Episode 2 Howard Goodall's Story of Music

MUSIC: "Poker Face" by Lady Gaga

Whatever music you're into - Monteverdi or Mantovani,

Mozart or Motown, Machaut or mash-up -

the techniques it relies on didn't happen by accident.

Someone, somewhere, thought of them first.

In the Late Medieval and Renaissance periods,

music, as often as not, was controlled and paid for

by the church, monarchs or aristocrats of one sort or another.

The exception was folk music, but don't think there were

musicians on every street corner, even in the cities.

For ordinary folk, it was still relatively rare to hear music

outside of church, as far as we can tell.

The arrival of opera in the 1600s began to change that,

and from the arrival of the first purpose-built opera house

in Venice in 1637, where music was performed

and who it was performed for began to change.

The paying public, initially the better off, admittedly,

began slowly to dictate musical taste.

The result was that more music was written and performed

than ever before, including pieces that

are still alive and well and amongst many people's favourites today.

The later half of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th

saw the lives and careers of some of the giants of European music.

Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven,

Schubert, Schumann, Mendelssohn and Chopin.

They lived through a time of tremendous social upheaval -

the American and French revolutions, the Napoleonic Wars

and yet more revolutions.

The turmoil of the times eventually saw music transformed.

It became bigger, louder and more ferocious.

And yet, before around 1800, the remarkable fact is that the music

doesn't reflect the mayhem that surrounded it.

The period from around 1750 to 1850

brought with it seismic social, political and artistic change.

In music, faith and morality, the watchwords of Bach and Handel

gave way to the pleasure principle.

Rather than trying to improve their listeners,

composers like Haydn and Mozart started pampering them instead.

And the rewards from their pampering completely transformed

the social status of the composer.

The process started with the dapper gentleman servant Haydn

soon morphed into the freelance star turn Mozart

and led to the tormented diva Beethoven.

In just his lifetime, composers went from below stairs to high table.

The whole function of music and the audience it was aimed at evolved,

and evolved dramatically.

The music of Haydn, Mozart, Schubert and their contemporaries

is many things, but it is very rarely genuinely disturbing or unnerving.

In their search for elegance,

they produced a ton of music of great beauty,

and in their search for sensuality, they made what might have been

a grubby existence into something attractive,

sensitive and often very touching.

What happened to musical style, then,

to reflect this change of attitude and mood?

The most noticeable difference was a new approach to chords,

the harmony that lay beneath every melody.

Complication was replaced with simplicity.

Unlike their predecessors, composers of the late 18th century

decided there were really far too many chords available

and that they needed far fewer for their purposes.

They preferred a language that was much simpler.

They were interested in great blocks of one chord

followed by great blocks of another.

Not only did they restrict themselves

to a menu of half a dozen chords,

there were three chords they used obsessively.

I...

IV...

V.

'In the days when red, white and blue flags

'were being hoisted all over Europe,

'those colours are as good a metaphor as anything

'for these three chords.'

Let's look at an excerpt from an opera of 1762,

Orfeo ed Euridice by Christoph Gluck.

It's a dance interlude that later came to be famous,

called The Dance Of The Blessed Spirits.

'Chord one, the home chord, usually starts and ends a piece.

'Here's a score of that dance with all the Chord Ones marked in red.'

You may be thinking that red is pretty powerful.

But there are still some areas of the map

not yet conquered by the red empire.

OK, so let's show the same map with the blue chords added,

eating up a bit more of the spaces that are left.

'The blue sections represent Chord Four.

'Now you can see there's not very much unoccupied territory left.

'I'll mark in the Chord Fives in white.'

So between them, our red, white and blue chords are all-conquering.

Nearly all of this music is either chord I, IV or V.

If I colour the final bits left in green,

that's for all other chords,

you'll see how tiny the remaining area now is,

roughly a quarter of the music only.

So the empires of red, white and blue

had the world of music at their feet.

This was still the case nearly 50 years later.

Here's a piece from 1808 by Beethoven.

'In this stirring section,

'Beethoven harmonises the whole thing

'with just our three main chords.

'It's as if Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven were reading

'from the same very small book of chords as a no-frills rock group.'

