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Chapter 3

How to Listen

“When I speak of the gifted listener, I am thinking of the non-musician primarily, of the listener who intends to retain his amateur status. It is the thought of just such a listener that excites the composer in me.”

AARON COPLAND, composer

What is ‘listening’? What are you supposed to be hearing and how is it possible to change the way you listen? Why is it that classical musicians can talk endlessly about the merits of one violinist over another? Does it really affect how I listen if I know that Mozart was born in 1756 or any of the myriad of apparently pointless facts that seem to surround classical music? And finally, what on earth is ‘authentic performance’? Listening to classical music is not as simple as bunging on a CD and opening your ears.

How we listen

Lesson one: there is no one correct way to listen to classical music or any other kind of music because it’s an intensely personal business. That said, there are facets of the music that you may not have thought about that can direct your listening – and a little knowledge will not only give you a greater understanding but will make you sound like an expert at the bar afterwards. Most gratifying.

In some ways our tolerance for classical music can be lessened by more immediately rewarding and popular forms. As Noël Coward, with typical acerbity, once remarked: ‘Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.’ We are raised on a musical diet of trash; everywhere we go there is ‘cheap’ music in lifts, restaurants, waiting rooms, garages, shopping centres, TV adverts, the radio, telephone call centre holding music … the list is endless. This music, as Coward points out, is potently gripping and effective. To me it can be a form of torture, but more importantly I think it affects the way we listen.

“Any time I travel anywhere it seems I’m forced to endure an inconsiderate person’s noise. I might even normally like the song but don’t really want it imposed upon me when I have, as most commuters do, other pressing matters to think about.¹”

CHARLEY, 26-year-old commuter, complaining about mobiles playing music on buses (from Transport for London’s website)

“We are increasingly likely to find ourselves in places with background music. No composers have thought to write for these modern spaces, which represent 30% of our musical experience.”

BRIAN ENO

The Polish composer Witold Lutoslawski (1913–1994) said: ‘People whose sensibility is destroyed by music in trains, airports, lifts, cannot concentrate on a Beethoven quartet.’ My bank has had the same music on its telephone banking service since 1997. I have heard that music so many times that I wake up singing it. There is no escape: if you want to speak to the bank then you will listen to this music. The title of this masterpiece of call-centre muzak is unknown to me. (The word muzak, incidentally, is derived from the Muzak Holdings company in the US, who specialised in ways of delivering this branch of music to public environments.) I agree with Lutoslawski that this damages our ‘sensibility’ towards music. It hasn’t ruined my appreciation of classical music – but it clogs my ears and doesn’t set me up well for a symphony. Muzak trains us to block out background music and noise, which is the opposite of what is necessary when I listen to classical music, where I require calm and quiet with open ears.

And it’s not just since the invention of beatboxes in the 1980s; our cities have been noisy for a long time. The classical musician driven mad by the noise made by music from the street was brilliantly encapsulated by the engraver William Hogarth in The Enraged Musician (1741). In the window the musician is playing the violin, a classy instrument, while the noise of the street includes baser instruments such as drums and hunting horns. The musician’s wig and attire suggest that he comes from a higher-status world than the noisy rabble outside, and he is disgusted by the appalling music of the street. I suspect part of his frustration stems from an incredulity that they don’t just stop what they are doing and listen to his infinitely superior fiddling. It looks like he has no intention of listening to them even if there is a rather pretty singer in their midst.

There is a passionate campaign against ‘piped music’ run by an organisation called ‘Pipedown – the campaign for freedom from piped music’. It’s a rather small revolution, but one that matters to music lovers. We are assaulted by music at every step through our modern cities, and finding restaurants and pubs that don’t play music is becoming more and more difficult. You may think that this is the whingeing of a musical snob. Does this matter to ordinary people? I think it should, because not only is it an imposition but it desensitises us to music.

If we overdose on facile forms it makes the complexities and subtleties of classical music seem laborious. The function of popular music is fundamentally different: it aims to be as immediately pleasing, as sonically gratifying and as exciting as possible, and to do all that in a very short space of time. In the time it takes to listen to a Beethoven string quartet you could have listened to well over ten different pop songs. We are used to music delivering the goods in under a minute: a pop song that doesn’t get to the melodic ‘hook’ by this time is unlikely to be played in public. This can make it difficult for people to approach classical music because it takes more time for the music to reward the listener.

