It is Christmas Eve, 1906.
And from Brant Rock, a wind-lashed signalling station
in Massachusetts, a momentous sound is heard.
It is the first ever wireless broadcast of a piece of recorded music.
Handel's Largo, transmitted by an intrepid radio pioneer,
Reginald Fessenden.
From these small crackly beginnings, a global industry would soon grow.
This historic broadcast ushered in a new age for music.
An age where music would belong to everyone, everywhere,
often, as it was in this case, enjoyed completely free.
Radio and its close relation, the gramophone record,
had a completely unexpected effect.
While many hours of classical music were recorded and broadcast,
most of all, radio and records helped local forms of folk music
find a global audience for the first time in history.
Especially American folk music based around the blues.
The invention of new recording techniques and the rise
and rise of the popular music that benefited from them
is the big story of the last hundred years of music.
Thanks to radio play, gramophone records
and now the internet, popular music has swept the planet.
The advent of free to air music for the world's grateful millions
would change the value, purpose and style of music more
dramatically than any other development in history.
The popular age, as it rapidly became, brought undreamed of musical rewards to humankind.
But it is also thought by some to have brought about the near
extinction of what came to be known generically as classical music.
But is it true that classical music has been suffocated in its sleep?
I would say not. I think what has happened is more interesting.
Classical music has changed and morphed into other forms.
Its DNA is everywhere to you care to look in the popular mainstream.
Not that the classical music world always welcomed this development.
This was the highbrow critics assessment of the musical
climax of a concept that took place in New York City in February 1924
and Aeolian Hall, a premier venue for serious symphonic music.
What happened, though, was that the event was hijacked.
A genius premiered a work he had composed in five weeks
and by the end of its 14 minutes, music's goalposts had been irrevocably shifted.
The point of the concert was educational, to demystify
the classical shrine of Aeolian Hall for people who liked jazz.
And to show connoisseurs of classical music that the upstart genre of jazz
could work in a proper concert hall setting.
As if to say, one day jazz will grow up
and will be respected like Beethoven.
The reception given to Rhapsody In Blue encapsulated
the polarised attitudes of the next 50 years.
High art critics panned it, the audience loved it.
Great music has a way of finding its voice whatever snobbery throws at it,
and what happened next is that Gershwin's first
recording of Rhapsody In Blue sold one million copies a year.
Rhapsody In Blue is now one of the standard pieces in every
orchestra's repetoire. An out and out modern classic.
What the 20th century teaches us is that if you give music
a nationality, a frontier, a class, a racial bade or a stylistic label,
it will break out of it.
Spectacularly.
Even Rhapsody In Blue itself is difficult to pin down -
is it classical music or jazz or both?
Just as there is no one thing that can be labeled classical music,
the same is true for many popular genres. Jazz, perhaps most of all.
From the very beginning, jazz as a style eluded definition,
so various were its manifestations in different places.
It is hardly surprising that a genre which defied form,
which chose improvisation over the printed page,
which allowed maximum freedom and looseness in its harmony,
its interpretation of melody and its rhythm, should have
splintered into 100 colourful shards on impact with the world.
In the '20s and '30s, the records of Louis Armstrong,
Fats Waller, Duke Ellington and many others were eagerly listened
and danced to across the world.
But there was another aspect of jazz that set a tone for popular music
in the 20th century.
From its earliest days,
it appeared to belong equally to musicians of all races.
Bucking the segregated trend of the '20s and '30s society.
But while popular music went from strength to strength,
classical music seemed to be losing its way.
It began the 20th century with both prestige and popular appeal.
How fast things had changed.
As late as 1926, the unveiling of a new piece by the last great composer
of Italian opera, Giacommo Puccini, was a media event on a global scale.
Turandot was performed to huge audiences and its standout number -
you may have heard it - became an instant standard.
# Nessun dorma
# Nessun dorma... #
With the exception of a handful of later works by American composers
John Adams and Philip Glass, newly written operas
became more or less invisible to the population at large.