VIOLINS PLAY "ROCKING ALL OVER THE WORLD"

# Well, here we are And here we are

# And here we go

# All aboard and we're ready to go

# Here we go

# Rocking all over the world... #

'In rock and roll, those three chords are still the Status Quo.'

# We're going crazy and we're going there today

# Here we go

# Rocking all over the world

# And I like it, I like it I like it, I like it

# I la-la-la-like it La-la-la-la

# Here we go

# Rocking all over the world

# Over the world. #

'But having a simplified palette of chords

'didn't mean composers were unimaginative or bland.

'It's simply that their concerns were different.

'Composers of this period, like its architects,

'were obsessed with clear form and structure.'

For both Haydn and Mozart, symbolism and symmetry play an important part

in how they constructed their compositions.

You couldn't just have random nice tunes with accompaniment -

you had to have an underlying logic, like a map.

Whereas in a previous era, Bach's satnav was calibrated mainly

to seek out the meaning of the words,

for Haydn and Mozart who followed him,

finding the perfectly laid-out route was just as essential.

The building of their musical maps had its most sophisticated

manifestation in the growth and popularity of the symphony.

The man who shaped and developed the symphony more than any other was Joseph Haydn.

'Haydn's long career as a successful musician and composer

'spanned the entire second half of the 18th century.

'He was notably generous in his support of younger composers

'like Mozart, a close friend who predeceased him,

'and Beethoven, who was for a time his pupil.

'The torch Haydn passed on to them

'was his crucial refining of the form of the symphony.'

Haydn took the idea of proportion and balance

and went one crucial step further.

His typical balancing phrase wasn't identical

but slightly different in character.

It created a sense of symmetry without simply repeating itself.

So in the exquisite slow movement of his 88th Symphony,

Haydn's first little phrase of six notes goes like this.

It's balancing second half takes the same shape

but changes the notes,

so it feels like it's on a continuing journey.

Then a final part equalling in length the first two bits together,

rounds off the phrase in a satisfying and ornamented way.

This process of taking a little cell of a tune,

then building on it to create longer units

with more interesting features to them,

is what Haydn taught the world to do, apparently effortlessly.

SYMPHONY CONTINUES

Beginning around the end of the 18th century, a significant

change in the way music was paid for and listened to began to emerge.

Joseph Haydn had spent most of his life employed by just one aristocratic family,

whilst Mozart began work as the musical servant of an archbishop.

But both went freelance in the Vienna of the 1780s

and began to write music for subscription concerts,

dance halls and opera houses, which were kept afloat by a paying public.

Failing to please this paying public could mean you would starve.

The next great composer based in Vienna, Ludwig van Beethoven,

was also freelance,

although he was also helped out by his aristocratic friends.

But while Haydn and Mozart had by and large aimed to please

and delight their public, Beethoven wanted to challenge and confront it.

Beethoven felt music might be capable of addressing

the poverty, despair and misery that surrounded the glittering

salons of Vienna and elsewhere, not brush it under the carpet.

This was new, and it was to have far-reaching effects for music.

'To many people, Beethoven is the very model

'of the tormented, misunderstood genius,

'a caricature of the classical composer,

'complete with demonic stare and perpetual bad hair day.

'A moody, mixed-up chap, he found himself in possession

'of musical talents even he couldn't quite come to terms with.

'The reputation and the man, though, don't always tally up.'

For a start, Beethoven wasn't one composer but three.

He starts off as a Mozart clone with a flair for playing the piano,

turns into "Haydn: The Sequel"

and ends up isolated from the world by deafness,

composing music that was to baffle, bewitch and amaze

every European musician of the next 100 years.

'While Beethoven devotees like to see him

'as a man who reinvented music from a standing start,

'the reality is that, like most composers,

'his early career finds him tuning him to the musical currents

'of the day and adapting them.

'Listen to this piece.

'This piano sonata is by a little-known Czech composer

'called Jan Dussek.

'Though he was based in London,

'Dussek's music was known to Beethoven.

'Now listen to this, a piano sonata

'written by Beethoven a year later, in 1798.

'Beethoven's 8th Piano Sonata, his Pathetique,

'was written when he was just 28

'and still making a name for himself in Vienna.

'It's not difficult to hear

'the distinctive traces of Dussek's piano style.'