In food circles there is an acknowledgement that time is important and that fast food has a detrimental effect on our health. The slow food movement, which began in Italy, aims to redress this balance. There isn’t a formal movement for ‘slow music’ or maybe ‘slow listening’, but perhaps there should be. This is not to say that all classical music is at a slow speed, merely that its creation takes more time and so does its appreciation. There is a difference between the fast-food approach – passively hearing muzak – which encourages our brains to tune out, and the slow-food approach – actively listening to classical music – which encourages us to listen more carefully. There is an enormous difference between hearing something and listening to it.

It might be that for the first few listens you will, quite simply, find some of this music boring. I am happy to admit that I have been bored in classical music concerts. I once left an opera by bombastic and grandiose French composer Hector Berlioz before the final act: it just seemed so excessively drawn out. But I have also been bored by uninteresting sport matches, dull dramas on TV and most especially by pastel landscape paintings in art galleries, although I don’t stick all those interests in the bin because of that occasional boredom. The experience of being bored is often because you are in the wrong frame of mind, or the work in question simply doesn’t speak to you. Don’t worry, there are plenty more.

Nevertheless, one of the central themes of this book is giving things a chance. In the next chapter I’ll discuss how to do the right kind of preparation so that even the most seemingly uninteresting music can tell its story and find a more receptive listener in you.

But let’s get on to the music. Below I’ve tried to describe some different ways in which we listen to music and I’m sure you, like me, will move between these modes during any piece of classical music. Even the most practised listener can lose concentration at some point in a piece and even the musical novice may have moments of elevated listening in the presence of a truly great performance.

Not listening

Passive listening

Active listening

Creative listening

Comparative listening

Specialist listening

Not listening

Not listening is what you do when you are thinking about how long the concert will last or how long it will take to get home. My hunch (and that’s all it is) is that people will not listen to at least 25 per cent of a concert. It’s natural, normal and perfectly acceptable. Look around you at any concert. There will be at least one person asleep, and many of the rest of them will be doing a ‘this is moving me’ face. This face is especially prevalent right before the interval. Adopt a comfortable position and know that it’s OK to let your mind wander.

Passive listening

This is the aural equivalent of ‘taking in the view’. It’s listening to the music but only hearing the surface. I find myself listening in this way when I’m engaged in another activity – typing this text, for example, with Bach’s English Suites playing merrily in the background. It requires effort to listen to the music in a concerted way all the time, so there are bound to be times when I sit back and let the sound fall upon me. For a classical musician this feels almost naughty – surely I should be thinking a series of great and profound thoughts as I listen? No. I’m just enjoying the experience. When I eat chocolate I don’t always read the ingredients and analyse what makes them combine to such indulgent effect. I simply chomp and go.

Active listening

This is when 100 per cent of your attention is taken up with the music. I usually achieve this at the beginning of the concert and can wane after about fifteen minutes. It can take something especially interesting (a loud bit) to jolt me back into the music. At this point I will quickly put on my ‘this is moving me’ face.

Creative listening

When I was a child music would constantly suggest images, as though the music played out a kaleidoscopic film in my mind. This film was different for every piece of music. I think this is the same for many people. Music suggests atmospheres, feelings or landscapes. I suppose when I was a child I did not realise that these were part of my response to the music; I thought they were part of the music. This is creative listening because it’s your brain being stimulated by the music and coming up with a creative response. For many people this is part of the joy of classical music and as the repertoire is so varied you can be transported almost anywhere. For some people, and the composer Olivier Messiaen (1908–1992) was one, these connections are unavoidable. He had synaesthesia, where one sense interferes with the other. Hearing certain musical chords made him see colours.

Comparative listening

This means that you’ve been to more than one concert and/or you’ve been listening to other pieces of classical music. It’s the basis of forming an opinion – from noticing that the lead violinist was playing particularly fervently on this occasion to appreciating aspects of the composition. Anybody is capable of listening in this way as we have been consuming music all our lives and have a huge basis for comparison.

Specialist listening

Once you’ve heard a piece several times you may start to notice differences between your recording and the version being performed. It might vary in any number of ways and you may feel that you can comment on these subtleties: the tenor isn’t as good, the strings are more vibrant, the brass sounded louder, they played it much faster, it wasn’t as emotional, etc.

