The Beatles: "crowned heads of anti-music" or the best composers since Mahler? Photograph: PA
Writing a column for the Observer Review in response to Sir Peter Maxwell Davies' recent speech to the Incorporated Society of Musicians, a few other random thoughts sprang to mind.
1. The first odd thing about reading his speech in full was the fact that Davies began by quoting the Latin dictum "diverso diversis delectantur" - "different people enjoy different things", but, about half way in, could not seem to stop himself getting in a terrible lather about pop music as a form of mind control. Let me point out straight off that I am not a fan of techno nor heavy metal, but I would defend anyone's right to enjoy them. Even the most mindless record is simply that - mindless, not mind controlling, or mind erasing.
2. The second odd thing was that no one else seemed to pick up on Sir Peter's bizarre theory of dance music as an agent of mind control. The following day's papers were full of his attack on the philistines of New Labour, but no one seemed to notice his obsession with "extremely loud music with a gut-churning, thudding bass beat" as some kind of Huxleyian/ Orwellian/ Stalinist/ Nazi force for evil. Surreal.
3.Just a thought: I could write an entire piece on how offensive to me the last night of the Proms is, and how the music performed plays to the most base instincts of jingoism and nationalism in the audience. I would not, though, hold that up as an illustration of how classical music of a stirring nature is an exercise in nationalist propaganda.
4. I didn't have room to mention Sir Harrison Birtwistle, a friend of Sir Peter Maxwell Davies' and another ranter against popular music, who seems oddly obsessed with Iggy Pop. Apparently Iggy has a silly name so can't be taken seriously. Where does that leave Sir Harrison Birtwistle?
5. Lest we forget: "The Beatles are not merely awful... They are so unbelievably horrible, so appallingly unmusical, so dogmatically insensitive to the magic of the art, that they qualify as crowned heads of antimusic". William F Buckley Jr, 60s American right wing critic.
"...the slow, sad song about That Boy, which figures prominently in Beatle programmes, is expressively unusual for its lugubrious music, but harmonically it is one of their most intriguing, with its chains of pan-diatonic clusters, and the sentiment is acceptable because voiced cleanly and crisply. But harmonic interest is typical of their quicker songs too, and one gets the impression that they think simultaneously of harmony and melody, so firmly are the major tonic sevenths and ninths built into their tunes, and the flat submediant key switches, so natural is the Aeolian cadence at the end of Not a Second Time (the chord progression which ends Mahler's Song of the Earth)." William Mann, music critic of the Times, 1963
6. For the opposite of cultural elitisism, check out Observer writer, Ed Vuillamy on why he loves Hendrix and Shostakovich.
7. A reccomendation: One of the best books on music I have ever read is The Queen's Throat: Opera, Homosexuality and the Mystery of Desire by Wayne Koestenbaum which one critic memorably described as "insightfully hysterical". It is possible to be both....
8. Just a thought: pop/rock and classical do not mix. (Pace Joanna Newsom.)
9. Do you think Sir Peter has ever heard - or even heard of - Joanna Newsom?
10. And finally, if someone out there is thinking of doing a techno remix of a Davies piece... please, think again.
