Music - Dermot Clinch discovers a rare TV treat

We get used to the style of Channel 4's new classical music series. By the fourth programme, we positively expect the presenter to put a crash helmet on his head, climb into a sports car bearing the number plate LUDWIG 1, and burn rubber at the first mention of the name of Ludwig van Beethoven. Beethoven turned the piano "into a performance power-house", he tells us. The composer "gave the instrument the test drive of its life".

Howard Goodall's Big Bangs is less ludicrous than it sounds. In fact, by the fourth programme, we may have decided that it is one of the most interestingly conceived musical series of recent years. Howard Goodall has been chiefly known as the composer of the theme for Blackadder. He will now, surely, be remembered as the writer and presenter of the first hour-long programme to be shown on primetime TV devoted entirely to the subject of equal temperament and the earlier Pythagorean turning systems.

The series investigates "five seismic moments in western classical music" and matches volcanic visuals with red-hot, dodgy prose. Is equal temperament - that tuning system which divides the octave into equal semitones - truly "one of man's most audacious attempts to tame the elemental force of nature", on a par, say, with the atom bomb? Is the history of opera interesting because it is "stained with the blood of revolutions"? Was the invention of notation honestly "music's equivalent of the printing press, or sliced bread"? (Was music's equivalent of the invention of the printing press, in fact, not the invention of the printing press?)

When we remember how classical music on TV has traditionally been represented by men in black tie skewered to plush balconies reciting improbable operatic plots, the originality of Goodall's approach is brought vividly before us. With programmes on Notation, The Birth of Opera, Equal Temperament, and the Piano, he offers a look at musical history from within. Recording, he insists in his final programme, is the single most important musical fact of the past century. Since its invention, music has been at war with itself: the concept of "a living, breathing, organic condition, ceaselessly reinventing itself, never static, never finished" has been battling with the concept of music "as a thing, like a building, a poem, a statue", something we can lay our hands on, bung in our CD machine.

Channel 4 has poured money into the series. Goodall visits the opera in Shanghai, the Uffizi in Florence, the Moulin Rouge in Paris. He attends a gypsy wedding in Romania, passes tantalisingly through Arezzo in Tuscany, strings metal bars between pillars of the Acropolis in Athens. And how good it is to watch a presenter who can demonstrate how a computer running the Sibelius software program prints out a fully notated score of the simple piece he is improvising at the keyboard, even if it does mean sending him into the crypt of a Cistercian monastery in France to do it. The print-out is over-faithful: it reproduces not only the performer's errors, but his acts of human feeling as well.

Goodall's act of playing the "idiot savant" let loose in the world of culture is tiresome. But it is not often that we see programmes on television about how the invention of musical notation led to unforeseen consequences for the metaphysical status of the musical work of art. For that rare opportunity, we should be grateful.

"Howard Goodall's Big Bangs" is shown on Channel 4 on Sundays, 8 pm, from 12 March

Post your comment

Please note: you will need to login or register before you can comment on the website