Skip to main content

Be quite, Classic FM!

Serious music snobs will wince, but when I'm driving I quite often tune to Classic FM. Okay they sometimes play opera, in which case I have to switch to another station, and they play far too much Mozart, but their 'bitty excerpts' approach is actually more suited to filling in on a 15 minute drive than Radio 3.

There are three classes of music they play that I genuinely enjoy:
  • My kinda music - Tudorbethan  church music, Bach, Stravinsky, Vaughan Williams... an eclectic enough taste to hit on occasionally
  • Nostalgia music - My father had very different musical tastes to me. I was brought up on a diet of the standard piano concertos, Tchaikovsky, Rimsky Korsakov, Mendelssohn - the romantic greats that were so popular back then. This isn't music I have on my iPod, but it brings all kinds of memories back
  • Genuine discoveries - I admit it's not very often (okay it has been twice), but occasionally they play something I don't know and really want to know. So far it has been Grieg's Holberg suite and the modern composer Eric Whitacre.
I say all this primarily to establish that I'm not one of those whiny people who moan all the time about Classic FM. But one thing about it really irritates me. Their announcers are too loud. Here's the thing. Serious music has much more dynamics - louds and softs - than popular beat combos. You want the louds to be LOUD and to be able to hear the quiet bits. So there I am, steaming up the A419 with Bach's exquisite Toccata and Fugue in D minor blasting out. This, I think, is why I quite like drum and bass. The bass on a good organ playing something with welly like this is stunning. But to play it at a sensible volume, when the announcer came on, he blasted out like a foghorn and deafened me. I had to drastically turn down the volume.

So get with the plot, Classic FM. Real classical music is not all quiet, peaceful and chilled. Sometimes it has to be played BLOODY LOUD. Please adjust the volume of your announcers accordingly.

Want to hear a bit of organ with welly? Turn up your sound for by far the best organist I know personally, John Keys, at work (you can find some recordings of his playing here):

1803. Bach - Toccata in D minor by brianclegg
Labels:

Comments

  1. Sue Guiney21 February 2012 at 10:04

    While you're at it, could you please figure out a way to listen to classical music on an iPod, especially on an airplane? The loud is too loud, the soft too soft, and how can you keep fiddling with the volume control from measure to measure? Drives me nuts. So that's my whinge for today,

    ReplyDelete
  2. Brian Clegg21 February 2012 at 11:59

    I may have an answer, Sue. The settings of a modern iPod have an option called Sound Check. This allegedly (I haven't tried it) irons out sound levels to avoid this problem. See http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2425?viewlocale=en_US for details.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why I hate opera

If I'm honest, the title of this post is an exaggeration to make a point. I don't really hate opera. There are a couple of operas - notably Monteverdi's Incoranazione di Poppea and Purcell's Dido & Aeneas - that I quite like. But what I do find truly sickening is the reverence with which opera is treated, as if it were some particularly great art form. Nowhere was this more obvious than in ITV's 2010 gut-wrenchingly awful series Pop Star to Opera Star , where the likes of Alan Tichmarsh treated the real opera singers as if they were fragile pieces on Antiques Roadshow, and the music as if it were a gift of the gods. In my opinion - and I know not everyone agrees - opera is: Mediocre music Melodramatic plots Amateurishly hammy acting A forced and unpleasant singing style Ridiculously over-supported by public funds I won't even bother to go into any detail on the plots and the acting - this is just self-evident. But the other aspects need some exp
117 comments
Read more

Is 5x3 the same as 3x5?

The Internet has gone mildly bonkers over a child in America who was marked down in a test because when asked to work out 5x3 by repeated addition he/she used 5+5+5 instead of 3+3+3+3+3. Those who support the teacher say that 5x3 means 'five lots of 3' where the complainants say that 'times' is commutative (reversible) so the distinction is meaningless as 5x3 and 3x5 are indistinguishable. It's certainly true that not all mathematical operations are commutative. I think we are all comfortable that 5-3 is not the same as 3-5.  However. This not true of multiplication (of numbers). And so if there is to be any distinction, it has to be in the use of English to interpret the 'x' sign. Unfortunately, even here there is no logical way of coming up with a definitive answer. I suspect most primary school teachers would expands 'times' as 'lots of' as mentioned above. So we get 5 x 3 as '5 lots of 3'. Unfortunately that only wor
25 comments
Read more

Why backgammon is a better game than chess

I freely admit that chess, for those who enjoy it, is a wonderful game, but I honestly believe that as a game , backgammon is better (and this isn't just because I'm a lot better at playing backgammon than chess). Having relatively recently written a book on game theory, I have given quite a lot of thought to the nature of games, and from that I'd say that chess has two significant weaknesses compared with backgammon. One is the lack of randomness. Because backgammon includes the roll of the dice, it introduces a random factor into the play. Of course, a game that is totally random provides very little enjoyment. Tossing a coin isn't at all entertaining. But the clever thing about backgammon is that the randomness is contributory without dominating - there is still plenty of room for skill (apart from very flukey dice throws, I can always be beaten by a really good backgammon player), but the introduction of a random factor makes it more life-like, with more of a sense
6 comments
Read more