The Long View | More than ever, the ‘classical’ adjective isn’t working

‘Remember,’ says the host of the TV music quiz broadcast on Sunday nights where I live, as he winks suavely at the camera before the credits roll, ‘all music will be classical music with time.’ I thought of this when Ade Edmondson declared his distaste for ‘classical’ music on Desert Island Discs. I heard Edmondson’s comment not so much as the dismissal of a genre, but as a kick against establishment ideals and inherited tastes that was absolutely in character. I’m not one to shout at the radio but couldn’t resist a sotto voce ‘Remember Ade, all music will be classical music with time.’

Edmondson’s taste is his taste. What offended certain corners of the internet was the sight of other people rejoicing in it (very 2023). Yes, we all wept a solitary tear when our favourite anoraked professor Alice Roberts declare how ‘refreshing’ it was to hear Edmondson say he can’t stand classical music. After the inevitable storm of vitriol from us – people who like to think their breasts the least savage and most open to soothing – Roberts clarified: she wasn’t enjoying seeing classical music kicked so much as revelling in Edmondson’s honesty on a programme seen as an arbiter of taste. Given the backlash, you wouldn’t blame Roberts for never wanting to step foot in an opera house or concert hall.

Much of the anger, from a battered, bruised and misunderstood classical music sector, surely stemmed from the notion that classical music isn’t the establishment anymore: that it’s actually far less controversial, in twenty-first century Britain, to admit you can’t stand classical music than it is to admit you can’t stand Hip-Hop – a genre which openly celebrates sexism against black women but which often sounds really good and strangely empowering… even for black women. Classical music, on the other hand, is emblematic of everything that’s gone wrong with the world: the poisonous seeds sowed by dead white men whose fruits are now enjoyed by the moneyed 1%.

We try, again and again, to argue the opposite – that most classical music that has survived has done so because it prized aesthetic development and human reflection over upward ingratiation; that despite still being marketed with champagne and tuxedos, the vast majority of operas champion the underdog and the marginalised; that commercial popular music has done a far better job of colonizing, dividing, profiteering and soul-destroying than classical music ever did. We have our work cut out there, given basic awareness of classical music in the UK will soon be the exclusive preserve of the privately educated.

One reason it galls to hear classical music dismissed off-hand is that classical music isn’t a genre. The word ‘classical’ conjures up images of wigs and harpsichords, whose associated sounds are very specifically different from those of Dufay, Taverner, Puccini and the universe of contemporary music that incorporates everything from film scores to sound art, from George Walker to Caroline Shaw. If classical music denotes anything, doesn’t it denote (crudely) music that might have been created in any one of the last 600 years but doesn’t utilize an explicitly enunciated rhythmic beat? That’s an awful lot of genres.

The apparent inability to break this universe of music open to more people is a failure on our part, but we can’t take all the blame given the relentless juggernaut of the commercial pop music industry and its complete dominance of the ‘musical’ conversation. The lumping together of six centuries (and counting) of music under the banner ‘classical’ doesn’t help – implying a single genre like ‘blues’ while suggesting a finite era rather than a continuing legacy.

Besides, the label ‘classical’ doesn’t fit at all with the newly fashionable idea that to listen across boundaries is as important for the brain as a balanced diet is for the gut. When you hear that idea punted with musical examples, as it is on various radio shows these days, you realise how meaningless the word classical so often is. Beyond some verbal inconveniences including the renaming of this magazine, would it be so hard to ditch?