This month’s Understanding Classical Music session looked at Leonard Bernstein’s Young People’s Concert No. 5, “What is Classical Music?”, filmed at Carnegie Hall over sixty years ago. It was the fifth of 53 programmes in the series.
Bernstein opened with Handel’s Water Music, declared it classical, and then asked why. Everyone knows it isn’t jazz, folk or rock, but the obvious labels fail. “Good” and “serious” apply to other genres. “Highbrow” ignores the millions of non-intellectuals who love the music. “Art” won’t do, since jazz devotees claim that too. “Orchestral” excludes solo, chamber and other forms.
His answer was “exact”. A composer writes down the notes, the instruments, and detailed directions for tempo and dynamics. Yet some composers were famously vague and left interpretation to conductors and performers. Bernstein’s examples, among them Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 21 and Haydn’s Symphony No. 102, showed that personality shapes the result, even if classical music allows less latitude than jazz. Popular songs, he added, are shaped far more by the performer and the setting.
Bernstein disliked the term, but noted that the “classical period” is usually dated 1700-1825: an age of culture and elegance in which art and music set rules and conforming to them meant perfection. Bach and Handel established those rules, as the fugal writing of Brandenburg Concerto No. 4 shows. Haydn and Mozart then added form, shape and refinement. The tune grew in importance, and Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro and Haydn’s teasing themes offered memorable, witty examples.
Beethoven closed the era. His music was loud and big, a “wall of sound” long before Phil Spector. Where Haydn and Mozart had toyed with emotion, Beethoven’s was raw and personal, and Bernstein illustrated this with the Egmont overture.
Romanticism followed, though many would still call Schumann and Tchaikovsky “classical”. Perhaps the best definition, we concluded, is music that has stood the test of time and will last for ever.
After the break we watched David Munrow’s 1976 video on flutes and whistles. Fashions and haircuts amused us, but the biggest laughs came from his exuberant playing of recorders and flute precursors some 500 years old. Whistle-type instruments are prehistoric (only bone ones survive), and Hamlet mentions a recorder. Easy to make and blow but hard to play, the recorder declined into a rustic folk instrument as true flutes emerged, perhaps influenced by pan pipes. He closed with a Schmelzer piece for recorder consort, lute and theorbo.
Our next meeting is at Startforth Community Centre on Friday 27 November at 10:00.
Report by Ian Royston