Hello folks!

Good afternoon to you all on this stunningly sunny day.

A few things to cover this edition of MMM — some practical, some poignant, and one that requires me to briefly justify why Saturday morning cartoons count as a classical education.

On we go…

Firstly, The Admin Bit: Midsummer 2026

Term starts next Monday 2 June and runs through to 12 July — a lovely stretch of what we can only optimistically refer to as summer.

For those of you on the rota system: self-booking on the website opens this Friday. So if you haven't already, do pop in and grab your slots before the good ones go.

Sonny Rollins — Saxophone Colossus, 1930–2026

It would feel wrong to send a newsletter this week without pausing on the news that came through on Monday.

Sonny Rollins, widely considered the greatest living jazz musician America, died on 25 May at his home in Woodstock, New York. His 1956 album Saxophone Colossus still sounds like it fell from another planet, a hard, swinging jazz stripped back and rebuilt from the inside. Alongside Coltrane and Parker, he defined what the tenor saxophone could do, and then spent the next six decades outdoing himself.

If you've never spent time with his playing, this week feels like a particularly good moment to start. A proper giant. The jazz world is quieter for his absence.

On Suno, and the Slightly Unsettling Direction of AI Music

This one's been rattling around my head for a while, and a piece from The Verge this week crystallised it rather neatly.

If you haven't encountered Suno, it's a much-hyped AI music generation tool doing the rounds at the moment. Here’s how it works: you type in a description, and it produces a reasonably convincing song in seconds.

And I'll say this for it: as a prototyping tool, it's genuinely impressive, and one of my more beginner students is already using it to help him build songs and understand more how to take lyrics and put them into melodic lines.

Want to hear what a bossa nova treatment of a particular chord sequence might feel like? Suno can sketch that out faster than you can sit down at the piano. For musicians using it as a starting point, a sketchpad, a way of stress-testing an idea almost instantly when you don’t have time to do anything high quality, then it’s pretty neat.

But here's where it gets interesting, and a little troubling. The Verge recently wrote about a pattern emerging in Suno's user base: people who have stopped listening to music made by other humans altogether, and now exclusively listen to songs they've generated themselves. Every playlist, every commute, every dinner — their own AI output, on loop.

Music has always been, at its core, a form of human contact. When you listen to a recording, you're receiving something that another person made, shaped by their experience, their limitations, their choices. That friction, that otherness, is part of what makes it matter.

A world in which we each exist in a perfectly personalised bubble of machine-generated content that reflects nothing but our own tastes back at us is... well, it's the opposite of that. It's the musical equivalent of only ever reading your own diary.

For extra reading, there's an excellent and much longer video discussion of these trends with Alex O’ Conner and Adam Neely (both interesting, stalwart YouTubers) on the new attitudes to music these technologies seem to be feeding.

Kit and the Widow: ‘Swansong’

This lovely old gem came up in a lesson the other day and I couldn't help but share it.

Kit and the Widow were a British cabaret duo — Kit Hesketh-Harvey and pianist Richard Sisson — rooted in the subversive musical comedy of Tom Lehrer and Flanders & Swann, often marrying high brow cultural references to middlebrow humour, a tradition I grew up admiring enormously, and one which is now almost entirely out of fashion. Which is our loss.

Hesketh-Harvey died suddenly in 2023, aged 65, and with him went something rather irreplaceable. ‘Swansong’ is one of his loveliest, deadliest pieces — a quietly devastating song about the environmental cost of consumerism set to Saint-Saëns' ‘The Swan’ from Carnival of the Animals.

The original, of course, is one of the most achingly beautiful two minutes in the entire repertoire, but by the end it has become something rather more uncomfortable — a piece of genuine condemnation that implicates the audience as much as anyone else. There's no punchline to hide behind. The laughter, if it comes at all, catches in the throat. It leaves you with something closer to self-examination than amusement, which is a very difficult thing to achieve in cabaret, or in any form, really.

Looney Tunes, Or, How Bugs Bunny Taught Me to Love Beethoven

I've been wondering recently how much of my love for classical music comes not from formal study, but from Saturday morning cartoons.

I grew up in the pre-internet era, which meant television had a captive audience and no algorithm to satisfy. And a large portion of what was being broadcast on Saturday mornings was Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies from the 1950s and 60s — cartoons made by genuinely extraordinary people that were still being shown decades later in the mid-90s, all scored by a composer named Carl Stalling, who averaged one complete orchestral score per cartoon per week, for twenty-two years. More on Stalling in the video above (from another very good composer, David Bruce).

Stalling and the Warner Bros. team didn't treat classical music as high-brow furniture. They used it because it worked, because Rossini is inherently funny, because Wagner is inherently enormous, because a perfectly timed quote from Liszt in the middle of a chase scene is one of the funniest things you can do to a piece of music without actually destroying it.

The Rabbit of Seville is a better introduction to Rossini than most lecture series. Rhapsody Rabbit — Bugs performing Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 — is timed with the precision of a concert performance.
And then there is What's Opera, Doc? — Chuck Jones' 1957 seven-minute condensation of Wagner's entire Ring cycle, in which Elmer Fudd as Siegfried pursues Bugs Bunny as Brünnhilde across a genuinely stunning Wagnerian landscape.

As one IMDB reviewer put it: "This short single-handedly got me interested in classical music, when countless music teachers could not.

Kids today are missing it. I genuinely don't know what the equivalent is.

That's quite enough from me!

In the meantime, go and listen to some Sonny Rollins. Or some Porky Pig. You do you.

See you all soon,

— Will