THEY DON'T MAKE THEM LIKE THAT ANY
MORE - - - Arthur Butterworth
This is a phrase often
heard in the tap-rooms of quiet country
pubs where curmudgeonly old men whinge
about how bad things have become since
their young days: They don’t build
motor cars like that any more. Grandmothers
are just as likely to be heard complaining
about modern super-markets and their
plastic-packed foods: "They
don’t know how to bake a decent loaf
these days". This could be
said about almost any kind of consumer
product, life-style, code of behaviour
or whatever other aspect of present-day
living warrants criticism.
This is all very well
and good, the older generation is entitled
to its - admittedly long-experienced
- assessment of the world in which it
now finds itself, but such views are
after all, only personal opinions; likely
to be quite justifiably challenged by
those of a generation or two younger.
As with everything else, the essence
of music has changed too. Some of these
changes are universally acknowledged
if not necessarily approved. What of
'pop’ music? There has always been some
kind of down-to-earth vernacular music
making: the bawdy songs of the medieval
tavern, now ardently preserved in those
serious-minded and precious dissertations
submitted as theses for a Ph. D in rarefied
university music departments’ ‘Early
Music’ studies. How does this kind of
popular music compare with music hall
of the 1880s, Jazz of the 1930s, or
the pop of the 1960s?
For those whose interests
are in more serious, intellectual music-making:
opera, chamber music, the concert hall,
there are just as many comparisons to
be mulled over. One such frequent topic
among the cognoscenti is to debate whether
there are now any "great conductors"
in the phrase: "like there used
to be". Just in the same way that
there is likely to be an everlasting
debate about the quality of local brewed
ales of the 1930s when compared with
modern canned beers, or the hand-crafted
motor cars of yesteryear with the flashy
computer-designed models of today. Opinions
differ, depending on ones own experiences
and tastes. Since these considerations
are so dependent on a personal view,
hard facts are not easy to ascertain,
if at all, but it might be worth investigating
how these inevitable changes have come
about.
Orchestral conducting,
it is recognised, is a fairly new phenomenon
when the long history of musical performance
is taken as a whole. The star-conductor
only began to displace the prima donna
in the musical public’s hero-worship
status towards the latter part of the
nineteenth century; perhaps little more
than a hundred years ago at most. However,
some of the world’s so-called "great"
conductors certainly made a world-wide
impression. How did they do it ? There
was no radio, no recording, no jet-setting
about the world; merely the live performance
in one place at a time, no radio or
television relays to world-wide audiences.
The prime reason for the development
of the conductor’s craft (not then really
an "art") was a prosaically
practical one: merely to ensure that
all the performers in a large and otherwise
unwieldy ensemble, could be kept together
in time and rhythm — not much concern
about interpretation of the way the
music was presented. Gradually, however,
his (in those days hardly ever, if at
all, "her") function changed.
In addition to co-ordinating the basic
pulse of the ensemble, it began to take
on a far more influential role: that
of "persuading" (if that is
the right word) the body of performers
to do so in his — the conductor’s —
very specific and personal way. He began
to stamp on the performance of the music,
no matter who had composed it, his own
interpretation of the printed symbols.
As players (perhaps
rather more so than singers) became
more technically precise in the matter
of keeping accurate pulse and rhythm,
the initial purpose of the conductor
became a trifle less important: good
players could - and still can - largely
manage without a conductor in the matter
of keeping time. The conductor’s essential
purpose subtly changed to that of unfolding
the music’s interpretation: moulding
the shape, intensity and length of the
phrases, exhorting the many disparate
individuals in the group to perform
in a unified way: the way the conductor
himself insisted that it be done.
Whilst orchestral players
have always maintained that a clear,
distinct and unambiguous beat is what
they appreciate most of all ("Just
you give us a clear beat, we’ll do the
rest!" is what, supposedly, the
hard-bitten, no nonsense London orchestral
players once told the young Vaughan
Williams), there is no doubt that as
time went on, conductors, or many of
them, began to be rather less concerned
with an automaton-like, regular and
faultless beat, knowing that their players
perhaps did not really need this kind
of spoon-feeding as regards maintaining
a steady and unanimous rhythm. Instead
they began to shape the music more expressively,
much in the same way that choral conductors
might do, (generally not using a baton
since they are more concerned with words
rather than symbols for rhythms of notes:
crotchets, quavers, minims). Now this
is fine if the music itself is expressive
and needs an imaginative interpretation,
and does not demand a rigid, unchanging
pulse.
In general, earlier
music, the baroque and classical style
requires a steady rhythm, whereas romantic
music on the whole does not invariably
lend itself to such formal rigidity.