Seven years after composing his Pathetique Sonata,

Beethoven has stopped sounding like Mozart or Dussek or Haydn

and started creating music beyond anything they'd imagined.

The first major sign he was breaking away from established formulas

was his Eroica Symphony of 1804.

'This was a considerable challenge for Viennese audiences of the time.

'If you were used to the regular, predictable patterns of Haydn,

'the Eroica's many noisy surprises and unexpected changes of key

'were an uncomfortable mix of titillating and alarming.

'Most of all, the Eroica was long.

'Its opening movement alone is the same length

'as an average symphony by Haydn or Mozart.

'Beethoven's ambition was growing, along with his music.'

Traditional histories like to equate Beethoven,

the colossus of music in the early 1800s,

with his contemporary, Napoleon Bonaparte,

revolutionary-turned-emperor and serial military adventurer.

'The Eroica Symphony was originally dedicated to Napoleon Bonaparte.

'Legend has it that Beethoven angrily scratched Bonaparte's name

'from the score when Napoleon declared himself emperor in 1804.

'It's a good yarn, but recent research suggests

'it might instead be, alas, a myth.'

Perhaps what Beethoven was really appalled by

wasn't so much Napoleon's imperial pretensions

but the unravelling of the high-minded aspirations

of the French Revolution itself,

the descent into cruelty and unfairness,

merely dressed in new colours.

'This despair is reflected in the music,

'but it's not to be found in the opening movement.'

Musicologists love to wax on about the ambitious first movement

of the Eroica Symphony, mainly because it's unusually long,

complex and unpredictable, and provides fuel

for seemingly endless analysis and scholarly scrutiny.

Beethoven takes a relatively simple tune

and builds from it a giant tapestry of ideas and musical meanderings.

But, to me, it's not the clever-clogs first movement

that carries the killer punch but the funeral march that follows it.

What's different and new about this movement is not its structure,

orchestration or technical bravado but its attitude.

Whereas both Haydn and Mozart aimed to reveal human emotions

through the filter of a gentlemanly, well-bred composure,

the Funeral March in Eroica is remarkable for its unflinching seriousness.

Grief is grief, pain is pain, and music,

Beethoven seemed to be proclaiming,

was the art best placed to confront such darkness.

Within the next two decades or so, most of his educated

contemporaries gradually came to the same conclusion.

'For the first time since the death of Bach,

'the music of the moment seemed more accurately

'to be attempting to portray the sadness and fear

'that people might actually be experiencing.'

And there were horrors aplenty to keep a sensitive person

awake at night at the start of the 19th century.

'From the Eroica Symphony onwards,

'Beethoven's music became serious-minded and earnest,

'since it was his unabashed aim to change the world through his art.

'It's debatable whether he did change the world,

'but he certainly changed the whole perception of music.'

This was Beethoven's real significance,

not how he changed musical form or language,

but how he recalibrated what music was for.

Single-handedly, he turned it from genteel after-dinner entertainment

into a state of mind that no civilised person could be without.

'Beethoven subsumed his own personality into his music.

'Whereas once music was driven by faith, beauty or elegance,

'now it was fuelled by a composer's own psychology.

'By making the music about him and his feelings,

'Beethoven was taking music in a new direction.

'Not only was music co-opted into the personality of the composer,

'so was the nature all around him.

'Nature was ascribed human emotions,

'it became a metaphor for the feelings of the artist.

'In music, once again, this movement starts with Beethoven

'and his 6th Symphony, the Pastoral, written in 1808.

'For the next 100 years, this symphony would act as a template

'for how one might portray a state of mind

'in musical pictures of nature.'

It's a curious fact about the history of music that

it's not always the most innovative composers of any particular era

that necessarily come to be the most admired by future generations.

A case in point is the last half of the 19th century, a period

when composers seemed to be obsessed with writing music

that dealt with death, doomed love and/or destiny.

One composer above all fashioned the musical tools to create

this dark and disturbing music,

and yet it's the composers who followed him

who tended to get the credit for the innovations actually

set in train by one of the most influential figures in music,

a French-speaking Hungarian, born in what is now Austria.

I'm talking about Franz Liszt - yes, Liszt.

His music may not be as well-known these days

as Brahms, Tchaikovsky or Wagner, but he was the guy

all other composers, including those three, looked up to.

