Anglo-Australian concert pianist Penelope Thwaites makes an impassioned plea for excellence.
The concert pianist Penelope Thwaites made an impassioned plea for excellence in music as being essential for the human spirit, when she spoke at a Greencoat Forum at the Initiatives of Change centre in London, 9 November.
‘Excellence in music is bound up with how we see ourselves as human beings. We are spiritual beings and we need food for the spirit as much as for the body,’ said Thwaites. The pianist, who was born in Chester, UK, and educated in Melbourne, Australia, is renowned for her recordings of the works of Percy Grainger, her eighth released this year on the Chandos label. She was addressing her theme ‘Excellence in music: luxury or necessity?’
After centuries of building up civilisation, ‘we now seem to be intent on destroying it’, she said. She instanced those ‘cutting edge’ works that, for example, end in smashing violins as part of the performance. ‘This retrograde impulse is going hand in hand with the advance of the greatest religion of our age — materialism.’ Sundays were no longer for church or quiet contemplation but for visits to shopping malls. And too much music-making had been taken over by money-makers as a product to be sold ‘by as much crudity and coarseness as the censor will allow’.
Thwaites suggested that many of the songs of her children’s generation reflect ‘a bleakness that lies at the heart of the materialistic society’. Fragmentation of the family had fractured ‘that confidence-building sense of respect for your origins’. And with a lack of confidence might often go a lack of humour. Excellence didn’t have to take itself too seriously, as she illustrated with an extract of music on CD from Fats Waller (who had made 500 recordings before his death in 1943). ‘His form of excellence has lasted.’ Thwaites interspersed her talk with more of her favourite music on CD, ranging from Rachmaninov playing his own third piano concerto, to Bach’s Christmas Oratorio.
She acknowledged that some may see the pursuit of excellence as a threat, if it created exclusive elites. ‘I do not subscribe to this view: we need elites as we need a vanguard in any field.’ The alternative was shown in the ‘hideous example’ of Mao’s China where top concert pianists she had met had been deliberately injured.
Excellence in music could even be regarded with suspicion in religious circles, if devotion to religious music supplanted devotion to the religion itself. ‘Fortunately for us, that issue was not a factor for Johann Sebastian Bach. Despite bad eyesight, huge family commitments, endless wrangles with tiresome local officials, he poured out the most astounding body of musical masterpieces,’ Thwaites commented.
And what of the role of government in promoting excellence in music? There was a need for ‘a total revolution’, among all political parties, in acknowledging the importance of real music-making in schools. Thwaites called for ‘an on-going think tank of real musical thinkers’ who would feed in ideas. Singing needed a colossal boost, let alone the provision of musical instruments. There was a need for ‘teachers who can go into the roughest schools and are capable of getting children to sing. They should be hugely paid and backed to the hilt.’ Valuable educational programmes of outreach from major orchestras into schools deserved proper government support. Currently the provision was hopelessly inadequate.
She also called for a national competition for new hymn tunes —‘stirring tunes that a football crowd could sing’—in which top contemporary composers would take part. In the past, Benjamin Britten, Vaughan Williams and others had written highly effectively for children and amateurs as well as professionals. John Rutter was one contemporary composer of religious music who really understood the voice, writing for all types of singers, she said. And far from just recycling the past, we should open our minds to new sounds and styles.
An example of this was ‘Jungle’, an extract from Michael Tippett’s cantata ‘The Mask of Time’ which, said Thwaites, ‘gives a taste of what amazing new sounds composers and performers can create’.
In 2001 she had organised the Performing Australian Music Competition in Melbourne, where 50 young musicians from 20 countries played music by 46 Australian composers. The young musicians had researched and chosen the programmes and much of the inventive repertoire of music had come from the last 50 years.
‘The real greatness in our culture has reflected and sustained our progress as human beings,’ Thwaites concluded. ‘Nothing less than an appreciation of greatness, and a pursuit of the best of which we are capable, is going to carry our progress forward… Above all, let us thank the great Creative Spirit and life force which is always there to inspire us, if we listen and if we dare.’