Friday 17 April 2009

I'm back in the eye casualty waiting room at our local hospital with a red eye ... again. One of the side benefits of keeping an online diary like this is that I can search it and easily trace my iritis history, which should impress the ophthalmologist. 

I've got some library work done this week, examining Henry Farmer's copy of the Glen Collection of Scottish Dance Music in Glasgow on Wednesday, and then yesterday I delivered the rest of the family to the dentist on the other side of Edinburgh and cycled from there to the National Library of Scotland, to poke around their manuscript collection. I spent most of the evening back home juggling travel plans for various upcoming bits and pieces. For example, it might just be possible (might) to play an early evening gig in Brussels and then get the train home to Glasgow in time for breakfast. Wouldn't that be neat?

There's been lots of publicity here surrounding the visit of Gustavo Dudamel and the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra to the UK, all of it breathless. Here in Scotland there's already an official Sistema-approved project on the go. I'm not going to snipe from the sidelines about genuinely exciting music-making by lots of young people who otherwise have a very hard life - that's wonderful. But I have to allow myself a bit of unease at the idea of orchestral music as a force for social good. Being part of a large body of people making music can change your life for the better, no doubt about it. But an orchestra is also rigid, hierarchical, and a hideously antiquated social model: ask anyone who plays in one for a living. So for a project whose aims are unashamedly social rather than artistic, from the outside it seems an odd choice of vehicle. But as a way out of poverty and crime, it's got to be better than boxing, hasn't it? 

Here in Scotland we've never quite progressed past our early 18th-century attitude towards classical music as something from outside imposed upon us by others, rather than something that we can inhabit and transform. I've got Matthew Gelbart's book here in the waiting room, and I'm reminded by him that what the Germans did instead was to take the science of classical music, inhabit it with aspects of their native traditions, and then through the action of individual 'geniuses' make it into something that was supposedly universal: think of the end of Beethoven's Choral symphony and the fall of the Berlin Wall. We now know that classical music isn't really a universal language (pop music and its visuals come closer), but it's clearly still got enough power for El Sistema to be able to pick it up and use it. 

Still, for those of us from a culture that's only been synthesised very marginally into the classical music tradition, getting involved in it wholeheartedly can lead to something of a cultural identity crisis further down the line. None of the coverage I've seen of the project has picked up this potential for cultural disconnection, which to me seems strange. I remember when they advertised for teaching staff for the Scottish project a year or so ago, I wasn't the only one who read the ad and thought 'Why does it have to be classical music?'  And while I can understand the reasons why, I am surprised that there hasn't been any debate about the cultural implications as well as the social ones. Or maybe I've just not been looking hard enough.