Even as the audience for revivals of old operas grew and grew.
A newly composed classical opera in the late 20th century
was like Beluga caviar.
A shockingly expensive product from an endangered species, accessible
to a very few privileged people and all but irrelevant to anyone else.
So how did this come about?
Avant-garde classical music began to set out on a radical new path
in the early years of the 20th century.
All the arts, as a response to the sheer speed
and intensity of modern life, sought to abandon
representational forms in favour of abstraction.
Just as modern life became more and more fragmented,
bewildering and unsettling, so too, cutting-edge classical music
became jagged and discordant to reflect the changing world.
Composers like Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg and Anton Webern
began to abandon the traditional building blocks of Western music.
They put in place a new system variously called atonalism,
12 tone or serialism.
Serialism aimed to do away with the sense of home in any given
piece of music by treating each of the 12 notes in the Western scale
as equals, not allowing any of them to be repeated,
so your ear could not latch onto one of them as the centre of gravity.
It was as radical a formula for music as it would be
for a language, if you've ruled that no letter
of the alphabet could be used more than once in a sentence.
Schoenberg's complicated theoren was only one possible way forward
for experimental classical music as the popular age gathered momentum.
Another option was to become the aural manifestation of the surreal,
and give up on any definable meaning.
The term "Surrealists" was first used to describe a 1917 ballet
staged in Paris.
"Parade" was a clownish concoction cooked up by composer
Erik Satie, painter Pablo Picasso and writer Jean Cocteau.
Parade was not without its innovations.
These included the juxtaposition of seemingly unrelated scenes,
the disruption of any expectation of a narrative
and its integration, against the composer's wishes as it happens,
of nonmusical side-effects into the score.
The rhythmic qualities of these sounds from type-writers to
factory sirens were to be exploited
time and time again as the 20th-century wore on.
But the timing of a buffoonish circus piece like Parade,
May 1917, seems now tasteless and incomprehensible.
At the very same time that this tomfoolery was
unfolding in Paris,
just 100 miles away on the Western front, 120,000 French lives
were being lost in one of the bloodiest battles of the Great War.
How cut off from reality had high art become that anyone deemed
the slapstick camp of Parade,
which has all the hallmarks of a hastily thrown-together student review,
an appropriate public offering while this was going on?
But there was another way for classically trained composers to go.
They could find common cause with the popular, and by so doing,
cross-fertilise their idiom with the commercial mainstream.
This alternative route for classical composers can be seen
emerging in the 1920s in Germany. Here, the hangover from the First World War was felt most acutely
with hyperinflation, mass unemployment
and running street battles between communists and fascists.
To address the political malaise,
an edgy, politically charged cabaret style was born in Berlin.
The composer who gave the style its hallmark was the classically-trained Kurt Weill.
He shot to recognition in 1928 with an opera/musical/play written
with the communist playwrite Bertolt Brecht.
It was the Thruppeny Opera.
Set in the criminal world of 18th-century Soho, complete
with thieves, beggars, prostitutes and pimps,
the Thruppeny Opera's message is that the corruption moneygrubbing
violence and cynicism of the underclass is really
no different to the wider values of capitalist society.
It begins with a murder ballad introducing the central character,
the charismatic murderous gang boss, Mackie Messer,
whose name in English was Mack The Knife.
The Thruppeny Opera of Trainspotting for the late '20s,
presenting to its middle-class audience a grimy, no-frills
vision of the alienated underclass.
In Depression-era Europe, it clearly struck a chord,
since by the time Weill fled Germany for the States in 1933,
it had been translated into 18 languages
and performed more than 10,000 times.
Here was a form of accessible music in the shape of a drama that
did mean something
and had plenty to say about the times it was written in.
What is remarkable is how, during the depression era
and the rise of fascism, it was popular music rather than
"serious music" that became the voice of conscience.
Even in the musical, so often a byword for escapism.
