch?) once said, there seems always to be a folk "revival" going on somewhere. It's a tradition! But I'm really thinking of things like orchestral re-renderings of prog rock, or rocked-up versions of Bach. That said, anyone who saw the wonderful series of British TV adverts for Hamlet cigars back in the day will surely have acquired a soft spot for jazz-lite interpretations of Bach, or at least that one, a perfect match of mood and musical underpinning. But I wonder how many TV viewers ever went on to discover the name of its performer, Jacques Loussier? [2]

It was jazz pianist McCoy Tyner who said, "Music is no plaything. It's as serious as your life". Well, for musicians, maybe; after all, it is their life. But it seems frustratingly difficult to find new contemporary music that is as serious as our lives, that can provide an adequate soundtrack for older folk whose decades of experience, enhanced emotional scope and, um, dodgy knees have transcended the simplicity of those long-ago days of dating, dancing and brooding in bedrooms. Maybe I'm just not looking in the right places? As I say, listening to music is no longer so high on my list of priorities. But, who knows, a bit further down Musical Way, further than I have been before, perhaps there is an unmarked building, which I will enter one day, cautiously – stop, hey, what's that sound? – and find myself instantly at home among a truly new musical tribe, one as yet without its own museum.

It could happen. But I'm more likely to realise that, dammit, this is just another Steely Dan tribute act! You go back, Jack, and do it again... 

1. That link is to Richter's official video btw. Think about it: a piece of "serious" contemporary music with its own video! Never mind music telling you how to feel about moving pictures, here we have moving pictures telling us how to feel about music...

2. For a truly awful example of "updating" see my ancient post MOR Alert, about some musical settings of Shakespeare's sonnets.