B Listers

January This month sees Classic FM magazine join its previously entombed radio station sister in the musoc.org Hall of Shame. There are a number of reasons why the magazine is particularly dreadful this month (see the indictment for details), but one of the main ones for its enshrinement as Class(ical) Traitor is the headline publication of a list - yet another list (see 09 Top Ten Top Ten) - of the "The 50 Greatest Composers" in its February issue (actually published early January).

Classic FM as a business (which is pretty much all it is) revels in these lists by nature - the current issue further publishes "the 25 classical composers without whom our heroes [the 50] could not have achieved greatness", the "Classical album chart" (a more misleading title is barely conceivable), this month's instalment of "The 100 classical recordings no listener should be without" and "50 works that changed classical music", "Five of the best: conductors", and its yearly appeal to readers to vote in its notorious "Hall of Fame" (see last year's Classic FM Countdown to the Hall of Shame).

Intriguingly, this latest 50, according to magazine editor John Evans, "are at the heart of everything we do at Classic FM" - intriguing, given that only 15 (JS Bach, Beethoven, Berlioz, Brahms, Chaikovsky, Chopin, Debussy, Handel, Haydn, Mahler, Mendelssohn, Mozart, Schubert, Schumann, and Vaughan Williams) get anything like the airplay their music deserves. Many more of the 50 receive only cursory recognition, often amounting to a single work (e.g. Tallis's Spem in Alium, Verdi's Requiem), and often in the form of something unrepresentative (Shostakovich's 'Jazz' suites, Wagner's Siegfried Idyll, Rossini's operatic overtures).

The rest, including Binchois, Desprez, Dowland, Dufay, Hildegard, Léonin, Machaut, Palestrina, remain virtually (often totally) unknown to Classic FM's listeners and airwaves, either because Classic FM almost completely ignores pre-1600 music; or, in the case of Lully, Corelli, Francois Couperin, Telemann, Rameau and Domenico Scarlatti, because Classic FM largely ignores opera, chamber and solo instrumental music (in favour of orchestral). Or, in the case of Schoenberg, Bartók and Boulez (the only living composer in the list, incidentally), because they're deemed too modern: after all, can anyone imagine the outcry - from advertisers, for starters - if any of Boulez's "Defining Works" (as listed in the main feature), e.g. the Hammer Without Master (Marteau Sans Maître) or Second Piano Sonata, were played on "Smooth Classics at Six" or Simon Bates's morning show?

The sheer idiocy and laziness of the whole exercise is typified by the fact that one of the 25 that the 50 "couldn't have done it without" is, apparently, Karlheinz Stockhausen; yet of the 50, only Vaughan Williams (just), Stravinsky, Shostakovich, Britten, Bernstein and Boulez survived long enough to be able to be influenced by Stockhausen's music. The idea that any of these apart from Boulez wrote music that has any relationship at all with Stockhausen's is as ludicrous as the lazy journalism that passes for research in this glossy industry brochure.

Music lovers may be tempted to dismiss this list mania as either irrelevant or irreverent, but it's not just Classic FM who are at it: as described elsewhere on this site (e.g. 09 Top Ten Top Ten, Seedy Sales), other previously more 'upmarket' outlets appear to see this as a worthy (= profitable) path to take.

One of these is Gramophone, which itself plumbs new depths in its own February issue with an outrageously entitled "Review of the Decade": little more than a shoddy back-of-envelope list - 10 items, naturally - of "seismic changes" in music over the last decade. In editor and ex-editor James Inverne and James Jolly's ranking, the iPod comes in at number one; the fact that they're promoting this absurdly overpriced gadget aimed squarely at the pop market, with little relevance to genuine music lovers - for whom only the concert experience or the nearest they can get to it (on a hi-fi, through loudspeakers) can do such sophisticated music justice - gives a good indication of the fat business fingers controlling Gramophone and influencing much of its writing and direction nowadays.

These pathetic lists smack above all of modern marketing - a juvenile way of packaging everything, even great composers and their music, so that it can be instantly absorbed by the great buying public. The "50 Greatest Composers" of Classic FM magazine boil down a millennium of magnificent music to a handful of 'brands' that have been selling concert tickets and CDs/LPs for many decades. Similarly, Gramophone's 'Review' tells us what trends we should be following, what bandwagons we should be jumping on (alongside its editors), what's 'vibrant', 'essential' and 'happening'. Industry cheerleaders, in other words; and B listers.

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