Guitar Canon Rock

[Peppin Kishore]

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When high art music struggles to compete in a market-place full of more accessible sounds, it is instrumental chamber music that feels the cold most acutely - yet great composers still turn to this medium for some of their most personal revelations. This talk covers some exciting new initiatives for young players, and explores the self-reinvention of the string quartet.

On the contrary, because chamber music is a particular spirit of performance, rather than a body of works, it exists outside the bounds of music history and national cultures. If there is a music-making that is, truly, an anachronistic exercise in nostalgia it is the orchestral concert; this presents for the most part repertoire at least 100 years old, while most more recent music finding its way onto programmes also adopts the archaic deployment of instruments that evolved between Haydn and Brahms - four horns, violins divided into 1st and 2nd, timpani - why, for goodness sake? Timpani evolved in the orchestra underlining harmonic progressions in the bass, while the dual division of violins arose from the tune-and-bass format of the 18th-century trio sonata, where a melody was shared in imitation. Neither role has much currency in music written since 1945, but every orchestra has a timpanist and divisi violins, largely because that orchestra mostly plays music by dead composers. That is an anachronism if you like, and some say increasingly an uneconomic one, despite the much-vaunted talents of new music for depressing box-office further. I for one love the orchestra dearly, and would go to the barricades to keep it going - which we may have to. Chamber music, meanwhile, is a spirit that has endlessly reinvented itself, and will continue to do so, because - unlike the orchestra - it is not tied to any genre, but to the practice of elevated cooperation - the creative spirit at its best, you might even say.

You will notice that my last two musical excerpts were from Jazz and the Blues. It doesn't matter if the players are a Quartet in the Wiener Konzerthaus, a group of teenagers thrashing on guitars in a garage or a clutch of tribal musicians under a tree in the veldt; where two or three musicians are gathered together to listen to one another as they play, you've got chamber music.

What unites them is the interplay between the vocal or instrumental lines, the sense not only of interplay but of mutual support that is the opposite of soloistic display. The vigour of this spirit in the context of early Dixieland Jazz and West Coast 60s Pop as well as in Stockhausen's 1969 Stimmung underlines better than I can that the 'chamber' ideal is an intrinsic part of human musicality, not something confined to music written down or to music played in a 'chamber', whatever that is or was.

The advent of recording in the early 20th Century meant, in effect, the removal of the transcription role. The disappearance of the piano duet medium from composition is the stark proof of this: the 19th-century duet's everyday 'recording' function kept it in the picture, giving rise to original masterpieces such as Schubert's Fantasia or Mendelssohn'sVariations op 81a along the way. With the lapse of its functional role, the duet fell into disuse - what composer has turned to it since Ravel and Faur? In fact, as The Oxford Companion notes, Stravinsky and Poulenc both wrote concerti for two pianos, the former without orchestra; more to the point, he might have added that both composers supplied highly effective

EX Poulenc Sonata for Piano Duet

The demise of the duet would not be in itself remarkable - after all, the rise and fall of musical genres is a human history - but for the unflagging currency of the piano, which has not passed from currency like the viol and the harpsichord. Given the central role of piano in the last 100 years, it must be worth a raised eyebrow that one of its most popular genres has all but vanished since the 1920s.(3)

Yet something greater than the piano duet disappeared along with it. Duet playing was the clearest manifestation of the spirit of domesticity without which any small ensemble music is somehow ersatz. The humblest piano duet represented something much greater than its content - not just the presence of music in the home but the intimacy of collaboration, in an age when other intimacies, particularly between the young, were kept in check. It is not far-fetched to see in the unselfconscious domesticity of vocal and duet music around the piano a highly active forerunner of our passive participation in television today. [photo] The following passage from Jane Austen's Mansfield Park perfectly illustrates this (4) in using the piano as the nucleus around which the simmering rivalries for affection swirl, among a group of young people. The heroine Fanny and her adored cousin Edmund are about to step onto the lawn to observe the stars when Miss Crawford, with whom cousin Edmund is smitten, joins the others at the piano to sing a glee.