Why we listen

Music connects with us at a primal level. We have an atavistic response to rhythm because we are rhythmic creatures: our walking, our speech, our daily lives are determined by rhythm and are accompanied by the constant beat of our hearts. However, merely hearing rhythm is not enough for us to be moved. My washing machine is rhythmical but I want to get far away from it when it’s on because it’s not musical. Still, when I listen to contemporary classical music it’s often the driving rhythm that I find exciting.

As well as rhythm getting under your skin, certain sounds themselves can provoke an immediate emotional reaction: my singing teacher Janice Chapman, a champion of a scientific approach to singing teaching, describes how the range of the human voice is perfectly matched to the range of our ears so that we cannot help but have a physical reaction to a highly emotive sound:

The resonance present in the newborn child is in the 3,000 hertz area, which corresponds to the most sensitive part of the human ear. A baby’s cries are ‘primal sound’ at its most potent as it is the only communication mode available to the newborn child, whose very survival depends upon its ability to communicate its needs when it leaves the womb. Babies practice vocalizations in utero and emerge from the womb with a highly effective vocal system ready for use.²

Our reaction to sounds that hit those sensitive parts of the ears are instinctive, as anybody who has listened to a baby cry will know: you simply can’t ignore it, any more than you can ignore being hit on the head with a hammer.

Even minute changes in rhythm and pitch can have a huge effect on us. An excellent example of how small variations in pitch and repetitive rhythm can make compelling music can be heard in the work of Steve Reich (b. 1936). Mechanistic, repetitive and seemingly lacking in some of the traditional elements of composition (melodies in particular are entirely absent, as are familiar choices of orchestral instruments, and sometimes the harmony is very restricted as well), at first listen his music is not far from the sound of my washing machine on full cycle. His music is labelled ‘Minimalist’ because it uses subtle shifts in sound and texture to make us listen. Reich is deliberately making music for our time, based on the repetitive sound-world of modern cities, computers and industrial rhythms. Music for 18 Musicians [0] sounds to me like a late-night drive through half-lit and empty streets – but that’s just my feeling about it.

Out of apparently meaningless repetition, music emerges. In fact, hidden within Reich’s work is a classical sense of structure; the changes are meticulously planned and can be very effective through subtle variation of pitch. Composers are able to make us listen and keep us interested by varying pitch and rhythm. But that’s not enough to keep the ear alert. If the sound quality doesn’t change enough then it’s like staring at a monochromatic picture – you want colour. In music we refer to colour as ‘timbre’.

Timbre means tonal colour or the quality of a sound – a bit like the mix of flavours that makes up the individual taste of a wine or a particularly good cake. Our sensitivity to timbre is extremely developed. We can recognise the difference between relatively similar sounds: a champagne cork exploding and a gunshot, our own front door opening and that of our neighbour’s coming through the walls, and we can often recognise people on the telephone from the first ‘hello’.

Timbre is what tells you that you are listening to a flute and not a trumpet – even though they may be playing the same note. The way that an instrument starts and ends a note can also give you clues: a trumpet, for example, has that distinctive brass ‘pa pa pa’ or ‘bbbbrr’ sound before the note fully sounds, and this is very different from the breathy ‘whhhoooo’ onset sound made by a flute. (Professional players aim to eliminate these sounds where possible and make a feature of them where necessary.) Timbre is one of those concepts that can’t really be adequately described in words, though you might say a sound is, for example, reedy, or breathy, or pure, or rasping, or bell-like [I and II].

Creating interesting timbres is part of the point of classical music. Listening to the beautiful sound of the flute can be an uplifting experience in its own right and the combination of these ‘colours’ can be thrilling. Some composers exploit the difference in timbre between instruments; Ravel and Debussy in particular were masters of combining orchestral sounds as a painter might combine colours. The lush effects of timbre as the sound moves from dark to light can be heard in Debussy’s La Mer (‘The Sea’) and exquisite balancing of instrumental choices can be found in Ravel’s Ma Mère l’Oye (‘Mother Goose’).

