Chris Swithinbank writes music.

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 par������������ti­cip­a­tion, 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.