Corporate values

Musical Times, Spring 2000 by Banfield, Stephen

Corporate values

STEPHEN BANFIELD

The BBC and ultra-modern music, 1922-1936: shaping a nation's tastes

Jennifer Doctor

Cambridge UP (Cambridge, 1999);

xii, 508pp; L50. ISBN 0 521 66117 X.

What image do we have of the early years of the BBC? One half expects Dr Doctors book to be a catalogue of quaintness and blunder, a feast of hilarious or actionable memoranda, a riot of pipe-smoking parochialism from the two Percys (Pitt and Scholes) and that almost literal army of supernumerary military and technical men - not a single woman features - who answered the adverts for a new-fangled type of job around 1922, sounding marginally more interesting than a residual government position in munitions or shipping. True, we are plunged headlong into a much more innocent age than ours, with its `musical appreciation' mission to the `plain man' of those early years, years in which the BBC Music Critic (Scholes) could prompt listeners to admit to `regarding a symphony as a mysterious contrivance of concentrated boredom', years when the Corporation could fail to spot the flaw in an attempt to woo an East End Jewish audience on Friday nights, years of Reith's belief `that enlightenment would lead to entertainment' through giving people what they would want tomorrow But the narrative is mainly one big surprise: that the BBC's music department dragged the nation firmly into the European twentieth century, thirty years before Glock (who has always been given sole credit), and did so with resolve and professionalism. Schoenberg is widely heard, Webern comes once a year to conduct the BBCSO (not just his own music, even though that includes the world premiere of his Bach ricercar arrangement), Berg, although taken up late, gets a wonderful studio performance of Wozzeck in 1934, and another of the Symphonic suite from the as yet unperformed Lulu that causes him to write to Adrian Boult:

how splendid the orchestra seems to have sounded... That this is happening in England especially - and not in my own country, where these pieces have not been performed and no one thinks of performing them - makes me doubly happy and proud!

And to whom is praise due? To Adrian Boult, but also to shadowy figures such as Pitt, Julian Herbage and Kenneth Wright, whom one never quite knows how to place. Were they musicians, musicologists, administrators, managers or impresarios? The fact is that they somehow managed to be all these things, and any suspicion that they may have shaped the nation's tastes desultorily in an alcoholic haze of old school tie and gentleman's club is firmly dispelled by the many quoted memos testifying to relentless hard work, endless bureaucratic justification to superiors, and a sustained artistic judgement that was progressive, altruistic (they didn't actually like Schoenberg but felt he should be heard), well-informed, non-partisan and determined. Edward Clark, admittedly, remains enigmatic, and the jury will probably have to stay out on him until we can see how his undoubted liability as an ISCM groupie, terrible office worker and uncertain conductor were offset not just by his utter belief in the Second Viennese School and the Corporation's (as well as the School's) ultimate belief in him, both amply demonstrated here, but by his work in other areas such as light music and the setting up of the BBCSO.

This is the point for mild lament that the book, still smelling strongly of PhD, takes such a narrow focus. We do learn a great deal about the overall workings of the BBC (it is good to have such a lucid description of the single-channel era and its modifiers), and about its contemporary music policy in general. But the case study complete with authoritative tables of works performed and some highly useful cameo biographies of the behind-the-scenes players, is an exhaustive one of the Second Viennese School, whereas the full picture we need of the BBC's influence on twentieth-century musical culture in Britain - which Doctor can undoubtedly give us if she cares to follow this up with a broader study - must examine Stravinsky, Hindemith, Bartok, Prokofiev, machine music, Les six, American composers, British ones (Vaughan Williams scarcely gets a mention), genres (popular, church, organ etc), music in revival, a longer chronological period, and something of the other media. There are so many overlapping stories to tell, as the curious bogey of `chamber music', now forgotten (though my mother still quails at the term), demonstrates. Whatever it was that the British public feared in highbrow music, from which there was often no escape

in the early years short of switching off the set, they enshrined it in that term, which appears to have been an amalgam of modern, early learned, abstract and catgut fears to which we have lost the key (or perhaps still need to confront).

But three cheers for Doctor's work nonetheless. The biggest surprise for me was to discover that there was really no such thing as the British musical establishment (a fine rebuttal to Stradling and Hughes, by the way). No conspiracy theory about national values stands up for a moment in the light of Boult's ferocious battle (as an internationalist he it was who conducted Wozzeck) with Hugh Allen and the obstructive Music Advisory Committee about whether to go for British or best. Boult and the BBC went for best, and we have a great deal to thank them for.