# I love you, Porgy
# Don't let him take me... #
A key example of musical with a message is Porgy And Bess by George Gershwin,
with lyrics by his brother, Ira, and playwrite DuBose Heyward.
Set in a poverty and drug-stricken African American fishing community in the South,
Porgy And Bess was notable for its sympathetic
but clear-eyed portrayal of underclass life.
The fact that three white men wrote Porgy And Bess has caused unease ever since it was written.
It is fair to say though that no such controversy prevented
some of the greatest African-American artists of
the century from recording versions of its superbly crafted songs.
# Summertime
# And the living is easy... #
# It ain't neccessarily so
# It ain't neccessarily so... #
What Gershwin's songs were doing was redrawing
the parameters of what subjects popular songs might tackle.
The challenge was taken up with unforgettable power,
in Strange Fruit, recorded by Billie Holliday in 1939.
It wouldn't generally be found on any music degree syllabus,
but it may be one of the pieces of music with the greatest individual impact of its time.
# Southern trees
# Bear strange fruit
# Blood on the leaves
# And blood at the root
# Black bodies swingin' in the southern breeze
# Strange fruit hangin' from the poplar trees... #
Strange fruit, written by a Communist poet,
Abel Meeropol, is thought to have been prompted by an unbearably
graphic newspaper photograph of the lynching
and hanging of two black men in Indiana in 1930.
A horror that was a disturbingly common occurrence in America
at the time, but not one that anyone had yet thought to describe in song.
# Scent of magnolia
# Sweet and fresh
# Then the sudden smell
# Of burning flesh... #
Holiday's hunting performance
and the distressing poetic text of Strange Fruit marks the moment
when popular song could no longer be dismissed as frothy
commercial fluff, when it began to assume a more mature rule
in society's examination of itself.
# For the sun to rot
# For the tree
# To drop
# Here is a strange and bitter crop. #
APPLAUSE
Classical music went through a stage in the 1920s
when composers took to rummaging around in music's back catalogue,
mischievously writing pastiche in the style of previous eras.
It was as if experimentation
and modernism had simply run out of steam,
to be replaced with the musical equivalent of repro furniture.
But then a startling, extraordinary new sound was heard and it came
from a composer who had form when it came to musical revolutions.
It was Stravinsky, the lord of misrule himself,
who took a leap in the dark and broke free, both from the zany
world of the surreal and from ye olde worlde of pastiche.
He gave a bracing new direction to the classical tradition.
MUSIC: LES NOCES by Igor Stravisnki
As is often the case, the most original, daring and influential
works are ones that keep up on the world, apparently out of nowhere.
MUSIC: LES NOCES by Igor Stravisnki
One such is Stravinsky's complicated 1923 ballet, Les Noces.
Staged in Paris, based around a Russian peasant wedding.
At times, the role of the voice is like the modern technique of rapping.
The nature of the rest of the ensemble is more startling, still.
A large battery of percussion instruments including four pianos.
The resulting jangling, sparklingly dissonant sound which is brittle,
full of edgy attack and a kind of out-of-tune resonance, would have
been literally unimaginable, even terrifying to audiences of the day.
One contemporary critic described Les Noces, the Wedding Night,
as "enough to convert intending brides and bridegrooms to celibacy."
But to other composers, this sound seems startlingly fresh,
like someone had uninvented the Symphony Orchestra
and started again from scratch.
The sound world of Les Noce is quite simply the most
imitated of all 20th-century combinations,
outside the fields of jazz and popular music.
By the time Les Noces was written, Mussolini had taken power in Italy
and the Nazi Party was beginning its rise to power in Germany.
When Hitler became Chancellor in 1933,
musical works written by communists, like Bertolt Brecht, Jews,
like Kurt Weill and many Broadway composers and African-Americans,
the creators of blues and jazz, were banned in the Third Reich.
Labelled as "degenerate music."
So how did classical composers respond to the Nazis cultural policies?
