Skip to main content

Ten Pieces - opening the world of classical music?

If you have children in primary school in the UK you may find them exposed to something called Ten Pieces at the moment. It's a BBC initiative to promote ten pieces of music to 'open up the world of classical music to primary age children.' What's good about this is that any school (or parent) can download the pieces free of charge (or stream them) here.

I've got really mixed feelings about this. Is it a good idea to introduce primary children to serious music (perhaps a better label than classical, as most of these aren't strictly classical)? Absolutely. Can you specify ten pieces that will do the trick? I'm not sure. I think there's a danger of the same sort of problems they have in English when everyone reads the same set texts.

What definitely is not good is the way I heard one of these pieces played on the radio (for some reason on Radio 2). The piece they happened to be playing is Zadok the Priest, and the presenter seemed to assumed that the opening orchestral section was just filler, so talked over it until just before the singing came in. This was musically inept as the most interesting musical aspect of Zadok is the way that the introduction seems to crescendo, then pulls back, so the real crescendo is vastly more engaging. This was totally missed.

But that was just one silly presenter. What about the list itself? I'd say 5 or 6 of them should be there, but there are some sad omissions. And that, of course, is the problem with every such list. Everyone will different ideas of what should be on it (I just know that at least four of these shouldn't.) The list is:
  1. Adams: Short Ride in a Fast Machine
  2. Beethoven: Symphony 5 (1st movement)
  3. Britten: 'Storm' Interlude from 'Peter Grimes'
  4. Grieg: In the Hall of the Mountain King
  5. Handel: Zadok the Priest
  6. Holst: Mars from The Planets
  7. Meredith: Connect It
  8. Mozart: Horn Concerto No 4 (3rd movement)
  9. Mussorgsky: A Night on the Bare Mountain
  10. Stravinsky: The Firebird (Finale)
I wouldn't include the Adams, not because I've anything against film music, but simply because there's far better film music - this is pretty tedious. Can't really argue with Beethoven, though I can't see any point in including the Britten. Grieg - fine. I wouldn't include Handel, because there should have been some Bach and there's no need for both. Holst, certainly. Meredith - sorry, no justification, this is just blatant tokenism. There is much better contemporary serious music. Mozart - I'm not a fan, but I can see he might deserve a place. And you can't question the final two.

What do I think's missing? Apart from Bach, I would have included Vaughan Williams (probably the Tallis fantasia), I would have put in something Tudorbethan - probably a spot of Byrd - and I would have included a bit of opera with singing in - probably Dido's lament from Dido and Aeneas. For a contemporary piece (and I'm conscious I might have gone over 10, so let's drop Mozart), I'd use Whitacre's Cloudburst, especially as that gives us another choral piece.

Still, bearing in mind it truly is a 'no one could agree' thing, the list is not a bad effort, BBC. Pat on the back deserved.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Why I hate opera

If I'm honest, the title of this post is an exaggeration to make a point. I don't really hate opera. There are a couple of operas - notably Monteverdi's Incoranazione di Poppea and Purcell's Dido & Aeneas - that I quite like. But what I do find truly sickening is the reverence with which opera is treated, as if it were some particularly great art form. Nowhere was this more obvious than in ITV's recent gut-wrenchingly awful series Pop Star to Opera Star , where the likes of Alan Tichmarsh treated the real opera singers as if they were fragile pieces on Antiques Roadshow, and the music as if it were a gift of the gods. In my opinion - and I know not everyone agrees - opera is: Mediocre music Melodramatic plots Amateurishly hammy acting A forced and unpleasant singing style Ridiculously over-supported by public funds I won't even bother to go into any detail on the plots and the acting - this is just self-evident. But the other aspects need some ex

Is 5x3 the same as 3x5?

The Internet has gone mildly bonkers over a child in America who was marked down in a test because when asked to work out 5x3 by repeated addition he/she used 5+5+5 instead of 3+3+3+3+3. Those who support the teacher say that 5x3 means 'five lots of 3' where the complainants say that 'times' is commutative (reversible) so the distinction is meaningless as 5x3 and 3x5 are indistinguishable. It's certainly true that not all mathematical operations are commutative. I think we are all comfortable that 5-3 is not the same as 3-5.  However. This not true of multiplication (of numbers). And so if there is to be any distinction, it has to be in the use of English to interpret the 'x' sign. Unfortunately, even here there is no logical way of coming up with a definitive answer. I suspect most primary school teachers would expands 'times' as 'lots of' as mentioned above. So we get 5 x 3 as '5 lots of 3'. Unfortunately that only wor

Which idiot came up with percentage-based gradient signs

Rant warning: the contents of this post could sound like something produced by UKIP. I wish to make it clear that I do not in any way support or endorse that political party. In fact it gives me the creeps. Once upon a time, the signs for a steep hill on British roads displayed the gradient in a simple, easy-to-understand form. If the hill went up, say, one yard for every three yards forward it said '1 in 3'. Then some bureaucrat came along and decided that it would be a good idea to state the slope as a percentage. So now the sign for (say) a 1 in 10 slope says 10% (I think). That 'I think' is because the percentage-based slope is so unnatural. There are two ways we conventionally measure slopes. Either on X/Y coordiates (as in 1 in 4) or using degrees - say at a 15° angle. We don't measure them in percentages. It's easy to visualize a 1 in 3 slope, or a 30 degree angle. Much less obvious what a 33.333 recurring percent slope is. And what's a 100% slope