Your classical one-a-day
By Clemency Burton-hill
Clemency Burtonhill was recently asked by the manager of her local café to make him a playlist. They had been chatting, and he’d discovered she was a classical music broadcaster. “He said to me, ‘Oh my God, I really dig classical music but I don’t know where to start,’” Burton-hill recalls as we sit in the same café in Kensal Rise, west London. “He’d noticed when he stuck on classical music in the café, his customers said they were more productive and it chilled them out.”
When it came to making the playlist, Burton-hill, 36, was eminently qualified for the job: she trained as a violinist at the Royal College of Music and is now one of the UK’S leading arts broadcasters. She presents the BBC Radio 3 Breakfast Show, fronts the Proms coverage on television, and last year made a documentary on Yehudi Menuhin, of whom she was a student.
Her café playlist included “a lot of piano music, also some gentle chamber music. Some Liszt, Chopin, Rachmaninov….” In return, she was given free flat whites for weeks.
The manager was one of several people who, over the years, have asked Burton-hill for classical music advice. She became used to a familiar refrain: classical music was intimidating; they had never “understood” it. Now, she has written a book aimed at opening up that seemingly rarefied world. Year of Wonder: Classical Music for Every Day has an ingeniously simple structure: for each day of the year, there is a page-long synopsis of a piece of music. Readers can also download the playlist from Apple Music. The aim was to be “informative, informed and informal”. Burton-hill adds: “Anyone, irrespective of who they are, no matter if they’ve never had a piano lesson, has as much right to respond [to classical music] as anyone else. I feel so passionately about that.”
She and her diplomat husband, James Roscoe, have a three-year-old son, Tom, whom she cites as an example: “He loves Mars from The Planets by Holst because he’s obsessed with the planets and spaceships.” But for many of us who have outgrown that childish lack of self-consciousness, classical music can still seem scary and intimidating.
“Education policy has a huge amount to answer for,” says Burtonhill. “The axing of music services, the scarcity of instruments means that something that used to be a basic part of children’s day is now the preserve of an elite, because private schools are more likely to have the money to spend on music education than state schools. Of course people are scared. If they’re not taught it, if it’s not normalised, then they think they don’t have the credentials to listen. It comes with a whole pile of cultural baggage.
“I’m not surprised people feel alienated. People say to me, ‘Do I need to dress up?’ or ‘I’m worried I’m going to clap between movements’. They feel that if they don’t know the rules, they don’t belong to the club.”
For what it’s worth, Burton-hill thinks not being able to clap between movements is “only a convention” and welcomes efforts by some conductors to challenge this: “I think most are coming to see that any disruption or break in concentration caused by a burst of applause between movements is a small price to pay if it means new audiences feel properly engaged and included.”
Year of Wonder was written in the same spirit, the idea being that busy people could fit in a few minutes of music around their everyday routines: “If you’re someone like me and you can’t find time to do yoga or meditation or drink green juice, then just stick it on when you’re in the bath or on your daily commute or when you’re cooking the kids’ dinner, then breathe again.”
Music has always been part of Burton-hill’s life. She was raised by her single mother, Gillian, with her two older half-brothers, in Hammersmith, west London. Aged two, she was transfixed by a violinist performing at a Christmas carol concert on the television. Her mother thought it a passing fad. It wasn’t. Burton-hill badgered her for a violin. A friend recommended the Suzuki method, which applies the basics of acquiring a language to learning music at a young age.
“And my mother dutifully looked through the telephone book, looked up Suzuki and put in a series of random calls to motorbike dealerships,” says Burton-hill with a grin. “Finally she got through to an incredible woman called Helen Brunner who became my teacher.” Burton-hill loved the violin and could have easily gone professional, but was always too interested in other things. Indeed, she is one of those frustrating people who seems to be brilliant at everything. She read English at Cambridge, graduating with a double first, and then turned her hand to journalism, acting and writing two novels. The fact she’s also beautiful has led to mistaken assumptions that her professional success has come easily (it hasn’t) or
that she’s somehow under-qualified (she’s not). Broadcasting turned out to be a natural fit for her eloquence. “It’s the perfect combination of journalistic inquisitiveness, performing and interviewing people. It involves all of those parts of me.”
It wasn’t until she got to know her father, Humphrey Burton, in her 20s (she met him only a few times as a child) that she realised how much music broadcasting was in the blood: he is a former head of BBC Music and Arts who created the Young Musician strand she now presents.
Burton-hill was guided by her own tastes when selecting the 366 pieces for Year of Wonder, but she also wanted to give readers a basic grounding in classical music and sometimes chose a composition with seasonal resonance (Alexander Scriabin’s Étude in C Sharp Minor is allotted to Jan 16 because it “feels like a large glass of red wine”).
She also pays tribute to several often-overlooked female composers. Fanny Mendelssohn, sister to Felix, is included, as are Maria Malibran and Louise Farrenc, a 19th-century composer who fought for equal pay. In the blood: Burton-hill is the daughter of EX-BBC Music head Humphrey Burton
But Burton-hill says there is still a lamentable gender pay-gap in the arts. “There was a report last year in America that showed across the arts, women in general are paid vastly less than their male counterparts. It’s still an issue everywhere in the world. No industry is untouched by sexism. It’s invaded society for centuries.” What does she make of the recently disclosed gender pay gap within the BBC? “Clearly it’s just a huge problem and it has to be addressed.”
Some pop music plays in the background. Burton-hill identifies it as the rapper Drake, and draws parallels between Bach and hip-hop. “There’s no ‘right’ way to listen to pop music. You either dig it or you don’t. There’s no response that isn’t valid.” That’s what she wants to see happen with classical music.
“If you have ears, it’s yours!”