5 hours ago
9
Classical music’s continued battle for relevance and impact continues to find new nadirs, from tired experiments with formats to bathetic look-at-me clickbait. But what if there was an answer – a joyous, creative and positive one – staring at us with irresistibly big eyes?
There really might be, in the shape of a blue heeler puppy. I’m talking, of course, about Bluey, the Australian cartoon for children of all ages. The numbers are huge: it was the most streamed show in the US last year, with more than 45bn minutes watched, and a billion streams and counting across the world for Bluey’s albums and soundtracks, all written by Joff Bush, the Australian musician who has led the composition of the music for each of the 154 episodes so far.
It is thanks to Bush that “Bluey music” is one of the most generous and all-encompassing ideas on the musical planet. He calls upon all the genres – from synth-pop to heavy metal to classical – to dramatise the adventures of Bluey, Bingo, Mum and Dad, but the music never makes the expected cheap links between genre and cultural association.
That’s never more true than when Bush uses classical tunes in Bluey’s scores. Holst’s Jupiter from The Planets is the tune that the Sleepytime episode unfurls to as Bingo makes her cosmic journey towards sleep, across the solar systems of her toys, her father, and her sister, ending up in the radiant sun of her mother’s love.
Mozart’s Rondo alla Turca, the finale of his piano sonata K331, is used in Bluey’s very first episode, Magic Xylophone, a signal of compositional intent for Bush and the Bluey team for how they would continue to introduce classical music to billions of listeners all over the world.
What’s so brilliant about Bush’s music, and about the new album Up Here – out on Friday – is that Bush isn’t introducing classical music in the same way that you try to introduce broccoli into your child’s diet. It’s simply because he’s finding the right tunes for the right dramatic situation, and playing with them, recomposing them, rearranging them, and making them fit for Bluey’s purpose.
That means there’s no moment in Bluey when the use of classical music, from Bach’s Fifth Brandenburg Concerto in Stumpfest to Handel’s Concerto a Due Cori in Seesaw, shores up the cliches of the classical. Bush never uses classical music to laugh at its elitist pretensions or to reinforce the stereotype that this music deserves fake reverence. That’s markedly different to how classical music has been used in the cartoons of earlier generations: for all the brilliance of their scores for Bugs Bunny and Tom and Jerry, the composers Carl Stalling and Scott Bradley are all about sending up classical cliches – albeit magnificently – as Bugs parodies Stokowski and Tom outdoes Horowitz.
The new Bluey album opens with a three-and-a-half minute orchestral tone-poem on the Bluey theme tune, in what amounts to a Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra for 2026. Having started with a riff on the bassoon solo that opens Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, the characters from the show announce the strings, woodwind, percussion and brass sections of the orchestra, cycling through a series of musical associations that’s very, very clever, but most importantly, totally joyful. Bush quotes from and transforms pieces including Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, Vivaldi’s Spring from The Four Seasons, the first movement of Bach’s Fifth Brandenburg Concerto, the clarinet solo from Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, and Mozart’s Rondo alla Turca, before “everyone!” plays the Bluey theme tune.
So, in short, it’s all gonna be fine. All we have to do is keep kids and families watching Bluey, and they will playfully and profoundly enjoy more classical tunes than the children of almost any previous generation.
Songs of love, loss and longing
London’s hallowed shrine of chamber music the Wigmore Hall today announces its 2026/27 season, and the shocking news of major change. From September, the venue will project translations during performances of “German Lieder, French chanson and choral repertoire”. What is the world coming to when we can’t assume a working understanding of early 19th century German romantic poetry when we’re listening to Schubert, Schumann or Brahms, so that you can display your knowledge of the funny bits in Heine with a stifled but perfectly timed titter? Joking aside, this is surely a welcome innovation if it widens accessibility to art song – don’t let the language put you off, these songs of love, loss and longing belong to us all.
This week Tom has been listening to: Schubert’s G major string quartet, D887. Hearing it at close quarters, played by a brilliant quartet from 12 Ensemble last week, put the music in my veins as it has never been before. This is a work whose ferocious and terrifying ambiguity between major and minor, darkness in the light and light in the darkness, makes everything possible, at every moment.
