Michael Hall (1) (1932–)

Pity the poor historian, obliged at every turn to confront history's bloody-minded refusal to happen in chapters And yet somehow the bothersome mess has to be ordered, or we'll never make sense of it.

Michael Hall's Leaving Home calls itself "a conducted tour of 20th century music" (file under Classical), and takes its structure from the recent Channel Four TV series of the same name, which functioned in part as a showcase for Simon Rattle. Rattle duly appears on the book's cover, even though all he has written is a short foreword .

There's more of Rattle here than meets the eye, however, for Hall's "tour" follows the route laid down by the TV series. Instead of a merely linear narrative, we get a kind of patchwork, arranged in chapters with headings like "Rhythm", "Colour", "America" or "Music Now". Just as Rattle's Leaving Home could find no room for such eminences as Sibelius, Janacek, Prokofiev, so Hall more or less follows suit, although he's not slavish about this: he finds space for Brian Ferneyhough, whose music didn't make it into the TV series, and omits Morton Feldman, who did.

'Ferneyhough in, Feldman out' provides a useful summary of Hall's aesthetic priorities, for he definitely prefers Ferneyhough's fleshy complexity to Feldman's skeletal bones. You or I may think Feldman matters more, just as we may find it surprising that Mark-Anthony Turnage,who is undoubtedly an important composer, makes it into the final chapter on "Music Now", when Louis Andriessen doesn't. On the other hand, although what gets left out matters, perhaps what gets left in matters more.

In that sense, Hall's concluding survey of what's happening now, which might have been the book's greatest asset, feels perfunctory and unbalanced. Perhaps the key to this imbalance can be found in a statement we find as early as page 22 : "Nothing fundamentally new has emerged since 1973, either in serious music or pop" As sweeping generalisations go, that's a pretty broad brush, but it's consistently applied throughout: on page 231 we learn that "after 19 73 there were no flags to rally round".

Both statements beg all sorts of questions, which Hall neither asks nor answers. Throughout he's lucid, but rarely passionate In each chapter he isolates a representative composer or two, then writes about one or more of their works in some detail, which causes problems on several occasions. You can't write about Stravinsky without saying quite a lot about his innovative sense of rhythm, but in a book like this, a whole page on time signatures in Symphonies Of Wind Instruments simply gets boring.

The book is handsomely designed. Its broad margins allow for the insertion of quotes from Rattle's TV commentary, quotes which sometimes add something distinctive, sometimes don't And there are some wonderful photos, the relevance of which is not always apparent: the picture researcher clearly enjoys modern architecture but I'm not sure what the picture of Channel Four's HQ is doing on the same page as Hall's brief survey of bebop (it's a fine photo, though)

In case I've been too harsh on the book, I should mention what may prove its greatest attraction : time and again Hall's discussion of this or that piece, whether by Conlon Nancarrow or Gyorgy Kurtag, had me longing to hear it. When so much writing on twentieth century's troublesome music is arid and distant this is not a small achievement.… (plus d'informations)