STEPHEN FRY - OF CLASSICAL MUSIC

Also, do you remember that quote from Alexander Graham Bell, about his telephone - T firmly believe that, one day, every city will have a telephone!' Well, according to statistics from 1967, there were already, by then, 100 million telephones in the US alone. Would you Adam and Eve it. All that and we lost Dorothy Parker. 'This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.' Marvellous, but I don't know. Does it all fit with this music from 1967? I mean, Aram Khachaturian, the Armenian composer who was by then well into his sixties, brought out Spartacus in '67. Play the Love Theme from Spartacus and Phrygia in your head - or The Onedin Line, if you prefer - and tell me if it fits 1967. I'm not sure.

Not quite finished with the Swinging Sixties. I need to just mention that in 1969, while Neil Armstrong was misquoting himself, Karlheinz 'No, but I've trodden in some' Stockhausen was in the middle of the first performance of his vocal classic, Stimmunjj. Now, call me odd, but I've got a recording of Stimmung - on vinyl, if you will! - and I think it's absolutely fab. Perfect music for putting on when you've had more than the odd glass of Chateau Margaux and someone is passing something round. OK that's enough of that. Thank you. Agenda Item 17; Any other business?

Shostakovich is now up to fifteen. Symphonies, that is. By 1972 -yes I said 1972 - he has premiered Number 15 which seems to get past the Communist Party unamended. That's more than could be said for 13. Communist leader Krushchev made him change the words. It seems a world away now, the old Soviet regime, doesn't it, and yet you have to remind yourself, it wasn't long ago, was it? 1972, I mean. Flares, Last Tango in Paris, an Oscar for Liza Minelli in Cabaret - and, just to forever help you to place it, Shostakovich's Fifteenth Symphony. Wow. There was also the death of Picasso, the death of WH Auden, and, one year later, Britten's Death in Venice.

Britten premiered his latest opera, Death in Venice, at his still-thriving festival in beautiful Aldeburgh. Sadly, it was around this time that the composer's health reduced him to doing very little composing at all.

1974. Just to place it for you, it was also the year Harold Wilson became PM again, the year Grenada won its independence, and the year Lord Lucan disappeared after the murder of his children's nanny. No, I haven't seen him. After that, well, musically, the '70s became more of a graveyard than anything else. By the time Thatcher came to power in '79, we had already lost Milhaud in '74, Shostakovich in '75, Britten in '76 and Khachaturian in '78. Add to that the loss in '77 of two of the world's greatest singers - Maria Callas and Elvis Presley - and you might be forgiven for retiring to your room to wrap yourself in your beloved vinyl collection.

True, the Polish composer Gorecki - pronounced Goretski, appar-endy - had come up witli a new symphony just as Concorde came in to service in 1976, but more about that later. The Gorecki, that is, not Concorde. Although, having said that, let me find some time for the Italian composer Luciano Berio. Apart from writing all sorts of weird and wonderful stuff for his wife, the singer Cathy Berberian, and a bunch of solo stamina tests for different instruments, called 'Sequenza's, he also found time in the '70s to revisit a set of folk songs he'd arranged in 1964. He repolished them in '73, and, by the mid to late '70s, they were getting more than a few performances around the world. The reason? Well, probably because they didn't sound like someone tuning a shortwave radio. If you are one of those people who feel they can't really listen to twentieth-century music, then try these, because they are a very easy way in, albeit via some cute old tunes. I may be wrong, but I believe the score calls for two rather large car suspension springs to be struck at various points. Don't let that put you off, though - the Berio Folk Songs are lovely. Anyway. Off we go. Let me nip on to 1980.

To Hoy, in fact, in the Orkney Islands. Very beautiful little place, I'm led to believe, and, by 1980, it had been the home of the English composer Peter, now Sir Peter, Maxwell Davies, for some nine years. He's one of what is often referred to as 'the Manchester group', because they were all making music in Manchester and they no doubt went round in a group. Probably, you know, all chewing gum, wearing shades and looking hard. Maybe not. Anyway, out of a set that included Alexander Goehr and Harrison Birtwistle as well as Elgar Howarth and pianist John Ogdon, Maxwell Davies is probably the one who wrote stuff that you have some vague chance of ever whistling. So, while the SAS stormed the Iranian Embassy on a crisp May morning in 1980, he was peacefully and, I hope, obliviously, putting the final bar line on his new work for solo piano, Farewell to Stromness. It is a delightful piece, written as a composer's protest against the imminent threat of uranium mining.

To be fair, it's a world away from things like his Eight Songs for a Mad King in the late '60s. Having said that, if you see die Songs for a Mad King on the bill anywhere, do try and get along, because they are a great piece of music theatre, if they're done right.

Anyway, let's take a stroll through the, let's face it, awful decade which was the 1980s/ Music, maestro, please.

W

ell, so much to tell, so little time. 1981, and, when Prince Charles marries Lady Diana Spencer, he does so to the strains of Jeremiah Clarke's The Prince of Denmark's March, otherwise known as the Trumpet Voluntary, at St Paul's Cathedral. The result is a rebirth for this unlikely little tune some 280 years after it was written. Couples across the country were demanding that their local organist draft in a friendly trumpeter so they could 'get married like Lady Di'. Also, the world gets the new work from Karlheinz Stockhausen, the composer who's mad, bad and dangerous to hear. It's called Donnerstag aus Licht, one day's worth of a seven-day-long cycle of operas, and the premiere, at La Scala in Milan, featured among other things trumpeters rigged up to loudspeakers, playing from the rooftops across the square in which the opera house stands.

1982, and new concert halls go up in Toronto, Denmark and at the Barbican, in London. It's also the year Carl 'Splash it on all over' Orff dies. Actually, that's Brut, isn't it? Oh, yes, 'the mark of a man', that's it. Ah, the power of advertising. In*83, cue the Richard Wagner. fi When I say 'awful' here, I guess I'm not meaning musically, but culturally. Ponytails, Thatcher's children, mobile phones the size of telephone boxes. Red braces. Greed isgood. Dreadful.

No, no, he's not back from the grave. It's just his centenary, that's all. One hundred years since the death of Little Richard, but sadly… NO years since the death of William Walton, who shuffles off just as the Monty Python team are pondering The Meaning of Life. It's also the year we first got CDs. Yes, 1983 saw the birth of the compact disc. And the death of the art of great cover design.

Moving on, to '87 in fact, Margaret Thatcher becomes the first British PM in 160 years to win a third term. And the confirmed incidences of last year's new bovine plague, Mad Cow Disease, are on the increase. Also, in 1987, cue the Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

' No, no, he's not back from the grave. It's just that, in 1987, an original notebook containing symphonies 22 to 30, in his own handwriting, is auctioned for a staggering four million dollars. FOUR MILLION DOLLARS! He could hardly get a few gulden for his manuscripts when he was alive and in debt and now they fetch $4 million! In 1987, the music world lost Jacqueline Du Pre and, in 1938, cue the Beethoven.