Quality | 2010.03.19
It took years. But I learned to love the riches of Radio 3 | Lynsey Hanley
Minimalism, jazz, folk, classical – it all seemed impenetrable when I was hooked on the three-minute pop song
Art is long, life is short; but not so short that you have to spend it cramming in culture. You can afford to take your time. Only recently have I learned that it\'s not going to go away if I slow down the pace and learn to appreciate it fully. When blues and ragtime mutated into jazz and rock\'n\'roll with African-Americans\' migration to the US industrial north, the music speeded up to match the speed of life. Halfway through the last century, the model pop song settled in at around three minutes, meaning you could squeeze in a few hundred listens a day if the mood took you.
Three minutes, then, was roughly the length of my musical attention span in my formative years. The chart rundown on Radio 1 may have lasted for three hours, but it was sliced into 40 short vignettes. The only music I knew was condensed, speedy, and soaring. The first time I tried listening to Radio 3 it felt like entering an examination room. It barely felt possible to concentrate for long enough to get to the end of a single movement, never mind a symphony.
It took me years to find the station remotely penetrable. For a long while I had no patience, my laziness supported by the thought that just because classical music – and world music, and jazz, and folk, all played on the station – existed didn\'t mean I had a duty to listen to it. But music is music: if you love music you will find something to love about almost any music. It just takes time. In the last fortnight I\'ve attended, and loved, two classical performances: Satyagraha , a Philip Glass opera about Gandhi; and one by the London Symphony Orchestra, which featured Glass\'s fellow American minimalist composer John Adams conducting his own work and that of Benjamin Britten.
It\'s through the music of Glass, Adams and Steve Reich, in particular, that many rock fans have found a way into the fear-inducing labyrinth of classical music, through their use of forms and themes, both musical and topical, that seem to form a bridge between the genres. Jazz is often the halfway point at which even adventurous classical and rock listeners stop, and go no further, with their musical explorations. The former look to jazz for its rigour; the latter for its apparent anarchy.
What you get with minimalism, however, is the chance to listen to little motifs, over and over as you would with a pop chorus or riff, changing and swelling with time. As with any relationship you have in life, it repays the investment of listening well. You can do that with pop music, too, but only if you regard quality as something that is detectable, and appreciable, across the board.
This week the critic Alex Ross ended his Royal Philharmonic Society lecture with a plea for taking the stuffiness out of classical music performance without compromising the seriousness inherent in all good music, saying: "But what if a rock band wants to make us think and a composer wants to make us dance? Music should be a place where our expectations are shattered."
Ross, in his column for the New Yorker , has done more than most to draw the attention of rock listeners to classical music, and vice versa, though he\'s a bit too keen on Radiohead – whose singer, Thom Yorke , never fails to give the impression of looking down his nose at all humanity – for my liking. Radiohead and Björk, Ross\'s favourite examples from the million-selling end of the avant garde, are by no means the twin apexes of intelligent rock music.
Dig deeper and you\'ll find innumerable bands dedicated to pushing their boats off the safe shores of four-four beats. The work of brothers Peter and David Brewis, who record mainly as the band Field Music but also as School of Language and The Week That Was , comes to mind. Listen to them and you\'ll hear McCartney-type harmonies, polyrhythmic drumming, elements of progressive and "post" rock, and the mesmeric repetition of minimalism\'s big hitters, Steve Reich in particular.
I doubt it\'s an accident that they\'ve got a song with the same title as Ross\'s unique history of modern music, The Rest is Noise – the first to treat classical music and rock music as equal partners in a 20th century of staggering musical innovation. I first heard them, by the way, on BBC 6Music . Something tells me that, if left alone or, even better, given an FM signal, this threatened digital station could become the Radio 3 of non-classical contemporary music.
To some that would count as damning with faint expectations, but if music of this quality was simply there , available, amenable to discovery whenever you\'re ready to discover it, more of us might begin to realise that we belong to all of culture, and all of it belongs to us.
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/mar/11/riches-radio-3-pop-song
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