peripathetic

Music matters - and Radio 3 delivers
Before we get going - does anyone here listen to BBC Radio 3? How long have you been a listener? And if you're not - why not? What do you imagine it to be like?

It is in radio talks that we can hear musical examples, without having to be able to read music. And if we can hear musical examples, a reviewer can make real, telling comparisons in matters of performance.

On radio we can listen to musical analysis of a complex orchestral work, and the BBC, using its orchestras, is able to offer, not extracts from existing recordings but specially recorded examples, telling us what the violins are doing at a given moment, and how that relates to what is going on in the woodwind section.

Nothing a newspaper or a weekly magazine can do can come anywhere near this. And yet one always yearns to find a good piece of music criticism - something more than the conventional deployment of boo/hoorah-words. If, as MacMillan wants, we ought to be able to talk intelligently about classical music, then composers and musicians would seem to be the people to teach us.

--From James Fenton's excellent Guardian article in today's Review.