Sir, - Time was when pop and rock seemed the way forward for music. Leonard Bernstein in his Norton Lectures could refer to the Beatles' song Eleanor Rigby as a masterpiece. And now? As I type this, the not unpersonable songster Ronan Keating intones from a sound-system opposite:
Life izza roll-er coas-der juiz godda ri-i-de ed,
Ah need you (need you, need you), canned hi-i-de ed, etc.
Readers can probably furnish for themselves the tune, consisting of the same three tones of the scale, tediously reiterated, that will give them Three Blind Mice.
So what went wrong? The Pop genre as such has never developed. The fabled Three Chords have got stuck in place like a holy trinity, immutable. I was surprised, listening to George Harrison's My Sweet Lord the other day, to hear a modulation which shifted the melody a tone higher. This device is the stock of many a tunesmith, but Harrison achieves it by voice-leading and not the usual crooner's jolt.
Even this level of competence (bread and butter to a Leaving Cert music student) is quite beyond any of our current pop crop. Is music the only field of human activity where earning power exists in calculably inverse radio to skill?
As to words, I'll speculate that Mr Keating's conception of a lyric is that it expresses "feeling". That the truest poetry requires artifice and hard-earned skill to write effectively is not, I suspect, an idea he would have much patience with. Lennon and McCartney may have been products of Welfare State education, but it was an education which required (as I can testify), the learning by heart of large tracts of Shakespeare and Marvell. And for the aspiring lyricist what better, etc?
I once surprised a pop buff by saying that pop and rock bored me because they were old-fashioned and technically primitive. I say he was surprised, because my work as a "classical" composer is for him generically old, even before it is written, while pop, however primitive, is by definition new. Yet my music, by trying to form a living link with a long tradition, is "new old", while pop, by dealing with notionally modern issues in a harmonic language that Mozart had outgrown by the age of seven, is "old new".
So where does it all leave us? - Yours, etc.,
Kevin O'Connell, Clifden Court, Ellis Quay, Dublin 7.