Some were lucky enough to escape,
the few who stayed put challenged the regime.
The nearest thing classical music had to a true dissident
in the 1930s was the Hungarian modernist Bela Bartok,
who forbid all performances or broadcast of his music in the
Third Reich and fascist Italy, a gesture which impoverished him.
He actually asked for his name to be added to
a Nazi list of so-called "degenerate musicians,"
Intended for public ridicule and ignominy.
To continue having their music performed,
composers who remained in Germany had to stay on the right side
of the regime, even if they didn't always actively support it.
For the now elderly composer Richard Strauss,
the most prestigious cultural figure in the Third Reich,
his struggle seems to be confined to how to handle the Nazi bigwigs
so that they would leave him alone.
This was clearly more important to him than tackling them,
for example, on the disgusting racial policies.
In his own field alone, Jewish musicians had been
ejected from orchestras, universities and conservatoires,
and the musical Jewish composers, alive or dead, had been prohibited.
One composer who had no qualms about working uncritically with
the Nazi regime wrote what has become a much loved
staple of the classical repertoire.
Carmina Burana had its tumultuously successful
premiere in the Third Reich in 1937.
Orff accepted the Nazi government's request to
replace the Jewish Mendelssohn's incidental music to a Midsummer Night's Dream.
He appeared powerless to intervene on behalf of a close friend who was
tortured and executed by the regime, and he lies to the Americans after
the war about having been involved in the resistance, which he was not.
The reverse side of totalitarian coin,
the Soviet Union, was just as eager to control the arts.
From 1936, Stalin's cultural henchmen recklessly prohibited
any sign of modernism in music.
This hardening of official attitudes caused huge
difficulty for Russia's leading composer, Dmitri Shostakovich.
A modernist at heart,
after one of his works was officially labelled "chaos not music,"
he had little choice but to write in the approved Soviet manner, or
run the risk that he and his family might end up in a prison camp.
But then, when Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, the
agendas of Stalin and his composers were, all of a sudden, newly aligned.
Composers' purpose and cause became patriotism.
After several decades of dislocation from the mainstream audience,
leading composers once again began to write music that engaged with
the musical tastes and hopes and fears of ordinary people,
living through the agony of war.
Perhaps the most dramatic example of a large-scale work of patriotic
intent was Shostakovich's Leningrad Symphony, premiered in March 1942.
Dedicated to the people of his home city,
at that time ednuring an apocalyptic siege.
The siege of Leningrad, modern-day St Petersburg,
cost more lives than any other battle of the war. So desperate were
the conditions, that in the winter of 1941, there were outbreaks of cannibalism.
A score of Shostakovich's seventh Symphony was
dropped by plane into the city and a scratch orchestra was assembled to
broadcast its message of patriotic defiance.
It was played on loudspeakers throughout the devastated city,
as well as outwards to the enemy lines, and performed
and broadcast all over the Soviet Union.
Before retreating from Leningrad in January 1944, German troops
were ordered to loot and destroy its historic galleries, mansions and
palaces, and a huge haul of treasure was taken back to Nazi Germany.
One cultural item they could not pillage was Shostakovich's seventh Symphony, Leningrad.
In the USA, musical patriotism took a rather different form.
# I'll be marching to a love call
# While you're waiting for me... #
Once America entered the war, at the end of 1941,
a massive hearts and minds operation was put in place to educate
and entertain both troops and the public.
# ..even though we're apart
# For I'll be marching To a love song
# The love song in my heart. #
And it wasn't just popular music that was pressed into service.
One of America's leading composers, Aaron Copeland,
captured the public mood in his 1944 ballet, Appalachian Spring.
Audiences adored Appalachian Spring,
with its touching innocence and optimism embodied in its
cleverly integrated 19th-century Shaker hymn tune, Simple Gifts.
Appalachian Spring stirringly expects American victory in the war,
and the ushering in of a better age, reflected in the sincere
and uncynical values of the pioneer rural communities it celebrates.
