Hear Me Out Paperback – 28 Sep 2017

In his engaging 288-page, 2017 book, Hear Me Out, Armando Iannucci presents a wonderful read, a paean to what he and many others consider the greatest art form, music, i.e. great, or serious, or “classical” music.

This is a collection of essays from various sources. Most are from a decade earlier, many written for Gramophone magazine, the audiophile magazine, hence the frequent references to CDs, and box sets, and only two mentions of the streaming services which have supplanted them. Here’s one: “Prince Esterházy, paying for a house orchestra and composer, in the form of Haydn, to come up with a regular output of symphonies, was the nearest the eighteenth century came to Spotify. And it was very exclusive.”

Iannucci is a fevered evangelist. He must go forth into all the world and share his excitement, born as a child and carried through middle age. That is the point, after all, of Hear Me Out. To share. He has created a bully pulpit, and on his imagined proselytizing he writes as follows: “After a concert, I want to grab people by the lapels and tell them how lucky we are as a species that, out of all the hundreds of billions of us who ever lived, one of us managed to come up with the Goldberg Variations. But I don’t, because that’s not the done thing. So instead I mention that the cafe downstairs does some fabulous chocolate éclairs.”

The comedy is there, in the pastry, yes, after all, that is his trade. Comedy. Satire. Self-satire, actually, as is the current fashion. He is not a musician, per se, but rather the creator of HBO Veep, and many other comedy vehicles back in the U.K. where he resides. But across the entire read we surely get the deeper point that it is the classical art form that helps him form his identity, his truest self, and regularly supplies a “more heavenly triumph” in its most transcendent moments. This is the essential, and life-saving, life-transforming business for the most sincere and intent member of the audience, like Iannucci.

The author laments it is an addiction, but a good one, this thing classical music: “... Lully, Couperin, Schütz, even Liszt, who’ve seemed unread books to me. These names are great blanks in my musical knowledge, taunting me as much as I’m taunted by not having read anything by Henry James, Anthony Burgess or Samuel Richardson, or by not knowing much about the paintings of Poussin or the films of Jean Vigo. These names remind me that all I’ll ever know in a lifetime of trying won’t be enough, that certain people have sweated a life of creativity I’ll simply never get round to doing anything about. There’s simply too much stuff to know, I tell myself, so why can’t I be left to enjoy the works I got to love early on in life without feeling pressurized into sampling everything else there is?

Iannucci concludes: “That’s what seems so magical about classical music. It’s such a vast space, a lifetime of exploration still wouldn’t seem enough. Popular music is very much of the moment; classical music demands an eternity.”

He puts in a good word for the lesser-knowns as well: “Now that seemingly permanent consensus (of who’s worth hearing and who’s not -- reviewer’s words here) is beginning to thaw. The recorded music revolution has allowed us to bypass the concert programmer and seek out works of outstanding merit that fall outside the accepted pantheon of the greats. Franz Schmidt’s Fourth Symphony and Herbert Howells’s Hymnus paradisi are my two suggestions for canonization. I’m sure you will have different ones. But that’s precisely my point; diversity and range, the impossibility of ever nailing down what makes great classical music, is surely essential to the survival of the form.”

(We must say we appreciate Mr. Iannucci’s welcoming gesture towards those “outside the pantheon” here; we wrote several books on that very topic, i.e. Obscure Composers, and can testify there is a vast expanse great music yet to be heard. Classical lover, rejoice. It will indeed take “an eternity.”)

All in all, a very warm-hearted tribute to classical music. Highly recommended, and a gift idea for those who wish to share their passion for this small slice of the music world that, alas, seems to get smaller each year as patrons age....though a younger generation is taking the stage. One such is pianist James Rhodes, with a huge Twitter following (for classical). We see he and the author are speaking out: “On 1st February 2018, Intelligence Squared brings Armando Iannucci and James Rhodes to our stage to discuss the transcendent power of music. They will be using the concert grand at Cadogan Hall to help tell their remarkable stories.”

Perhaps two media-savvy types such as these can turn the tide....one can hope.....we don’t want classical to go the way of Canterbury Tales, urtext known only to a few in a forgotten language, do we?

Iannucci's enthusiam for music is delightful. His opera libretto was entertaining but needs work.