Here’s to the Southbank’s bold new season
The music for the autumn line-up is commercially risky but also worthwhile, says Ivan Hewett
The Southbank Centre, Europe’s largest multi-arts centre, has been in a comatose state for almost six months. Apart from the Hayward Gallery, the entire centre has been closed to the public. The three auditoria, the Royal Festival Hall, Queen Elizabeth Hall and Purcell Room, have been dark and silent. Meanwhile, the centre’s economic woes have mounted. It is on course for losses of £5million by the end of the year, and is about to sack almost 400 staff, more than two thirds of its workforce, a figure which rises to 80 per cent in the case of the Poetry Library. To stem the losses and form a viable business plan for the future, it has had to reconceive itself as a start-up business, offering itself as a set of venues available to outside promoters, and reducing its own promotions to only 10 per cent of the programming.
Nonetheless, the centre is not content just to be an artistic garage, taking any offer that comes its way. It seems determined to set a distinctive artistic policy, by working closely with the orchestras and ensembles resident there. Its autumn season, Inside Out, which shows a coordinated approach between all those organisations (apart from the London Philharmonic Orchestra, oddly) is certainly a bold statement of intent. The keynote is “diversity”, focusing on groups previously marginalised in culture, women and – even more so – people of colour.
The literature programme features such luminaries of black letters as Angela Davies, the African-american political activist and philosopher, Alicia Garza, the co-founder of Black Lives Matter, and the novelist Arundhati Roy. The classical music programme hammers the same message home. “As the classical music season centres untold narratives and under-represented voices,” says the press release, “the Southbank Centre’s autumn season hopes to contribute positively to the wider cultural conversation, with an emphasis on performers and composers of colour new and old.” The grammar may be convoluted but the underlying message is clear: everyone everywhere in the classical music business is now homing in on the importance of black composers and performers, so the Southbank must do the same, only in a committed way that puts it ahead of the pack. Sixteen of the 57 pieces being played by the resident and associate orchestras are by composers of colour. The Philharmonia is playing a work by Florence Price (1899-1952), a distinctive African-american composer who overcame the prejudice against women and black composers to create an astonishing body of work. The
London Sinfonietta is offering an entire concert by established and emerging black composers, co-curated by George Lewis (one of the most original music theorists of the past century) and the singer Elaine Mitchener, conducted by Zimbabwean-born American Vimbayi Kasiboni. The National Youth Orchestra is performing Mighty River by the contemporary Belize-born British composer Errollyn Wallen, a magnificent piece which explores the history of the slave trade in Britain.
It’s a risky policy from the commercial point of view, as unknown names – of whatever colour – are never a big box office draw. The cynical view of all this would be that it’s pure politics, and nothing to do with art. The centre is battling for survival, and has made the judgment that for its current bid for Art’s Council support to be successful it has to ally itself to the political movement sweeping the world. While these are serious factors, and the Southbank is hardly going to reverse its fortunes overnight, my view is that anyone who loves classical music should still welcome the Southbank season, for several reasons. Firstly there’s simple justice. There are a wealth of black composers who collectively write a vast body of music, and need to be heard. A proper extended focus on them gives us the chance of repeated listening that is the prerequisite of any artistic judgment. The long-term benefit of the season could be the impetus it gives to “normalising” music by non-white composers, so it becomes part of the repertoire. Until that happens, genuinely fine composers like African-american George Walker are condemned to remain valued only for what they symbolise.
As for the cynical view that the season is just about politics, it’s always been the case that who’s in and who’s out in music has depended on nothing to do with music. In my lifetime, I’ve seen two major rediscoveries of a whole school of composers prompted by political upheavals. The first came in the Eighties, when the pack ice of cultural repression in the Soviet Union and its Eastern Europe satellites began to thaw, and eventually disintegrated completely. This revealed to the West a treasury of music that had previously been locked away, by composers such as Alfred Schnittke and Sofia Gubaidulina, whose work was then championed at the Southbank and other places. A decade later, a whole generation of Chinese composers burst on to the classical music scene. The “lost generation”, once forced to carry pigswill and mend roads during the Cultural Revolution, came to maturity. Again, the Southbank took a lead in revealing these composers to British audiences. Now, it’s the turn of African-american composers swept into prominence by the Black Lives Matter movement.
Finally, to classical music lovers who worry that the landscape of the art form could be being changed beyond recognition I say, stop worrying, and rejoice. Bach, Beethoven and Stravinsky aren’t going to disappear any time soon, though they will have to share their space with new arrivals to the scene.
Composers we now think of as immovable fixtures of classical music were once thought of as marginal. In his lifetime, Bach was considered to be lacking in taste and over-complex. Beethoven was thought to be dangerously erotic, and Stravinsky a barbarian with “slanting Tartar eyes” (as he was sneeringly described in an early edition of Grove’s Dictionary of Music – racism in classical music takes some surprising forms). The “canon” of accepted masterpieces and great composers has always had porous boundaries. Joachim Raff used to be thought of as a great composer, but he dropped out, and in recent times, new candidates for greatness have been put forward, and some accepted – the French Baroque composer Marc-antoine Charpentier is one. As new composers enter the tradition, the tradition itself shifts. As TS Eliot said, a genuinely traditional work is the one that transforms and renews the tradition, not the one that leaves everything securely in place.
Will it be Indian and Africanamerican and African composers now being rediscovered that bring about that transformation? There’s only one to find out; allow the music be heard.
The Southbank Centre’s Autumn Season ‘Inside Out’ begins on Sept 17. Details: southbankcentre.co.uk
There are a wealth of black composers who need to be heard