UK Edition
After 30 years, is it time that Classic FM changed its tune?
The classical music station is a major success story, yet it also divides opinion. Here, two Telegraph writers go head to head
‘It has a feeling of total conviction’ by Ivan Hewett
Next Wednesday, Classic FM turns 30: that’s 30 years of extraordinary commercial success in the difficult market of classical music. At its height in 2002, the station pulled in almost seven million listeners, and in December 2021 it could still boast an audience of almost five million and a market share of 4.3 per cent. That’s more than twice as many as its great rival Radio 3 which has just under two million listeners and a market share of 1.4 per cent.
And how is Classic FM celebrating the birthday? By asking its listeners to bake a cake, “put up some bunting and enjoy some delicious treats among friends and neighbours”. That’s exactly as it should be; enjoying delicious treats of an aural kind is precisely what the station is all about. Every piece of music you hear on Classic FM has been chosen because the station has evidence that people love it, and want to hear it again and again.
Compare that to the ethos of Radio 3. Of course, no one would claim Radio 3 doesn’t want to give its listeners pleasure. But that aim is blurred and compromised by a whole range of “oughts”. We ought to pay attention to music outside the Western Classical tradition because there’s so much great music there. We ought to get rid of our hang-ups about the special value of “art music”, and realise that pop and urban and folk music is just as valuable. We ought to listen to ear-bending medieval polyphony and scrunchy modern music, because listening to music isn’t just about having a good time, it’s about “going on a journey” or being “stretched” or “challenged”.
These “oughts” are in tension with each other, so it’s not surprising Radio 3 can come across as a station not entirely sure of its own mind. Classic FM, by contrast, radiates that feeling of total conviction that comes from simplicity. “The world’s greatest music”, it shouts on its website, a phrase it unashamedly identifies X with a few hundred well-known pieces by while male composers.
You may disapprove of that. You may feel it shows a disgraceful unawareness of how diverse music has become, and that it perpetuates the oppressive patriarchical value system that has always dominated classical music. But for people who feel that way a ready solution lies to hand, which will cure their rage and contempt instantly. It’s called the off-button. No one is obliged to listen to Classic FM, and anyone who hates it can take comfort in the fact that none of their licence-fee money goes towards maintaining it.
In any case Classic FM isn’t the dreary trudge round the same handful of pieces its enemies claim it to be. True, The Lark Ascending does come round a little too often, but in the last few hours of listening I’ve heard a JC Bach symphony I don’t remember hearing before, and have been reminded how heart-warming Max Bruch’s rarely heard two-piano concerto really is.
What’s more, the station isn’t entirely deaf to the calls for more diversity: the African-American composers Florence Price and Scott Joplin, as well as the Black Briton Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, feature prominently on Classic FM’s website. Admittedly, their music is immediately enjoyable, unlike that of the more ear-bending and difficult George Walker (who is absent). But that’s not surprising. In the end pleasure rules, as it always has on Classic FM, and it’s that straightforward honesty that has allowed the station to thrive. Long may it continue.
‘It patronises its audience’ by Simon Heffer
What is the purpose of a classical music radio station? If it is to provide a form of aural wallpaper for casual listeners, interspersed by fatuous comments from presenters often ignorant about the classical canon, then Classic FM does the job perfectly. If it is to widen an understanding of culture, stimulate intellectual curiosity and encourage a deep engagement between the listener and the music he or she hears, then Classic FM isn’t even on the starting grid.
That it has lasted 30 years suggests it fulfils a useful function; but then so does a lavatory, and Mr Crapper’s invention has lasted even longer. It is unquestionably popular. But it cheapens classical music by treating it as a commodity; worse, it patronises its audience, lulling them into a sort of cultural Stockholm syndrome where they mistake mediocrity for excellence, and where boundaries are seldom pushed out. Of course, it is wonderful if people hitherto unattracted to classical music start to listen to it, and expand the horizons of their taste. But the problem with Classic FM is that, as Matthew Arnold once said of Thomas Carlyle, it leads its converts out into the desert and leaves them there.
They are spoonfed on bitesize chunks of music – some of it classical, some of it impersonating the classical style – with which they may already have a mild familiarity, because of its use in television programmes, in advertisements or in films. The familiar is used to coax them into a safe, unchallenging, ultimately boring environment.
But it doesn’t need to be like this. A little time spent sampling other classical music stations shows a successful model of intelligent, knowledgeable presenters, and can offer context and suggestions of further listening.
The other depressing aspect of Classic FM is the severe limitation of its daytime playlist (there is occasionally more adventurous programming in the evening). The same well-worn pieces recur day to day; again, familiarity is an asset to be prized above curiosity and discovery. The playlist seems largely to be based on the station’s ridiculous “hall of fame”, an annual poll of its listeners in which they choose their 300 favourite pieces of music. One or two challenging pieces sneak in (Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier, Mahler’s Symphony of a Thousand), but it is a welter of film music (in the estimation of the station’s listeners, the theme to Star Wars is over 250 places above Elgar’s First Symphony) laced with music played to oblivion by the station. Listeners are helpfully told that Holst’s Planets includes Jupiter, and Elgar’s Enigma Variations includes Nimrod. As a measure of the taste of the most gullible element of the British public, it is invaluable.
I defer to no-one in my admiration of Ralph Vaughan Williams: but his Lark Ascending, which tops the poll, is far from being his best piece of music. But then many of the really great works by Vaughan Williams – his Fourth and Sixth Symphonies, Sancta Civitas, his Piano Concerto, the Second String Quartet – are not “smooth” (a word much beloved by the station), but aggressive, sometime violent, disturbing, challenging. They are proof that music is sometimes a journey, and can be a never-ending one.
There are more than 300 pieces of music out there. Many are not smooth. Many have not been used in films. Many are by genuine classical composers and not by people posing as them. Many are wonderful. I say to the incarcerated, be daring. Switch off Classic FM, and go and find them. You have nothing to lose but your intellectual chains.