The Farts Ascending: Classical Music and the Culture War

Recently the Daily Mail enjoyed howling about a picture of the Queen being removed from a student common room in Oxford. This profoundly important piece of news conveniently occupied the entire front page on the same day that yet another government minister was found to have broken the law. The tenor and content of the culture war is relatively familiar to anyone who spends too much time on twitter or in the blogosphere, and its value as a loincloth for the right is usually clear to see. However, every now and then a right wing author fails so spectacularly to chase their own shadow that the mechanics of the culture war performance are laid bare.

This week, in Unherd.com, Ben Cobley treated us a piece that puts the b back in subtlety. ‘Why The Elites Hate Vaughan Williams; The Lark Ascending Has Become Proxy For Brexit’ opens with the observation that ‘…few could have imagined…this unremarkable piece would have turned into a political football.’ Strangely enough I haven’t seen the Young Communist League playing the orchestral piece at their rallies, so I wondered where the political kicking began? It turns out, in true culture war style, with the same author and in this exact article. The piece opens with the usual pastoral nationalist platitudes about RVW’s biggest hit. We’re told it ‘evokes the beauty of the English countryside’, ‘conjuring up images of what has been lost: the unspoilt England’, ‘rather like a Constable Painting’ etc etc. You can already feel the ambiguity and expansiveness of the music being crushed down into a very tight pair of Union Jack y-fronts. Another paragraph makes a crude comparison between the musical phrases of the piece and the rolling English Countryside. You get the point. It’s impressively banal.

But what’s this? It turns out, not everyone worships this particular piece of music. Cobley has found a total of three people who dislike the piece, one of whom, Chrissy Kinsella, runs the London Music Fund. The point is stressed that Labour’s Sadiq Khan is the patron of this charity. For some reason the author omits the fact that Boris Johnson was the previous patron. I can’t imagine why… well, actually I can: it’s a wafer thin attempt to turn opinions on The Lark Ascending into a partisan issue. Apparently any critical opinions expressed about the work make a ‘strong us and them’, and that ‘the piece serves as a proxy…to display distaste for other things and people’. Cobley uses irony like an iron to the face.

It goes on in this vein, groping harder and harder to conclude that the instrumental piece is an actual representation of English conservatism in sound. Then the final paragraph brings the moment of genius: ‘…the Lark shows us what it means to be free. Its sneering detractors, then, in trying to prevent the Lark from speaking for itself, display a palpable contempt for freedom’. That cast iron logic could also mean that those who don’t like the Rite of Spring display a palpable contempt for sacrifice, those that don’t like Pachelbel’s Canon display a palpable contempt for armaments, and those that don’t like the Nutcracker display a palpable contempt for…testicles?

We know this level of reasoning would be laughed out of an undergraduate seminar, but it sure is popular with these culture warriors. This particular article was number one on the Unherd website and boosted by other right wing websites for most of the week. The value I see in Ben Cobley’s piece being so poorly argued is that it actually provides a clear overview of how the modern right concocts their favourite plaything: a culture war. The standard recipe goes something like this: 1. Find a cultural object that you can squash into a silly nationalist box 2. Find someone on the internet who doesn’t like said object, and decide they represent ‘the elite’ 3. Write an article with this reasoning: ‘the elite’ hates this cultural object, so they must also hate this country 4. When people point out your idiocy, parade their criticism as an act of censure or ‘cancellation’ etc. 5. Repeat.

Vaughan Williams wrote The Lark Ascending in response to the George Meredith poem of the same name. A skylark’s actual birdsong doesn’t have the same musical intervals or gestures as The Lark Ascending, sounding closer to a prog rock keyboard solo than Vaughan Williams’ carefully measured modal phrases. If you do think that RVW was representing the skylark song, at the most generous, you could say it was a highly figurative transcription. However, to make the piece work as a nationalist symbol, every element must be reduced to a cheap signifier of the soil of England. Resident conservative zombie Allison Pearson tweeted this in response to the article ‘I once saw a lark ascending — powered vertically by the insane beauty of its own song — and it was exactly as VW wrote it’. Pearson is probably already deaf from screaming at all the gay and black people on her TV, but whether she knows her tweet is untrue isn’t important. What is important, for the culture warriors, is to always reduce the object to a cheap signifier, a ridiculous totem to rally your cause around.

