The BBC has joined the war on our culture
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Here’s your starter for 10: which music festival has a disco night, a Nick Drake tribute evening, a Sarah Vaughan night, and a performance by the pop star Sam Smith in its first few days, and carries on with shows by the likes of Florence and the Machine?
Glastonbury? Latitude? Green Man? Wrong. It’s the self-described “world’s greatest classical music festival” – the BBC Proms, which last week released its programme for this summer.
Let’s be clear: the Proms is indeed a wonderful celebration of classical music, with any number of enticing concerts this year – not least the return of the Berlin Philharmonic (so much for the doom-mongering claims that the era of visiting European orchestras was over thanks to Brexit).
But it’s that very fact that the Proms is avowedly a classical music festival, that its organisers rightly see it as a classical music festival, and that the vast majority of its audiences attend it because it’s a classical music festival that makes the injection of artists and repertoire that are not, on any serious definition, classical music so depressing.
It’s yet another demonstration of the cultural cringe which so many of those in charge of serious art – let’s even call it high art – have succumbed to. It’s a mindset that maintains that the Proms – and classical music generally – is self-evidently an elitist experience, and therefore needs to justify its performance by introducing more democratic elements into the mix.
And not just music. The City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra has just decided that it will drop “any perceived ‘rules’ of a traditional concert” and will now actively encourage concertgoers to use their phones to film concerts. Just days before the announcement, tenor Ian Bostridge had had to stop his performance in the orchestra’s own hall after light from phones filming him made it impossible for him to carry on.
As for the music: it’s now being argued that, because so many of the composers are dead, they’ve really got no place being performed at all.
Last month, Arts Council England published Let’s Create: Opera and Music Theatre Analysis, which contains a graph effectively equating the age of a piece with creative sterility and a lack of relevance: “As a result of its limited engagement with the creation of new work, opera and music theatre may find it harder to make an argument for its continued evolution as a cultural practice.”
The report also attacks opera critics for “almost exclusively writing from a classical music perspective”. As opposed to a Critical Race or Queer Theory approach, presumably.
The real sin of much classical music, according to the Arts Council, is not just that so many of the greatest composers are no longer in a position to compose, what with their being six feet under. It’s that they dared to compose masterpieces which audiences have turned to for decades or even centuries: “Terms like ‘excellence’ ... are indicative of the way in which opera and music theatre still retains unhelpful hierarchies about what kinds of work are valued.”
Bloody Beethoven and his hierarchical string quartets.
This is the context in which the world’s greatest classical music festival – someone will presumably be sacked for using the g word – believes that it has to include the likes of Sam Smith, who appears to be better known for his outre clothes than his music.
Mind you, Wagner was a snazzy dresser for his time.
