Steph Power casts a critical eye on Music as Alchemy, where Tom Service explores the ‘apparent magic’ of six of his favourite conductors.
Music as Alchemy is writer and broadcaster Tom Service’s first book. In it, he unpicks the apparent ‘magic’ of six ‘great’ conductors; what they do and how they do it, described in poetic rather than technical terms through a series of personal encounters with them and their principal orchestras in rehearsal and performance. Informal interviews provide access to this traditionally exclusive world, whilst a smattering of information about the orchestras and repertoire in development paints a basic background picture.
Service considers each pairing in turn, observing a typical orchestral schedule as a fly-
Disappointingly, Music as Alchemy glosses over issues of social and artistic relevance at a time when many orchestras world-
The masculine emphasis on ‘his’ orchestra is a given in this survey, as Service’s roster of ‘great’ conductors are all men, even as he notes that well-

by Tom Service
292pp,
Faber and Faber,
£18.99
Service is careful to note that the days of the tyrannical, megastar maestros such as Wilhelm Furtwängler, Arturo Toscanini and Herbert von Karajan are over; that a healthier, more democratic culture of mutual respect now prevails. But his conductors are presented as superstars nonetheless; they, their musicians and even the music are lionised as culture heroes in terms that often stretch credulity. For instance, he writes that Abbado’s
‘body language is only translatable into sound because the musicians…believe that’s possible…that Abbado’s gestures communicate everything they need to know…they can safely go further into the music and their musicality than they could otherwise and Abbado himself is pushed to explore the extremes of what’s possible because he knows there are no limitations imposed by institutional politics or personal conflicts’
thus idealising the orchestral environment and reifying the aesthetic experience. Throughout, Service talks about music in universalised terms separate from society and real life, writing, for instance, of a performance of Gustav Mahler’s 6th Symphony that:
‘Having looked at the music’s terror and fear and premonitions of death squarely in the face, it was possible to return to the world drained but renewed.’
Yet, at the same time, he describes music in exalted emotional terms as, for instance, in a performance of Hector Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique:
‘We all became Berlioz’s doomed protagonist that night, wracked by obsessive love, experiencing moments of sensual joy and pastoral calm and then going through the fires of hallucinogenic hell until the ultimate extinguishment of our collective ego in the final moments…’
Emotional transport is often central to the hearing of extraordinary music and the impetus to share the effects of it on oneself is matched only by the paradoxical impossibility of doing so through the medium of words. Service is clearly a knowledgeable as well as passionate advocate but his grandiose descriptions infantilise both the experience and his readers; moreover, he skirts uncomfortably close to condoning a kind of artistic submission and escapism despite his intention to encourage the opposite and, indeed, to de-
Ultimately, it is not enough to suggest, as Service does, that transported listening amounts to active participation in the artistic experience; for that, one also needs a good deal more critical engagement than is offered by Music as Alchemy, for all that Service is not always won over by the music-
Music as Alchemy by Tom Service is available from Faber and Faber.
Steph Power is a regular contributor to Wales Arts Review.