Listening To The 20th Century (with a hangover)

The lovely loving LOVE people were kind and cool enough to invite me over to their pad last night for a talk by the smashing chaps at Elmwood (Leeds). And I don't mind telling you it was fucking brilliant. So fucking brilliant in fact, that we all went to the pub and had some nice old booze to celebrate the brilliance of it all. I can't wait to blog about it. No, really. It was ace. So as soon as I sober up I'll spill the beans; right across both carriageways of the internet. But right now, the details are a little hazy. It wouldn't be fair to start mouthing-off just yet. The only (solid) thing I have to show for it at the moment is this book...

... which I picked up in Waterstones on my way over. So, whilst my brain's still in the bathroom, I'll blog about that instead. Everyone ok with that? -Yep? Ok. Cool.

Well, I don't usually blog about music, not least because it's such a devisive subject. But sod it. I don't care this morning. This book is all about 20th century classical music - something I'm dead interested in at the moment and something that more people should be interested in too.

See, most people like to think they've got really broad taste in music; most people like to think they even understand music. But (I spit on you philistines!) they don't. What we think of as modern/pop/contemporary music, the music we listen to every day on the radio, in bars or on TV is actually only as cutting-edge as -say- erm... a wooden hammer. It's blunt, obvious, unsophisticated. Dumb. Yep, the music we listen to is about as innvovative as sausages I'm afraid. And no matter what the NME says, your favourite band aren't ever gonna change the course of music (nope, not even Radiohead). And that's because very, very few musicians are classically trained.

Now, whoa, whoa, whoa - hold your horses; hold your fire. Don't get me wrong: I'm not saying all popular music is rubbish. Some of it's wonderful. But the music we think of as "popular music", as a form, is only 50 years old. And it's a form that is (by it's nature) disposable, light and -well- just a bit of fun. Remember those frothy love-songs from The Beatles first album? Well, that's what popular music is all about. And whilst The Beatles went on to extemporise, galvanise and formalise the possibilities of that form, we've all tended to work within those limits ever since. And if you think dance music's innovative and modern, then the Strauss family might just have something to say to you. Oh, and Haydn, Handel, Mozart...

No, the innovations in comptemporary music were all made in the first half of the 20th century. Whilst Mahler and Stravinsky pushed orchestral music to it's absolute limits, Shoenberg and Messiaen dismantled the very fabric of music; re-built, re-structured, re-designed it. Whose gonna do that these days- Amy Fucking Winehouse? Blood Red Shoes?

Serialism, minimalism; weird electric intruments, disturbing harmonies, shifting, complicated rhymths. The new, the odd, the groundbreaking and the eclectic will never be heard on Jools Holland. John Peel never played Guillaume De Machaut or Gesualdo (16th century death metal, if you're interested). If you're genuinely serious about music, you can't do much better than Radio 3 these days, I'm afraid.

Now I feel like a right fucking pensioner. But at least I've sobered-up...