What can I say?

[french frank]

my earliest memory of primary school teachers playing 78s of The Nutcracker

I imagine that is what Alan Davey was imagining was common. It certainly wasn't common in my primary school. The only 78s I remember being played in my seven or so years at secondary school were Danse Macabre and The Swan (from guess what). Probably on the same record.

I don't mean that Radio 3 specifically taught me to like music. It gave me the opportunity to discover that I did like it and expanded on that with informative programmes.

[Richard Barrett]

I think that ignorance rather than inquisitiveness has been increasingly promoted by the institutions of society, essentially for political reasons, although what we're describing here is a side effect it has on culture and the arts. What might have been experienced in the 1970s as an irresistible attraction towards exploring an unknown universe of music might today more readily be experienced as elitist, as cultural snobbery; and the gradual restriction of higher levels of cultural education to the wealthier classes only reinforces this. One way out would be to populate Radio 3 with people who are honestly able to say "I'm an ordinary person with an ordinary education who nevertheless loves this stuff so there's every chance that you might also". As you'll know, 26% of BBC executives were privately educated and 33% of them are Oxbridge graduates (not the recently-departed Roger of course, but he seems to have been able to move in those circles as if to the manner born). Not that I have anything as such against people who've been thus educated, but such statistics are indicative of a division in society which is reflected in the various patronising and doomed attempts by Radio 3 to make contact with a wider audience.

[MrGongGong]

I don't dissent from the 'interested to learn' claim but it wasn't true in my case, I just liked music from my earliest memory of primary school teachers playing 78s of The Nutcracker, I liked music, simple as that and R3 provided it. .

This is a perfect example of what I was talking about before
This kind of experience, while very common in here, is unusual and the exception.

In spite of the (very good in many cases and admirable) efforts by the BBC and others people are put off classical music because the phrase "Classical Music" has come to mean boring musica for "old people". This has very little to do with what it sounds like and what the experience of listening is. I've banged on about this far too much anyway :peace dove:

Unless you stimulate curiosity then all there thing will amount to very little IMV

[french frank]

As you'll know, 26% of BBC executives were privately educated and 33% of them are Oxbridge graduates (not the recently-departed Roger of course, but he seems to have been able to move in those circles as if to the manner born).

Though RW did have an extremely privileged musical education - Chetham's and Royal Holloway to read music (and perhaps a young chorister in his dad's place). So we have taken a step or two in the right direction here …

[Richard Barrett]

This kind of experience, while very common in here, is unusual and the exception.

Right. And very often it was mediated by particular circumstances and/or particular individuals during a formative period. Not, I would guess, the kind of individuals who populate Radio 3 nowadays.

[gurnemanz]

"If you look back at the Third Programme, they were bringing high culture to a relatively mass audience but they could assume that their audience knew everything,” the controller said.

When I was growing up as a teenager early 60s, Aunty BBC hardly acknowledged the expressions of our culture. I was middle class, reasonably intelligent and being, I suppose, fairly well-educated at a South London grammar school. "High culture" counted as "square" for us, i.e. boring and dull. It was a big shock to the old-style cultural system when Times classical music critic William Mann reviewed the Beatles. I can hardly remember a single music lesson from my school, but well remember someone bringing in a Dylan LP (low culture?) which we played in the lunch break (I have bought just about every album of his since). By the time the BBC rather belatedly created a pop music station in 1967, limping along culturally after Radio Luxembourg and the pirates, I was just about to go to university and lose interest in all that stuff. I came to classical music because I was studying German and realised that Schubert, Wagner, Beethoven etc belonged in there. Anyway, Radio Three/Third Prog did have programmes introducing people to classical music – Talking about Music, Pied Piper. Why do that if the audience already "knows everything" and "do not need to have the ins and outs of classical music explained to them." ..... I did and bought Robert Simpson's Penguin books on "The Symphony" to find out - still got them and use them.

The very concept of "bringing culture" to people is fairly meaningless to me. People make their culture which sometimes finds expression through various art forms, which can be disseminated by ever more various means. Post–war culture against the background of the "global village" and mass media with its melting pot of disparate elements is not so conveniently categorised as high or low. Nothing odd for me about Roy Orbison being a Private Passion of Harrison Birtwistle or Hans Keller and Dmitri Dmitri Shostakovich being a football fanatics.

[ahinton]

The very concept of "bringing culture" to people is fairly meaningless to me.

I would argue that it's meaningless full stop; what I dislike about the much-paraded notion is the implication that it would't get across to most people unless someone actively "brought" it to them, by which of course I do not mean performances and broadcasts per se but the idea that such work has somehow to be spoon-fed to people who'd not otherwise be attracted to most of it just by listening.

People make their culture which sometimes finds expression through various art forms, which can be disseminated by ever more various means. Post–war culture against the background of the "global village" and mass media with its melting pot of disparate elements is not so conveniently categorised as high or low. Nothing odd for me about Roy Orbison being a Private Passion of Harrison Birtwistle or Hans Keller and Dmitri Dmitri Shostakovich being a football fanatics.

