A half brick. That’s about how musical I am as.
So I’m no judge of an orchestra, but Simon Heffer in the Telegraph seems to think the New Queen’s Hall Orchestra is pretty good. The unusual thing about this orchestra is that it does not receive Arts Council funding.
I have to say that the fact that it gets some of its money from the patronage of the Duchess of Cornwall means that it cannot claim to be entirely independent of the State, since I presume she gets much of her money from the Civil List. But there you go. If one has to have state subsidies for the arts it is much more in the proper style that the dosh should come from the bejewelled hands of the former mistress, now wife, of the Prince of Wales than by filling in a grants form. I rather hope she hands over a velvet bag of gold sovereigns instead of writing a cheque.
I digress right royally. Here is what Simon Heffer writes about the orchestra’s founder, John Boyden:
He has serious convictions about arts funding – in particular, he believes that the market for orchestral music is so distorted by public funding that innovation is almost impossible. Until the Arts Council’s predecessor began funding orchestras just after the war, serious music depended on ticket sales and the patronage of the wealthy. Before the late 1940s, the LSO (a company owned by its players) paid dividends. Now it receives £2,355,836 (in 2010/11) from the Arts Council alone.
Mr Boyden believes that by keeping the price of tickets artificially low, the gap between an orchestra and its audience has become a gulf. He believes that other orchestras use their Arts Council funding to undercut orchestras such as his, taking up residencies in the provinces that are only made possible by the taxpayer’s largesse. The state does not contemplate pulling the plug on these famous institutions and, as a result, everything in the orchestral world is static. Mr Boyden argues, with some justification, that the last piece of new music to seize the public imagination was Britten’s War Requiem 48 years ago – because the music now written for these orchestras is created to satisfy not the musical public, but the taste of a handful of bureaucrats.
Oh, couldn’t agree more. My first career was in theatre and I spent most if it in the (commercial) West End where I rose to the dizzying heights of Chief LX. At the time I was quite leftie, I admit; it was the done thing in the Thatcher years, you know, sorry; and so had this vague idea that it would be quite nice to work in subsidised theater where in some way “real art” was done. Then- my last theater job- I actually did work in something Arts Council supported, and it was one of the things that started me questioning leftism and ended me up as a libertarian. By the end of that job, I had begun really resenting the idea that taxpayers’ money was funding these total winkers, and really started to appreciate how the need to sell tickets is a great driver of quality, not some high-falutin’ incestuously defined artiness.
I love classical music, but typically despise the uses made of the symphony orchestra by still-composing composers. At both of the last two Proms I have attended, there were works receiving their premiers, complete with composers coming on at the end to take a bow. They both sounded like a random compendium of orchestral effects stolen from the composer’s favourite orchestral works, but leaving the tunes behind (because that would be too obviously thieving). They weren’t offensively nasty in the manner of earlier Proms pieces dating from the William Glock era. They were just not what that audience had come to hear.
The presenters of the Proms do their best to be upbeat about such new pieces, but they cannot conceal the utter flatness of the response to them from the audience. We all just sit there waiting for the damn thing to end so that the real music can resume. At the end of them we clap politely, so as not to hurt the poor idiot’s feelings, and then heave a sigh of relief.
Real new music gets presented by the composer, at concerts which are all his stuff, or all new stuff by him and his mates, to an audience which really likes his (or his and his mates’) stuff. If an audience can only be assembled for a particular composer’s music by sandwiching it (like the famous Gordon Brown Bad News Sandwich – good news, the bad news (i.e. the true object of the exercise), more good news) between truly popular or at least interesting and entertaining orchestral works, well, what does that tell you?
I sincerely believe that if orchestral music received no state subsidies at all, it would be much better. Concerts of old music would be better. Concerts of new music would be out of this world better. Just how much of it there would now be, how people would dress while playing it, who would show up, how rich everyone would get, had such subsidies been absent for, say, the last three decades, I have no idea.
(I love the War Requiem.)
On a side note, for those interested in how technology and the internet are changing our lives. Within a minute of reading this post I was able to load up Spotify and search for “New Queen’s Hall” and also “Britten’s War Requiem” so I can find out what they’re on about and form my own opinion. All without paying a penny.
Ive wondered at the link between lack of live performances and the subsidies.
Eg: Who wouldnt like to go to a meal with a quartet playing off to one side?
Performers who are paid a “wage” by a state funded orchestra arent likely to do it as its “beneath” them. Take away a state funded meal ticket and we might be likely to see more connection between “taking arts to the people” and real life.
The problem is, whenever you raise the possibility of withdrawing Arts Council funding, or closing the BBC, et cet ra, you will invariably be assailed by people declaring that if you do that all that will be left is “populist trash” and it is this sort of “right wing socialism” which is as much to blame for our current condition as any scruffy Socialist Worker reader. Heffer himself a while ago wrote a ludicrous article in the Telegraph (can’t be bothered to search for it) about how the BBC should be abolished… except for Radio 3 and 4, which apparently render a required service to the nation, and Simon Heffer knows this because they appeal to his refined tastes.
And this is one of the major problems libertarians have. Everybody, it seems, has something; some little slice of the State-provided pie, that they insist cannot be done without. Abolish funding of orchestras? The philistines will overwhelm us!
This is part of what depresses me about being a libertarian. Often I can have conversations with people, and they’re agreeing with this and that and yes, smaller government and freedom and so on, but I know damned well if I step on their thing, I’ll lose them in an instant, so I stay away from it to avoid an argument or what have you. It’s why I’m as proud not to be a conservative as to not be a socialist. They both want state things, they just want different state things.
This is the genius of slow state expansion on the Fabian model. It hooks people in, one thing at a time, and then that thing not being done by the State becomes unthinkable.
The Duchess of Cornwall likely gets no money at all from the Civil List. Charles’ income derives from the Duchy of Cornwall.
Paul Draper, lead singer of Mansun (who were huge in their day, you may remember) summed it up brilliantly and pithily in an interview inThe Guardian. Annoyingly, it was about 11 years ago, before everything got put ont’ Web, so I have to try and quote from memory. It was something like
Look at all the public money poured into classical music over the last fifty years, and what has it achieved? Not much, in my opinion. Pop music has been entirely driven by the market, and what has it given us? The greatest body of creative work in this country since the War.
I wish I’d known that when I wrote this.
I’m also going to go and listen to Britten’s War Requiem.