The Necessity of Musical Mediocrity
In music, just as in life, the second-rate, banal and middle-of-the-road are the true foundation of lasting greatness and help us properly to understand it, says Tom Service.
Musical mediocrity is fundamental to lasting musical greatness. Instead of scorning the dull and mediocre we should embrace and celebrate it, accept it as an essential aspect of each of us, the most reliable indicator of what it is to be human. Thank goodness for Mozart's contemporaries, second-rate composers like Antonio Salieri and Carl Ditters von Dittersdorf, who help us define and truly understand his genius. And thank goodness, too, for the musical mediocrities of our times who perform an equally valuable service with their inoffensive music whose huge appeal today is as predictable as the certainty of its future oblivion.
In this parade of the undistinguished, Tom finds parallels with musical mediocrity in the atavistic appeal of the Concours de l'Ordinaire. He talks to its founder Marcus Atkinson about his extraordinary Festival of the Unexceptional which celebrates mundane cars of the recent past like Allegros and Ambassadors, Fiat 124s and Renault 18s, Montegos and Maestros.
David Papp (producer)
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The Listening Service
An odyssey through the musical universe, presented by Tom Service
