Chris Swithinbank

As a brief in­tro­duc­tion: Ken Nielsen of the Aus­tralian group Pinchgut Opera wrote a ‘man­i­festo for the fu­ture of clas­si­cal music’ as Greg Sandow — who posted it to his blog — de­scribes it, Tim Ruther­ford-John­son has added his two cents here and below are mine. Per­haps my Eu­ro­pean per­spec­tive on Nielsen’s An­tipodean angle has caused some mis­un­der­stand­ings, in which case apolo­gies.

Nielsen sug­gests that given that ‘the clas­si­cal music in­dus­try is in de­cline with an age­ing au­di­ence base and a low rate of new au­di­ence entry,’ a se­ries of mea­sures are needed to make con­certs ‘more at­trac­tive and ac­ces­si­ble.’ Some of his points touch on new music’s role in re­new­ing the art­form, which he fol­lows with:

Be­cause el­e­ments of the cur­rent au­di­ence are so con­ser­v­a­tive, a greater va­ri­ety of con­certs and for­mats, aimed at dif­fer­ent au­di­ences, is prob­a­bly nec­es­sary. Stick with the cur­rent stuff for the olds, offer in­no­va­tion to those ex­cited by it.

Now to me that does not sound like any kind of so­lu­tion to any­thing. It boils down to ‘keep doing what we’re doing and do some new music con­certs as well’. As Tim Ruther­ford-John­son points out, the new music sec­tor doesn’t have a par­tic­u­lar prob­lem with ei­ther an age­ing au­di­ence base or new au­di­ence entry rates and they al­ready offer music in a large va­ri­ety of for­mats dri­ven by an alloy of in­no­va­tion and ne­ces­sity. So if as an ex­ist­ing clas­si­cal music in­sti­tu­tion you are of­fer­ing ‘in­no­va­tion to those ex­cited by it’ and are doing so along­side ex­ist­ing and per­haps bet­ter equipped or­gan­i­sa­tions, you must match the qual­ity, in­tegrity and com­mit­ment that many of those or­gan­i­sa­tions dis­play if you are to gain the trust of your au­di­ences. If you are going to ‘stick with the cur­rent stuff for the olds,’ then you are as­sum­ing, given your age­ing au­di­ence base and low new au­di­ence entry rates, that you will let this ‘old peo­ple’s pack­age’ drift off into the sun­set as the au­di­ence dies off.

It is pos­si­ble that after two hun­dred years of au­di­ences rever­ing Beethoven’s music, no-one will be in­ter­ested any more, but it seems un­likely to me. I can, how­ever, imag­ine shrink­ing au­di­ences dri­ving this music ‘un­der­ground’. One of Nielsen’s pro­pos­als is that ‘a con­cert should be more like com­mu­ni­ca­tion than a one-sided speech.’ With­out get­ting bogged down in con­cepts of in­ter­ac­tiv­ity and au­di­ence par­tic­i­pa­tion, I be­lieve this is ad­dressed by the idea of in­tel­lec­tual en­gage­ment. The rea­son new music sur­vives is that it de­mands thought­ful en­gage­ment of the lis­tener, an en­gage­ment that the au­di­ence is di­rectly seek­ing when they come to a per­for­mance. This is not some­thing nec­es­sar­ily re­quired in your av­er­age clas­si­cal con­cert or de­sired by its au­di­ence. While there are au­di­ence mem­bers who do en­gage in this way with older music (per­haps a sub­stan­tial num­ber) I would sug­gest that the au­di­ences have long in­cluded a large pro­por­tion who were seek­ing light en­ter­tain­ment that was not too tax­ing, or at the very least some­thing fa­mil­iar and re­li­able. How­ever, this au­di­ence is now (and has been for some decades) shared with other out­lets of music both live and recorded, and the sec­tion most likely not to have con­verted to lis­ten­ing at home or going to other venues is the old­est sec­tion, hence the skewed de­mo­graphic. [I can’t sub­stan­ti­ate any of this, but would love to see data that might prove or dis­prove any of this the­o­ris­ing. Though how one would test for the au­di­ence’s in­tel­lec­tual en­gage­ment, I’m not sure.]

