About Pie Jesu

In terms of the various problems the BBC’s gone through over the last few years, this is fairly mild, but it does raise a few questions about what and who it’s for, as well as my old favourite, what exactly we should expect people to know, especially when it comes to high (or indeed low) culture.

Yesterday, the astronomer Michele Dougherty was the guest on Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs. As was common in the past, not so much these days, her selection was weighted towards classical music, albeit the sort of classical that doesn’t frighten the horses (Nessun Dorma, Elgar’s Cello, Tchaikovsky’s Violin and so on).

And in that vein, her last selection was the Pie Jesu from Fauré’s Requiem. All perfectly normal, except that the excerpt they played was the Pie Jesu from Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Requiem, a completely different piece of music. And then Lauren Laverne back-announced it as Fauré. Now, I don’t know how they actually put the show together, whether someone else slots in the pieces of music during the edit, so it’s entirely possible that neither Laverne nor Professor Dougherty was aware that they we’d not been listening to the piece they were discussing. But someone somewhere in the process (several people, I’d guess) would have heard the transition between speech and music and speech and not been aware of the disconnect. And those people would all have been working on what still purports to be a music programme. 

Now, it’s easy to say that this sort of cock-up wouldn’t have happened in Roy Plomley’s day, but just because it’s easy, doesn’t mean it’s not true. The sad thing is that, compared with Plomley’s era, people working on the show today have access to far more tools (Google, Shazam, etc) with which they could have checked what happened and avoided embarrassment. The problem is not necessarily that people don’t know, it’s that they don’t seem to care.