GIGMAG.CO.

UK

Gig

The generation game

If Generation X is to engage with the concert hall, we need to find ways to show it that the symphony orchestra can create every sort of music and collapse the barriers between classical and popular

Opinion: David Whelton, managing director, Philharmonia Orchestra

t a time when the Philharmonia Orchestra is selling an average of 2,600 tickets for each of its Royal Festival Hall concerts and shortly after selling 6,000 tickets for a single programme performed twice with Riccardo Muti to celebrate our 60th anniversary we could be forgiven for thinking that all is right with our world. However, when I gave a now wildly misreported interview to Prospect magazine, the observations I made in it clearly struck a chord. Has the dominance of popular culture, and particularly popular music, resulted in a missing generation in the concert hall? Nicola Benedetti pointed out recently that a team on University Challenge failed to recognise a single piece of popular classical music. Why has this come about and what should orchestras such as the Philharmonia being doing about it? This is a cultural question, not a social one; an issue about the way that education and leisure have changed in the last 50 years and the way different branches of the arts have responded. It is emphatically not about the relative value of one music genre over another. Why is it that a major new orchestral work is not universally greeted, like a new Ian McEwan novel or the opening of a Tate Modern exhibition, as an event, a cultural reference point that people are happy to discuss over a glass of wine even if they know nothing about it? Certainly the answer lies partly but only partly in the classroom, where music education is only just beginning to recover from its difficulties during the 1980s. It may be also about the fact that we conduct our lives today against a constant soundtrack of commercial, mainly pop music. It cant help that Cool Britannia chose not to risk presenting classical music alongside contemporary art, dance or pop music as the leisure choice of politicians and opinion formers. Meanwhile, classical music is reported in the press as being an ideal deterrent for vandals. There is also the question of the absence of a visual context in classical music. Concerts of classical music used in film attract massive new audiences, many of whom admit that they would

feel intimidated by a traditional concert because of their lack of a visual reference point. Vast numbers of young people enjoy the complex contemporary orchestral scores that back computer games, most of which are recorded by orchestras. So what can orchestras do to make sure that both adults and young people have enough experience of our artform to enable them to choose for themselves whether to participate in it? Firstly, we have to accept that audience development is not just about workshops in schools or taking socially and culturally excluded groups into concerts, vital though this work is. It is about every person in this country, regardless of age, education or social status.The popularity of Classic FM has shown that there is a huge audience for the music itself, one that nonetheless finds the concert hall, with its idiosyncracies and conventions, intimidating. Orchestras such as the Philharmonia are working with Classic FM to take that audience into high-quality live concerts throughout the UK. New technologies such as the Concert Companion [as reported in the inaugural issue of Gig] can also be used to provide a musical roadmap. We need to find ways to show young people that the resources of a symphony orchestra can be used to create every sort of music and in doing so collapse some of the perceived barriers between classical and popular. At the Philharmonia Orchestra we are looking at how we can present some of the computer game scores that we have recorded within the concert hall. We have just launched a major new interactive music website, The Sound Exchange, which among many resources includes a library of thousands of orchestral sound samples (every note at every pitch on every single instrument in the orchestra), all of which are free to download and use in composing, mixing and sampling. Above all we need to have the humility to recognise that our artform is in danger of being marginalised and the confidence to tell people that it is of value. None of us however robust our ticket sales can afford not to.
WWW.PHILHARMONIA.CO.UK/THESOUNDEXCHANGE