Plain English Awards Speech December 10th 2010 at Chetham’s Music School, Manchester
Click here to hear Norris’s song Plain English, with Andrew Lyle on clarinet and Bas Terraz on bass.
Musicians should practice clear communication. We must engage our audience’s attention: if we’re playing a sonata, we need to engage it for half an hour at a time. Even if a Beethoven or a Mozart has written the notes we play, it’s all too easy for us to obscure the message they should carry.
People don’t always realize that music has meanings of its own. Sir Thomas Beecham famously said ‘The English do not much care for music, but they absolutely love the noise it makes.’ He separates ‘the noise it makes’ from the real essence of music – the meaning that those noises are to convey. You don’t need a degree in Music or Semiotics to understand those messages, but you do need to know that the meanings are there, and to listen in such a way that you might understand them.
It’s the performer’s business to bring about that way of listening. Of course, we make the nicest ‘noise’ we can: but experience shows that messages are not always best transmitted by the nicest noises – just as the best-looking actor is not always the most interesting to listen to.
We can help transmit music’s messages with words – liner notes for our CDs, talking to our audiences. We can lay on parallel art-forms to illuminate what’s going on – just last week in Rotterdam, I played Brahms to a set of specially-made films. But the most important thing of all is to convey the meaning through the music itself.
In an age of vocal music, of Songs from the Shows and rock music, it’s easy to think that the meaning of music is simply the meaning of its words – though composers like Schubert or Wagner disprove that idea in everything they wrote. In 1906, in the Preface to the English Hymnal, Ralph Vaughan Williams maintained that the provision of Fine Melody was a Moral matter. People find it hard to imagine how a melody can be immoral, but Vaughan Williams lived at the only time in history that purely instrumental music was more highly prized than vocal music. He had listened to so much music with no words that he could understand the message of a melody. That’s what helped him match folk tunes so well to new hymn words. Who remembers now what the original words were to ‘He who would valiant be’? ‘Our captain calls all hands’. Sounds odd now.
So, music has meanings beyond words. Since we’re met in a place of Musical Learning, I’ll pursue that point just a little further. We know we’re getting those meanings across if our audience reacts. And there are only two desirable reactions – Satisfaction or Surprise. (The Newcastle composer Charles Avison pointed out two hundred and fifty years ago that we can also Disgust our audiences, but we’re not discussing the aesthetics of Modernism this morning —- entirely legitimate though they may be.)
Surprise and Satisfaction can only be experienced by those in a state of Expectation. If they’re not Expecting anything in particular, they can’t be Satisfied when it turns up, or Surprised when it doesn’t. So we must play to arouse Expectation, and the secret of that is – Timing.
But back to the Plain English Campaign. I’ve spoken about clear communication in Music in order to counter any idea that Plain English is Dull English, with no room for poetry. Music is not a prosaic art, and yet it relies on clear communication. So too does Poetry herself. Let me return to hymn-books for some examples.
In ‘New every morning’, John Keble, the Professor of Poetry at Oxford, wrote:
New perils past, new sins forgiven.
But the Bishop in charge of a hymn book called Mission Praise prefers to sing:
New dangers past, new sins forgiven
That’s not Plainer English, that’s a covert suggestion that you could only be going to church if you’re stupid enough not to know what ‘perils’ means.
Isaac Watts wrote:
Till moons shall wax and wane no more.
Mission Praise prefers:
Till moons shall rise and set no more
a thirty-fold foreshortening of the Church’s reach into Eternity!
I should mention the United Reformed Church’s careful avoidance of gendered language in ‘Thou whose almighty word Chaos and darkness heard’. Instead of
O now to all mankind
(a splendid example of music’s separate meaning meshing perfectly with the meaning of the words – the long, high, note coinciding with the word ‘all’) – the new hymn book has
Now to all HU–mankind!
Let there be light, indeed.
And a week or two ago I found myself singing, in ‘Through all the changing scenes of life’
How blest they are, and only they, Who in his truth confide.
which is not so much Plain as syntactical nonsense, compared with the original:
How blest are they, and only they, Who in his truth confide.
Plain is not Dull; Plain is not Stupid. Plain is Beautiful, Plain is Clever, Plain is Poetry.
William Wordsworth’s Sonnet, Lines written upon Westminster Bridge:
Earth hath not anything to show more fair.
is better expressed neither as:
Comparative evaluation of a wide range of visual stimuli suggests the emotive pre-eminence of the geometric configuration of a pre-industrial riverside cityscape, a seat of commerce, as viewed from the principal river-crossing of the contiguous city, a seat of government.
nor yet as:
Ooh, that’s nice!
Dull would he be of soul who could pass by A sight so touching in its majesty.
That’s the Beauty of Plain English, and more power to the campaign that so successfully promotes it.