Fighting the ‘POSTER-GIRL IMAGE’
There’s more to music than mere marketing
The time was when Nicola Benedetti was treated as classical music’s favourite babe, promoters seizing on her glowing good looks as the image most likely to bring audiences flocking. And in truth, her looks do still attract attention. Benedetti just turned 32, after all.
And yet, since winning the BBC young musician of the year award at 16, the violinist has prioritized her music over glamorous photo shoots or stadium concerts. She spends as much time playing chamber music with her trio and her recital partner, pianist Alexei Grynyuk, as she does playing the popular concertos, and she’s often left the beaten track to play and record unusual repertoire.
She’s passionate about music education, and as well as being involved with half a dozen music education organizations, she has just set up her own charity, the Benedetti Foundation, which will support instrumental tuition at the highest level in schools all over the U.K. No wonder she’s received the kind of honours that normally come to people twice her age, such as the 2016 Queen’s Medal for Music and most recently CBE (Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire).
Benedetti is still buzzing about a recent tour with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra in China, and a series of performances of a violin concerto composed for her by jazz bandleader, trumpeter and composer Wynton Marsalis. “Audiences just love that piece!” she says. “We get standing ovations in places where audiences are normally too staid to stand for anything.”
How did the world’s most celebrated jazz musician end up composing a basically classical violin concerto? “It goes back to the time I heard Wynton’s Swing Symphony, which he composed for the London Symphony Orchestra and Simon Rattle,” Benedetti says. “It made such a huge impression on me because it was a kind of collective expression which was euphoric in a way I had never heard before in a concert hall. So after that my then-manager and I kept pestering Wynton to write a piece for me. He wasn’t keen at first, but in the end we persuaded him.”
Benedetti talks about Marsalis with utmost respect amounting to awe. “He’s just the most intensely curious man about every kind of music, and he’s so determined to go into everything in the deepest way,” she says. “When he was working on the concerto, I would send him examples of concertos to show the variety of different idioms of the violin, and also different ways composers have handled the form.”
Did she learn from him in return? “Oh, of course. He introduced me to jazz violinists like Ray Nance, but not just violinists. I learned about so many great jazz players, like Johnny Hodges, the sax player in Duke Ellington’s band.”
Though the piece is unquestionably classical, with no jazz improvisation, there’s no doubt it reflects Marsalis’ thoughts about the black experience in the United States, and his conviction that jazz speaks to this with more truth and dignity than modern genres. (He has blamed rap’s “pornography and profanity” for bringing the black community into disrepute.)
“One of the things I find very moving about the piece is the way it calls on that heritage, especially in the blues movement,” Benedetti says. “There’s a feeling of tremendous depth there.”
Marsalis’ critics say his attempt to marry classical and jazz plays up to the classical music’s oppressive dominance. Benedetti goes quiet, and thinks before replying. She says, “Of course this music is linked with a history of oppression, which has generally been white and European. I would not want to diminish that fact at all. It’s true almost every composer I play belongs to that culture. That’s a fact I can do nothing about.
“But should the worth and cultural weight of something be denied because of these ideological faults? That’s what I would question,” she says. “I don’t feel that the music itself encodes a message which in any way celebrates oppression. I would argue that when it comes to musical and artistic expression, these works are the product of people with profoundly considered moral values. We shouldn’t judge them through the prism of today’s values.”
This leads to the Benedetti Foundation. She’s so busy — why take on such a huge labour? “Because there’s such a need for it,” she says. “Instrumental tuition is in a really bad state, in Scotland and England. There are great teachers out there doing great work, and half the work of the foundation will be to support them, as well as giving workshops and lessons for kids in different cities.”
So will all kinds of music be embraced, or just classical?
“In our mission statements you will find no mention of classical music specifically. But,” she says emphatically, “classical music will be at the centre of what we do. It’s true that other styles of music often get you into the creative process more quickly. But I don’t think just speed is the most important thing. You can educate yourself in a few hours to create a pop song on a PC via the internet in your bedroom, if that’s what you want.
“So for me it would be ridiculous to focus our music education efforts on something which is already ubiquitous, and offers no challenge, and which I think is often cynical and pushed through heavy marketing. I’m sorry, but there’s a depth and complexity in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony which simply puts it on a different level! If you’re asking me, should the content of the music education program be pop, I would say no, absolutely not.”
All this shows just how far she is from the poster girl of classical music the world assumes her to be.
“I’ve always tried to fight that,” she says, “by trying to deepen my seriousness as a musician, and I always try to talk about something rather than nothing. So much of life nowadays is to do with appearance. I’m not saying appearance isn’t important. I’m not allergic to any sort of superficial beauty.
“One shouldn’t be purist about these things. People who refuse all surface beauty remind me of those people who say the only way to listen to classical music is with headphones while reading the score. They forget that until very recently performance was also a visual thing as much as an aural one.
“You just have to keep the visual thing in its place, behave with as much integrity as possible — and for me that means not playing on my femininity. I can’t stand that. I certainly don’t expect to have respect handed to me on a plate just because I’m a woman. That’s not how life works.”
So much of life nowadays is to do with appearance. I’m not saying appearance isn’t important. I’m not allergic to any sort of superficial beauty.