One evening last November I took my daughter to a concert given in Brighton by the English classical pianist, Joanna MacGregor.  The evening and Miss MacGregor were provocative and inspiring in roughly equal proportions, and I wrote about it and her here.

Last Sunday afternoon BBC Radio 3 broadcast a concert which Miss MacGregor gave the previous night in the Assembly Rooms, Bath.  It was her recital contribution to the opening night of the

2006 Bath International Music Festival, and featured much the same content and the same contrasts I blogged about - Professor Longhair staring across the platform at J S Bach, for example.  For the next three or four days the curious can still hear a programme repeat here.  It lasts about 90 minutes (and if you use IE you can pause/advance it - but not with Mozilla).

I put “recital contribution” in italics because Miss MacGregor also makes a weighty administrative contribution to this year’s Festival, being its new Artistic Director.  She speaks about this part of her role at the beginning of the programme:-

When I came to the Bath Festival I was struck, obviously, by the existing core customer audience which is very loyal, and they love chamber music –high quality chamber music – and you’ve got these wonderful venues like the Assembly Rooms, the Guild Hall.

But I knew I wanted to sort of open it up, and I knew I needed to open it up to other audiences.  And I also needed to bring my personality into all this - and, of course, I’m so interested in so many different kinds of music.

So straight away I knew I was going to invent a new focus on traditional music, a new focus on electronica, maintain and expand the jazz programme and let the jazz programme completely burst its banks, you know … and invade the rest of the programme, all this kind of thing.  And, of course, my big thing is “never putting anybody in boxes”.  So I would never ever say, “OK, it’s world music and it’s cool, and it’s classical music over here everybody.  And in the blue corner it’s jazz, you know.”  It’s just never gonna happen like that with me.  And I think this recital programme is an example of that.

Around the twenty-minute mark in her recital she escapes The French Quarter via some engaging and hard-driving re-arrangements of Piazzolla tangos … violent string tamping, foot stamping and all.  Around the forty-minute mark, at last, she is picking her way through the narrow, horse-shit perfumed streets and peering up at the ornamented chapels of early eighteenth-century Leipzig.

The Goldberg is, for me, the most elevating of all Bach’s wonderfully elevated composition, religious or secular.  Really listened to – that is, with fully sustained attention and due receptivity - it is a journey into the interior only approached but not, I think, equalled by the late Beethoven sonatas.

But it isn’t my purpose now, anymore than it was last November, to set myself up as a serious music critic.  I really couldn’t do it.  Beyond noting that Joanna employed a greater dynamic range than when I heard her last year, with a better flow to her line and less choppiness, I will remain silent.  Be grateful.

Politics, however, pervades “the rest of everything” and invites me to make a more adventurous response, which I shall try to do.

Those opening words of Joanna’s are a fine statement of philosophical - as well as musical - intent.  Here is an exultantly free-spirited child of modernity … noisy in her non-judgementalism, entirely confident that this is her time and to hell with the trammels of the past, not merely open to experiment but monumentally disinclined to caution.

Obviously, such a cast of mind will see no stop to doing what pleases it, whether banks burst and programmes are invaded or not.  There being no greater purpose to a liberal life than the pursuit of individual freedom, no idea of belonging to or serving a greater whole, things all too easily take a dive into this kind of self-absorption and self-gratification.  The free life is a weak life.  Without the ideas of belonging and service, the deep well of identity which should colour our character and from which we should draw much of our human creativity and strength – facets of a true individualism, incidentally – is effectively capped.  We are deprived of our principal psychological bulwark and exposed to the gale, whichever way it blows.

It blows, and one clear consequence evident even to the most myopic liberal is the development of social anomie – so pervasive now among the urban young.  The great French-Jewish sociologist Emile Durkheim drew an image for us of high social instability as the controlling influence in the level of suicides in society.  War – in Durkheim’s case the Franco-Prussian War - is the ultimate producer of social instability.  But liberalism in its advanced form IS war on Western society and, through it, the psychological stability of each one of us.  In real terms it is not the pursuit of individualism at all but of cultural uncertainty, and the lightness of being which obtains from that.