Here it is, danced by the choreographer who commissioned it,
Martha Graham.
Like Stravinsky's Firebird
and The Rite Of Spring, Prokofiev's Romeo And Juliet or Ravel's Bolero,
all riotously successful,
Appalachian Spring was composed as a ballet score.
Why is this significant?
Because it's hard to imagine what 20th-century classical music
would have done without dance.
It was as if the distraction of telling a story,
reaching an audience or submitting to the structure of another
art form, liberated composers from the necessity to impress academics,
musicologists, or worse still, each other, with musical naval-gazing.
Don't get me wrong,
this sort of avant-garde music did find an audience,
but in the 1950s, cutting-edge new music began to take a strange
direction, going even further than the radicals of the 1920s,
with whole pieces being made up of "found" sounds, and musical
decisions being made by the toss of a coin or the mood of the musician.
The high-water mark of this movement has to be John Cage's creating,
in 1952, a piece called 4'33", consisting of the player or players
doing nothing for that length of time, treated ever since
by the classical music high command as a significant musical event.
The piece was in three movements.
Here's an excerpt from the second.
While all this was going on, it was the American musical,
inspired in part by the lead shown by The Threepenny Opera,
that began to comment on the social conditions of postwar America.
# Buying on credit is so nice
# One look at us And they charge twice
# I have my own washing machine
# What will you have though To keep clean?
# Skyscrapers bloom in America
# Cadillacs zoom in America
# Industry boom in America
# 12 in a room in America. #
West Side Story,
composed by the classically-trained Leonard Bernstein,
with lyrics by a young Stephen Sondheim, had instant impact,
full as it was of great tunes,
influenced by jazz and popular styles.
Its audience, though, 50 years earlier,
would most likely have been going to the opera instead.
In the 50 years since West Side Story,
the musical has gone from strength to strength, finding an audience
of millions that Gilbert and Sullivan could only have dreamt of.
The musical filled the vacuum that had been created by opera's
turning away from the accessible and popular style it had pursued
since the 1630s.
So can classical music ever regain its central position
in people's emotions and affections?
I think it already has, but it's done so in surprising ways.
Just when it looked as if classical music might be sleepwalking
to oblivion, along came a knight in shining, indeed, silver armour.
The 20th-century's own medium, cinema.
One of the first examples of a collaboration
between a major classical composer and a filmmaker of genius
was Prokofiev's groundbreaking score
for Eisenstein's Alexander Nevsky from 1938.
Although many classical composers had a go at writing for the
cinema, for the most part, it was specialist film composers who were
prepared to subordinate their music to the requirements of the film.
Even a comic strip Gothic thriller like Batman,
aimed at a mass audience, featured a full-on orchestral score,
classical in all but name, composed by the brilliantly quirky
Danny Elfman, which made the action sequences thrilling and dark.
If anyone tells you classical music is dead in the 21st century,
all it means is that they don't go to the cinema.
While classical music and cinema thrived,
popular music post-war wasn't standing still.
Better microphones and recording techniques,
the arrival of the long-playing record,
and, in particular, a new breed of musical virtuoso were all laying
the groundwork for the blossoming of electrifying new popular forms.
One of them was the jazz style known as bebop, the frantic,
somersaulting groove of the late '40s and '50s,
where whole tracks were devoted to helter-skeltering instruments,
sometimes so low, sometimes into ordinator groups,
tumbling across notes at high speed,
wilfully oblivious of the harmonies they once belonged to.
If death-defying off-piste skiing at high altitude down
near-vertical slopes had a musical equivalent, this would be it.
# Salt peanuts, salt peanuts
MUSIC: "Salt Peanuts" by Dizzy Gillespie
# Salt peanuts, salt peanuts. #
In the music of Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk and Dizzy Gillespie,
bebop became the most influential form of jazz in the '50s and beyond.
# Salt peanuts, salt peanuts. #
Whilst bebop relied, for its forward momentum, on giddy chaos,
other forms of popular music wanted to go in the other direction,
towards a raucous, thumping regularity.