Timbre applies to voice as well, and in a blind test I reckon I could spot the difference between at least ten of the world’s tenors: Jussi Björling, Luciano Pavarotti and Plácido Domingo have such distinctive timbres that within the space of a single note I can tell who is singing. It’s the same for many experts with violins. Not only do the instruments themselves vary in sound but the playing style changes with the individual and that’s what gives it away. In the days before violins were ridiculously expensive (millions of pounds for the best instruments) a player might have owned many violins and chosen the most appropriate one for the piece in question. Fritz Kreisler, a stylish early-twentieth-century virtuoso from Austria who was world-famous for his effortless playing, owned many fine instruments until he had to get rid of the famous Guarnarius del Gesù violin to settle his tax bill. Owning two world-class instruments is no longer financially viable even at the very top end of the profession, which can help make it easier to identify a violinist by listening to the sound of their fiddle. (Even as I write, the police are trying to track down a Stradivarius that was stolen from a player at Euston Station in London.³ The instrument was valued at £1.2 million, the bow at £62,000. Imagine carrying something that valuable to work every day.)

How could you possibly tell one violinist from another? Actually it’s simpler than you’d think and, like most things in music, practice makes perfect. First and foremost each violinist has a different personality, and that comes through clearly in the case of violin gods and goddesses such as Anne-Sophie Mutter, Jascha Heifetz or Itzhak Perlman. In addition to this the violin’s sound is influenced by a number of physical factors: the type and quality of wood, the quality of the bow, the use of either metal or gut strings, the varnish used and tiny shifts in design from maker to maker. Spectrograph analysis reveals that each individual violin has an audio fingerprint unique to that instrument. The perception of these differences may be very subtle and only noticeable by professionals used to listening to violins all day long. But with practice it becomes possible to tell Maxim Vengerov from Nigel Kennedy with your eyes closed. I’m still practising.

I can’t do justice to the difference between players but to my inexpert ear Anne-Sophie Mutter has a tone that gleams but then so does she when she steps on to the stage, Vengerov’s playing is smoother and darker, like well-matured single malt whisky, whereas Nikolaj Znaider plays in a lyrical way that sounds almost like a singer. This is of course a waste of prose – you need to hear them to appreciate the difference. A great violinist makes us listen by varying the tone that their instrument makes; application of more pressure, vibrating their arm to create vibrato and the amount of attack with which they begin a note can alter the tonal colour. This is why it’s worth checking out the same piece played by different players until you find the one that compels you to listen.

The difference between a good violin and a top-class violin is in the resonance. Even a child’s starter violin has strings that vibrate when a bow is drawn across them which cause vibrations in the body of the violin. But a top-level violin creates more vibration and a greater range of colours. This means that a Stradivarius (the most expensive and famous violin) will make a sound that hits the ear in a more fulsome way than a cheaper and less resonant version. You can plot this resonance on a graph and prove its superiority scientifically, but the best judge is your ear, which in the presence of a live performance is able to ‘feel’ the difference in sound.

You may well be thinking this is like those blindfold tests where TV wine connoisseurs are hoodwinked into admiring cheap plonk and rubbishing a Château Mouton Rothschild 2005 vintage (no, I’ve never tasted wine that good), but honestly, there is a huge difference in the quality of sound that I believe you would be able to notice in a test. A cheap student-level violin has an abrasive, nasal quality and doesn’t sound even throughout its range, whereas a truly great instrument has depth of colour, an even tone from top to bottom and, like a person with a fascinating speaking voice, the violin seems to have personality. There is a rich, creamy quality to some violins that is a million miles – and probably a million pounds – from the scratchings of a child practising on their first instrument. You’d know the difference; trust me.

HARMONIC PENGUINS AND THE MUSIC OF BALI

While humans are fairly adept at recognising each other through the timbre of our voices, we also have the assistance of other markers, such as snazzy dressing, distinctive noses and receding hairlines. Pity the poor penguin in an Antarctic blizzard who must recognise his mate by the timbre of her squawks. In fact they do this extremely effectively by making an extraordinary two-tone sound that varies from penguin to penguin.⁴ I know it’s unbelievable but a penguin (unlike a human being) can make two sounds at once which are very slightly out of tune with each other. This ‘out-of-tune-ness’ creates what musicians call ‘beats’ (not to be confused with drumbeats which are entirely separate from this definition of ‘beats’). Because in Western music we aim to eliminate music with ‘beats’, it’s actually very difficult to explain, although there is the example of honky-tonk pianos.