What light people do, in case you hadn’t noticed, is to take momentous decisions lightly.  For the intellectually able among them, degrading and destroying useful things such as our cultural heritage and even our genetic uniqueness is, basically, no problemo!  After all, what better, bigger boxes are there from which to un-put people out of than these?

To return, then, to music, it is by no means impossible to answer the great question of how that profound Western genius audible in the glories of the Baroque, Classical and Romantic periods drained gently away into the sad, small neuroticism of Schoenberg’s Viennese Schoolers and the later strugglers from Stravinsky, Shostakovich and Bartok on down.  Essentially, it was let go by the generation of composers to whom it was bequeathed.  Doubtless, many of these folks - the noisiest and most insistent - were exercised by the heady desire to sweep away the old order in music as elsewhere, and to declaim the dawning of their new creative day.  The rest were meek and simply couldn’t raise a coherent defence.  In any event, for all of them the spiritual resources to stand on their fathers’ shoulders were no longer there.  This was no one’s fault, really.  It was liberalism.  Since its beginnings in the Enlightenment it has been steadily kicking away the bulwarks of the Western soul, and by the late 19th century the damage was extensive.

Let me make it perfectly plain that I am not quite so crass as to claim that light folks and liberals have no love of Bach or Beethoven.  Our musical giants are not remembered only on weathered headstones or by some mute squiggles on a stave once drawn in ink made from lamp-black.  But the will to modernity is horribly strong, and generates a dichotomy aptly described by the philosopher and Nobelist, Henri Bergson - another French Jew and, in fact, a classmate of Durkheim at École normale supérieure.  In Creative Evolution (1907) he wrote:-

In reality, the past is preserved by itself automatically.  In its entirety, probably, it follows us at every instant; all that we have felt, thought and willed from our earliest infancy is there, leaning over the present which is about to join it, pressing against the portals of consciousness that would fain leave it outside.

Well, by the time Montmartre was fashionably bohemian, and Le Chat Noir a-buzz with gossip, a group decision had been taken to resolve the issue and leave it outside!

So it is that the Goldberg stands today as a public admonition to what is missing.  It is a monument to what we are not, as men.  Its private subtleties rise out of a foundation of cultural certainty and spiritual weight, not lightness … out of faith and tradition, not modernity.

I was interested to find in an otherwise typically lightweight and unhelpful Guardian article this quote:-

At the end of the first of Daniel Barenboim’s 2006 Reith lectures - In the Beginning Was Sound - the composer James MacMillan asked Barenboim the following: “What is it about serious music that baffles, and, indeed, in some cases offends, the advocates of an ever increasingly ubiquitous, narrow, some might say debased, popular culture?  Is it its very ability to rise from the mundane?  Is it the suggestion that there may be such a thing as a secret inner life that cannot be reduced to a rigorously enforced commonality, that there may be no such thing as a closed universe?”

Now, I know little of James MacMillan save that he is a widely performed Scottish composer whose music is of the age.  In any case, he has here only the popular between his teeth.  An easy prey.  Not like having to take a bite out of his own work.

No surprise, then, that I do not read, “What is it about our great musical heritage that baffles and, indeed, in some cases offends the advocates of an increasingly ubiquitous, narrow, some might say debased, modern culture?  Is it its very ability to rise free and clean from a politic that poses as morality?  Is it the suggestion that there may only ever be Man and God and Nature, and that we have replaced these with the rigorously enforced fiction of Man alone … that there may be such a thing as a universe of the spirit which we have let go, and it is a purely European spirit?”

And the answer to this question?  I think you know it.

However, let’s end with Joanna MacGregor on the Goldberg, because her answer, while non-political, is also a hopeful and sincere one.

What I really love about it is that emotionally it takes you everywhere.  It starts off as really quite freewheeling and, you know, light-hearted.  There’s a kind of wit about the first ten variations and they’re quite concise.  And then it begins to open out, you know … emotionally it just goes on to another level.  And then when you get to the final ten variations you really are in a different place.  You are in an entirely tragic, deep, profound, exhilarating, ecstatic place.  And it’s been a very carefully paced journey that Bach’s done.  And I think that’s why, when you start playing the Goldberg Variations, you think you are never really going to stop, you will never stop playing them.  Once you’ve started, that’s it.

I commend an early start.