Aesthetics, Athletics and Advertising

I always like going out to schools and colleges to meet sixth-formers and their teachers. It’s usually amusing, informative and largely straightforward. Some sort of entertaining academic talk aimed at the 17 and 18 year olds, and an outline of what it’s like to study music at university, career prospects, and so on. I do quite a lot of them, and they usually go very smoothly: everyone has a good time.

I drove up to the further reaches of north Hampshire last week in the expectation that this would be business as usual. This was a big event with pupils from several sixth forms, loosely based on the idea of high and low culture. I showed up with quite a nice presentation on ostensibly high culture (Mozart) in an ostensibly low-culture environment (TV advertising). Undergraduates who took my ‘Mozart’s Ghosts’ course in the first semester of 2015-16 will know it well!

What I wasn’t expecting was the makeup of the rest of the panel. I wasn’t remotely surprised to find a philosopher from Birckbeck College talking about aesthetics. I was slightly more surprised to find also on the platform Jim Mansell – sports editor for the Daily Mail – and the ex-Lib-Dem MP Lembit Öpik. Things looked nicely set up for an amusing day.

I think Mansell was there as someone who worked for the redtops (he had previously worked for the Daily Star), and therefore perhaps a card-carrying supporter of low culture. More striking – and I should have known this – was the fact that Lembit Öpik has been one of the few MPs reckless enough to appear on I’m a Celebrity: Get me out of Here, and this was the logic, presumably of his participation. Which rather left me in the role of the representative of high culture – which my talk rather undercut. Which I guess was really the idea.

It was an provocative day, with a round table in the afternoon chaired by the head of the host institution who declared (I paraphrase) that only high culture was worth of attention and low-culture was pretty well the work of the devil. It was a great way to start a highly-varied and wide-ranging discussion which wandered far enough to encompass personal statements on the use, value and ethics of censorship. We worked hard.

You can click here for a video of the TV advertisement that I talked about. It’s titled L’envol, and is part of a 2014 publicity campaign mounted by Air France. It mixes the slow movement of Mozart’s Piano Concerto in A, K.488 with a pas de deux from the 2007 ballet Le parc by the Armenian-French choreographer, Angelin Preljoca.

Mark Everist