A honky-tonk piano is created by de-tuning the three strings which are hit every time a note is played. In a normal piano these are tuned to sound as one note. A discrepancy in tuning between the different strings creates a sort of ghastly wobbly and out-of-tune noise. The effect on the British ear is fairly unpleasant, unless you like Chas and Dave. But in other musical cultures this sound is welcomed: if you’ve ever listened to the music of the Gamelan from the Indonesian islands of Java and Bali then you may have noticed that it sounds out of tune to your ears – many Western musicians react with shock when they first hear it. A friend of mine spent a year in Bali and on returning to England found she couldn’t sing in tune because her sense of pitch had been affected by playing in a Gamelan orchestra. In Gamelan, two xylophone-like instruments sit next to each other and have almost exactly the same five notes (or seven in some cases) except that when the two instruments play together they sound marginally out of tune. This creates a shimmering effect (due to the beats created between the notes). This is the same effect as the penguin’s two-tone squawking.

The advantage of these ‘beats’ is that they travel a long distance and can be heard through objects, clearly an advantage for the penguin trying to locate a mate on the ice. Gamelan is traditionally played outdoors and I know from personal experience that the noise can penetrate glass, steel and concrete as no other instrument can. When I worked at the LSO St Luke’s, a centre for community music, the sound of the Gamelan could be heard through the acoustic glass and soundproofing, such was its resonance. The architects had put the office next to the Gamelan room and every week I’d see the support staff sitting with headphones trying to block out the relentless ‘bonging’.

We perceive this difference in tuning as timbre. Anyone can tell the difference between a honky-tonk piano and a Steinway grand piano tuned for a classical recital. But the technical explanation requires an understanding of harmonics.

I have decided only to include this short explanation of harmonics as it is beyond the scope of this book. Harmonics are produced when any note is played and they resonate at frequencies higher than the fundamental, creating harmonic resonance (have I lost you yet?). Certain instruments produce sound energy at particular frequencies, which is known as formants. Aaaaaaggghhh. I’m going to leave it to you to research this yourself should you be interested. Just take it from me: harmonics are what make one sound different from another one. Simple.

(For a more lucid explanation of the harmonics of music see How Music Works by John Powell, appropriately published by Penguin!)

Context: listening and understanding

Timbre is not the whole story of listening, because listening to classical music is helped by knowing the context in which the piece was written. Remember that music was written by human beings, people with children, wives, lovers, desires, their own victories and failures. They are fallible – even the great ones. We sometimes speak of composers as if it was only their work that mattered, but the whole person is of interest. Knowing that Bach was a devoutly religious man explains the serious nature of his composition. Knowing that Beethoven had a fiery personality tells you so much about his music, especially the furious pieces written after he became deaf. Knowing that Stravinsky could be very harsh in his criticism of other musicians tells us so much about the shifts in his own output, as if that incisive critical mind were turned in on itself, provoking him to reinvent his style.

The fact that Elgar was a rather melancholy Englishman affects the way that I listen to his Cello Concerto: the melody, the sound of the orchestra, the nostalgic quality of the music and the rather grey, melancholic emotional atmosphere all suggest to me an idealised, pastoral version of Britain that no longer exists – or may never have existed – but which, living in England, I can somehow immediately identify as English. These bits of contextual information form associations which are deeply personal and make a network of information around the music. For me they attach themselves to specific bars or harmonies like Post-it notes.

Listening doesn’t happen in a vacuum and for this reason I think that it’s very useful to know the rough time period in which a piece of music was written. When I don’t know or can’t place this period, then the ‘Post-it notes’ are highly personal and random, but as I get to know more about the piece then the associations can be shared with other people. For example it’s nice to feel that Vivaldi’s furiously energetic music makes you think of blue skies but it’s much better (I think) to know that he composed in Venice and allow images of Venetian waterways to permeate the music.

Where you first hear a piece of music is just as important as what you know about it. Film is potent in combining powerful imagery and music, such that the two seem inseparable. Unforgettable moments for me include the use of the elegiac Barber Adagio in the film Platoon, the resolute Ride of the Valkyries in Apocalypse Now or the chilling juxtaposition of the sublimely civilised Aria from J.S. Bach’s Goldberg Variations as Hannibal Lecter casually murders his jailers. It is almost impossible to forget the potent combination of images of extreme violence accompanied by music. There was an outcry in 1973 when a girl was raped whilst the perpetrators sang the song ‘Singing in the Rain’. This was said to be a copycat crime following an infamous scene in Stanley Kubrick’s film A Clockwork Orange. As a result of this and other such crimes, Kubrick withdrew the film from release in the UK. This is more than a Post-it note – it’s like an indelible permanent marker.

We also have our own cultural contexts for hearing music that can change from town to town, and country to country. Hearing music from the Indian classical tradition – Ravi Shankar playing the sitar, for example – I’m aware of very few of the symbolic meanings that are attached to the music. The same for me is true of the music of the Gamelan from Bali. We recognise it as music produced by human beings; it can often have similar structures to Western music – tunes, rhythm, harmony, organisation – but it doesn’t immediately have the same meaning for me as it would for someone brought up in that tradition. But if you only listened to English music then you’d be severely impoverished. The difficulty in listening to music from the Czech Republic, Russia, America, Germany, France and so on is that each country represents different attitudes and has musical styles associated with it that we may not immediately understand. That’s part of the joy of classical music – each country’s music ‘tastes’ different and has rich history to be uncovered.

Recording has spoiled our listening

Lieder (German for ‘songs’) is a good example of music that was at one time fresh and exciting but without knowing the context it can be difficult to understand and tedious. In Vienna during the latter years of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth there was a fashion for the salon performance which was literally chamber music, a performance in a small room (not that small room!). These salons differed from performances in a church or opera house because the scale of the music was smaller owing to the limited space, and it was in these salons that ‘art song’ or Lieder developed. Composers such as Schubert, Schumann and Brahms would have listened to and performed music in this context and consequently their songs are specifically written for that environment. They are often intimate, personal and tender songs about love, rejection and pain.

Sitting in the same room as a singer has a musical intimacy that many people these days never experience, living as we do in the age of the recording. Two hundred years ago there would have been no opportunity to hear music unless it was performed live. Naturally the best musicians and performers flocked to musical centres such as Vienna to share ideas and hear each other’s music. Imagine the atmosphere in those soirées. Composers and poets would share their newly penned work, talented young musicians gathered to play the music, aristocracy mingled with artists and the possibility of hearing something fresh and of great merit was ever-present. It would have been a very dynamic way to listen; the audience were performers themselves; anybody might do a turn during the evening. It’s a world away from the way we listen to the songs now – as though they are preserved and sacred. A great performer knows this and attempts to recreate the freshness that would have existed in the first performance.

Sadly there are few modern equivalents to this informal way of listening to classical music; we must buy tickets to concert halls or listen on the radio. But there are some venues that try to recreate the intimacy of those evenings, for instance the Wigmore Hall, which is small enough to create an intimate atmosphere and has a reputation for bringing together the very best musicians, who sometimes bring in historical instruments for their recitals. At the Royal Academy of Music there is an amazing room where they have all sorts of pianos dating back to the early nineteenth century. Listening to music played on the exact type of piano the composer would have owned gives you a greater understanding of why they wrote the way they did.

Where to listen: the internet and audio technology

If you can’t get to a concert hall or you are thinking about building up a library, then there are now a number of options for listening to classical music: whether you are a silver surfer or a teenager doing dodgy downloads, the internet is now making music highly accessible. Superb audio is coming to a computer near you and it’s worth getting a pair of high-quality speakers hooked up to your sound card (the bit of the computer that makes the noise.) For me a decent internet connection is the ideal way to encounter music.

As a first step, if your computer can handle it and you have broadband internet access, you should be able to download Spot-ify. I strongly urge you to do so. Somehow it is able to give you access to almost any CD you care to listen to. There is a monthly fee for the advert-free subscription service but there is a free version which is frankly pretty good. But the reigning king of internet music is iTunes from Apple. I don’t know how I lived before iTunes. It’s possible to buy pretty much any music and download it instantly. The range is much greater than Spotify and if you are worried about losing your music in a computer crash then you can legally burn CD backup copies. Thanks to iTunes I have around 3,000 individual tracks stored on my mobile phone at a fairly high quality. The joy of this for me is in shuffle mode which picks tracks at random from your entire CD collection – it’s a great way to rediscover music.

