Sometimes you can be helped towards a greater understanding of your own views on a subject by reading an argument that is diametrically opposed to everything you believe. This happened to me yesterday when I came across the playwright Mark Ravenhill’s piece in the G2 section of the Guardian, a piece which in the print version appeared under the headline “British writers treat audiences as bored channel surfers. I’d much rather be treated as an adult.”

Ravenhill thinks that most contemporary plays, movies and novels infantilise their audiences by attempting to be too much fun. “And so we throw spectacle at you, make sure there are three laughs on every page, grip you with the power of ‘what happens next?’, do what we can to shock you with graphic sex and violence.” (Ravenhill, incidentally, came to prominence with his play ‘Shopping and Fucking’, which, according to Wikipedia, is in part about “drugs, shoplifting, phone sex, prostitution, anal sex, and oral sex in the London department store Harvey Nichols”.)  Ravenhill goes on: “From the worthiest of new-writing theatres to the brashest of musicals, from the Booker shortlist to the BBC newsroom, the assumption is the same – that you out there are very easily distracted.”

If he can find three laughs on every page of the books on the average Booker shortlist, then I want what he’s smoking, but of course the concern that our attention-spans are getting shorter is a real one, and it would be disingenuous to pretend otherwise. Where we part company is in Ravenhill’s equation of the need to be entertained with immaturity. He describes a visit to Poland to see Polish theatre director Krystian Lupa’s play ‘Marilyn’, a “three-hour work in progress that will eventually form part of a nine-hour exploration of ‘personality’”. Ravenhill admits that the play was occasionally “really, really boring”, but then claims that this was OK, because “I was truly being treated as an adult, someone who didn’t need to be constantly diverted.”

I like to think that I too am an adult who doesn’t need to be constantly diverted – unless, that is, I have paid good money to be in a place of entertainment (and even the theatre, which God knows has provided some of the dullest nights of my life, can still, at a stretch, be described thus) – in which case I demand diversion, every single second of the evening. Anyone who is currently constructing “a nine-hour exploration of ‘personality’”, it seems to me, has completely forgotten about his audience, or at least the conventional notion of an audience, full of people with jobs and worries and dependants, people who are tired after a hard working day or week. My suspicion is that the policeman and the teacher and the nurse who works in a hospice does not feel infantilised in the least by someone’s desire to keep them entertained and diverted; rather, they are grateful for it. The job of providing these diversions, however, can occasionally seem less than adult: writers sit around in jeans and old T-shirts for large parts of the average working day, eating biscuits and watching some of the funnier acts from ‘Britain’s Got Talent’ on YouTube, while their friends and contemporaries don suits, rush off to meetings, save lives, keep entire transport systems running. Perhaps inevitably, there is a desire to compensate for the lifestyle, produce plays and books and films that are no fun whatsoever in an attempt to convince the world outside our offices that a day in front of the word-processor is the equivalent of eight hours down a Siberian salt-mine.

…Martin Kettle’s impassioned article in the Guardian almost persuaded me to listen to a Beethoven piano sonata….until he began with the bullying, as cultural absolutists are wont to do. He tells us that some opinions are “wrong”, that “some things are just better than others, full stop”, that the best music is capable of “ennobling” us, and that “musical taste and public values need improving”. (I’m not sure how public values got slipped in there. Nor am I sure what they are, or why on earth he would think that those of us who don’t listen to Beethoven wish to see them remain at their current level. For the record: I’m all for improving anything. Why not?) At one point, he even seems to be arguing that Beethoven himself is an elite: “It’s not the audience that is an elite for liking the music. It is Beethoven for writing it in the first place.”  What is interesting in these sorts of diatribes is that frequently the language used to express them breaks down altogether. How can one man be an elite? How can an opinion be wrong? And if  “some things are just better than others, full stop”, then surely all cultural criticism is redundant? Just give us the league tables – the facts, as Mr Gradgrind would say – and be done with it. Whatever else Beethoven is good for, he doesn’t seem to do much for cogency.

 I am prepared to accept that Martin Kettle is a nobler person than me – it wouldn’t be hard. But if Beethoven is capable of ennobling us, then it stands to reason that the noblest people in the world must be classical critics and classical musicians, given that they are exposed to his music more than any of us.  We are therefore long overdue an official scientific study comparing the nobility of Beethoven aficionados with that of people who only listen to, say, African music. And how much nobility do they need, these people? After twenty years or so, shouldn’t they be taken out of the Royal Festival Hall and put to the public good? They’re wasted where they are. Anyone that noble should be running a public service, maybe even the UN.

 It’s always the Nazis who put the mockers on this sort of stuff; Goebbels and Hitler loved Beethoven, and it seems uncontroversial to claim that whatever power Beethoven’s music has to improve us as human beings somehow didn’t work on them. I would like to propose a counter argument: that nobody who owns a bootleg copy of Bruce Springsteen’s show at the Main Point, Bryn Mawr in 1975 has ever ordered the bombing of a country.  If this turns out to be true, then I have more evidence for the ameliorating effects of early live Springsteen on the soul than Martin Kettle can ever muster on Beethoven’s behalf.

 “Public values” would be improved, apparently, if “the BBC was willing to put classical music or theatre” – it apparently doesn’t matter which, so  this clearly isn’t just about  Beethoven -  “on its main channels. …But those days are gone, sadly.” One thing I never understand: why do self-confessed elitists like Kettle want everyone to join their elite?  Because then it wouldn’t be an elite any more, and they’d have to find something else.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/feb/16/classicalmusic.guardiancolumnists