The great conductors active at the end
of the nineteenth and earlier in the
twentieth century: Von Bülow, Hallé,
Richter, Nikisch, Furtwängler,
Toscanini, along with British conductors
such as Beecham, Wood, Harty, Boult
and especially Barbirolli were generally
"expressive" in their gestures
rather than precise automatons. This
is, admittedly, a very wide generalisation,
for each of them could be precise when
the music (such as Mozart) called for
it. But their greatness lay in their
personal communicative gifts; not only
with their players, or singers, but
with their live audiences. This is a
point that is often forgotten when comparisons
are being made. It is all very well
for record buffs to claim that such-and-such
a re-mastered recording from — say —1925,
or 1947 is a "collector’s piece"
and that present-day performers make
a poor comparison, but this ignores
the phenomenon of the live concert which
NO RECORDING CAN EVER REPRODUCE. Musical
performance is not just about the performer
bringing the printed notes to life and
then leaving it on record for evermore.
Musical performance is a two-way emotional
phenomenon: the performer communicating
and being responded to by the listener
at the very moment the music is being
performed. This is not necessarily an
overtly demonstrative thing, but it
is there all the same. (Pop concerts
demonstrate that this is very much the
case; hence the hysterical — perhaps
overdone — reaction of hordes of young
women at such "happenings").
Concert-goers by convention do not show
such highly-charged emotion until they
applaud at the end of the performance;
but this has not always been the case
- for example the near riot at the premiere
of ‘The Rite of Spring’ in 1913. No
matter how memorable and "collectable"
an historical performance might be considered
to be, there is nothing to compare with
a live performance.
In this sense, some
of the great conductors of the past
- even the recent past - who gave performances
within living memory - certainly do
appear to be greater than many present-day
travelling maestri whose performances
whilst technically slick, accurate and
polished so often lack that almost indefinable
quality of communication with the listener.
To be able to vouch for this with some
conviction, (or authority, if you like),
depends on having personally experienced
such performances. Younger musicians
and music-lovers certainly have opportunities
to listen to performances given before
they were born through the almost limitless
and easily-available re-masterings.
Thus they can claim to be able to make
comparison with present day performances.
In this sense of course, they are right,
but what is lacking on such re-masterings
is the irrecoverable sense of the original
performance: not just the actual sounds
made by the performers, but the undefinable
atmosphere of that subtle sense of occasion,
the response of the audience. In some
cases the present-day listener can justifiably
claim, of course, that on the evidence
of hearing a re-mastered recording,
that the standard of performance just
cannot match either the technical or
interpretative excellence of today’s
artists: this is absolutely a matter
of taste, and who can gainsay that?
However, the experience
such as this writer has had, of having
listened to, and taken part in, music-making
of many kinds over a period of more
than six decades, would seem to endow
one with a reliable means of comparison
between earlier performances and those
of today. As far as conductors go there
do appear to be differences of approach
and, perhaps technical abilities. The
earlier generation were perhaps not
so conscious of technique for its own
sake, but were certainly endowed with
expressive insight and warm, human imagination
which often appears to elude the present
generation of celebrated conductors.
On the other hand,
the younger generation are more slick
(and this is not meant in any derogatory
sense) with the baton, able to accommodate
every mathematical or mechanical rhythmic
complexity which so much contemporary
music demands of them. All this is achieved
with accuracy and assuredness that probably
would have been beyond many conductors
of earlier days.
These different musical
temperaments can best be illustrated
by something that happened some years
ago. A very long-established professional
orchestra which, even at that late date
in musical history, had never played
‘The Rite of Spring’ because the very
distinguished line of permanent conductors
it had had over the years, considered
it was too technically demanding, (even
though it had been given its premiere
in Paris forty years earlier and the
conductors themselves probably considered
it too awkward to conduct!) was eventually
able to perform this significant twentieth-century
work, through the ambition and cool-headed
determination of an amateur conductor,
who, being a very wealthy engineer and
business-man with a clear-cut analytical
mind, knew how to approach this demanding
work. His performance was assured and
competent: like the younger generation
of today’s conductors he was essentially
a technical wizard. However, in the
second half of his all-Russian programme,
he all but came adrift because he lacked
that expressive insight essential to
romantic music: he got lost when it
came to accompanying an imaginative
soloist! He was unable to mould phrases,
but seemed to regard the music as a
whole as an exercise to be applied rigidly
and automaton-like.
Herein lies some of
the differences between today’s whizz-kids
able to direct the most complex of rhythms,
and an earlier generation, who, although
sometimes a bit lacking in sheer technique
possessed an artistry often wanting
in many of today’s technically dazzling
but otherwise arid performances.
Arthur Butterworth ©
June 2004