Rocket "88" was released in 1951.
It's generally reckoned to be the first rock 'n' roll record.
Unlike the unpredictability of bebop, rock 'n' roll's appeal
lay in the clockwork rigidity of four beats to a bar.
Jazz was for cool dudes to listen to,
rock 'n' roll was for teenagers to dance and date to.
And teenagers suddenly existed, apparently, after 1950.
MUSIC: Rocket "88" by Jackie Brenston
# V8 motor in this modern design
# Black convertible top And the gals don't mind. #
Not only did teenagers now exist,
the affluent society that was America, and eventually Europe,
in the post-war period,
saw teenagers with pocket money to spend.
Transistor radios and dance-set record players meant that
music aimed at teenagers was where the money was to be made,
and the record business acted accordingly.
Increasingly, albums were for adults,
singles in the hit parade were squarely aimed at youth.
As time went by, other elements were added to the recipe of rhythm and blues.
The simplicity and liveliness of country music,
and the soaring passion of gospel.
# Hey mama, don't you treat me wrong
# Come and love your daddy all night long
# All right now
# Hey, hey
# All right. #
In the late '50s,
the best pop songs were well-crafted packages still aimed at a
teenage market, but often possessed of a sharp emotional intelligence.
# Tonight, you're mine, completely
# You give your love so sweetly
# Tonight, the light of love Is in your eyes
# But will you love me tomorrow? #
Not only did popular songs become more sophisticated, in the 1960s,
it was popular music that became the voice of political opposition.
It supported the Civil Rights movement.
# Come, senators, congressmen, please heed the call
# Don't stand in the doorway Don't block up the hall
# For he that gets hurt Will be he who has stalled
# The battle outside ragin'
# Will soon shake your windows And rattle your walls
# For the times, They are a-changin'. #
It was popular song that spoke out against the Vietnam War.
# And it's one, two, three, What are we fighting for?
# Don't ask me, I don't give a damn, Next stop is Vietnam
# And it's five, six, seven, Open up the pearly gates,
# Well, there ain't no time to wonder why
# Whoopee! We're all gonna die. #
# Picket lines and picket signs
# Don't punish me with brutality
# Talk to me, so you can see
# Oh, what's going on
# What's going on
# Yeah, what's going on
# Ah, what's going on... #
That America's conscience in the period of the Civil Rights
movement and the Vietnam War was pricked not by its leading
classical composers, but by popular music, says something
about the changing status of the two genres in the 1960s.
The inescapable reality is that classical music had,
by this time, lost its ability to voice their hopes and fears
of the majority of the population, a status it had certainly enjoyed
when the music of Verdi, for example, expressed the whole hopes
of the Italian people for independence.
It does it little credit to have let itself reach
the precipice of redundancy.
That's not to say that pop songs were anything like
as musically complicated as the classical music
they were fast outstripping in the public's affections.
The sheer volume of songs composed, albums recorded
and careers launched in the blossoming of the pop age
shouldn't blind us to the fact that, in purely musical terms,
the melodies, harmonies and rhythms of the vast majority of those songs
were both relatively limited and relatively static.
Large swathes of the pop, rock
and soul repertoire are variants on the basic blues template,
with a straight, four-in-a-bar drum beat, a diet of between three
and 12 chords, and a smallish smorgasbord of instruments to
choose from, revolving around guitar, bass, keyboards and drums.
# She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah
# You think you've lost your love
# Well I saw her yesterday. #
One group who started out as a no-frills guitar and drums outfit
not only became the most famous musicians on the planet,
The Beatles revolutionised pop music.
# She loves you, And you know you should be glad
# She said you hurt her so
# She almost lost her mind
# But now she said she knows. #
The Beatles' music swiftly moved from catching
but simple rhythm and blues to a sophisticated musical mix
that encompassed all the styles they'd grown up with,
as well as new ones they'd invented.
