Classical Music suffers from its name. It conjures up images of orchestras in tail coats and, worse, 18th century powdered wigs. The reality is very different. The real range is any music that finds a home on BBC Radio 3, and that is almost any sound that does not involve a bunch electric guitars, a drum set, and ear-splitting loudspeakers in a stadium or field. The date does not matter, nor the number of instruments and singers, or even the part of the world from where it comes. It is the music from as early as we can find it to that of composers still in childhood. The manner of the music does matter, though. It is to be listened to with care, not just absorbed as background noise.
This part of music is an art and does not sit comfortably in the portfolio governments like to call cultural industry. Serious music’s profit is in human enrichment, not always money or standard jobs. In the last forty years – ever since Conservative chancellors and education secretaries started regarding music as a tiresome option – its public funding base has taken a pounding, whichever party is in power. Now fewer children are participating and studying it than in the 1970s, newspapers (online or in print) have curtailed their coverage to not much more than is given to very minority sports, and very few ministers are to be seen at concerts or the opera, frightened of being labelled ‘elitist’. Festivals have shrunk, orchestras have lost all but a sliver of their public money and in all four countries of the UK, the great strides in provision in the 1970s have been reversed to the point where great companies like Welsh and English National Opera are on their knees, pale shadows of their finest years. In many ways Britain’s artistic decline matches its crumbling health service – the difference being that neither press nor government care.
Then, hooray, there are the Proms – programmed, staged and sustained from mid July to mid September by the BBC, as they have been since 1927, when Sir Henry Wood realised he and Robert Newman could not keep them going in the same way they had done for the previous 32 years. It was the BBC’s first great investment in arts broadcasting – well, not quite: the BBC Singers, the country’s only adult salaried choir, had been formed two years earlier. After the Queen’s Hall was bombed in 1942, the Proms moved to the Royal Albert Hall and the BBC Symphony Orchestra took over the main duties of performances from the disbanded Queen’s Hall Orchestra (though the timpani remained the same drums until about 2015).
Gradually, the Proms have expanded not just the scope of the music but the range of orchestras and ensembles playing and the venues used. This year there have been Proms in Nottingham, Newport, Bristol, Gateshead, Belfast and Aberdeen. As well as continuing Wood’s tradition that in every season the fundamental repertoire of major symphonies and concertos should be played, there are new commissions, film, jazz, musicals and video gaming music nights. This year there was a Purcell semi-opera that included break-dancing, and – most poignantly – the East West Divan Orchestra, uniting Arab, Israeli and European musicians playing Schubert’s 9th Symphony conducted by the increasingly frail Daniel Barenboim in what will probably be the last time he appears on stage in this country. The Proms are the cornerstone of our music culture: the most comprehensive festival in the world and one that is alone in making sure there is real diversity among the performers.
And – just listen, government – much of the season of 73 concerts was a sell-out, with every concert broadcast live, repeated on Radio 3 in the afternoons the following week, and often two per week available on television: public service broadcasting at its purest, without any nonsense from political parties about bias. The fact that the concerts sold well would no doubt be seen by the libertarian right as the good reason to sell off the brand. In the Netherlands Gert Wilders’ government is trying to abolish all cultural funding, so our fringe Tories are not alone. Those that bought it (probably a US corporation) would soon come to the same conclusion as Wood and Newman. The season cannot be sustained on a commercial basis without dumbing down and shortening. That is why they brought in the BBC 97 years ago.
At the heart of the Proms are the BBC orchestras – for some, the one chance in the year to be heard in London and judged against the world’s greatest from Europe and America. This is a vital process for critics, agents and other promoters: an opportunity for musicians to find their true level in the musical ecosystem. So the Proms are vital. Much more than that, though, they are proof that ‘classical music’, that sneered-at label that sends shivers of terror down the spines of lifestyle editors and tabloid journalists in a way it never used too (in the 1980s the Daily Mail, Express and Mirror all had classical critics), is not elitist. Its detractors are merely shallow.
Radix is a radical think tank. Therefore let us think radically and advocate for the return of the values of civilisation, universal cultural education, the complexity of human achievement, the display of astonishing skill and feats of memory, the longevity of artistic communication that the BBC Proms present. During that Purcell evening of The Fairy Queen (the first ever West End musical in 1692), as the audience laughed, cheered, and listened intently, the 12 year-old German girl sitting next to me leaned across and whispered, “I never knew concerts could be like this.” They can be, not just at the Proms but throughout the year in every village, town and festival – if only that miserable institution, the Treasury, and ignorant politicians of every party would allow it.
Prom 24: Purcell’s Fairy Queen with the Companie KAFIQ dancers, Les Arts Florissants and Le Jardin des Voix, conducted by Paul Agnew. Photo Chris Christdodoulou.
