It’s what we can’t afford to lose that’s key to Concert debate

As New Zealand prepares for the first time to host an International Society for Contemporary Music World New Music Day in April, organisation president Glenda Keam will be relying on RNZ Concert technicians to record and broadcast the concerts.

It’s great news that RNZ chief executive Paul Thompson has shelved the proposal to change Concert FM to a fully automated service. While it has been heartening to see the strength of reaction from many parts of the community, the discussion needs to be much wider.

What cannot be lost in the debate going forward is the radio station’s specialist production department, which performs the important role of capturing unique live and culturally rich music events in New Zealand. Recognising this vital RNZ Concert role deserves more prominence, especially as the future of the music broadcaster remains uncertain.

Another important point is that RNZ Concert is not just ‘‘classical’’. Dating back decades in various forms, RNZ Concert’s playlist of classical, jazz, contemporary, and world music, including recordings by local musicians and composers, is well known and appreciated by its dedicated and highly vocal audience.

Playing a wide range of classical music is only part of RNZ Concert’s mandate. Live concert recordings, interviews with artists and making documentaries on a wide range of topics are vital functions for the sector, as well as the audience.

What is at stake here is an incredibly diverse range of musicmaking activity, particularly, but not exclusively, local musicmaking, which is brought to an audience by RNZ Concert. A range of special things will not survive in the vacuum its absence would create.

There needs to be greater recognition of the range of music played and discussed on RNZ Concert, which also translates into the audience being catered to. A lot of the current rhetoric is focusing on orchestral classical music as if it is all RNZ Concert presents. So there is a misrepresentation of the argument as being between elitist orchestra lovers who want ‘‘their’’ music to be privileged, and anti-elitist individuals who think classical music is outmoded and stuffy.

In reality, our orchestras punch above their weight in presenting interesting programmes, building audiences, taking innovative creative risks and providing our composers with opportunities to develop their craft and create innovative new music.

How will we hear what our bright young composers are doing if nobody brings their music to an audience? How will the performing ensembles even continue to exist in order to play the new music if nobody gets to hear them?

Without the specialist RNZ Concert production teams there will be no recordings and no broadcasts of new notated music, and the next generation of composers will become an endangered species.

Besides a wonderful array of orchestral music, RNZ Concert brings to its audiences a much greater spread of musical styles, performers, time periods, regions, socio-historical perspectives and interesting musical characters than most of the other programmes put together, and if it were to cease existing then much of those cultural riches would be lost to current and future generations.

And it’s not just a matter of playing the recorded music; RNZ Concert has over the years recorded many New Zealand premieres, made interesting radio documentaries, and presented lively discussions, as well as being the only strong supporter of many New Zealand composers and sound artists.

Quite a few of the interesting radio documentaries have also been repeated on RNZ National.

University of Canterbury music lecturer James Gardner has made many radio documentaries with RNZ Concert over the past 20 years, on subjects from contemporary music festivals in Huddersfield to Frank Zappa to a particular kind of harpsichord to the music of John Cage to John Barry’s Bond soundtracks to the history of electronic music.

The most recent of these documentaries,

covers an enormous range of musical styles, TV music, experimental sound art, pop music, and exemplifies the breadth that RNZ Concert has brought to its audiences over the years. No other radio station does anything like this.

Certainly RNZ Concert’s value cannot be evaluated on economic grounds alone. We should be thinking about New Zealand’s moves towards wellbeing and acknowledgement of the place of arts in a healthy society.

The neoliberal populist view of what is affordable has no place in an argument that should be about what we cannot afford to lose from our culture. New Zealand’s purported celebration of diversity and inclusivity will become hollow words indeed.

If our ISCM World New Music Days and Asian Composers League festival guests, who are coming here from around the globe to hear our music and theirs, performed by our greatest performers (including three orchestras), are told that none of the music will be recorded or broadcast or ever heard again, they will shake their heads in disbelief and go back to their home countries glad they don’t live here.

How will we hear what our bright young composers are doing if nobody brings their music to an audience?

Associate Professor Glenda Keam is the University of Canterbury’s Head of Music.