Reith Lectures

Det här är värt att lyssna på, the Reith Lectures. Varje år tallar en framstående person om tänkvärda ting, och i år talar Daniel Barenboim om vad han lärt sig genom musik. Lektionerna kommer ut varje fredag och idag var det första programmet. Man kan hämta ned dem men de har dem endast uppe i en vecka. Men så finns det också en utskrift av talet. Här är ett smakprov från frågorna:

"The music is innocent - it is what the human being makes of it. Only the human being is not courageous by nature, and the human being always likes to blame something else - somebody else or something else - and therefore it says classical music is elitist, classical music is transcendent. I'm sorry, classical is none of that, classical music is nothing until it comes into contact with a human being. I can plead exactly the opposite of that. I can tell you that making music and playing it in an orchestra is the best way to understand democracy. Elitist? What do you mean, elitist? The oboe plays the most wonderful tune in a slow movement of a Brahms symphony, and the whole orchestra, all ninety or ninety-five of them, and the conductor with the big ego, is following him.

(LAUGHTER)

Everybody's following him, everybody supporting him, adjusting everything for him to be able to express this thing. He's the king of the world - and that lasts for eight bars!

(LAUGHTER & APPLAUSE)

I'll just finish that, I'll just finish that. And then, on the ninth bar, he hold… goes back in the society, in the collective, and he has to do what ninety-five people have been doing for him for eighty-five bars, he has to do maybe for the double basses or for the clarinet or whatever the case may be. I'm sorry, music is not democratic, music is not elitist, music is not transcendental, it is what the human being does with it that it becomes moral, immoral, amoral, transcendental, or sheer nonsense."