He was the trail-blazer, the experimenter, the pace-setter.

To do full justice to the death-and-destiny obsession,

music needed to be turbo-charged,

and Liszt was the man who provided the rocket fuel.

Disturbing emotions were conjured up in his harmonies.

Flashy set-pieces thrilled and terrified

a sensation-seeking public.

Liszt was the composer who, more than anyone else

in the 19th century, recalibrated music's forces.

So it's worth looking in detail at some of the many innovations

he brought to fruition.

Liszt innovation, number one -

"The Devil has all the best tunes."

Liszt's Totentanz, "Death Dance",

triggered a craze for extravagantly ghoulish, Halloween-style music,

full of dark, deep, crashing chords and abrasive strings.

It's a craze that has yet to abate.

The legacy of this kind of up-tempo theatre of the macabre

didn't just inspire composers of the period,

like Saint-Saens with his Danse Macabre...

..or Grieg's March Of The Trolls...

..but also film composers of our own time,

like the spookily brilliant Danny Elfman.

In Batman, edge-of-the-seat action sequences are given

an undercurrent of avenging menace by Elfman's Lisztian score.

But Liszt's creepy death dance wasn't the only musical trick

up his sleeve.

Liszt innovation number two - "All the fun of the Fair."

Liszt was a spectacular pianist who more or less single-handedly -

or should that be two-handedly? -

forced piano builders to adopt iron frames to replace wood frames,

because they simply broke under the hammering he gave them on stage.

Liszt dazzled audiences with his use of the piano as a kind

of fairground of effects.

This is Liszt in lighter, crowd-pleasing mode.

His Grand Galop provided the template for Offenbach's

hallmark Can-Cans of 20 years later.

In his 30s, Liszt became music's first international star.

Some female fans became hysterical

at the mere sight of him on the stage.

But showy turns were only a fraction of what Liszt could do at the piano.

Liszt Innovation number three - "First Impressions."

He created a style that shimmered and gleamed,

an aural equivalent of the blurred vibrancy of a painting by Monet,

where sounds, like colours, melted and smudged into each other.

This sparkling piece was written just three years after the first

Impressionist exhibition had taken place in Paris, in 1874.

Liszt's incandescent paintings in sound were to be hugely

influential on a younger generation of French composers,

particularly Claude Debussy.

Debussy's glimmering piano pictures owe a huge debt to Liszt,

whom he revered like a disciple.

Liszt's contribution to orchestral music was equally immense.

Liszt innovation number four - "Symphonic Poems."

He invented what he called the symphonic poem

and wrote 13 of them to get the new form off to a cracking start.

This is Liszt's symphonic poem, Prometheus,

inspired by the Greek myth in which the Titan, Prometheus, steals

fire from Zeus to give to mankind.

He's punished by being bound to a rock,

while a great eagle snacks on his liver, every dawn for eternity.

Pain and anguish saturate the music.

The idea behind Liszt's symphonic poems was to reduce

the traditional four-movement symphony, as perfected by Beethoven,

into one concentrated shorter piece that would be a musical

response to a non-musical artwork.

By doing this, Liszt was moving away from the idea of music

as an abstract entity of its own, where audiences listened attentively

to 40 minutes of pure music, like doing a crossword or a brain-teaser.

His symphonic poems took just one scene,

a character or a snapshot, and wove the music around that.

It was Liszt more than anyone who shifted the emphasis

away from orchestral music as pure music,

to music that tried to illustrate something else.

This, for example, is the opening of his symphonic poem,

Hunnenschlacht, the one inspired by a then-famous mural

of Attila the Hun's many battles.

Fought in 451 AD, against the now-Christian Roman Empire

and their allies, this was a rare example in which Attila

and his heathen Huns got a sound thrashing.

Liszt's musical response to the painting attempts to depict

the ghostly armies of the battle mustering for the fight.

Interspersed amongst the whispery strings are military

outbursts from the horns.

You'll notice in the painting that there are relatively few

actual soldiers depicted - it's more ordinary men

and women who've been engulfed unwittingly in the conflict.

So Liszt is careful not to make his orchestra sound too percussive

and martial, at least to start off with.

