Some Fabulous Chocolate Eclairs

Armando Ianucci spoke recently at the Royal Philharmonic Society awards. The transcript is here courtesy of The Guardian. As with all of Ianucci, even when he's addressing serious issues he can't help pepper it with humour:

I'm aware that it's easy to fall back on quasi-mystical, pretentious language when trying to talk about one's experience of classical music, but that shouldn't stop us trying. We don't talk about music enough. As someone who's never felt he's had the technical language at his fingertips, I feel all I can do is talk about it in whatever English I have at my command. I want to emote about how I feel. After a concert, I want to grab people by the lapels and tell them how lucky we are as a species that, out of all the hundreds of billions of us who ever lived, one of us managed to come up with the Goldberg Variations. But I don't, because that's not the done thing. So instead I mention that the cafe downstairs does some fabulous chocolate éclairs.

Here he talks of his upbringing and his approach to music:

I loved strange noises. I had no notion of what was considered contemporary or old-fashioned, cutting edge, or period. It was all wonderful and new. I wasn't scared of the avant garde because I had no notion of what an avant garde was.

I realised this a few years ago, taking my son to school. He was eight or nine at the time. A piece of Ligeti was on the radio. Not to put him off with what maybe he would think was a strange, slightly disturbing noise, I tried to draw a simple analogy. 'Sounds a bit like bees buzzing, doesn't it?' I said. He listened for a bit, then said, 'No, it sounds like a lot of penguins fighting for a fish, and one of them's just got it.'

He was right - that's precisely what it sounded like. He was listening much harder than me. And it struck me then that I was worrying about my son being put off classical music by being exposed to something that may have been too difficult.

And that worrying was unneccessary, because labelling the music 'difficult' was a very adult way of categorising the music in the first place. He, not knowing much about chromaticism, harmony or serialism, nor anything about theory, had no reason to label what he was hearing as being significantly different from, say, Handel. It was just a very interesting, very alluring, piece of ordered sound.