' The glee began. "We will stay till this is finished, Fanny," said Edmund, turning his back on the window; and as it advanced, she had the mortification of seeing him advance too, moving forward by gentle degrees toward the instrument, and when it ceased, he was close by the singers, among the most urgent in requesting to hear the glee again.'

It is this centrality, this provision of an activity before which others in a room concede, that has passed to technology and specifically to the television. Quite when technology overwhelmed domestic culture for good is hard to ascertain: The Oxford Companion reminded us that not only orchestral but chamber works themselves came in for duet transcription; my own mother encountered Schumann's Piano Quintet first as a piano duet, as late as the 1930s. At any account, the warmth of human interaction conveyed by Jane Austen, and no doubt taken for granted by her, was no longer to be found in the living rooms of Western societies much after 1939: it was passing to the garages and basements where youngsters experimented in the genres of Jazz ensemble, and later rock & roll band.

Thereafter, it is interesting that the history of rock and popular music itself suffers in miniature the same loss of chamber intimacy, the same nostalgic searches for a less self-conscious age, that we feel with a twinge when comparing the domestic role of performance in Jane Austen's day to our own. From 1955 to 1975, rock music's star turns developed from energetic amateurs on an unglamorous club circuit into superstars playing to audiences too numerous to count, with millions beyond them participating through recordings. The Beatles' progress from The Cavern in 1962 to New York 's Shea Stadium in 1966 is a most startling example. In this situation it was inevitable that groups who, by the 1970s, were travelling circuses with lorry-loads of equipment, hundreds of employees and a turnover of millions would become aware of lost 'roots'. The pattern is familiar: the individual member takes time out from the big band - Rolling Stones, Genesis or whoever - to play in smaller projects where that individual's kudos alone is not such as to require the whole paraphernalia of stadium rock - the hoped-for 'return to smaller venues'. In the later 1970s, critics lined up to point out how far stadium rock bands had left behind the freshness of those early days; nostalgia for the lost freshness of earlier albums became in fact a stock-in-trade of rock journalism. Pink Floyd were the ultimate target, with the subversive freshness of their first records - the domestic music, as it were - giving way to the inflated self-observation and hand-wringing whose public canvas critics loved to hate, even as millions bought Wish You Were Hereand The Wall.

This was a bubble that had to burst, the pendulum-swing starker in this case than in any musical development I can think of in the classical sphere. The fervent hatred of punk rock for that aggrandisement is still fresh to me from the late 1970s; though I am not an expert on punk, I have never seen a plainer musical process of reaction than the attack on stadium rock that produced The Ramones and myriad other bands.

I think few might deny that something similar has happened to this music, and for the same reasons as fuelled the inflation of the rock band, namely the demands of consumption. Am I the only one to feel, when hearing that the Suchandsuch String Quartet has sold out five nights at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, no doubt playing safely familiar Viennese repertoire, that this very music is now safely under lock and key, in a museum far from the home context that gave rise to it? The image problem I mentioned, of a formalised programming being played in formal surroundings, seems to me closely related, for example, to the legend of sustained perfection around the Amadeus Quartet, an image of the abstracted art work that exalted the purity of the canon - the complete Mozart and Beethoven, the late Schubert, hardly anything experimental and so on. Such a package elevates that canon, but at the same time removes it further from any sense of social context of the sort that generated the composition in the first place.

Even the plush surroundings of the QEH, for example, are a far cry from the context that first hosted Beethoven's Quartets. However we perform on modified instruments, with 'original' tempi and phrasing, the original context for these compositions is lost - just as the Beatles could not return to what they had once been in The Cavern. We put every stylistic aspect under the microscope in period performances, yet ensembles happily perform 18th-century music with scrupulous care in the Royal Albert Hall, to Prom audiences of three or four thousand listeners in a stadium acoustic. My point is just that this cannot avoid serving to institutionalise art, in the way that the Rolling Stones' early, raw R & B hits are further institutionalised when wheeled out 30 years on for an audience of 15,000 in a Japanese stadium.

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