Popular music

I have the radio on most of the time.  Talk radio, the CBC, which despite the vicious cuts the current government has made - clearly intended to kill the public broadcasting network - carries enough intellectually stimulating material aimed at grown-ups to satisfy me for much of the time. It's intelligent company and it helps to keep my brain functioning. Some time last week I heard a discussion about the music of the early 20th century that sparked a train of thought about the importance of music in my life - in anybody's life for that matter, but it's the role of music in my own life that I want to talk about today.

My earliest memories include snatches of ballads from late Victorian and Edwardian times and the rousing but often sad songs of the Great War of 1914-18, all of this of course written as much as several decades before I was born, but still popular when I was a small child. I heard these songs on wind-up gramophones that were part of the furniture in many homes in those years.  By the middle 1930s, music on the radio, another rather large piece of furniture, removed to a distance the silences between snatches of music as the record was changed and the clockwork motor rewound. Sometimes the radio could broadcast a live orchestral concert with a whole symphony uninterrupted, but most music came on vinyl records with a diameter proportional to playing time so the music played in rationed chunks of 3 to 5 minutes, the physical limits of 78 rpm vinyl records. In that way I heard a great deal of the popular music of a time that is on average around 100 years in the past. That merged and mingled with the popular music of the 1930s and 1940s, the years of the world war that I experienced as a child and adolescent youth.

That music had substance. It wasn't timeless classical music, just ephemeral popular music, but it had two qualities that have vanished altogether from the the cacophonous noise that contemporary radio announcers describe as music. That music had recognizable tunes and sometimes had words that were mellifluously arranged and worth hearing. Rarely, the words - lyrics - were poetry. Not very good poetry perhaps, but genuine poetry nonetheless with verses, rhyming couplets, stanzas. Some composers of that golden age worked in partnerships with versifiers, as Arthur Sullivan did with William S Gilbert. A few, like Noel Coward and Cole Porter, combined both roles with wit and panache.  It puzzles - and frustrates - me that they have no modern successors. If I listen carefully, I can very rarely discern sense in the words that are chanted as accompaniment to one of the contemporary barbarities, rap or hip-hop, but only so rarely that it's not worth enduring in the almost always vain hope that it will be worth hearing.

Why has this happened?  Why don't modern youngsters have tastes like the young people of 50, 75 or 100 years ago, eager to listen to, and appreciative of, tuneful ballads and songs worth hearing?  It's one of the great mysteries of modern life to me, and it has blighted my old age that I so rarely hear the songs I once loved, and that nothing has come along to replace or reinforce them.