# And you know you should be glad. #
From the beginning of their careers,
they'd happily plundered musical influences from a plethora
of earlier genres, like the Anglo-Celtic folk modes,
or scales, in this song.
# Eleanor Rigby
# Picks up the rice in the church Where a wedding has been
# Lives in a dream
# Waits at the window
# Wearing a face that she keeps In a jar by the door
# Who is it for? #
Or the tongue-in-cheek novelty song style of music hall
in songs like this.
# When I get older, losing my hair, Many years from now
# Will you still be Sending me a Valentine?
# Birthday greetings, bottle of wine. #
The Beatles also introduced into progressive pop music
such exotic innovations as an improvising classical orchestra...
..string quartets...
# Yesterday
# Love was such An easy game to play... #
..and instruments long since consigned to the curiosity cabinet.
Harpsichords...
# And it really doesn't matter if I'm wrong, I'm right
# Where I belong, I'm right
# Where I belong... #
..fairground organs...
..18th-century piccolo trumpets...
..and recorders.
No other group of musicians in history did as much to expand
the possibilities of recording technology as did The Beatles,
often coming up with completely new techniques with producer
George Martin at Abbey Road Studios.
The studio albums the Beatles assembled between 1965 and 1970 are
like a joyful, cheeky, kaleidoscopic journey through musical history.
The message their irrepressible creativity sent out to
the young at heart of the world, swimming in teenage pop culture,
was that old stuff still had a role to play.
The music's past was cool and interesting and fun, too.
They were the most unlikely saviours of old-fashioned music,
but that's undoubtedly what they were.
# Let's all get up and dance to a song
# That was a hit before your mother was born.
# Though she was born A long, long time ago
# Your mother should know
# Your mother should know. #
But even the Beatles didn't think to base a whole song
around a Lutheran hymn, harmonised by JS Bach.
That idea was Paul Simon's, in his knowingly-titled American Tune.
In this song, written in the months after an American planted
the Stars & Stripes on the moon,
Simon's patriotism is underpinned with one key ingredient - gratitude.
It's something he shares with
George Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Aaron Copland, Bernard Herrmann,
Leonard Bernstein, Stephen Sondheim, Burt Bacharach and Bob Dylan -
all the children or grandchildren of Jewish immigrants.
# We come on the ship They call the Mayflower
# We come on the ship That's sailed the moon
# We come in the age's Most uncertain hour
# And sing an American tune
# Oh, and it's all right
# It's all right, it's all right
# You can't be forever blessed
# Still, tomorrow's going To be another working day
# And I'm trying to get some rest
# That's all I'm trying, To get some rest. #
At this stage, it looked as if American and British rock
and pop music was becoming kind of a world standard,
but then traffic started arriving from the other direction, with
styles from non-western cultures vastly enriching music's palette.
Once again, the Beatles had started the trend, with the music of India.
In the mid-70s, Stevie Wonder brilliantly adapted
the street rhythms of Cuba in a series of hugely influential albums.
# You are the sunshine of my life
# That's why I'll always be around
# You are the apple of my eye
# Forever you stay in my heart. #
Paul Simon then recorded in the culturally-isolated Apartheid-era
townships of South Africa.
Graceland was controversial, because technically,
it broke a United Nations embargo.
But it helped bring the vibrant music of the continent to
a global audience.
Since then, thanks partly to immigration, thanks partly to
the Internet, world music has become a bustling and flourishing reality.
In the mid-20th century, it seemed as if the two traditions of music,
classical and non-classical, were drifting further and further apart,
as if they were speaking different, untranslatable languages.
But then a strange thing happened.
In America, the two zones, contemporary pop and contemporary
classical, gave birth to a child that was half one, half the other.
The child's name was minimalism, and the arrival of minimalism
provoked a seachange in the relationship between musical genres.
It ushered in an age of musical convergence.
Our age.
