Richard Morrison

Why we should all become musical missionaries

Ihave some sympathy for the people running the Southbank Centre in London. Over the 40-odd years that I’ve been reporting on music, Britain’s biggest and most highly subsidised arts centre has made numerous attempts to renew, refresh, repurpose, regenerate or whatever the current buzz-verb is. Somehow, the results always fall short.

The £100m refurbishment in the 1990s, for instance, never achieved its primary aim: fixing the Royal Festival hall’s dry acoustics. Then the grandiose plan to overhaul the Queen Elizabeth hall, Purcell Room and hayward Gallery, concealing its much-reviled brutalist-concrete outlines, fell apart because a bunch of skateboarders whizzing around the venues’ grungy undercroft mysteriously acquired enough legal savvy to halt the scheme.

And now? In the long term, the Southbank faces the prospect of being overshadowed by the Centre for Music planned by its rival, the Barbican.

And in the short term, its two resident symphony orchestras, the Philharmonia and London Philharmonic – though both playing brilliantly – will be losing their principal conductors as the Barbican’s LSO goes from strength to strength under Simon Rattle.

The Southbank’s main marketing achievement in recent years has been to ‘democratise’ its spaces in order to exude a friendly, family feel. The Festival

hall’s foyers must be busiest, noisiest and most activity-packed of any concert hall in the world – sometimes too much so, I suspect, for older concertgoers. Yet however much it tries, the Southbank still can’t disguise its origins as a purpose-built ‘palace of culture’ designed in an era when people thought the arts should be gathered together in one temple-like edifice.

Today, the mood, especially among young musicians and artists, is very different. They seek out ‘found spaces’ – abandoned industrial premises, vaults, multi-storey car parks – in which to present their stuff. In doing so they often attract new listeners who, for whatever reason, shun conventional venues.

how does the Southbank, or any mainstream classical venue, respond? Well, three cheers for effort and imagination. It has launched a scheme

The musicians involved will gain as much from the encounter as the newcomers will

called Encounters in which people who rarely go to concerts – the Southbank is talking primarily about ex-prisoners, the homeless, isolated older people and young people who have fallen through the net of education, employment or training – will be given a free ticket.

But here’s the twist. Each small group of first-timers will be chaperoned by a distinguished musician. The 12 names announced include Nicola Benedetti, Marin Alsop, James Gilchrist and Mark-anthony Turnage. Each will share their ‘musical insights and passion for their art’ with the newcomers. Each newcomer will then get a free ticket to a second event, and be encouraged to bring another newcomer with them to that.

It’s an attractive idea, not least because I suspect the musicians involved will gain as much from the encounter as the newcomers will. People like Benedetti, Alsop and Gilchrist already do inspirational workshops with young musicians, but it’s a very different matter to establish a bridge of empathy with someone who has zero musical experience but a great deal of bruising life experiences. And I admire the Southbank, too, for not pushing more free tickets down the usual channels – to school pupils, or that elusive 25-35 age group who are too busy trying to pay their rent, find soulmates, build careers and start families.

So the scheme has great merits. But why stop there? Why rely on a handful of famous musicians to be mentors when every musician at every level could do the same? The impact of that could be phenomenal. I would never have studied music beyond school, for instance, if a schoolfriend’s father, then co-principal viola of the BBC Symphony Orchestra, hadn’t fed my curiosity about music by smuggling me into Pierre Boulez’s rehearsals at Maida Vale studios.

And it’s not just the performers who can and should be advocates and mentors. Ordinary music lovers can be too. It isn’t always easy to persuade a son, daughter, niece, nephew, godchild, neighbour or work colleague to accept a ticket to a classical concert or opera. But provided you choose the right piece, I’ve found over the decades that if you sow a seed, it can flower in surprising ways.

Let’s not leave it to a few ‘outreach’ specialists. Every musician and music lover should be a missionary for the artform we all love. That’s the best way to ensure it survives.