Inevitably, such confidence in moving so freely amongst the vast cultural heritage that Music with a capital ‘M’ has engendered demands praise. Ford’s intellectual energy, his preparedness to expound on anything tangentially connected with music, his confident, sustained and entertaining pronouncements on the sheer indispensability of music to world civilisation are cornerstones that give some stability and sense of cohesion to so multifarious a group of often very brief articles. It is to Ford’s credit that the organisation of the text as a whole, which could so easily have imploded into a jumble, emerges, if not as a sustained line of thought, then at least, for the most part, as a series of interwoven and interconnecting concepts. Thus a review of the orchestral excesses of works by Handel and Ta Dun leads to a review of orchestral excesses of a different kind, in McCartney’s Standing Stone, leading to articles on Lennon and the phenomenon of Liverpool, and, from there, to a review of books on Purcell, Elgar, Rutland Boughton and the Glastonbury Festival. This kind of conceptual snakes and ladders reinforces Ford’s chameleon interests and becomes one of the sustaining points of engagement in the overall organisation of the text; forcing the reader to wonder where Ford will go next. Only towards the very end of the book, with a group of articles ranging from Fauré to Mussorgsky, did this organisational principle appear to have outlived its interest.

Despite the obvious intention to dazzle with his range, the conceptual heart of this book are the passages dealing with Australian music in general, and the treatment of Peter Sculthorpe in particular. The first article, which provides the book’s title, is a personal, articulate and compelling justification for the sheer cultural necessity of classical, Western, serious music. (I share Ford’s difficulty and frustration with the designations of this great art form.) The genesis for this article is Ford’s encounter with a traffic sign, thereby illustrating the neat hermeneutic encapsulation of the relationship and contradictions between art and entertainment that constitute one of the article’s central points. Elsewhere, with less obvious artifice, Ford writes with disarming directness about his own turmoils as a composer, agonising good-naturedly over drafts, length and sources of commission. ‘Taking it seriously’, a brief comparative political and social study on the place of serious music in Australia and Finland, should be compulsory reading for all Australian politicians and, I would suggest, arts journalists. The four radio talks from 1989 gathered together under the title ‘Sculthorpe at sixty’ are in many ways the most illuminating and certainly the most sustained part of the book. Ford writes about the man with real affection and respect. The four talks are genuinely engaging for both the reader who has followed Sculthorpe’s career assiduously and for the reader who knows little about him. These pieces have a sustained focus on their subject and create an authoritative sense of insight that is not always present elsewhere. There is also less indication that the piece as a whole began as a series of talks than, say, in the later discussion about Shostakovich’s string quartets where spoken rhetorical devices are still fairly evident. The overall impression Undue Noise leaves us with is that Ford writes about Australian music, including its practitioners and its national significance, supremely well.

Even so, this book poses some interesting problems. Perhaps the most prominent is what Ford unashamedly labels musical snobbery. Ford’s party line is unequivocally that all types of music are good and, as he himself overwhelmingly typifies, that the well-rounded musician will be as eloquent about rock, jazz, blues, film music and world music as about all those bewigged composers. The failure to embrace adequate eclecticism is, for Ford, a potent accusation, as his review of Peter Conrad’s vast Modern Times, Modern Places amply demonstrates. I must admit to a lack of conversion at Ford’s hands whilst recognising that he does indeed write about jazz, blues, film music and rock with authority and passion. Whilst musical boundaries can be, and often are, blurred to the point of indistinction, the problem for me remains that the eclectic position Ford so often articulates always seems an unequal one, particularly given that these days it is the non-classical musician who is most likely to encounter fame, wealth and worldly honours. Musicians and commentators outside the classical tradition are never expected to be as versed in Monteverdi, Clara Wieck or Warlock as they are in their own idiom. Yet Ford does not castigate any commentator on non-classical music for a failure to be adequately informed of artistic activity from the lands of the classical tradition.

This problem struck me particularly in articles such as ‘Elvis and Amadeus’, where the supposed similarities between the two are sustained in a piece that spends two-thirds of its length discussing the pop star alone and one-third not really discussing the composer at all. Or ‘Learning to like Verdi’, in which Ford praises ‘the average Broadway musical of the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s’ and then speaks of Aida as ‘especially hideous’.

This kind of personal absolutism, of course, has its merits. For a start, it provokes me to make the very points I am making, and that does the realm of music no harm at all. Yet there is something about Ford’s inclination towards the democracy of all organised sound that made me wonder whether his view wasn’t careering towards the position of those who believe that Beethoven’s ‘Pastoral’ Symphony isn’t complete without the odd splashing wave and that Grieg’s ‘Morning’ from Peer Gynt is atmospherically heightened by bird squawks — or is it the other way round?

I could mention other things: the number of articles in the book that are reviews, some of which do not always move beyond the limited interest and scope of that genre; a passion for performance authenticity expressed in somewhat perverse terms; and some curious judgments about pianists. However, I cannot believe that Andrew Ford’s intention in writing these articles over so long a period, or the ABC’s in compiling them, was to convince us that Ford is always right. This book is ultimately a grand-prix racetrack: articles whiz round at dazzling speed, in a great variety of hues and often with much clangour. That some come off the track at times does not detract from the impact of the event.