Playing the Skyline (BBC R4)

[Master Jacques]

I don't know whether any Forumites have caught up with this excellent mini-series on Radio 4, or whether this is the right place to mention it.

However, anyone looking for an antidote to the anodyne gobbets of Vivaldi, Schubert and Cole Porter being served up this morning on BBC's so-called "dedicated classical music" channel would have had a marvellous time listening to this imaginatively conceived and brilliantly executed little series of three programmes, in which three "classical" composers and three "popular" musicians were commissioned by Radio 4 to each write a short piece evoked by a British landscape important to them.

We've had Courtney Pine and Anna Meredith's London, Kizzy Crawford and Gwilym Simcock's Port Talbot, and Highland/Lowland Scottish variants from Julie Fowlis and James MacMillan (today). The idea was to examine the compositional process from sight to sound, with comments from each of the composers on the "alternative" take from their colleague, and the results were fascinating and beautiful.

Today's James MacMillan premiere - a three-minute piece, appropriately entitled Playing the Skyline, for the RSNO's brass and percussion with schoolchildren from Cumnock - was a belter. It's repeated tonight, but you can Listen Again for the next twelve months.

How sad that we have to go to Radio 4 for this sort of imaginative approach to contemporary music as part of our "ordinary lives". Radio 3 has Cole Porter as composer of the week. What a camp, kitsch dereliction of duty. How can the R3 producers live with themselves?

[Serial_Apologist]

Villa-Lobos composed a piece based on the New York skyline, so nothing particularly new there; and I'm willing to bet that this has not been acknowledged.

[pilamenon]

How sad that we have to go to Radio 4 for this sort of imaginative approach to contemporary music as part of our "ordinary lives". Radio 3 has Cole Porter as composer of the week. What a camp, kitsch dereliction of duty. How can the R3 producers live with themselves?

Well, I've enjoyed hearing about Cole Porter's live and work today - no other station provides the Composer of the Week treatment, which is for me much more engaging than the 'talking heads'-style documentaries favoured by Radio 2. It's good to hear about this Radio 4 programme, and I agree it could have been on Radio 3 - e.g. would have made a good Proms interval, post-concert feature - but there's nothing wrong with this week's COTW, and I'm quite sure the producers of it can live with themselves.

[jean]

Didn't listen as carefully as I meant to, so I may have got this wrong.

Two different approaches seem to have been used - one, an attempt to represent the emotional charge of the landscape concerned, an approach familiar from centuries of 'programme' music; the other a transcribig of the actual line of the bulidings that appear on the horizon, as though it was itself a procession of neumatic notation, an approach familiar from a few generations of conceptual visual art.

Which works best?

[Master Jacques]

What was fabulous about this series was the insight into the variety of means a composer might use to recreate a physical landscape in sonic terms - six ways to skin the cat, and all six pieces really rather good at the end of the day. Fascinating stuff, and it's interesting that it took Radio 4 - not Radio 3 - to do it. This is one genuine way to "normalise" musical experience, through analysis of the contemporary creative processes; and it made a shaming contrast with Radio 3's timid, cosy maternalism.

[Master Jacques]

but there's nothing wrong with this week's COTW, and I'm quite sure the producers of it can live with themselves.

"Today ... Cole Porter at the Circus!" Is there really "nothing wrong" with that? It is not Cole Porter per se, of course -though he ought to be on R2 not R3 - but the flippant, superficial and thoughtless approach to music - any music - which is what's "wrong" here, in all bar one or two bastions of quality (CD Review, Music Matters...)

And yes, the R3 producers (and procurement managers) should be ashamed that they are leaving R4 to do the job that the "dedicated music channel" ought to be doing, to support contemporary composers. A handful of Prom commissions is fine, but it hardly "connects" with a larger public, in the way that Playing the Skyline has managed to do.

[pilamenon]

I agree with what you say about good ways to connect with new music totally - though I can see why it's on Radio 4 as well. But I think there are far worse things going on on Radio 3 than the one you cite. Composer of the Week, by its signature presentation and style, for me makes every musical subject and genre covered by Radio 3 worth listening to - and broadens my horizons in the process. I concur about the "anodyne gobbets of Vivaldi and Schubert" far more!

[Master Jacques]

I don't mean to turn this into a lambasting of Composer of the Week (though I do feel that the butter has got into the works there as well!) but this excellent Radio 4 series highlighted for me an approach which R3 ought to be thinking about, if they are seriously interested in doing the job they are chartered to do: which is to interest new listeners in music, especially what's going on in our own time. Stuffing them with middle-brow gobbets of Vivaldi, Schubert and (with respect) Cole Porter is both lazy and desperately unimaginative. There's so little on R3 these days which is aimed at intelligent young people, in particular. Very depressing.

[jean]

I don't mean to turn this into a lambasting of Composer of the Week...

But you are.

Couldn't we stop talking about that and discuss this programme instead?

[Master Jacques]

But you are.

Couldn't we stop talking about that and discuss this programme instead?

Well, as I introduced the topic, I thought that's what I was doing. And by the way, my initial reference to Cole Porter was aimed, not at Composer of the Week (which another poster brought up) but at Cole Porter's presence on the Breakfast Show - at the same time as we were getting a MacMillan world premiere on Radio 4.

That's what seems perverse: that Radio 4 is doing the contemporary music premieres, and in its popular morning slot too, when Radio 3 prefers to schedule Cole Porter. All of which, Jean, has precisely nothing do with the latter's presence on Composer of the Week.

[jean]

...And by the way, my initial reference to Cole Porter was aimed, not at Composer of the Week (which you brought up)...

Not me.

[Serial_Apologist]

But you are.

Couldn't we stop talking about that and discuss this programme instead?

I think the point is that if Radio 3 does not introduce its musical brief in the ways that it merits, (and I would exclude COTW from this criticism generally) the newcomers it purports to be bringing in will not be able to make head or tail of programmes such as this on Radio 4, for example, because they will have had no consistent induction or references to go by.

[jean]

I'm aware of that, of course.

But if we do it on every thread, programmes like this don't actually get the discussion they deserve in their own right.

[Master Jacques]

Not me.

Indeed - apologies! and I've edited my post to make it more accurate.

[Master Jacques]

I'm aware of that, of course.

But if we do it on every thread, programmes like this don't actually get the discussion they deserve in their own right.

Agreed. Except that, in this case, part of my amazement came from the fact that Radio 4 can get it spectacularly right, as far as bringing contemporary music to a much wider audience is concerned, whereas Radio 3 seems incapable of doing anything nearly so imaginative (or interesting!)