Liz Smith: Classical music tells us a lot about the mood of the time

The Tory MSP tells Holyrood about how classical music speaks to the mood of the times.

What was the first record you ever bought?

I can’t remember, but I suspect it will have been Abba. My father was very keen on music, so there were quite a lot of records in the house. I think I was given some money at Christmas time, and I bought an Abba record.

What is your go-to karaoke song?

I’m not into karaoke, not at all. It’s just not me and I think probably I’d make a fool of myself – and that’s not something that I tend to do!

How about choir singing, would that be your kind of thing?

One of the things I regret is that when I was at school, I spent so much time on the games field that I didn’t do enough music. I would like to have been able to play an instrument. I don’t have the voice for singing, but I do like choral music.

I’m very much a classical musical person, always have been. But I don’t think I know nearly enough about music, not just from not being able to play an instrument but also because I think music is a very special language. The reason I like listening to music is because I think it is extremely powerful and emotive. It’s a reflection on what the mood is at the time. I like an awful lot of classical music, I like choral music, and I think to be able to sing in a choir is very powerful – but I don’t have the right voice for that.

What music do you associate with your childhood?

I spent a lot of my childhood, university years and even now outdoors. I tend listen to music at specific times rather constantly – and let’s be honest, with this job there’s not a lot of time to do that. When I step down from politics, I hope to have a bit more time to enjoy things like music festivals.

You said your dad was into music. That must have had an influence.

Yes, he was into a lot of Gilbert and Sullivan, Johann Strauss. We used to travel a lot to Germany and Switzerland and Austria, he picked up a lot there. He’d been involved in the very difficult times in the Second World War in Malta; he was in the RAF and had a very difficult war. When he came back, he didn’t really speak to the family much about it because it’d been so bad – but what he did do was to try to learn a lot about the enemy in terms of what had been in the German psyche at the time. He’d come across a lot of German people who were not warmongers at all, so I think he spent a lot of his time trying to travel across Europe and ensure he understood what had happened during the Second World War. He was very interested in culture and literature and music.

One thing I enjoy is reading biographies of composers. I’m very interested not just in politics, but in how they have interpreted the mood of their time. I’ve just finished reading a wonderful biography of Shostakovich. I visited Moscow and Leningrad quite a lot during the Glasnost years of Gorbachev, and I’ve been back. Something like Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony is very powerful about what happened to Leningrad, when they lost three million people. Shostakovich was somebody who was able to tread the very fine balance, as you had to do in the Stalin era whereby anything that might be seen as dissidence was picked up. He is a really interesting person to me because of the fine line he was treading between trying not to be a dissident but also valuing Russian culture, which he did greatly, but also Western culture.

Wagner, too. Do I like Wagner’s music? Most of it, yes, but there is some that really worries me. His relationship to Hitler and people like Wittgenstein or Kirkegaard, some of the philosophers, I think that’s quite an interesting dimension to that period of history as well.

I’m very interested in making connections between music and the culture of the time, the history of the time, that’s something I quite enjoy. I read quite a lot about that.

Is there any composer you think reflects the current mood?

It’s too early [to tell]. There will be people who are writing now, but it’s always easier to see history and culture in hindsight. It’s a very, very turbulent world for all sorts of reasons and the music will probably reflect that. But I would struggle to pick out somebody who I think can put their finger right on the turbulence and difficulties that we’re having to go through just now. It’s an interesting question.