I can't sing, can't even whistle, and, until recently, couldn't really say I played an instrument. That last omission officially changed two weeks ago when I received a certificate that said I'd managed to persuade a professional in the room for 10 minutes that I had a tiny grasp of the piano, and had passed my Grade 1. I realise that, of course, when it comes to music, it doesn't matter how much or how little technical expertise one has. It doesn't matter if the sum total of your involvement in music is just as a listener, for music transcends any limits on ability, nationality, religion, or language. It is the most magical act of communication.

That word, communication, is what I want to discuss: how we - what I'll call, the artistic community - communicate with our audience, and how much we let them communicate with us. I'll concentrate on music, but my thoughts take in the arts generally. I choose music, because, despite my lack of technical expertise, it is the artistic experience I'm most happy with.

Classical music has been, for me, the single most inspiring, most moving, most magical thread running though my whole cultural experience. It's the art form in whose presence I feel most comfortable, most myself. And it's probably no accident that when I first embarked on a career in comedy I did it as a producer on radio, playing with sound.

I can trace my love of classical music from the moment, aged 11, I attended my first musical appreciation lesson and the needle of a badly battered record player dropped with a loud thump onto a scratchy recording of Holst's The Planets. Then I heard sounds that excited me in a way that somehow the recordings of Deep Purple and King Crimson my brothers played never did.

So began my musical career, as a listener. I soon took advantage of a newly opened public library only yards down the road to join their fantastically new and extensive record library. And I eagerly ate up Beethoven, Mahler, then Sibelius, Shostakovich, Bach's amazing St Matthew Passion, the eccentricities of Berlioz, the purity of Bruckner, the invention of Nielsen. Discovering Radio 3, my encounters expanded. I heard a season of Rubbra symphonies in the early Eighties and have loved his symphonies ever since. I discovered Bartók, Walton, and strange noises, such as Xenakis.

I loved strange noises. I had no notion of what was considered contemporary or old-fashioned, cutting edge, or period. It was all wonderful and new. I wasn't scared of the avant garde because I had no notion of what an avant garde was.

I realised this a few years ago, taking my son to school. He was eight or nine at the time. A piece of Ligeti was on the radio. Not to put him off with what maybe he would think was a strange, slightly disturbing noise, I tried to draw a simple analogy. 'Sounds a bit like bees buzzing, doesn't it?' I said. He listened for a bit, then said, 'No, it sounds like a lot of penguins fighting for a fish, and one of them's just got it.'

He was right - that's precisely what it sounded like. He was listening much harder than me. And it struck me then that I was worrying about my son being put off classical music by being exposed to something that may have been too difficult.

And that worrying was unneccessary, because labelling the music 'difficult' was a very adult way of categorising the music in the first place. He, not knowing much about chromaticism, harmony or serialism, nor anything about theory, had no reason to label what he was hearing as being significantly different from, say, Handel. It was just a very interesting, very alluring, piece of ordered sound. So too, when I first heard Rubbra, was I unaware that his music, along with the music of many English symphonists of the Fifties, Sixties and Seventies, had been critically banished from the airwaves and concert halls because they were deemed embarrassingly traditional. So I had no idea I wasn't meant to like it.

Listening to classical music is a journey, not a state, an activity, not a meditation. Music is not a background noise. It's something you bring into the foreground of your experience, by engaging with it, by doing some work. Only recently have I come to listen properly to Schumann, Haydn and, especially, Bach, and begun to get that sense of rich, deep satisfaction that I first encountered more immediately as an adolescent in Mahler. I'm aware that it's easy to fall back on quasi-mystical, pretentious language when trying to talk about one's experience of classical music, but that shouldn't stop us trying. We don't talk about music enough. As someone who's never felt he's had the technical language at his fingertips, I feel all I can do is talk about it in whatever English I have at my command. I want to emote about how I feel. After a concert, I want to grab people by the lapels and tell them how lucky we are as a species that, out of all the hundreds of billions of us who ever lived, one of us managed to come up with the Goldberg Variations. But I don't, because that's not the done thing. So instead I mention that the cafe downstairs does some fabulous chocolate éclairs.