Quite; all this highbrow and lowbrow idea is largely about patronising and snobbish attidues, the former being more akin to furrowed brow, frankly. I think that I was lucky during those of my formative years when I'd become aware of the existence of music that no one ever told me what music was good for me and all that stuff so that I could instead just get on with finding what I could find and responding to it on its own terms without it being suffocated under the dead weight of imposed cultural baggage.

[Richard Barrett]

The very concept of "bringing culture" to people is fairly meaningless to me

Indeed. It suggests a top-down model of culture which is part of the problem, not the solution. But, in the current climate, people "making their own culture" is maybe a misnomer too because certain ways of making it are part of the bread-and-circuses operation while others are increasingly marginalised by not fitting into it. This affects not only how (for example) music is disseminated but also how it's made, and indeed whether it's made.

[french frank]

This kind of experience, while very common in here, is unusual and the exception.

Some generalisation here. It may be 'very common in here' while, at the same time, being 'very uncommon in here', depending on who you're talking about. How are you quantifying this? It wasn't Richard's experience. It wasn't mine. Was it your experience?

It's like the argument that declares any views to be 'unrepresentative' of the Radio 3 audience. How do you 'represent' an audience that would like more organ music, and less organ music? more early music and less early music? more jazz and less jazz? more contemporary and less contemporary?

I don't really buy the argument that the name 'classical music' is the base of the problem. So it's associated with 'old people': why? is it because it's corralled into a small obscure backwater and studiously kept away from anywhere young people are likely to be listening? Remember the 'Urban Classic' Prom which included two very short pieces of 'classical music' (Mosolov and Henze) which were the only pieces edited from the TV recorded broadcast on BBC Three. Chicken and egg?

[french frank]

http://www.theguardian.com/music/2009/apr/02/classical-music-children

[In my primary school no one learned an instrument. Primary school children didn't. 'Music' meant singing (and without sight-reading).]

But is it essential to learn an instrument to appreciate classical music in particular? Most children don't learn a musical instrument, do they? But they still appreciate music of one kind or another …

In order to enjoy plays, poetry or novels you don't have to be a playwright, poet or novelist.

[ahinton]

I don't really buy the argument that the name 'classical music' is the base of the problem. So it's associated with 'old people': why? is it because it's corralled into a small obscure backwater and studiously kept away from anywhere young people are likely to be listening? Remember the 'Urban Classic' Prom which included two very short pieces of 'classical music' (Mosolov and Henze) which were the only pieces edited from the TV recorded broadcast on BBC Three. Chicken and egg?

I think part of this problem is that the very term "classical music" is about as meaningless, misleading and useless as the concept of "bringing culture" (kicking and screaming?) to people who, it is assumed, would by implication not otherwise encounter it. Some people think of "classical music" as being represented by such as Haydn, Mozart, early Beethoven and early Schubert whereas others have a wider view of it, but what we're talking about here - or rather what some people are referring to when they talk of "classical music" in that pejorative sounding way - is almost everything that's not some kind of pop, rock, jazz, folk or other convenient pigeon-hole category; the prospect that Machaut and Xenakis might be thought of by anyone as "classical music" surely embraces its own absurdity (and, in any case, who would suggest that such "classical music" as Varèse, Lachenmann, Ferneyhough and Hespos, for example, is for "old people"?)...

[MrGongGong]

Some generalisation here. It may be 'very common in here' while, at the same time, being 'very uncommon in here', depending on who you're talking about. How are you quantifying this? It wasn't Richard's experience. It wasn't mine. Was it your experience?

What I mean is that for every person who was played the 1812 Overture (for example) in school assembly and then went on to love classical music for ever there is a much much larger group of people for whom the experience failed to connect AND (more importantly?) these people ARE the potential audience for R3 and Orchestral and other music.

My experience was that I discovered that I loved playing music and singing and going to gigs but was puzzled why my music teachers dismissed much of the other music that was happening at the time. I was banned form playing the school grand piano because I had discovered the blues and that definitely WASN'T music that should be played by grammar school boys on the Steinway. (It secondary school I was one of the boys who was allowed to operate the hifi and put on the "improving" music at the end of assembly but got into a bit of bother when I substituted a sound effects record for the intended disc ..... so was banned from that as well)

I don't really buy the argument that the name 'classical music' is the base of the problem.

I don't think that it is the "base" of the "problem" BUT the name IS a disincentive to many who actually LOVE listening to what you and I might term "classical" music.

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

But is it essential to learn an instrument to appreciate classical music in particular? Most children don't learn a musical instrument, do they?

There's still the tick-box Wider Opportunities, approved of by different governments, because it, er… ticks the boxes; i.e. most children do learn a musical instrument. A huge waste of time and money, in many instances, diverting resources from more worthwhile musical education projects.

[Honoured Guest]

Why not introduce someone you know well and care for to a well-chosen concert or recording or broadcast?

Personal recommendation has a much greater chance of success than mass education or broadcasters' policies.

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

Why not introduce someone you know well and care for to a well-chosen concert or recording or broadcast?

Personal recommendation has a much greater chance of success than mass education or broadcasters' policies.

This is very true. My father did the groundwork. School, the BBC and record companies did the rest.