Classical music is a unifying tonic for a world awash with division and noise

The Proms show that concert halls are civilising spaces in which even silence speaks volumes

All over the British Isles, during the summer months, there are festivals devoted to classical music. Some have become integral parts of the national culture, like the Cheltenham Festival. Others remain small and experimental, like the festivals of Presteigne and Chipping Camden. If I had time and energy I would explore them all, since nothing delights me more than a provincial town dressed up for music. But there are books to read, articles to write, meadows to mow and animals to care for. Summer is a time when I cannot travel.

Thanks to the radio, however, I can attend the greatest summer music festival of all, that of the Albert Hall Promenade Concerts, the last remaining argument for the BBC, and one powerful enough to inspire spasms of forgiveness for the streams of leftist bigotry that otherwise issue from Broadcasting House. What is beamed on the airwaves from the Albert Hall might be a performance of a Mahler symphony; but what you hear in your rural retreat is both a Mahler symphony, and the mute astonishment of people who are hearing a Mahler symphony for the first time.

Our world is awash with trivial noise that some mistake for music. In restaurants, bars, public spaces, shops and even railway stations it is stuffed into every crack. Thanks to digital devices even the classical repertoire is being assimilated into this culture of ambient noise, to be heard rather than listened to. But that is one reason why live performances are so valuable, namely for their otherwise unobtainable by-product, which is the silence of the others listening next to you. In the concert hall music ripples across this pool of silence like moonlight across a lake. No studio recording can match the result. For the real performance is one half of a dialogue, the other half of which is the stillness of a listening crowd. That stillness – the stillness of 5,000 people gripped by a shared experience of beauty – comes across almost as vividly on the radio as it does in the flesh.

Sir Henry Wood’s aim in establishing the Proms was to deliver the masterpieces of classical music to the people, and to do so at an affordable price. That can no longer be the primary aim of these concerts. For better or worse, people come to classical music from recordings, and the main task for a public festival of this size must be to bring people out of their private spaces and away from their digital machines into the open society of music.

Classical music, and the symphony orchestra which is its champion, depend upon a form of life in which singing, dancing, acting, performing and discussing all play a part, lifting their participants from their ordinary routines into a place of meaning. The organisers of the Proms, under the leadership of David Pickard, have understood this, and seen that they must open a door into the wider reaches of musical enjoyment. Along with lunchtime chamber concerts and late-night extras, they have provided talks, discussions, singalongs, scratch orchestras and days of inspiration for family groups and the young. The emphasis has been on music as something that you do and on classical music as the heart of an everyday togetherness and a shared language.

This emphasis on the active and life-enhancing side of music is essential, if young people are to do the stretch exercises required by their attention spans and so prepare themselves to sit through a Bruckner symphony, a Mozart opera or a Beethoven quartet. Without those exercises the concert hall will cease to exist, and we shall lose a civilising space on which we all, directly or indirectly, depend.

The silence of the concert hall, its seriousness and its detachment from the world of “getting and spending” offer an extension and a substitute for what was once provided by the church. And loss of those things will be a loss to all of us, including those who have never set foot in a concert hall and have no intention of doing so. For they propagate a vision of community, a sense of being at home with others, which stands as a beacon above the waves of social-media spite and identity politics. They are the sign of the great things that still unite us, against the small things that increasingly divide us.

Opening a door into musical culture is not the only purpose of the Proms. In concerts of this kind, with their festive atmosphere and egalitarian style, it is possible to introduce rare, neglected or adventurous works that might otherwise appear like dustcovered relics, to be examined through learned monocles.

Among the high points this year have been two works by Lili Boulanger, including her alarming setting of Psalm 130 (De profundis clamavi), works which show that this talented young woman, who died aged 21 at the end of the First World War, might well have become one of the great 20th-century composers. We were also treated to a performance of Arvo Pärt’s surprisingly solid and structured Third Symphony, while Sally Matthews and the BBC Symphony Orchestra under Juanjo Mena performed two extracts from Samuel Barber’s Antony and Cleopatra. Barber followed Shakespeare’s text so closely that this opera never received the attention it deserves. In the days before surtitles, Shakespearean words above a fullscale romantic orchestra proved to be all but unintelligible. In operatic dialogue it is clarity that is needed, with the words stepping back so that the music can speak in their stead.

No composer understood the matter more clearly than Wagner, whose libretti are all the more poetic for the care he took to let the music shine through them. Another of this year’s high points has been a superb performance of Act 1 of The Valkyrie, with Esa-pekka Salonen conducting the Philharmonia and Robert Dean Smith, Anja Kampe and Franz-josef Selig in the three dramatic roles. For those opera enthusiasts who have been driven, like me, from the opera house by the excesses of Regietheater, and who can no longer bear to observe the monstrous ego of a producer bouncing like a deranged puppet between the audience and the action on stage, the only way to experience the great works of the operatic repertoire is in the concert hall, performed like this before an audience gripped by the music, with no distractions from the stage.

Listening to the Proms takes me back to my teenage years, when I would hitchhike from our semisuburb after school in order to join the queue. What I learned then, and what I have never ceased to believe, is that classical music is a form of knowledge – knowledge of harmony, melody, rhythm and counterpoint, of course, but also knowledge of the human heart. The great works of our tradition lead us to empathise with feelings that we might never otherwise know, to feel the logic with which nameless states of mind move from crisis to crisis and from crisis to resolution. We can never put this emotional knowledge into words. But music leaves its mark on us, in the form of an outgoing and universal sympathy. It acts as a kind of blessing, offering support in all our troubles, and endowing us, most importantly, with the courage to feel.