Non-stop wallpaper

Spectator, The, Dec 11, 1999 by Phillips, Peter

I have so far managed to see only one of Andrew Graham-Dixon's programmes on Renaissance art (BBC 2, Sunday) - the most recent one, dealing with Mantua, Milan, Urbino and Ferrara. I was careful not to make the mistake of expecting a rerun of Civilisation and had no cause for disappointment, even though at least twothirds of what featured on this programme was mentioned by Clark and, in the case of the Palace of Urbino, drew out of him some of his most memorable phrases. GrahamDixon is more tightly argued and less distractable than Clark. Above all, he is only talking about the painting and it is clearly intended that little should interfere with what he says - neither the encompassing cultural world in general terms nor the music which is played as backdrop to his speeches. This latter I found astonishing.

It was clearly intended that the music should be unobtrusive. Almost none of it had any intrinsic merit; indeed much of it was no doubt pieced together specially for the programme, so there was no question of it taking the foreground in its own right. Musical artworks of the period, so far as I could tell, were only used twice: a small section of a Monteverdi madrigal was played to accompany a shot of the Palace of Mantua and a bass solo from a Monteverdi opera used to accompany a view of the Palazzo del Te. After everything that went before the quotation from the madrigal, I was surprised to hear this, but it was so obvious a reference that even in this context it could not be resisted. True to the thinking behind the programme, however, Graham-Dixon spoke over it, rendering it almost inaudible, and so it, too, might just as well have been a workshop job. The opera extract was more prominent if very brief.

Otherwise the music came over as being New Age and virtually non-stop. The first lengthy silence came after about 47 minutes and lasted 90 seconds. It was like sitting in a pub when the disc on the hi-fi runs out of material, breathing a sigh of relief whilst bracing oneself for the inevitable replacement of the first disc with a second. On this programme the music was equally trying to set an atmosphere, which I gauged to be one of timeless wonder. At any rate this is what I wearily put up the barriers against when I hear electronic drones and vibrato-full sopranos waiting into fat acoustics. Much of the time it was either a solo voice with drone and ethnic percussion or flutes descanting over repeating basses. A representation of a 'grenade exploding above a keyboard' in Federico da Montefeltro's studio was accompanied by violins sliding around in reverberant dissonance employing a harmonic style trapped somewhere between Messiaen and Giles Swayne. The phrase 'to create a contemplative state of mind' was lifted with indistinct choral meanderings reminiscent of Swayne's Cry.

So I found the music both distracting and inappropriate and thought it a tactical error. But then being a pro I suppose I would, even if I am not prepared to argue that a wonderful opportunity has been lost to promote Renaissance music on television. I am not convinced that programmes about paintings are necessarily a good showcase for the other arts: even though Clark did in fact manage to cover artistic worlds more than just his speciality, he sometimes miscued the music badly, and I can imagine that the planners of GrahamDixon's series simply decided to duck the whole problem of what was just right musically, and in which style. There is a minefield there (which deserves its own programmes).

But music, however unobtrusive and blameless, has a meaning. Even in the pub, perpetual background sound which has audible structure will make some impact; all the more will it do this with masterpieces by Botticelli in the foreground. The effect of the music chosen for this programme (untitled and unacknowledged in the credits) was to annoy. Since none seemed to fit the bill, I wondered for the umpteenth time - just as in a public place - why it was thought necessary to have music at all. People seem to get nervous with silence, become restless and need to be courageous to face it. Music, for people who don't care much about it, is the easy way out. But then there wasn't silence on this programme. There was GrahamDixon's thesis, for which the paintings filled all the available space perfectly well.