The Blackberry Walk

I was walking home from work just the other day, and I had an itch overtake me, an itch for classical music. It was a Friday, and perchance I checked online to see if there was anything I could go to in Nottingham. And there was; there on the website was a classical concert themed on Nordic composers, specifically Grieg and Sibelius. Surprised by my good fortune, I bought the ticket which, since I am under twenty-six, was only five quid. Five-fold it cost for a regular ticket, for the majority f the seats. Five-fold it cost for the silver-haired generation. It speaks to the good character of the English that so few dye their hair and manage to accept the trappings of old age. And I saw all their heads like a sea of quicksilver from my high-up seat in the Royal Concert Hall. Going to these classical concerts, you see all the elderly middle class of the great Nottingham catchment, all those feeder villages to which the English retire. They form the bulk of the audience. The movements of Grieg's Piano Concerto played, and the audience knew when and when not to clap, waiting between movements, only clapping at the end. They know the piece, no doubt, and have grown up listening to classical music. It is an education that has been lost. I lament that I have had no such education. Listening to Grieg, I had heard parts of the concerto, the famous parts, without realising they fit together as they did. The second movement stood out. It is beautiful. And it is also a piece I already knew from the same source as many in my generation: Civilisation V. Civ V has no doubt been the greatest educator in classical music for my generation, the older zoomers. And listening to the second movement, I was taken back to a delicate, very specific vision of the game, where I was looking at my nation in the tundra, a set of cities in a frozen wasteland. I've never had much talent for strategy games, and the game of this fantasy likely ended in a loss. But that is the story of every civilisation; there is the rise to greatness and grandeur, and the fall to philistinery and failure. And unfortunately, we are in the latter part of the cycle, in that decay. The sea of silver I saw says so much; that somehow , this tradition of classical music, of the orchestra, the soul of the West, just hasn't continued. That classical orchestra was the soundtrack of the West, Civ V understood well. It is the West's soundtrack, its spirit. And with the death of the classical tradition, it's a sign that the guiding spirit of the West has likely died too. Morbid, you may think it, to say that classical music and the West is a dead or dying thing, but I believe it to be true. The death of classical music can be heard in the works of Schoenberg and in the works of other composers at that time. Tonality, that delicate mathematical array, born in the Renaissance, experienced its dementia-ridden end by Schoenberg's hand, dying chaotic, harsh, and broken. This art form, classical music, had grown up alongside the Western civilisation as a kind of mirror. Through art, the ineffable is reflected back to you, reflecting the soul of a place, a nation, or a time. Grieg is a Norwegian, and through the glass prism of his works is reflected the snow and the fjords. The West is no different, though it is so large and unwieldy a concept, we, like the fish who knows not the water in which they swim, are unable to see beyond it. I say classical music is dead, but was I not at a classical concert? Is its tradition not still living? Unfortunately not. Post the Second World War, very few new compositions of merit have been made. The classical concert today is a museum showcasing the past; and the museum is where the dead past is laid to rest. Its music is no mirror of today, but rather a looking-glass into the past, a past similar but quite different to today: it cannot reflect the spirit of the times. The orchestral music of today, all that is left of the tradition, is only film scores, these post-Stravinsky or post-Wagner film scores, which play only a supporting role. Cinema is the new great art form of the new era. In days past from the 18th century onwards, the novel was our highest art form, and the great literary work of fiction was what bound a people in the West. Post world-wars, in our new age, the film has taken over that role as our societal glue, and as the mirror through which our society sees itself. In sum, the past is a foreign country; and that's just what I thought sitting in the Royal Concert Hall. I had an inkling, a kind of gnawing suspicion eating away at me, that all this classical music, like the performances I was watching, were in some way foreign. Not of my culture. And to identify with them is to identify with a long-lost order, even a long-lost tradition. Somehow, at some point, the baton was never passed on to the younger generation. Where the blame lies, whether it was the younger generation not receiving the baton, or the silver-haired folk not giving it up, it's hard to say. Given the '60s, the former is highly likely. The rock music born in this era, which quite consciously made something new, synthesising Western tonality with black jazz and blues, has supplanted classical music as our civilisational mirror. Synth music too has played this role, a new style for a new era. If I were to make a prediction, it would be that as we become more technologically integrated, and as the virtual world blurs ever-more into the real world, synth music will begin to take more and more of the market share from rock music. Rock is the music of a civilisation in transition, the cataclysm of volcanic change; synth is more still, a calm ocean reflecting up the new reality. The concert concluded and, getting up to leave, I wrapped myself in my coat, rejuvenated. Maybe I'm a little priggish, but there is a delicate beauty in classical music, particularly from this era, which cleanses the soul. I climbed the stairs, and left the concert hall, out into the cool air of Nottingham city centre, still humming the motifs and melodies. I wandered past an old kebab shop, Mega Munch, once the favourite of UoN students, which recently closed down - burnt down, in fact, no doubt for tax reasons. I pass and make my way to the bus home, passing any number of nightclubs en route. Some blare out dance music; others blare out cheesy hits. All are violence to my ears. Those delicate melodies I had on exiting were assaulted by these flesh-eating earworms, so scientifically crafted to necrose our sense of beauty. One can retreat into the Garden of the past, but never stay there. It hurts and offends me, but what on earth must the silver-haired generation think? And when they, heaven forbid, pass on, will this oasis dry up? Will my generation, when we are old and grey, flock to classical concerts, or will the taste only be kept alive by scholarly interest? All I can say is this: that I'm very much looking forward to my next classical concert, and I implore you, dear reader, to go to a performance youself.