Sunday 19 February 2012

I’ve managed to find time this week to reacquaint myself with Haydn songs for the upcoming concerts with Kathy Fuge. Joy.

Matthew Gelbart has just published this very interesting account of the beginnings of the idea of ‘Scottish music’: it’s well worth a read, but you might need a library login to access the full thing without ridiculous cost (let’s leave aside for now the scandal that is the economics of academic publishing). Thanks to Karen McAulay for spotting it as soon as it appeared.

On Wednesday I went to hear Rachel Beckles Willson talking about the work of the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra on the West Bank in Palestine: she was inspired (if that’s the right word) to examine their work after being surprised at the uncritical nature of the initial press coverage, which seemed to ignore the potential difficulties and the limitations of using such a politically-loaded art form as western classical music in such a situation.  It reminded me of El Sistema, which has similar initiatives and uses the profile that high-end classical music performance can bring to gain publicity for its work.  When it launched here in Scotland a few years ago, I was perplexed at the cultural naivety of the debate surrounding it, and today I had a wee look at its website to see how it’s getting on, and how they deal with the issue there. Here are some excerpts from the FAQ:

Why classical music and not Scottish traditional or another type of music?
The social benefits of Sistema come from the structure, challenges and cooperative nature of a symphony orchestra.

Well, yes, the excitement of the co-operation can be wonderful, but you also have a 19th-century hierarchical structure, where many highly-skilled people have little say in how they work, and the end result is directed by a man (usually a man) being paid at least ten times as much, waving a stick at them: not necessarily the ideal recipe for social benefits.  Also, having a symphony orchestra as your model leaves you with a cultural legacy that’s only really well suited to playing music from another time, and usually another place (unless you count film scores).

There are many other worthy musical pursuits but we don’t believe they bring the same level of social benefit that our orchestras are set up to achieve.

Ouch. Now that’s a very arrogant claim to make.

I'm not even going to attempt to analyse this one:

Orchestral music is beautiful, and we think beauty is important.

It’s easy for me to sit here and moan: I’m not the one getting off my arse and engaging kids in ensemble music-making in difficult circumstances. Persuading people to make music together is an enormously worthwhile and transformative thing to do, and all power to them.  But I can’t help noting the naivety in the startling presumption that participation in an orchestra can provide a better level of ‘social benefit’ than other musical experiences. That seems to me very shaky ground indeed on which to build a programme of social work, and appears to be influenced more by a desire to justify the continued primacy of classical music institutions. 

Now to me that seems quite obvious, but it’s rare to find such reservations expressed in print, which is why it was very interesting to be in a university room full of people on Wednesday afternoon who were also asking: why should the classical music world think it’s so special?