A music snob confesses Alexander Armstrong
Alexander Armstrong once mocked Classic FM but he was wrong – the station launched a joyful boom in classical music
What I loved about Radio 3 back in the olden days, when it didn’t give a toss about the youth, were the silences: socking great caesuras just left blank for quiet reflection.
The presenter, like a Swiss bank official in a film, would back off to the shadows to leave us alone with the treasure, shimmering back only once we’d quite finished.
It was poetic, seemly and unapologetically intellectual, which is why duffers like me adored Radio 3, flattered by its bone-dry erudition and smug because we’d learnt how to pronounce Boulez the proper way. You didn’t merely tune in. You committed and belonged; it was like going to church.
The only problem was that the national listenership in those days could practically have fitted into the Wigmore Hall. That was classical music’s lot.
The numbers just kept falling away. Partly because modern classical music sounded like things falling out of a cupboard; partly because the very things we classical music fans lapped up – the old-fashioned reverence and scholarship of the broadcasters – had all the glamour and allure of an advanced-level chess lesson to those on the outside.
It was starting to look like pretty thin gruel, especially when pop music’s shiny bright ice-cream van pulled up alongside, with its queue round the block and its suspension rocking all through the night.
If we wanted anyone to listen to our precious classical music in the future, we would have to go out and bring them in. And we’d have to stop being so bloody precious about it.
When Classic FM launched on commercial radio in 1992, classical music’s collective sphincter tightened. The thought of Smashie and Nicey striding into its marble halls, all scrubbed up and in dicky bows but with Mozart instead of Madonna in their record cases, sent blood pressures soaring.
In the event, Classic FM turned out to be a masterstroke. You might think I’d have to say that: I’ve been a presenter on Classic for six years and now host its daily morning show.
But then you have to consider that I too was a terrible classical-music snob – I loved the knockabout chumminess of pop radio but, when it came to classical broadcasting, my tastes were drier than a Senior Common Room manzanilla.
I was one of those, when Classic launched, who tittered into the backs of their hands at apocryphal tales of mispronunciation (‘That was Reckem by Forr’ after In Paradisum). In 2020, Classic has a weekly listenership of nearly six million. I’m not tittering now.
Classic goes out and parks its very own shiny ice-cream van next to pop’s now rather dented one, and people flock from far and wide.
And that is its extraordinary – and rather moving – genius. Classic understood from the beginning that people love what they know. So it lays out easy lures for new listeners: a cheeky Pachelbel Canon here, Zadok the Priest there.
While doing its utmost to keep newcomers soothed, it gently weaves in more new strands for them to form attachments to; maybe a film theme or a first pass at some Holst. Thus, in gradual layers, listeners find themselves on nodding terms with 20, 30, maybe 100 pieces of classical music, some of them on the way to becoming dear friends.
Yes, it’s a compromise – because it has to be. Works get filleted so that the juicy artichoke heart of the fourth movement is sliced away from the prickly leaves of the first three and served up alone. But does that really matter? Especially when several million people then go off and discover the complete work for themselves (and they do).
Who cares if the playlist includes Downton Abbey and orchestral Beatles covers alongside angsty Mahler? And if the music’s constantly touted as ‘relaxing’, well, these are just further siren songs to call in legions of new fans who discover classical music isn’t a hair shirt.
We’re not an exposed shoreline where anything might come in on the tide. We’re a lagoon; it’s safe. You can tune in late at night and know it won’t be harrowingly contemporary. We also have a partnership with nine of our very best orchestras (from the LSO to the National Youth Orchestra), The Sixteen and Opera North, which has brought phenomenal new revenues – and audiences – to live classical music all over the country.
Classical music is incontrovertibly in purpler health now than it has been for years, both on Radio 3 and on Classic FM. To get there, it has had to move out of its ancient citadel and embrace a world of jingles and charts, phone-ins and shout-outs. It’s not ideal but it is still wonderful.
So if ever I find myself hankering for the long, respectful silences of the olden days, I remind myself that classicalmusic broadcasting was a whisker away from becoming one long silence itself. And then throw up the fader on a righteous slice of fuguetastic Bach.