A LITTLE before Christmas, a newspaper asked me whether I could tell it what in the arts or music had been my highlight of 2005. This “could be anything you’ve seen or heard in the UK this year: a play, an opera, a rock gig, a ballet solo, a sculpture, a CD, a film”. The paper was collecting responses from a range of voices for an end-of-year feature. “A quick e-mail (up to 50 words) or a brief phone call is all that’s required.”
An interesting question. But in answering it there was a danger of being sidetracked by a desire to show off cultural credentials, or do favours to chums in the arts world. So I tried to think honestly about my reply. What had genuinely moved me — entered my life, my real daily life — in the year now ending?
Real daily life for me involves an average of about two hours a week spent on the London Underground. Like other Londoners I have appreciated Poems on the Underground, featuring posters placed alongside other advertising, above carriage seats. The British Council, the Poetry Society and Arts Council England, who help to sponsor this, have hit on an excellent way of bringing poetry direct to the public. In big, clear print and unadorned, the posters display short and accessible poems — ancient and contemporary — from Chaucer to Blake to Seamus Heaney. Passengers have time to study and think about these texts. I have spent a journey pleasantly from Archway to Bank on the Northern Line learning by heart a John Donne sonnet.
So should I nominate Poems on the Underground as my cultural highlight for 2005? But the series was born years ago. Something more recent tugged my sleeve.
In the past year there has been the extension across the Underground in London of a scheme a few years old, now working wonderfully. The Tube has always attracted buskers, but until recently they were illegal. For half a century there had been a running battle between the authorities and the buskers, the former harassing the latter, and not without reason. Some of the pitches chosen by buskers restricted the movement of pedestrians through the tunnels; and some of the buskers were really just tramps, blowing tunelessly into a mouth organ. It was begging masquerading as music-making.
But the illegal buskers, though irritating to some, had many supporters among Londoners, including me. Among them were good musicians; most were doing no harm; some were outstanding. Years back I spent a few hours sitting beside a friend, a blues guitarist, on the floor of the pedestrian tunnel connecting the Central with the Northern Line at Bank station, holding out his hat for money, and taking note.
I learnt much. Should you yourself ever try busking you will find that we who hurry along Underground tunnels as part of our daily lives have a deep subliminal fear of loitering or sitting down. Maybe herd instinct tells us that only the wounded animal stops. But conquer the fear and lower yourself to the floor, and you are soon calm, out of the rush, and in relaxed command of a new perspective on the world. You stare. You size up potential customers.
I observed that naive and happy music brings in the coins faster than jaded or sophisticated stuff, and that the public likes to be moved rather than amused, and loves simple tunes. I noted too that the poor were as generous as the rich, that mothers, especially with children, were kinder than men, and that black people gave more often than whites or Asians. Most, however — donors and non-donors alike — disliked the announcements over the public address system commanding passengers not to give money to buskers. After every such announcement the coins would rain down.
In fact the authorities represented less of a threat to a busker than did other buskers: there was a turf war between them for the best pitches; rows were common; and informal truces often broke down.
I concluded (and wrote in The Times) that London Underground should find a way of licensing and regulating busking rather than simply try to ban it. And this is what it has done. There are now proper rosters, designated and sponsored pitches in non-nuisance-causing places, and music of quality and variety which is real rather than piped. Over this Christmas, busking has made the rush bearable, lifting many a frazzled shopper's heart.
So in answer to the request for my cultural highlight of 2005 I submitted this: “Amazing how a snatch of music heard in passing — a phrase, a tone, a rhythm — can lift imagination and spirit. Transport for London have finally relented and let buskers play at selected, marked spots in Underground pedestrian tunnels. Rock, opera, country, blues . . . setting and circumstance are all against these artists yet their music has stolen into my heart as I hurry by.”
There was something more I wanted to write, but no space. It was this. The appeal of a simple tune, unadorned, direct to the human soul, is a wondrous thing. You would have learnt this sitting beside my busker-friend, hundreds of feet beneath the pavements of Bank station. Musical arrangement matters, of course, when there’s time and space; orchestration matters; harmony thrills; rhythm energises; proficiency impresses; a fine voice adds tremendously; and if you can get an audience to sit down and give you their full attention for an hour you can build on a composition. But at the core of any composition we take to our hearts is a melody; and the melody is probably simple and usually short: often no more than the sequence of a few notes. Any music with a rightful claim to a place in the mainstream of our musical tradition is music a man can whistle, on his own, in a minute, in the dark.
I hate — yes, hate — musicians who deny this; whose work denies this. They dine at a table whose platters and tankards they disdain to recharge. Without melody, music would leave the centre of our lives. Place music where it is, a pillar of civilisation, and there will always be scope for a sophisticated few to play around at the margins, discarding melody, teasing our perceptions, intriguing our sensibilities. Let them. Let them and let us enjoy the cleverness. But when they affect a superiority over composers whose audience are the millions for whom melody is the key, then remind yourself that the sneerers are only parasites on a beast whose life-blood is melody. Tunes — tunes and rhythm — are what anchor music into the human soul. All the rest is embroidery.
The day before Christmas the last item on the Today programme was an interview with the composer Sir John Tavener who had written new music for the words of the old carol Away in a Manger. He implied that he found the existing tune trite.
Of course it is trite. The words are trite too — and beautiful. The tune is trite because what we know and love well does become trite, and because melody must always flirt with triteness, its currency being anticipation, pattern, repetition, resolution: the expected, the half-expected and the surpise.
The presenter asked Sir John whether his new music might prove singable and be sung by ordinary people; did Sir John “regard this as an essential element?”
“Not really because, you know, I wrote it with King’s College choir in mind.”
Well here’s a new year’s resolution for Sir John. Let him spend a week in January busking his new music in a Tube tunnel. And let whichever snooty Daily Telegraph person it was who declined to publish my year-end tribute to buskers sit beside the great composer, proffering his hat for small change.
