Radio 3’s listening figures are down – and it’s a good thing
As any habitual newspaper-reader will know, feckless millennials have ruined marriage, the workplace, the oil industry and potatoes. But now my generation has been given a chance to redeem itself: we might just save Radio 3.
When Alan Davey stepped down as controller of the station last year, that departure was arguably overdue. If I’d been in his shoes in 2019, when 500 noteworthy names from the arts signed a furious open letter attacking his programming, I’d have changed my name and fled to Bermuda.
Davey’s tenure was dogged by accusations of dumbing down, sidelining alternative music and generally making everything a bit too Classic FM. That last complaint came most loudly from one Sam Jackson, then-head of Classic FM.
In an ironic twist, the millennial Jackson – a fresh-faced stripling of 41 – has replaced him as controller. He took over in April, but radio stations are like oil tankers; turning them around takes time. Still, is change coming quickly enough?
The latest listening figures – released last week – aren’t encouraging. Radio 3’s audience is down, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing; it’s never aimed to reach everyone. But the audience of its fluffier rival Scala is down too. Classic FM had a recent bump, but its listenership remains in decline.
Why? Maybe because the three of them have spent the last few years trying to fight the online muzak-streaming on its own terms, which cannot but fail. To listeners who want soothing background noise, “radio” no longer means radio. As I type, one Youtube station of “radio beats to relax /study to” is being live-streamed by 45,000 people. That’s nearly a quarter of Scala’s total audience.
Chasing those listeners is futile, because they’re overserved already. Why listen to “Take 30 minutes out with a relaxing classical mix” – the title given to an episode of Classical Mixtape (Radio 3, Fri) – when various online playlists offer the same thing?
But Classical Mixtape is a Davey-era hangover. Jackson talks a lot of sense about what listeners want: “People want presenters who have knowledge and authority about the music that we play.” Yes. I don’t need more comedians, newsreaders or celebrity gardeners; I want to hear from people who have devoted their lives to music.
Step forward another millennial: Caroline Shaw. Her three-part series, The Colours in Sound (Radio 3, Sunday), is a beacon of what Radio 3 should be, and a coup for the station.
Shaw is a promising broadcaster – intelligent, intimate, informal – who also happens to be one of the most exciting composers alive.
I feel embarrassed not to have discovered her work till last year.
If, like me, you’re late to it, she was Radio 3’s Composer of the Week in January – listen to that edition on BBC Sounds. You won’t regret it. Her choral arrangements are thrilling. Her Partita for 8 Voices is extraordinary, drawing on everything from Byrd and Tallis to The Beach Boys.
She’s a very fine singer herself, and gamely uses that gift to demonstrate subtle variations between sung vowels, or even versions of the same vowel (the traditional English choral “ahh” versus the harsher “aaa” of American shape note singing).
The idea of a colour-themed show sounded gimmicky; it summoned memories of soprano Nadine Benjamin’s slightly irritating series themed around “emotions”. I needn’t have worried. Shaw’s is an exercise in listening closely, often approaching “colour” in the sense of tone or timbre.
She enthused about overtones, those phantom notes which “can often be heard most clearly in choral music”. In Monteverdi’s Vespers of 1610, for instance, the choir keeps “relentlessly” holding an open D chord, she explained, but as the instruments doodle around them in D major, you start to hear, as if from the choir, a “hidden” third which no one is actually singing.
As a practitioner, Shaw marvelled at the sheer mechanics of the “huge battery of percussion” in Messiaen’s Turangalîla-symphonie. It calls for up to 11 percussionists, “which is pretty wild”. Shaw herself loves mad percussion – she’s written for plant pots – but she’s never scored a piece for more than three or four percussionists.
Listening, I wondered what it might have been like to hear Benjamin Britten – who was younger than Shaw is now, when he began composing music for The Third Programme in 1946 – talk off-the-cuff about his choices and influences. I felt lucky.
Radio 3 has never been about background music. It’s about music that you sit forward to listen to, with love, fascination or horror – but with close attention, guided by a knowledgeable human voice.