Eventually, the battle proper kicks off, and if you look closely,

you'll see the Romans carrying a gleaming golden cross.

In the midst of the battle's tumult and chaos,

Liszt introduces on the trombones an old, plain song chant,

Crux Fidelis, "Faithful Cross", to represent this image in the scene.

The final three minutes or so of the piece has the plain song theme

interwoven into increasingly excited strings.

Liszt rounds off his musical account of the painting

with storming victory music,

complete with extra brass reinforcements and a pipe organ...

..with the instruction, "If it can't be louder

"than the whole orchestra, don't bother!"

In the last half of the 19th century, the underlying form

of music began to strike out in radical new directions.

The colossus of the period, Richard Wagner,

began deliberately to destabilise the old-fashioned key systems

that had held sway for three centuries or so.

This produced music of great power, but also, on occasion,

music of enormous length and of richly layered complexity.

As the great Italian composer Rossini put it,

"Wagner's music had many fine moments, but many bad quarters of an hour."

But after Wagner's death in 1883,

a refreshening wind of change began to blow through the musical cobwebs.

It came from France, spearheaded by Camille Saint-Saens,

composer of The Carnival Of The Animals,

Cesar Franck, Charles-Marie Widor and Gabriel Faure.

MUSIC: "Gymnopedie Number 1" by Erik Satie

The movement was set in train by one of the most remarkable figures in music, Erik Satie.

Erik Satie's first Gymnopedie of 1888,

as well as sounding like a long, hot afternoon after a boozy lunch,

can be seen as the first shot in a war

to debunk pomposity and declutter French music.

Satie, described by his tutors at the Paris conservatoire

as "the laziest student ever", was an eccentric intellectual

who hung out with other arty dreamers in Montmartre.

Satie's music could hardly sound less like Wagner

and what the Germans were up to.

The irony is that there was a German influence

on the work of Satie's Parisian contemporaries.

Here's a clue. Composers like Cesar Franck, Charles-Marie Widor,

Camille Saint-Saens and Gabriel Faure were all trained organists,

and playing the organ means above all

knowing one particular composer's work inside out - JS Bach.

MUSIC: "Toccata" by Charles-Marie Widor

More than a hundred years after his death,

these organist-composers in France

were invigorated and inspired by Bach's clarity and economy.

Even the master himself might have admired

Charles-Marie Widor's famous Toccata.

It was first performed by Widor himself

at the Trocadero Palace in Paris in 1889

and it's given a rousing send-off

to many a newly hitched bride and groom ever since.

The dignity and dexterity of Bach can also be heard

in the music of Gabriel Faure,

perhaps the most talented of these French organist-composers.

Listening to Faure after Brahms, Liszt, Wagner or Tchaikovsky,

it's as if someone has spring-cleaned and redecorated

a teenage boy's bedroom.

Gone are the posters of death, psychological torment,

superheroes and tragedy.

The augmented piles of clothes have been put away,

and the windows have been opened

to dispel the diminished sneaker-smelling air.

Faure's exquisite music simply says, "Chill,"

or, perhaps, refrigerez-vous.

World music is a term that's been in vogue only in the last few

decades, referring to that exhilarating influx

and cross-fertilisation that has taken place between Western music

and the music of many different cultures.

CDs, radio and most recently the internet have accelerated

this development, enriching music for us all.

But what about the days before recorded sound?

The answer is that with a few rather half-hearted attempts

to adapt the folk music of their traditions, composers tended

to stay within the musical traditions they had grown up with.

But in the final decades of the 19th century, that began to change.

One crucial catalyst was an event that brought

the music of other cultures to Western Europe,

and in doing so enriched its musical palette.

It took place in Paris in 1889, the centenary of the French Revolution.

It was the World's Fair.

Here in the Trocadero, which overlooked the newly built Eiffel Tower,

Widor first played his famous organ Toccata,

and here also non-Russian composers heard

the music of Mussorgsky for the first time.

One such composer, then aged 27, was Claude Debussy.

His visit to the World's Fair was a life- and music-changing experience.

What Debussy learnt from Mussorgsky

was that there was a way of building up the architecture of a piece of music

that was an alternative to the developmental method

that was bread and butter to Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven.

The development approach was to take small cells of melody or rhythm,

or both, and make up a whole discourse from them

over a 15- or 20-minute period.

