STEPHEN FRY - OF CLASSICAL MUSIC

ow, sorry to make this book nigh on interactive, but would you just help me a moment. Close your eyes, again, and imagine if you will a huge 1950s post-war British factory. Are you there?

Bugger. Actually you can't read this if you close your eyes, can you? OK, open them again, and I'll do the imagining.

I'm seeing a aircraft hangar-sized factory in the fifties. Lots of people are working - only not on anything vaguely mechanical. They are writing… with quill pens and parchment manuscript. Suddenly, a huge, almost air-raid-siren-like hooter goes off, and, immediately, many of them down quills. Then a voice booms over the loudspeaker: 'Ladies and gentlemen, it is now 1600. It is now 1600. The Renaissance shift is now at an end. Will composers please remember to take all their belongings with them when leaving, so that the baroque shift can get to work immediately, and we won't have any complaints. I repeat, the Renaissance shift is now finished. Anyone who's working a double shift and staying on for baroque is entitled to five minutes to stretch their legs. Thank you.' BING BONG.

OK, OK, so it never happened like that, I know. Why do you think I did it? It just shows, in a way, how useless these labels are… Renaissance, baroque, etc. People just… composed. True, music evolved over time, but not in one year. So maybe that's why many scholars have even had difficulty in agreeing where one period ends and another one begins. Most plump for baroque as starting around 1600, but then this becomes meaningless when you see that composers such as Dowland, Gibbons and Monteverdi - all of them hardly contenders for the tide 'Mr Baroque of Morecambe Bay, 2004' - were working long into the seventeenth century. Still, as politicians are wont to say, where do you draw the line? Well, here, as it happens, so I guess we've got to lump it.

Now, let me take you by the hand and lead you through the streets of the early seventeenth century - I'll show you something that'll make you change your pants.

1607. Good year? Bad year? Well, bad year if you were Guy Fawkes, I suppose. Bad in that you were dead, I mean, your head satayed with peanut sauce just a year earlier, after you'd been caught in the House of Lords, walking backwards with a carelessly leaking keg of gunpowder. 1607 means the new play from everybody's favourite bard, William Shakespeare, namely Antony and Cleopatra. It means the new gadget from Galileo, a compass, so now you could see your way through the stench and fog of south London to go and see Mr Shakespeare's play. And what else have we got? Let's see… Oh yes, we've got opera, as I said earlier. Opera. What more could you want?

Well, opera singers, I suppose: we haven't got them yet. Well, that's not fair, actually. We have got opera singers, we just haven't got women opera singers. Not yet, anyway. It's still all blokes. Ever since St Paul, no less, said that women should stay silent in church, they've become as rare as a witch at a diocesan coffee morning. So, if we don't have women, who is going to sing the high bits? Who is going to hit the top Cs? Well, looks like someone will be going to the ball, after all. If you get my drift. Well, OK, someone is going to the ball, but it turns out it's going to be your personal surgeon - now remove your trousers, please! Yes, along with opera came the meanest men in all Italy - and you can't deny they've got good reason to be - THE CASTRATOS. Mmm, could be a great series on Channel 4, produced by HBO.

I would seriously have loved to hear a good castrato, just to see how different they were from today's counter tenors. The idea, most common in Italy, it's got to be said, was to castrate a boy soprano, thus preserving the boy's voice, and combining it with the chest, lungs and therefore range of an adult. One of the most famous castrati who ever lived was a man called Farinelli (1705-82) who, it is said, was employed by Philip V of Spain to sing him the same four songs every evening. Check out the film about him - very good.

Y

es, OK, I know. It's not my fault. Don't blame me. Yes, we have opera. It's a big fat hit with virtually everyone who goes to see it. And you can see why - it was so starkly different to anything that had come before it. As beautiful as a four-part Mass is, especially when delivered in the glorious settings of a visually stunning cathedral, just think how ALIVE an opera must have seemed in comparison. It must have been a bit like when Special FX first started to take off in films. Audiences had, literally, seen nothing like it before. Well, opera must have been like that - different from anything they'd ever seen before.

But how did I know they'd go and invent opera long before they had proper sopranos? Amazing, really, when you think. But nevertheless, opera was here to stay, and, with opera, came egomaniac primadonnas. But, as we've said, not female ones. In fact, arguably, much worse: egomaniac primadonnas with a grudge. In fact, with a grudge and no balls. What an awful combination.

What's the most amazing thing about the revolution that was opera, though, is that, despite being the biggest thing in vocal music in years, centuries even, it, more than any other innovation, led to a dramatic improvement in another, seemingly completely different, area, namely instrumental music. Why? Well, because the accompanying orchestra in the pit was called on to play more and more dramatic music. Very often, this dramatic music would mean playing new things, new sounds which had never been tried before when instruments were simply for accompaniment. Now that ever new sounds and textures and effect were called for, composers needed ever better players who could pull off the more technically demanding music they were writing for their operas. This would eventually lead to the orchestra leaving the pit altogether, and going up on to the stage, on their own, much to the outrage of the Church.

The Church, you see, HATED instrumental music. And why? Well, because of the very fact that it was instrumental, and therefore NOT VOCAL. If there were no voices, there could be no words, and if there were no words, there could be no praising God. But, well, it's post-Reformation, now, and the Church's influence is very much on the wane. Even it could not stop something as fundamental as instrumental music from taking root. And so it would grow and grow. And we'll follow it as it does, but for now, let's to^ the court of Louis XIV.

I say, witch? Could you hold up both hands and tell me the time? What's that you say, 1656? Thank you!

Well, I've checked and the hands on my witch tell me it's 1656. Time for an update. 1656. Where are we? Well, it's thirty-six years since Miles Standish and the Pilgrim Fathers landed at New Plymouth, which is an astonishing coincidence, when you think - all that way round the globe in a souped-up junk boat and they land somewhere with almost the same name as the place they left. Also, the English Less-Than-Civil War had been and gone, and Charles I had had his headache cured in rather dramatic fashion by the men with the Beatles haircuts, Cromwell and Co.

? ver in Paris, however, the French King is having an altogether nicer time of it. In fact, if you had dropped in any time around 1656, you might have come across a rather remarkable piece of entertainment. Remarkable not only for the fact that the reigning monarch of France is about to dress up in a golden solar costume and prance around like a wazzock, but also because, by the time he's finished, the development of the orchestra would be on a different planet. The P Did you like the way I left the verb out, there? Very post-Ref, don't you think? (lecasion was a lhtle ballet, cooked up by the King's composer in resi-ili-nce, Lully.