Time To Face The Music

Olly Mann is surprised to discover a taste for classical music—years before he was expecting it…

I WOULDN’T SAY I WAS DISMISSIVE OF CLASSICAL MUSIC. It’s just that it always struck me as something I’d get around to when I’m older, like gardening, or going on a cruise. I listen to a broad range of artists: Sixties rock groups, truck-drivin’ country stars, moustachioed troubadours, sexless boybands. But, when you boil it down, they’re basically all peddling four-minute, music-and-lyrics, chorus based pop songs. Classical music—unless you include Broadway showtunes or movie soundtracks—has never formed part of my repertoire.

This is probably because classical music was shovelled into me at school like carrots and chips. Countless teachers, stuck for ideas on wet Wednesday afternoons, filled up our music lessons by bunging on Holst’s The Planets or Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf for us to dissect as a listening exercise. Presumably this gave them time to open their post, but it built an unfortunate connection in my young mind between classical music and boredom and, worse, tainted the genre with the poisonous hue of “edutainment”—like the tedious ITV Schools programmes about fractions we watched in maths.