Description

 HOWARD GOODALL'S 20TH CENTURY GREATS 
(Complete Series DVD) 

[Four films. Tiger Aspect for Channel 4 Television. Transmitted 27th November - 18th December 2004; repeated several times since then] 

Produced by David Jeffcock, directed by David Jeffcock and Francis Hanly 

The series won a Royal Television Society Award for Education and was nominated for a BAFTA and an International Rose d'Or. 

_____________________________________________ 

Classical music started the century as the undisputed master of its field. It was recognised (in the West) as the main purveyor of music of emotion, subtlety and innovation. It reached a vast mainstream audience. Gradually this changed. Classical music began a journey into the avant-garde, and abandoned western tonality, the familiar ‘rules’ and practices of music that had served for several centuries. 

Whatever the artistic merits of this new approach, there is little doubt that the mainstream audience couldn’t – or didn’t want - to follow it. A vacuum was thus created. Into it stepped an enriched form of popular music, that now began to take over as the principle producer of sophisticated, emotionally and artistically satisfying music that could be understood and enjoyed by an intelligent, mainstream audience. But that’s not to say that this new, enriched popular music was free of innovation. It wasn’t. It not only created new musical forms; it enthusiastically embraced all existing forms of music, be they classical, popular, folk, ‘world’ – or whatever. (The very musical forms the avant-garde were rejecting.) Popular music even embraced the avant-garde! 

At the highest level of popular music, the most gifted composers consistently produced music that was at the same time familiar yet strange, a clever and exciting mixture of the old and the new. And the greatest popular composers didn’t just influence other popular composers. They also influenced a new generation of ‘classical’ composers. No doubt composers like Stravinsky, Shostakovich, Schoenberg and the other twentieth century ‘classical’ giants will – rightly - feature in future music histories. But the pivotal story of Twentieth Century music, Howard Goodall believes, is this astonishing, unexpected and unprecedented flowering of popular music. In this new century, the old, damaging division between the two camps – classical and popular – will no longer be an issue. There will just be music, good and bad. 
_____________________________________________ 


_____________________________________________ 
About the whole series.... 

Howard Goodall's Channel 4 series on 20th-century music was a triumph of intelligent televison. It worked because it was driven by a powerful polemic by David Herman, Prospect Magazine 

After a terrible year Channel 4 ended 2004 on three high notes: the start of David Starkey's ambitious history of the British monarchy: Green Wing the most original British comedy series of the year: and the outstanding factual series of 2004 Twentieth Century Greats, presented by Howard Goodall. 

Goodall's series was rightly acclaimed by critics when it was shown just before Christmas. But the critics failed to notice precisely why it stood out from the bland culture of current British arts television. First, Twentieth Century Greats was driven by a powerful polemic. The great story of 20th-century music, argued Goodall, was the rise and rise of popular music - not the trite stuff of pre-1920's Tin Pan Alley or, for that matter, of most pop music of the last 20 years, but a new and sophisticated popular music which drew on other forms such as folk, classical and electronic and which, in turn, fed new developments in classical music. At the moment in the mid-20th century when classical music was disappearing down a cul-de-sac and wilfully cutting itself off from mainstream audiences, popular music was filling the vacuum left by the avant garde. Instead of Schoenberg or Stockhausen, Goodall brought an unlikely pantheon of popular songwriters and film composers centre stage. 

This is a fascinating argument and forms part of a larger polemic against modernism. What is particularly interesting though is how unusual it is to find such a bold thesis about the arts in television today. The best arts series have always had a simple, polemical idea (think of John Berger and Mike Dibb's Ways of Seeing or Robert Hughes's The Shock of the New) This is what also distinguishes early Arena and the first series of The Late Show from others (Omnibus, Saturday Review, or today, Imagine and The Culture Show. Goodall's programmes took a big idea and ran with it. 

The series was risky in other ways. It is hard to imagine Channel 4 executives whooping for joy at the thought of a programme on film composer Bernard Herrmann, or even Cole Porter and Leonard Bernstein. If the subjects were risky, the tone was even more daring. Most arts programmes fall back on a mix of biography ("Arthur, tell us about Marilyn one more time"), celebrity-fixation and a strangely bland kind of criticism. Goodall ditched all this. There was a little biographical background but for the most part he used technical musical analysis a critical language of harmony, tonality, chord modulations and Dorian modes.