STEPHEN FRY - OF CLASSICAL MUSIC

Straight ahead of me, you should be able to see the smiling face of John Cage. Can you all see him? It's 1952, you see, and if I just stop speaking for a moment, and let you… \ I / / X ?? / / I \ \

… did you hear that?

That was nothing. Niente, as they say in Dewsbury. Bugger all. Pas une sausage. Odd one, really. John Cage, the forty-year-old modern composer, decides that music is all around us. You know. The birds, the trees, the traffic, even. So he writes a piece - IN THREE MOVEMENTS - which has directions to remain 'Tacet'. Silent. So, if you can imagine the first 'performance', in inverted commas: someone came out on to a concert platform - pianist I think it was, complete with page turner, and proceeded to play nothing. For 4 minutes 33 seconds. Of course, Cage has had the windows opened, so that you can hear the noise from outside, everything. THAT's the MUSIC, in the eyes of John Cage. What goes on around you. I believe the music on the first night consisted of a fair few fortissimo 'You've got to be jokings' and the odd largo hand clap. Even a sforzando cry of 'CRAP!' And do you want to know the best bit? People record it! They do. In fact, I can recommend the Frank Zappa version. I don't know what it is, there's just something about the performance.

On your left again is 1953 - Coronation Year. The music you can hear is William Walton's Orb and Sceptre, written especially. The couple outside are still Waiting for Godot- have been since last year. Please don't throw them food. The gravestone on my left is that of Dylan Thomas, who died this year, although it is partially obscured by the sculpture in the foreground, which is entitled King and Queen by Henry Moore. Sorry? Yes, Janice, the curvy bit of rock with the hole in the middle. Yes, it is finished.

Just passing out of view, behind us, there is a Spanish-looking gentleman in safari shorts with a net. That is Joseph Canteloube. He's very much the Gallic version of Vaughan Williams. He collects French folk tunes the way you and I might collect famous people's mortuary photographs. Or is that just me? Anyway, Mr Canteloube is very happy this year because his new piece, Songs of the Auvergne, is a big hit. It contains tunes he collected on his travels up and down the volcanic peaks of the Auvergne - surprisingly enough. On the wall behind him, you can see a poster for one of the big movies of this year - 1955 - The Seven Tear Itch.

Putting music into contect can really throw up seeming anomolies, like The Seven Tear Itch and Songs of the Auvergne, which just don't seem to gel. On the other hand, it can shed more light on certain pieces too. Take the next year, 1956. If you can look to your right, you might catch the Catherine Wheel hips of Elvis Presley, only pardy obscured by Leonard Bernstein's operetta, Candide, which is situated to the rear of the year. A far more fitting pair, Elvis and Leonard, I think. Candide has suffered somewhat from having a showstopping overture. As a result, a lot of people don't ever get to hear the rest of it.

Finally, we are now just pulling into 1957, so can I just answer two questions I had earlier: yes, this is the place for a loo break, and yes, Eden has indeed given way to Macmillan. Behind Mr Macmillan, who is sat on the park bench, are representatives of The Six, the six countries who sign the Treaty of Rome, and thus start us on the inexorable trail to the prosecution of people selling bananas by the pound. The beginnings of the Common Market, in other words. There are desegregation riots in America - in Arkansas die paras are called in - and Jack Kerouac coins the phrase 'beat' or 'beatnik' in the cult book from '57, On the Road. All that, plus The King and F. What more could you want? As it is now 6.30, some of you may want to take a wash in your rooms, before going on to flie concert of two new works from 1957 - Shostakovich's Second Piano Concerto and Bernstein's new one. I'm reliably informed they are both lovely, although my mum did tell me you might want to bring a book, or at least a good magazine, for the Shostakovich outer movements.

Actually, tour Time Out. Thanks. A quick Bernstein moment, if you will. Bernstein was born in 1918 in Lawrence, Massachusetts, but of Russian descent. After studying piano and composition at Harvard, he pursued a career in conducting, first as assistant to the legendary Serge Koussevitzky at Boston, and then, in his own right, with the New York Philharmonic. In much the same way as Mahler before him, the conducting was just one side of the coin for Bernstein, allowing him, as it did, to compose at the same time. Thus it was that in 1957 he got together with Stephen Sondheim to write his biggest hit. Based on Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet - West Side Story. It is still, today, a totally exuberant score, with - quite simply - some fantastic tunes. Well, it's got to be said. OK. Your Time In.

And that just about brings us to the end of my very first tour. Thank you for travelling with Fry's Tours. I would remind you that there is a collection for the driver - that's me - on the way out, and, also, could someone remember to take with them the sickbag that's on the back seat. Thank you.

f I could be so rude, could I just ask you to put a bookmark in this page for just a moment. Remember which line you're on, if you would, close the book, and look at the front cover.

Are you back? Right, well you will have noticed that the words on the front said 'Stephen Fry's INCOMPLETE and utter history of classical music'. And, in my view, incomplete is such a beautiful word, isn't it? It's a perfect dectet of letters, a divine decimal delight which deliciously describes the nature of the next section. In… complete. Innnnnn… complete. Gorgeous, isn't it? Makes me want to jump on a chair and sing it to the tune of Fingerbobs. 'In… complete… In complete…' Stunning, isn't it?

I guess what I'm trying to say in the previous paragraph is that we are about to zoom, lickety-spit, through a full three decades, not even stopping to spare the horses. So do forgive me. Here we go. With the possible exception of Cliff and the Shadows, the other young ones of 1982 were Benjamin Britten and the Sunday Times Colour Supplement. (OK, so Benjamin Britten was forty-nine, which is stretching it a little to call him a young one, but the Sunday Times Colour Supplement was brand new this year.) Britten's incredibly moving War Requiem is a moving mixture of Latin Mass and the poems of Wilfred Owen. Well, I did say some of the effect of the war would take a while in coming. It was premiered just a year after the Bay of Pigs became the temporary centre of the world, and the same year that 3,000 US soldiers and marshals had to accompany James Meredith on his first day at college, to stop riots happening round him. Why? Simply because he was black.

Two years later and possibly one of the most famous 'What Were You Doing When…' events, ever. The year will forever be etched in the brain to many - certainly for me, I know - mainly for the question: 'Do you remember what you were doing the day… the day Deryke Cooke thwarted Mahler's ambition to write the same number of symphonies as Beethoven?' At least, that's how I remember it. Yes, it's amazing, isn't it? Some musicologist finds Mahler's last sketches, and just goes and finishes them off. So you have… Mahler Ten. In 1964. Very odd. Someone would eventually do it to Beethoven, too, but not for a good twenty-four years yet. What else has happened? Well, "65 saw Bernstein's Chichester Psalms, commissioned by the Dean of Chichester, oddly enough, and premiered the same year as Lyndon B. Johnson was. Well, to be accurate, he wasn't premiered, he was presi-dented, I suppose. Still. Onward. No time to lose.

1967 becomes the year of Jeremy Thorpe leading the Liberal Party; of the Six Day War; of Martin Luther King leading marches against Vietnam; and of both the US and Soviet space programmes in crisis following deaths on launch and re-entry, respectively. Elsewhere, at Cape Town's Grooote Schuur Hospital, Christiaan Barnard performed the world's first heart transplant. Oh, and here's a fine couple of statistics to put alongside 1967 in your brain's filing system: Iff 1967, 5.3 BILLION CANS OF SOFT DRINKS