BBC Music in the Glock Era and After

The way this intriguing and absorbing book is organized means that it's quite near the end before we learn how Leo Black became a BBC employee and what (if only in retrospect) this way of life meant to him. A successful student at Oxford in the early 1950s, he writes that ‘I'd absorbed from somewhere a certain humanistic approach to great music, a belief in its connection with personality and human depths that helped save me from becoming a “musicologist” and stood me in good stead when at long last I came to write a book’ (p. 187). Musicologists will bridle at the slur, the familiar, defensive claim that their approach to great music cannot by definition be ‘humanistic’, or involve any ‘belief in its connection with personality and human depths’. Adding a good measure of salt to the wound, Black then declares that it was in 1955, at a conference in Oxford, that he came to the doleful conclusion that ‘musicologists show very little interest in or talent for music’ (p. 189).

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