It all happened in a flash. I was talking to the head of Lyric FM, Seamus Crimmins, last December, and the conversation got around to the possible place of contemporary music on the new channel. "Before we think about contemporary music," he said, "we've got to deal with the music of the century we're about to leave." Without thinking, I found myself saying, "Countdown. A series of 100 programmes that looks at the music of the 20th century year by year, beginning 100 days before the end of the year, and ending on New Year's Eve with 1999."
As an idea, it was clear and simple. As a project . . . well, it was whatever you decided to make of it. On the one hand, it could be done just by scanning the peaks of the last 100 years, and then filling in some of the gaps. On the other, it could be done by trawling through the valleys and the foothills while keeping a sharp eye on the peaks. This, I felt, was the approach for me, and one which would give a truer representation of the most exciting and surprising of musical centuries.
So, before I got the green light - or indeed would have accepted the green light - I really needed to dip my toe in the water. I decided to bury myself in histories, reference books and recordings, doing the basic research on five selected years - 1900, 1925, 1950, 1975 and 1995 - exact spots in the calendar of the century, but random choices in relation to the history of music.
What Seamus got out of it was a detailed proposal. What I got was some grasp of what the project would involve. My feeling was that, yes, however labour-intensive it would be, it was do-able. The response to the proposal was positive, and my fate for the next 12 months was sealed.
Since converting in my mid-teens from a position of musical conservatism, my enthusiasm for a broad spectrum of 20th-century and contemporary music hasn't wavered. For richness and diversity, there's never been a period like it. Apart from Beethoven, Weber and, maybe, Cherubini, you'll find it hard to think of a composer active in 1810 who's still heard regularly today. 1910 yields Bartok, Berg, Debussy, Elgar, Falla, Faure, Holst, Janacek, Mahler, Nielsen, Prokofiev, Puccini, Rachmaninov, Ravel, Satie, Schoenberg, Scriabin, Sibelius, Strauss, Stravinsky, Vaughan Williams, Webern. Not even the romantic heyday of Liszt, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Brahms and Wagner can match this.
The sheer depth and range of the century would be the major foundation of the series. Things could, of course, get a little bit more difficult towards the end. Pleasant Surprise No. 1 was the fact that 1995 was actually far from a desert in the CD catalogue. In fact, I had recordings of 27 pieces from 1995 in my own CD collection. They mightn't be mine or anyone else's particular top choices from the repertoire of that year. But with works by John Adams, Thomas Ades, Michael Daugherty, Roger Doyle, Pascal Dusapin, Philip Glass, Barry Guy, Piers Hellawell, Oliver Knussen, Gyorgy Ligeti, Peter Maxwell Davies, Steve Reich, Toru Takemitsu, John Tavener and Michael Tippett among them, there was already a realistic basis for representing the output of that particular year. The five years of my test made it clear that the challenge wouldn't so much be deciding what I could include as what I could bear to exclude.
There was, of course, the possibility that some of the 95 years yet to be explored might turn out to be unexpectedly barren. So I decided to allow myself a minor freedom: I would play pieces either in the year they were completed, or in the year they were premiered. There have always been some major dislocations between composition and performance. The premiere of Ives's Fourth Symphony was given - under three conductors, such is its complexity - in 1965, 49 years after it was written and 11 years after the composer's death.
This famous case is only one of a sizeable number of delays, which affected composers from Berg and Webern to Shostakovich and Copland, not to mention the extreme case of Shostakovich's favourite pupil, the radical Galina Ustvolskaya, who seems to have composed in a virtual vacuum for the first 20 years of her career. The nature of a piece's influence at any time will vary greatly depending on factors which are no longer necessarily clear once it has acquired a wide audience - when it was published, premiered, broadcast or recorded, and which came first.
