Richard Morrison
The Arts Council’s plans for the new decade
It’s never easy managing an orchestra in Britain, though it’s probably a more secure job than managing a football club. At last month’s annual conference of the Association of British Orchestras, however, the stress was even more evident than usual. There’s something of a ‘perfect storm’ feeling building up – a collision of uncertainties from many different directions.
Brexit, for instance, throws up a ton of unanswered questions or, worse still, questions to which there seems to be only one depressing answer for itinerant musicians. Then there’s the new government’s election promises about ‘ending austerity’. They now appear – at least to the cultural world – to be not worth the paper they weren’t written on, with talk of a new five per cent budget cut being imposed on all sectors except the National Health Service.
And for those running the BBC’S five orchestras – and anyone who enjoys Radio 3 and the Proms – there’s an added worry. Top Tories are talking about replacing the BBC licence-fee with a voluntary subscription, along the lines of Netflix. To which one has to ask: what did Netflix ever do for classical music?
On top of that, Arts Council England’s strategy document for the next ten years, Let’s Create, was published just before the ABO conference and hovered over it like an ominous cloud. It’s not so much the silly stuff it contains about avoiding talking about ‘the arts’ and ‘artists’, because the a-word apparently puts off ‘ordinary people’. (The preferred jargon now is ‘culture’ and ‘creative practitioner’.) Nor is it its threat that, in ten years, the list of those organisations receiving public subsidy will probably be very different from what it is today.
No, it’s more the underlying assumption that producing world-class art – sorry, culture – and playing to full houses is not enough. Your orchestra must also be ‘relevant’. Meaning? Well, attracting audiences that reflect ‘the full diversity of England’, for instance. And engaging sufficiently with issues around climate change.
Then there’s the ACE’S decision to divert more funds into encouraging the general public to make music, rather than passively consuming it. I totally get the impulse behind this. Making music, at whatever level, is one of the most spiritually, mentally and physically nourishing things you can do. And the great failure of British education in my lifetime has been to deprive millions of children of the opportunities and training to nurture the musical skills that will permanently enrich their lives.
That battle, however, needs to be fought with the politicians running education policy. It’s pointless for ACE to start diverting money away from professional orchestras – themselves running exemplary music-education projects – to impose a new bureaucracy of box-ticking and subsidy-dependency on voluntary music organisations that are doing perfectly well without.
I like Darren Henley, ACE’S chief executive – not least because he is an indefatigable groupie for all sorts of music in all sorts of venues. When decent people join arts councils, however, something odd happens to them. They think they have a mandate to impose grand visions on thousands of arts professionals whose own visions are, on the whole, grounded in a much better sense of what their local communities need and like.
The ABO conference was a case in point. It included sessions where Henley and other ACE executives outlined their ten-year strategy to make classical music more ‘relevant’ to ordinary people.
Yet it was being hosted in Manchester by the Hallé Orchestra. Here is an organisation that has been embedded in its city for 162 years, more than half of them without help from the Arts Council, which hadn’t been invented. It has established links with schools and communities across northern England. It runs a youth orchestra and two youth choirs as well as a great adult amateur chorus. It has championed up-andcoming regional composers from the young Edward Elgar to Mark Simpson. And it has also sustained an global reputation for artistic excellence under inspirational music directors such as John Barbirolli and now Mark Elder – conductors committed to serving the citizens of Manchester.
Such organisations don’t need lectures in how to touch the hearts of ordinary people. All they need is a modest but steady amount of public investment. If ACE wants to do something useful in the next ten years, a better use of its time would be to persuade the government that classical music matters.
There’s an assumption that producing worldclass art and playing to full houses is not enough