Richard Morrison
A vaccine may be on the horizon, but there’s a long road to recovery ahead
The editor asked me to write about the ‘green shoots of recovery’ for this issue. Poetically, it makes sense. New year, new hope and all that. Realistically, though, it’s a tough task. Vaccines may well beat back this terrible virus in the next few months. But where does that leave the thousands of British musicians who haven’t earned a penny from music for ten months?
What of the venues, music clubs, promoters, publishers, orchestras and opera companies that have made staff redundant and now have to rebuild from scratch? What of Britain’s once huge network of amateur performing organisations? Many of their members will have had their own employment and medical problems. Will they now have other priorities in their lives?
What of audience confidence? Would you sit a few inches from strangers in a packed concert hall any time in 2021? Or is social distancing going to be a factor for a long time, with profound implications for box-office takings?
And what will be the impact on music of living in a country that has run up a staggering debt of £394 billion to fight COVID? With the NHS, education, defence and social services likely to be top of the spending pile, it’s hard to imagine the arts getting much of a handout in future. And on top of that, there’s Brexit, which is certainly not expected to increase the chances of British musicians working regularly on mainland Europe, where many have made successful careers.
So where, in this gloomy landscape, are the green shoots? Well, the point about green shoots is that they aren’t fully-grown shrubs and flowers. Musicians and music lovers will do themselves an enormous psychological favour if they stop thinking that, at some point soon, a magic switch will be flicked and live entertainment will flourish like it’s 2019 all over again. It won’t. Progress will be patchy and organisations will move at very different speeds. Thousands of musicians will continue to find little work in the profession for some time yet. And it will take a brave promoter to programme, say, Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius or Verdi’s Requiem any time before next autumn. Britain’s wonderful tradition of big-chorus singing may need to be rebuilt almost completely.
No, I detect the green shoots in the imagination and determination that many music organisations and individuals have shown during the pandemic, not just to survive but to find new ways of presenting high-quality music at a time when normal channels were cut off. More concerts by UK musicians have been live-streamed on the internet in the past ten months than in the previous ten years. And although that won’t solve our orchestras’ economic problems, it has enormously increased the size of their potential fanbase.
The sudden enforced end to touring has also concentrated musicians’ minds on the communities in which they live. And that’s a welcome adjustment if it leaves some permanent mark on our thinking. For decades, professional music-making has resembled a streamlined production-line – not exactly soulless, but not spontaneous either. This year, ensembles and soloists have been forced to rethink basics and seize opportunities as they came up. In the short term that has often been traumatic. In the long-term it could open up new ways to sustain careers in music.
Case in point? During lockdown many more musicians established links with local hospitals and care homes. If the politicians and health authorities would only recognise the growing mountain of evidence demonstrating the therapeutic benefits of music on the elderly, the ill and the isolated and lonely, that could be an enormous growth area for musical life. Similarly, schemes such as the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra’s proposal to start a new specialist music school in a challenging part of the West Midlands, or the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment’s decision to move itself – lock, stock and Baroque bassoons – into a comprehensive school in north London, could signal a shift in the way that performing ensembles interact with the education system to ensure that all children grow up surrounded by music.
These are all green shoots. Whether they flourish or wither depends, ultimately, on one simple thing: how much communities value music, and therefore how much they are prepared to raise funds, buy tickets and lobby politicians to save the organisations that provide it. By this time next year the truth about that will be revealed – with brutal clarity, perhaps, in some cases.
The enforced end to touring has concentrated musicians’ minds on their communities