I'm always amazed by how quietly people leave a concert hall, or if they talk to each other, it's chatter about if they can remember where they've parked the car, or wasn't the soprano wearing a nice dress. I think this is because what music does to us is such a private thing, we feel it's not quite right to voice it.

There's no way anyone is ever going to fully 'know' music, but I do think there's now an obligation to allow as many people as possible to know as much about it as they can. That's not the same as saying that music could become more accessible through marketing gimmicks. That's' why I'm always suspicious of any concert that puts other things in the way of the music, fireworks, laser displays, as if scared that the music by itself will not be enough.

Nor does it mean the classical music industry has to sart talking awkwardly in the language of the street, going on about how Beethoven was a crazy guy, and Wagner made 'action movies'. It's not that at all. But it's about developing a language that talks to the audience aware of their intelligence and appetite, but also recognising that they will have questions that need answering.

It was when I first started going to live concerts I realised that seeing a piece of music performed live was the best single explanation of what it was about. It didn't need words or footnotes. My fondest musical memories are of live concerts, of seeing and hearing Belshazzar's Feast for the first time at a Glasgow prom, and being overwhelmed by the violence and energy of Walton's music. Of seeing what The Rite of Spring looked like, not just what it sounded like. But outside the concert hall I feel there is a greater and greater appetite for verbal communication about music. As traditional music teaching in schools diminishes, the language is taken away, but the feeling is still there. People want to have proper grown-up conversations about why music matters, about why the arts matter.

That's why I think it's necessary to have an emotional debate about music as well as an intellectual one. Music is a dialogue between the heart and the head. Too often, though, a review will concentrate on how well a piece is played, but not on why that piece deserves to be played in the first place.

We need to wake up to the fact that people are now asking basic questions. Why are we musical? Why did people write symphonies? Why do we have the string quartet? They seem child-like, these questions, but they're there to provide us with the opportunity to enthuse and explain and demonstrate the answers we first stumbled upon in our musical journey and which encouraged us to make that journey in the first place. Figure out our answers to those questions, and it will help us tackle some more simple, yet more terrifying, questions: why should the state spend money on the arts, why do we have opera and why is it so expensive, why should we have so many orchestras in London?

Just as I think any performer tries to perform music as if for the first time, with all that energy and excitement that comes from discovering a new piece - maybe trying to recreate the memory of falling in love with a piece when hearing it first as a child - and just as people regularly say of a brilliant conductor that they seem to conduct as if recreating the energy an audience must have felt when the piece was first played decades, even centuries, before, so too I think we need to communicate our knowledge with the passion we first encountered as children.

I can't believe I'm about to say this, but I find I can't listen to Mozart. I don't dislike him, I'm just unmoved by him. I realise I'm in a minority and I'm intrigued as to why this is. I broadcast a Radio 3 interval talk about this a few months ago, and the controller, Roger Wright, rather mischievously scheduled it in the middle of a live relay of The Marriage of Figaro. I received the biggest response to anything I've ever done. Buckets of letters and emails. None of them hostile. One or two confessing they agreed with me. But many more patiently, movingly, explaining why they loved Mozart.

I think we should at all times keep trying to ask and to answer the most basic of questions about music, about the arts. What are they there for?

For me they're not there for any other reason than to remind us that, no matter where we are, whether we're learned, in prison, poor, successful, alone or average, our material circumstances are not all that we have, that we can see beyond ourselves, that we're human and are therefore dignified. That's my answer. I'm sure each of you has a different one. I just wish we all had more opportunities to express them.

Actually, I prefer the response given by my examiner at my Grade 1 piano exam. He looked at me and said, 'Are you the candidate?' And, when I said yes, said, 'Well, good for you!" I think that more than anything else sums up my musical journey so far.

· This is an edited version of the speech.

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