The 20th century is the century of recorded sound, and Seamus and I agreed that certain historical documents of the sort we are denied from earlier periods should qualify on their own account. So, in what is one of the most oddly disturbing recordings I know, the last castrato makes an appearance, singing the Bach/Gounod Ave Maria. Grieg can be heard playing one of his early piano pieces in a recording so wobbly the piano almost seems to have a vibrato. Joseph Joachim, who premiered the Brahms Violin Concerto, can be heard in an arrangement of one of the Hungarian Dances, and the great Spanish composer/violinist Pablo de Sarasate plays his own Zigeunerweisen. The art of improvisation, often spoken of as a closed book to classical musicians, is represented by Albeniz and Elgar on the piano, Vierne on the organ. And a short Scherzo for viola and cello by Hindemith, written in three hours to fill the last side of a set of 78rpm records, is there, too, recorded with Emanuel Feuermann the day it was composed in 1934.
Record companies' treatment of composers as performers has been, at best, patchy. Many left important recorded legacies, others were ignored completely. Some of the real gems are not at all well known. Among those featuring in Countdown are Enesco's inspired playing of his folk-inspired but folk-music-free Third Violin Sonata with Dinu Lipatti (a war-time recording made by Romanian Radio), Rachmaninov conducting his sombre Isle of the Dead (he once considered opera conducting as a career), and Schoenberg conducting Pierrot Lunaire with a magical sense of fantasy matched by few other recordings. Piano-playing and conducting were major activities for a lot of composers. But Samuel Barber trained as a singer, and he recorded his Matthew Arnold setting, Dover Beach, in 1935, showing a wonderfully mellow baritone voice.
The 100 programmes of Count- down will be completely different from the 100 programmes that I might have ended up with, if the brief was simply 100 hour-long programmes on the music of the 20th century. A century-wide thematic ordering and prioritising hasn't really been possible.
The series' full title, Countdown, sampling the century, is an attempt to explain this. Themes, movements, patterns of change emerge gradually over the years, and a lot less clearly or coherently than they would in a book. The programmes are like local reports, looking around from the perspective of the time. They all include some samplings of news of the day, from major political developments and wars, to things like women being arrested for smoking, the invention of the pop-up toaster, and the first use of reflective "cats' eyes" on roads.
I would like the experience of listening to the series to have something of the unpredictability and randomness of life itself - things are always harder to put in perspective when you're living through them, than when you've got the wisdom of hindsight. Composers' own views (often vitriolic about each other), recorded in articles, interviews and letters, and the responses of contemporary audiences and reviewers, provide a much more complex mesh than the clear patterns of history books.
The regular violence of audience response in the second decade of the century is quite remarkable. Their behaviour was, quite simply, riotous, and on numerous occasions resulted in the police being called. The abandoning of tonality, the destruction of the comfort of a sense of key, was more than a lot of listeners could bear. To show just how differently this sense was attended to, I've included a 1914 recording of George Henschel accompanying himself in two, short songs by Schumann. Between the two, he improvises a little link on the piano, to ease the "shock" of the change of key. This is a now-forgotten practice, which persisted with some older pianists right up to the 1950s.
Audience objections haven't gone away. The audience at the premiere of Stockhausen's Trans in 1971 tried to sabotage the work with a range of tactics, including whistling and ironic applause during the piece. The composer's response was to have the recording of the premiere issued on disc. I was at the English premiere of Ligeti's masterpiece, the opera Le grand macabre, and heard him being booed during his curtain-call. And the antipathy to Harrison Birtwistle's Panic, expressed at the Last Night of the Proms in 1995, became a national news story. (One of the curious things I've learned is that, in the early years of the Proms, when smoking was allowed, there were signs in the hall cautioning people not to strike matches during the music!) The 20th century can be viewed, like any other, as a succession of orthodoxies, many of them burdened with those over-used prefixes, neo- and post-. But it has been generously blessed with individuals who stand challengingly apart from the mainstream. Diversity rules OK. The model of history as an upward progress has been replaced with something like a rotating barber-pole, an ever-replenishing state of flux.
Without even half of the programmes of Countdown completed and in the can, I already feel like Schoenberg when he said to the orchestra after the premiere of his opera Von heute auf morgen, "Gentlemen, the difference between what you played tonight and what I actually wrote in my score would make a new opera." The 20th century has been so abundant that the pieces I've had to leave out would have made a series every bit as interesting as the ones I've been able to fit in.
The first programme in Countdown, sampling the century is broadcast on Lyric FM tonight at 10 p.m. The series runs nightly (except Saturdays) until the end of the year.
