There is a poignant connection between these two phenomena.
I have to declare a lack of interest here, because light music is not my thing. On the other hand, since I started conducting amateur orchestras five or six years ago I've had to perform a fair bit of it, something I did with a certain sniffiness at first, then with a degree of grudging admiration and latterly almost with enthusiasm (I am trying to stop it going any further).
Often with discussions like this one the really interesting thing is not what's said, but what the broadcasters leave out. This was a rare occasion however where the issue you think they aren't going to touch on at all is not just included, but actually given a full five minutes of full-frontal, that issue here being the extent of the BBC's own involvement in light music's decline.
Now obviously there are many reasons for the decline, economics being one of them, technology being another, the rise of pop culture another still. But undoubtedly the BBC played its part, setting up Radios 2 and 3 without dealing adequately with how light music was going to be catered for. Light music was pushed into the margins on Radio 2, and in the Glock-era it was ridiculous to imagine that Radio 3 was going to be playing any Haydn Wood when it couldn't bring itself to love Robert Simpson. There are apparently numerous anguished memos written by a BBC bigwig to Radio 3 wondering why so little light music was getting played. One might as well ask why bears were defecating in the woods.
Hats off to the BBC for allowing these heretical views to be heard. My son, who was in the kitchen whilst I was listening to this self-flagellation, said, "You can't imagine Sky doing that".
Several other things stood out for me. One was the often-told story of Ernest Tomlinson, furious at the BBC proposing to clear out its light music library, an act of musical Stalinism if ever there was one, offering the use of a barn on his Lancashire farm in which the thousands of orchestral sets could be stored. Tomlinson, a very fine composer, set up a library of light music, still going today, which did much to preserve music which would otherwise have been lost. He is said to have come upon a skip full of parts outside the London Palladium and hired a van on the spot to save them from destruction. A friend tells me that MGM destroyed its sheet music library in Hollywood - to build a car park. Yes, a car park.
The other stand-out was Anne Dudley recounting her experience at Music College of finding the composition department dominated by the avant garde (as most music departments in most conservatoires were and still are), and being bemused to find Eric Coates regarded as a joke figure rather than a serious musician. This is an experience I had too, although I was lucky to have lessons with John Tavener, who stood firmly outside the mainstream, a place I have stood myself ever since.
The widespread assumption, shared by the programme, that light music is a different genre to classical music, or at best a sub-genre, isn't really accurate in my view. Lots of classical composers - Mozart, Elgar, Tchaikovsky, Sibelius and many others - have written light music (by which I mean music which sets out to entertain), and this should give us a clue that there is a bigger and broader question hanging in the air here, about the approachability of light music, and the extent to which it that quality has been lost from classical music generally in the last century.
To put the question the other way round, to what extent is it legitimate for a classical composer to set out not to entertain? Two things seem obvious to me. One, that all music (indeed perhaps all art) should be entertaining (I use that word in a very wide sense, as I'll explain in a minute). The other is that a lot of music is being written, indeed has been written in the last century or so, which has no intention of entertaining whatsoever. Indeed, if you ask its composers and performers, many would scorn the idea of doing anything so base as to give their audiences a good time. For me, entertaining means many things - stimulating, challenging yes, but also soothing and consoling. The point about art is that it is a mediation of human experience, not the experience itself (the most horrifying opera I've ever seen is Idomeneo, a terrible story mediated by music of unsurpassed luminosity and grace).
Ultimately it is easy to regret the decline of light music, because it is readily, though I think inaccurately, rendered as a separate genre whose exponents were once famous and who, amongst musicians at least, are still household names. What is much less easy, because it is harder to identify them, is to lament the obscurity of all the composers at the more serious end of the classical spectrum who did not disdain their audiences, and who wrote music that was approachable, that sought to entertain in the very broadest sense, and who were pushed into obscurity by the same institutional forces (the conservatoires, the universities, the broadcasters) that did for so-called light music.
Why is the fate of these individuals important? Because on the whole the public is not interested in avant-garde music, and, particularly in a time of austerity, the public subsidy which keeps the infrastructure of classical music going is harder to justify when so much of its output is devoted to pushing a kind of music which, statistically speaking, almost no-one likes. Less money for classical music does not just mean fewer performances of Boulez and Berio. It also means less Berlioz and Brahms.
Ultimately, those of us who love classical music have to find new repertoire which can enthuse the public. Otherwise classical music will become increasingly marginalised in schools, in the public imagination and in public spending priorities. At the moment it doesn't seem to me that anyone is trying to reverse this trend.
Traditionally the middle-class turn to classical music in middle-age. The weekend of the Light Fantastic however, many of my middle-class middle-aged friends have gone off to Glastonbury.
