Radio shows about music give me good vibrations
One of the small sorrows of my life is that I can’t make music. As a dutiful middle-class child, I studied both the piano and the guitar for five years, at the end of which I still couldn’t read a note. When I attempt to sing in the car, my children cast me reproachful looks. And although I love listening to music of every kind, from baroque opera to hip-hop, I can seldom identify the instruments involved, let alone distinguish a tremolo from a vibrato.
I was hoping that Radio 3’s new series Inside Music might cure me of this musical dyslexia. Every Saturday, a different virtuoso chooses a selection of music and explains, “from the inside”, what makes each piece so special. In the first episode, for example, the percussionist Colin Currie explained how, in a Steve Reich piece for two marimbas (giant xylophones to you and me), both musicians play the same tune, but one lags “that very important quaver behind”, which means “you get these incredible textures that just, sort of, bring the ear into a stratospheric bliss”. Interesting stuff – though I wasn’t certain I’d recognise a quaver if I met it down a dark alley.
Four episodes in, I can’t claim to be much the wiser. Musicians, it turns out, are hardly better than athletes at explaining how they do what they do. They lean heavily on adjectives (“clean”, “flirtatious”, “warm”) that describe the end result without casting much light on the process. They rummage around in vain for the right words – and no wonder. Music so often expresses the inexpressible. Highly technical and difficult though it might be to create, it is received effortlessly, and by the heart rather than the brain. How does one explain this mystery?
It can’t be done – and it doesn’t really matter. What makes this programme a joy to listen to is the enthusiasm of its presenters. This week’s expert, the soprano Claire Booth, was a particularly excitable host. At times she tumbled over her words and almost shouted into the microphone, so urgent was her zeal. At other moments, she just swooned with pleasure. “Ooooooh,” she shuddered at the end of Ravel’s Le Tombeau de Couperin. “That was so perfect you don’t want it to end. At least, I don’t.”
Soul Music (Radio 4, Wednesday), goes in from the opposite angle. Each programme considers, not the execution of a piece of music, but its sentimental value to ordinary people. This is something that any of us, however musically illiterate, can understand. I remember exactly where I was when I first heard the subject of this week’s episode – God Only Knows, by The Beach Boys. It was 1981, we were staying by the sea with family friends, and their much-cooler-than-me son put Pet Sounds on the record player. As the French horns began their rising, melancholy introduction, I felt something new register in my 10-year-old heart: the pain that goes with love.
I’m not sure there has ever been a pop song that better expresses the awful conundrum of finding a soulmate. True love can only end badly: if not with divorce, then with death. Two of the contributors to Soul Music were witnesses to this truth. Erin Prewitt experienced it at first hand when her husband – and the father of her young daughter – was killed by a car while out jogging. Kim Lynch saw it in her parents’ long and happy marriage. Aged eight, she woke up to the sound of those French horns drifting through the sunlit house, and her father telling her mother: “This is for you.” Decades later, as Lynch’s mother was dying of cancer, she wrote a final love letter to her husband. It just said: “God only knows what I’d be without you.” Soul Music often makes me sniffle – but this time I was bawling.
Radio 4’s new series Instrument Makers began yesterday with a visit to Penrith, where master luthier Roger Bucknall makes some of the finest guitars in the world. The musicians Richard Hawley and Martin Simpson rootled around Bucknall’s workshop, marvelling at his collection of rare and ancient hardwoods, each of which creates a different tone. It’s always a pleasure to listen to perfectionists talking about their craft. But with no presenter to introduce us to each character, or help us keep track of who was talking, this often felt too muddled for comfort. Still, at least I now know what a “luthier” is. The education continues.