So Beethoven is able to construct a whole symphony movement from this tiny idea.

MOTIF FROM BEETHOVEN'S FIFTH

Count how many times he uses it in just the first 40 bars of the symphony.

HE MOUTHS

That's 13.

That's already 33 and counting.

Debussy, inspired by Mussorgsky,

ditched 100 years of studious development technique

and started over -

Mussorgsky, because he knew no better,

and Debussy, because it suited his taste for experiment.

GAMELAN PLAYS

What revolutionised Debussy's music more than anything, though,

was a wind of change blown into the Paris World's Fair from very far afield.

The World's Fair showcased exhibits and cultural tableaux

from all over the planet.

Thanks to increased communications,

the global village was starting to become a reality.

What especially mesmerised Debussy was a Javanese village,

complete with a gamelan orchestra,

with its gongs, bells, bowls and xylophone-like chimes.

The particular sonorities and scales of the gamelan orchestra

intrigued Debussy so much, he was inspired to attempt

an evocation of its Eastern sounds on a Western piano.

Although he couldn't replicate the unfamiliar tuning of the bells,

gongs and other metal bars of the gamelan,

or the exact division of the Asian musical scale,

he could approximate it in two ways.

One was to make use of the so-called pentatonic scale,

the five notes that are common to all the world's musical systems

and which are especially prevalent in Eastern music.

On a piano, the pentatonic notes can be found by playing just the black notes.

There's a whole section of his prelude Voiles, "Sails",

which is all pentatonic.

The other trick Debussy deployed was to allow his chords to hang over each other,

overlapping and ricocheting from one to the next.

This technique - on a piano, at any rate -

has the effect of eking out

the sympathetic resonances, or harmonics,

latent in the reverberating strings.

Natural harmonics are hidden extra notes, usually quite high in pitch,

that are found within any given sound,

like the additional colours of the spectrum

contained within white light.

Every time you allow the felt dampers on a piano to clamp down on the strings,

you shut off the natural harmonics from resonating.

CHORD STOPS

But Debussy wanted to do the opposite,

to allow the strings to ring like they would on a harp.

His hanging chords with the dampers kept away from the strings

were a kind of return to nature.

"CLAIRE DE LUNE" BY CLAUDE DEBUSSY

Putting these ideas into action,

Debussy created a new soundscape for the piano.

The reformation of scales and harmonies that he introduced

offered a whole new palette of aural possibilities.

The piano had never sounded so exotic and so rich.

By recalibrating the traditional Western scale on Eastern lines,

Debussy's music was a radical departure

from the classical style he'd grown up with,

and his harmonic experiments based on Asian sound combinations

were still influencing musicians, especially in jazz, half a century later.

In the first three decades of the 20th century,

wave after wave of often startling, even alarming modern music

made its presence felt.

Starting with Strauss's electrifying and dissonant Salome,

Stravinsky's riotous and rhythmically driving Rite Of Spring,

everywhere, musical revolution was in the air.

But in the mid 1930s, Hitler and the Nazis

and Stalin and the Soviets determined to put a stop

to what they saw as excessive modernism, in favour of music

that the mass of people could understand and appreciate.

The Nazis went further, shamefully banning any music

by those they considered their racial and political enemies.

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 forbade all performances or broadcast of his music

in the Third Reich and fascist Italy,

a gesture which impoverished him,

and who 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 music of 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 lied 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 rigorously 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 enduring 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 7th 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 couldn't pillage was Shostakovich's 7th Symphony, Leningrad.

The 20th century began with the many explosions set off by modernism.

But then, modernism, to a large extent, went underground,

as Hitler and Stalin wanted music for the masses.

After the war, modernism returned with a vengeance.

A new generation of composers, usually labelled as the avant-garde,

wanted to deconstruct music and start again.

The results were, to say the least, controversial.

One thing you can say for sure, though,

is that the mainstream audience was left largely baffled by this new music.

As if to fill this vacuum, popular music began to blossom,

becoming evermore sophisticated, both musically and emotionally.

By the mid 1960s, the damaging split between art music and pop music

had become a seemingly unbridgeable chasm.

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 sea-change 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, John Adams and 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 Auto-Tune 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... #

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd