Obviously, listening to music is essential to its enjoyment. You do not need me to tell you that. Music is much more than just sound, and it provides more than the proverbial ‘soundtrack to our lives’. It plays an integral role to the social functions of many modern-day situations, shaping and influencing our social interactions with one another. Allow me to take you on a little tour through clubs, gigs and festivals. Follow me if you will.

When someone mentions Minneapolis, Minnesota, the name Hüsker Dü probably does not spring to mind. The home town of my favourite band is more famous for having given the world Prince, a man so diametrically opposed to the Hüskers, it is almost unbelievable that they are from the same place. But then (talented as Prince is), sometimes it is hard to believe that the flamboyant superstar is not a kind of shared, perverse fantasy. Therein lies his most vital difference to the Dü. The actual phrase ‘Hüsker Dü’ means ‘Do You Remember?’ in Norwegian. Sadly I do not; the band broke up just after I was born. As I listen to Bob Mould’s molten guitars spilling beautifully from my cd player, I get the sense that you don’t have to remember. Because they created it, and lived it purely on their own terms, the music remains more alive and ten times fresher than anything around today.

Hearing music is easy, listening is much more difficult. It is a rare occasion for us to give complete attention to the sounds which are unfolding around us. Music is most often present in the background, the accompaniment to a different activity. Sometimes, however, this is just not enough. I do not want to rain on people’s good fun, but music is an art and thus demands our respect. Increasingly, however, musical taste is an excuse for prejudice, a means of dismissing whole centuries, genres, and styles of music. Contemporary art music, in particular, suffers from such prejudice. ‘All this modern rubbish’, ‘Schoenberg and that lot’ and ‘horrible noise’ are all wildly inaccurate accounts of contemporary ‘classical’ music, which speak of a widespread misunderstanding.

“The revealing science of God can be seen as an ever opening flower in which simple truths emerge examining the complexities and magic of the past and how we should not forget the song that has been left for us to hear.”

It was with these and other such lyrics the prog band Yes alienated casual listeners everywhere, and became, in the eyes of the fastidious seventies critics, the epitome of everything that was wrong with progressive rock. The genre fell from grace with the fickle public, and was relegated to cult status worshipped by delusional twits everywhere.

A “defence” of any musical period is both superfluous and impossible to accomplish with a mere thousand words, if at all. So why this article? Well, because too often contemporary music is mercilessly written-off due to its ostensibly “difficult” nature, which is rather sad. The music itself doesn’t need defending, but the charges of pretentiousness frequently levelled at it must be addressed, allowing it to have a chance to be appreciated as something more than narcissistic indulgence by a quasi-intellectual elite, and a bandwagon for bourgeois pseuds to jump on.

Leoš Janácek (1854-1928) is recognized to be “one of the most substantial, original and immediately appealing opera composers of the twentieth century” (John Tyrrell). As a composer he is not noted for his piano writing, instead famed primarily for his operatic writing (e.g. Jenufa, 1904 and The Cunning Little Vixen, 1923) as well as his instrumental pieces (e.g. Sinfonietta, 1926). As a result the beautiful piano miniatures that form On An Overgrown Path (1901-8) have been unjustly neglected. Indeed many pianists do not encounter Janácek’s piano music at all (except perhaps his four larger pieces In The Mists, 1912). His piano music is certainly not included in the core repertoire of the nineteenth or early twentieth centuries that is performed in the professional concert hall.

In February of this year there was a concert curated by Ph.D. student, Felipe Otondo at the Rymer auditorium, here in our very own music department. This concert featured the work of renowned York-based composer Trevor Wishart. In this article I shall try to give some insight into the work of this composer and the importance of electronic music.

The image of Jimi Hendrix burning an electric guitar on stage has emerged as an emblem of 20th century music. We read that: “The set ended with Hendrix burning his guitar onstage, then smashing it to bits and tossing them out to the audience. The show instantly catapulted Hendrix into US stardom”. A few years prior to that near sacrificial ritual taking place, a well-known and too frequently referred to political group burned books in a square of Europe. No particular sociological insight is required to discern that acts of middle class vandalism–the Western underclasses have always been perfectly aware of the status they enjoy globally, for all the supposed solidarity with the poor of the world–are instigated, staged and promoted by agents whose main interest may only be extraneous to literature or music.

All that many of us wanted for Christmas, apparently, was more classical-pop crossover bands; as Il Divo and The Choir Boys added their names to the ever-expanding roster of genre-bending bands, such as G4, Amici Forever (the ‘first opera band’), Charlotte Church, the Mediaeval Baebes and Vanessa Mae. However their music appeals to us, their considerable success and controversial appeal does serve as a reminder that musical segregation –convenient, perhaps– doesn’t come without certain associated tensions.

Our western music history is defined by the constant modification of musical activity from intuitive interactions with the phenomena of natural and organised sounds into a set of characteristic and formulaic practices understood in terms of familiarity. Furthermore, in the 20th and 21st centuries, owing to the establishment of copyright laws and the gradual extinction of anonymous music and also due to developments in mass distribution of published materials, the growth of music as an ideological medium has been rapid. Whether it be the blut und boden quality in the music of Sibelius, Vaughan Williams or Strauss, the deliberate innervations of the amorphous post-war avant-garde movements, the seemingly subversive genres of the rock and roll traditions or the aggressive, highly politicised and radical music of the North-American and European under-classes, the framework within which most Western music is conceived and operates in remains the same: through the proliferation of sound products, its role becomes steadily and exclusively emblematic of attitudes ascribed to it by the producer.

Downloaded music. Now there’s a moral quandary, a thought experiment for our times. Consider the system: I download a song, listen to it and enjoy it. I harm no-one else, nor deprive them of any opportunities, yet this is an immoral action. Confusing, no? As we all know, the argument is that if everyone got their music for free, the artists wouldn’t have any reason to make more, which Would Be Bad. Ah, well. Bang goes that nice sharing idea someone had. Guess we’ll all have to keep trudging into Virgin Megastore and handing over a tenner an album after all. But wait! We don’t have to do that, because that argument makes as much sense as my face.

The discovery in a Pennsylvania seminary last October of the manuscript of Beethoven’s own piano duet transcription of his Grosse Fuge elicited some decidedly inarticulate responses from musical elite. Lewis Lockwood, a Harvard musicologist, memorably commented to The New York Times, “Wow! Oh my God! This is big. This is very big”. Lockwood’s momentary lack of erudition is forgivable, as the manuscript has been considered lost since its sale, 116 years ago, at a Berlin auction. To compound further the potential impact of its discovery stands the fact that the Grosse Fuge has been one of Beethoven’s most enduringly controversial compositions since its first performance in March 1826.