This is why the culture war venturing into classical music, or the broader world of sound, is interesting. Most classical music is instrumental, and so claiming it for one cause or another is very difficult as it lacks the text to justify a particular concrete interpretation. Instrumental music is never completely without textual signifiers, but many generations of musicians and philosophers have debated the extent to which textual meaning can be prescribed by instrumental music, and there are still no clean conclusions. As we’ve seen here, often the title of the piece is the only object writers can grasp more tightly, and even that tends to result in infantile conclusions. That’s not going to stop the culture warriors though — these articles will keep coming. It’s only so long until one of them finds out many people think God Save The Queen is a rubbish piece of music (it is). I’m actually hoping for a Proms performance of Elgar’s Nimrod played by a pole-dancing kazoo orchestra, just for the splenetic column miles we’ll be gifted afterwards.

We can see similar patterns elsewhere: last month Douglas Murray was whining in the Spectator about a ‘purge of historic harpsichords at London’s premiere conservatoire’. Of course the harpsichord collection at the Royal Academy of Music isn’t being ‘purged’ or anything similar — that’s Murray’s culture war invention so he can keep ignoring slavery. What’s actually going to happen is the provenance of these instruments, and their connection to wealth generated by the slave trade, will actually be explored. That’s not sufficient clickbait for a culture warrior, so it becomes a ‘purge’. If we were going to purge harpsichords tuned at A=415, I’d be all for it, but I digress. Murray cowers at the complexity of the past, and his article, When exactly did harpsichords become racist? is the usual banal attempt to hold back the changing tides of historical interpretation.

Arguing loudly with oneself in an empty room will eventually bring spectators, and these people have learnt that. Unfortunately the noise created has a real cultural effect. As a composer, I know something of this personally. My next opera explores our addiction to the monarchy and the empty vessel it provides for a kind of sado-nationalism. Unsurprisingly perhaps, most producers won’t touch it with a bargepole. They know that being dragged into a culture war can seriously exhaust individuals and organisations. Vaughan Williams refused a knighthood on multiple occasions, and wrote some profoundly disturbing (and brilliant) music, such as his 4th Symphony. In the same way that Ben Cobley ignores this and all the other nuances of the composer’s work, artists know that if they become subjects in a culture war, their work will also become a squashed fragment of what it really is.

However, there is an even more important effect of the culture warrior nonsense: to divert our attention away from more substantive problems. I’m aware that in writing this article I’m participating in the stupid merry-go-round, so let me just remind you of some of the issues you will never see these culture warriors addressing, because they actually involve challenging power and vested interests. There are more food banks in this country than McDonalds’. We have a grotesque problem of child poverty. Thousands of households are being evicted every week in this pandemic. We have one of the most transparently corrupt governments in living memory. I could go on for yards, but closer to this topic, children’s music tuition is becoming the preserve of the wealthy, music is being extinguished from school curricula, funding for youth orchestras and choirs is paltry, rehearsal spaces for bands and gig venues are being swallowed up by a zombie economy that only profits through property development, and the music industry is being bled dry by the effects of Brexit. The culture warriors are glad to watch this actual culture being killed. But no, let’s not discuss it… better to have a lobotomised argument about The Lark Ascending.

The culture war is a pocket nuke. Within this apparently frivolous, unimportant discourse, is actually a key function of today’s corporate media: to completely distract from any substantive political issues. That’s because the moment you scratch the surface of any of these issues, you see that our ruling class, our establishment, our actual elites, our Eton educated government, has absolutely no solutions for these problems, and often are the cause of them. We are now eleven years into Tory rule, and forty years into the Thatcherite consensus. When you have no one else to blame, distraction is the only option left. So yes, for them, there is a value in us arguing over The Lark Ascending, and because of this, the culture warriors don’t care if their arguments are idiotic.

We have to wade through their gunk to higher ground. If there is a freedom I would claim for The Lark Ascending, it is the freedom to listen without these suffocating conservative vampires reducing every gesture to a George Cross in the Aeolian mode. To hear our imaginations floating, free as the final violin cadenza. That is a freedom that actually merits the word. As Ralph Vaughan Williams said: “It never seems to occur to people that a man might just want to write a piece of music.”