Minimalism emerged quietly in the 1960s,
and loudly in the 1970s, spearheaded by American composers
Terry Riley, Philip Glass, and most of all, Steve Reich.
Steve Reich has been described as the single most influential
composer of the late 20th century, bringing fresh ideas
and impetus to both popular and classical music.
It's a big claim, but correct.
Reich derived his inspirations from African drumming
and Balinese gamelan music.
He found that the apparently repetitive,
hypnotic patterns of these drum and mallet-based musics were,
in fact, subtly changing all the time.
He applied this approach to Western music.
Reich is also the godfather of sampling,
whereby a fragment of recorded sound is chopped up
and recycled back into a musical pattern.
# It ain't going to rain!
# It's gonna rain, it's gonna rain, it's gonna rain... #
Sampling is the bedrock of practically every hip-hop
track you've ever heard.
Sampling is even more ubiquitous in dance music
than the electric guitar was in the rock music of the 1960s.
Its genesis can be traced to a single
work by Steve Reich in 1965, It's Gonna Rain.
In It's Gonna Rain, Reich takes the recorded sermon
of a Pentecostal street preacher and chops up segments of it
to make rhythmic cells that are repeated again and again.
These techniques were then adopted in popular music,
but now the exchange of ideas was a two-way street, between cutting-edge
popular musicians and their classical, minimalist counterparts.
David Bowie integrated minimalist styles from Reich
and his fellow New Yorker Philip Glass into his 1977 album
recorded in the shadow of the Berlin Wall, Low.
Then, 15 years later, Philip Glass composed a Low Symphony,
based on material from the Bowie album.
With exchanges like this between what used to be seen as
polar opposites, classical and pop, becoming more commonplace,
the split between the two wings of music is,
after a century, finally beginning to close.
More than anything, it's advances in music technology
that have helped draw the two sides closer together.
Music technology, whether for recording, amplification or editing,
has developed at an amazingly accelerated pace, right up until our
own time, and continues to propel music in different directions.
From synthesisers and drum machines, to sampling, club-style
mash-ups, and the unstoppable spread of autotune software.
Or, for that matter, playing the human voice on a keyboard.
# Drink to me only with thine eyes
# And I will pledge with mine
# Or leave a kiss but in the cup
# And I'll not ask for wine
# Or leave a kiss... #
But is the age of the machine beginning to get out of control?
Is the servant becoming the master?
The cutting edge of both fields has become unapologetically
mechanised and electronic in its character,
which alarms all those who cherish the spontaneity and humanity of
unplugged music, whether classical, folk or from other cultures.
The danger of technological overload is articulated even by those
who are most at ease with it.
Radiohead's melancholic song Kid A,
the product of a thoroughly convergent set of electronic
and minimalist musical ingredients, uses a voice processor
to evoke what might be the distressed cry of a human clone.
# We've got heads on sticks
# You've got ventriloquists... #
Worrying about becoming slaves to machines is nothing
new in human progress, but what the musical past tells us
is that it doesn't do to worry too much about what happens next.
For every movement, there is a counter movement.
For every fear, a reassuring hand on the shoulder.
Music in our civilisation started out as a free-flowing,
unwritten, spontaneous oral tradition,
based entirely on the lives, loves and expectations of ordinary people.
In truth, its fundamental purpose hasn't changed in all these
centuries, despite the many layers of sophistication
it has acquired along the way.
JS Bach was probably the cleverest composer who ever lived,
but he gave his performance almost no instructions as to how
they might interpret his sublime music.
He hastily scribbled down the notes and left them to it.
It is as if he is saying, "Trust me, and play."
We, more than any previous generation,
can identify with Bach's request.
We press play, and one million styles, sounds, oral colours
and voices breeze in towards us, as if through an open window.
We're like children, with 1,000 games at our fingertips.
We have, at last, reached a point
where there are no wrong or right decisions about what music
we may or may not enjoy, just one gratifyingly simple instruction -
play.
Subtitles by Red Bee Media