If you are interested in having the highest-quality audio then there is an audio format called FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec). Hyperion Records are now selling much of their output via the Web in FLAC. This is recorded at a higher quality than conventional formats like MP3 and WAV. If this is getting a bit geeky then let me just say this: a higher-quality file does make a difference to your listening but only if you have a decent pair of speakers. If you are listening on your kitchen radio with the fridge buzzing in the background then it’s simply not worth the extra effort of seeking out higher formats. If like me you sit in a darkened room with the best speakers you can lay your hands on then maybe it’s worth the extra money.

The most exciting development that I’ve seen is the Super Audio CD (SACD) which gives you 5.1 surround sound and higher quality than CD. Those still lamenting the loss of the ‘warmth’ of vinyl probably abhor the thought of yet another digital format. To my ears (which I like to think are pretty reliable) there’s not enough difference between the CD and these newer formats to warrant the necessary expenditure unless you are an audiophile. Until the ordinary listener can hear the difference immediately and afford to buy the equipment I think that CDs and MP3s will remain the industry standard. (MP3 and other compressed formats such as M4A and OGG give quality sound for but use less space on your computer or iPod/ MP3 player. Compression is what we all do to our suitcase when coming home from holiday – we squeeze as much in as possible, and though it comes out in the same form – a shirt is still a shirt – it’s probably a little crumpled. Compressed music isn’t quite as vibrant as uncompressed music.)

I sincerely hope to be proved wrong in this because I would love to have the opportunity for higher and higher recording quality. The difference for me is in the presence of the sound. If you are used to hearing nothing but recordings of orchestras then the real thing can be surprisingly vibrant. Recording flat-tens the sound and seems to put it into a box or behind glass. In pop music technical wizardry makes certain sounds pop out of the texture but that doesn’t work in classical music where fidelity to the natural sound is vital. Where FLAC recordings or SACD win out over MP3s and CDs is that you can hear the instruments ‘in relief’, there’s a more palpable sense of the presence of the instruments. This brings an added depth to the sound which means you can hear through the texture – this is especially noticeable in high-density orchestral scores or choral music where there is a lot going on. At a live concert you wouldn’t have a problem hearing the inner workings of the music but on MP3s especially the sound can become too full and detail gets lost – I get a sensation of too much busy-ness and noise. But if you are happy with your Roberts analogue kitchen radio from 1974 then stick with it by all means.

If you want to watch classical music then apart from patchy access on TV there are a couple of internet opportunities: YouTube is a good way to find all sorts of hidden treasures but can be disappointing in audio quality. There’s some great stuff available but you might get lost trying to find it.

The Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra are pioneering a brilliant subscription internet service which at the moment is very reasonable: for a year’s subscription you can watch every concert live from the Philharmonie (their concert hall in Berlin). What is particularly exciting about this ‘digital concert hall’ is that it enables you to watch whatever concert you choose rather than the small number broadcast on terrestrial television – it puts you in charge of your viewing. The drawback is that you’ll need a very sharp computer – and, again, quality speakers for it to be worthwhile. But this technology is coming down in price all the time and pretty soon I believe most concert halls will be offering similar services. The advantage of watching live concerts over the Web is that it can connect you with the players more directly through pre-concert talks, close-ups and general familiarity. This helps prevent that rather disengaged way of listening I mentioned earlier.

How we listen has changed

As wonderful as it is to be able to listen to any music from almost any period of musical history, thanks to the invention of recording we now have something of a museum culture which pins down music for close examination, like a desiccated butterfly fixed to a board. Music that was once listened to in a vibrant atmosphere (taverns, salons and noisy opera houses) can now be played almost anywhere in the world on iPods, and that, I believe, cuts it off from its roots almost entirely. This can be like listening to music in a vacuum – it is rendered meaningless.

How can we have a more vital and immediate way of listening to classical music? A listening that rescues diamonds from the past and shines them up anew? Well, it’s partly up to us to investigate the history and context of the music, but it’s also up to the performers to create performances that bring music back to life and which convey something of the original spirit.

In the next chapter I’ll look at what you can do to create a more meaningful engagement with this music.