Given this the­sis, I would sug­gest that more tra­di­tional clas­si­cal music in­sti­tu­tions might need to learn from new music groups not what to pro­gramme but how to or­gan­ise. They should pre­pare for a dif­fer­ent au­di­ence, per­haps smaller it is hard to be sure, but com­mit­ted and in­ter­ested, not just carry on with ‘the cur­rent stuff for the olds.’ New venues be­come im­por­tant not, as in new music, be­cause of de­mands made by the music, but be­cause of de­mands made by the chang­ing au­di­ence. Re­al­is­ing that artis­tic in­tegrity and re­spect for your au­di­ence’s huge ca­pac­ity for thought­ful­ness is es­sen­tial. An or­ches­tra should be pro­gram­ming Beethoven be­cause it is good, not be­cause it is Beethoven. If a cel­list doesn’t like Beethoven, they don’t bother too much with his sonatas and play other music in­stead. The or­ches­tral mu­si­cian doesn’t have that pre­rog­a­tive, but the pro­gram­mer should think along sim­i­lar lines — ‘I am pro­gram­ming this music rather than any­thing else, be­cause I be­lieve it is an ex­cel­lent com­bi­na­tion of ex­cel­lent music.’ Their judge­ment may some­times seem ec­cen­tric but if it is suc­cess­ful, they will gain the au­di­ence’s trust and cre­ate stim­u­lat­ing ex­pe­ri­ences that are sur­pris­ingly unique. This is per­haps sug­gested by Nielsen — ‘change comes about not from strat­egy meet­ings but from in­no­va­tion — new things being tried, some fail­ing, some suc­ceed­ing’ — but it re­quires more than just in­no­va­tion for in­no­va­tion’s sake. Orig­i­nal­ity is a po­ten­tial by-prod­uct of a com­mit­ment to a deeply-felt, per­sonal quest for beauty.

On the role of new music in tra­di­tional con­texts, Tim Ruther­ford-John­son writes that he is ‘scep­ti­cal that in­tro­duc­ing new music to his­tor­i­cal con­certs (which has been going on to lit­tle re­turn for decades) is the an­swer.’ I agree that it isn’t the an­swer, but this state­ment ab­solutely re­quires the caveat he pro­vides it: ‘un­less done with the ut­most se­ri­ous­ness and in­tegrity.’ Com­bin­ing new and old can be ef­fec­tive, a fact prob­a­bly most often proved in cham­ber music and solo recitals where the per­form­ers choose their own reper­toire. They know in­stinc­tively when works lie well along­side one an­other.

What is fre­quently mu­si­cally un­sat­is­fy­ing is when things are forced into such a con­stel­la­tion by some ex­ter­nal ide­ol­ogy. Pro­gram­ming com­mit­tees at larger or­gan­i­sa­tions find it very dif­fi­cult to pro­gramme by ear as it were, to pro­pose ap­po­site com­bi­na­tions that they can feel work­ing. Mau­r­izio Pollini’s pro­gramme of Bach (arr. We­bern), Lachen­mann and Brahms with Peter Eötvös and the LSO last month was an ex­cel­lent ex­am­ple of some­one know­ing that these three works would fit to­gether mu­si­cally de­spite their his­tor­i­cal dis­par­ity. More often, peo­ple pro­gramme by theme or by scheme, throw­ing things in as gim­micks like gra­tu­itous side sal­ads (and they most def­i­nitely mar­ket them as such). They may be­lieve new music to be a pos­i­tive ad­di­tion to their sched­ules but lack the ed­u­ca­tion they have in Beethoven, Tchaikovsky and Dvořák to be able to pro­gramme it ef­fec­tively.

For me, clas­si­cal music, or any art­form for that mat­ter, doesn’t need a man­i­festo for to­mor­row; it needs every per­son in­volved in every facet of the in­dus­try/com­mu­nity to strive to be in­spired, to think hard, never do any­thing ‘be­cause that’s what we do’ and de­liver qual­ity today. The fu­ture will take care of it­self.

One caveat: I hold the view that how­ever hi­er­ar­chies and in­sti­tu­tions col­lapse and trans­form, hu­man­ity will pre­vail in pro­duc­ing art. Ad­mit­tedly ex­ist­ing struc­tures can be in­cred­i­bly im­por­tant in sup­port­ing and pro­mot­ing cre­ativ­ity, but one must al­ways be wary not to allow those struc­tures to be­come con­straints. Rub­ble can be an ex­cel­lent play­ground, so per­haps I’m not the man to be giv­ing ad­vice.