Well, that didn’t go to plan.
Throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, it was often said that no sector was hit harder than music. Concert halls were silenced, recordings postponed, musicians furloughed.
Musicians and music lovers fought back. Where there was goodwill and hard work, much was achieved. In my home city, thanks to an outpouring of local generosity and a hard working board of directors, the Madison Symphony managed to pay their musicians (none of whom are salaried) for every cancelled rehearsal and concert. Orchestras went online. Here at the ESO, we premiered over 40 new compositions and arrangements in 2020 and 2021, reaching over 300,000 viewers. Where goodwill was missing, such as at the Metropolitan Opera, little, if anything, was achieved and many suffered.
Throughout it all, one could sense how deeply musicians felt the forced separation from our audiences. And, through all the lockdowns and variants, we were all counting down the days until we could re-connect with our listeners in person.
As the most desperate part of the pandemic subsided, signs were hopeful. As the ESO went back to the concert hall in the Autumn of 2021, we saw a rapid improvement in audiences. Our October ’21 Elgar Festival, which had been rescheduled from its usual June slot, was a big success. To look out at a packed Worcester Cathedral after everything that had come before was as happy a moment as I have ever had as a performer. It felt like a true happy ending to a tumultuous story.
But as 2022 dawned, something was amiss. Was it that last damn variant, Omicron, and the Christmas misery it brought? Was it the sudden explosion of oil prices and inflation swallowing up people’s savings? Was it the rising interest rates driving up listeners’ mortgage payments and credit card bills? Or had folks just discovered so much to do online in 2020-21 that going out to concerts suddenly seemed passé?
Whatever it was, there were murmurings among managers throughout the arts. Sales were down. Way down. Audiences were buying tickets at the last second, if at all, driving up marketing costs. Many stalwart foundations and funders had turned their attention elsewhere during the pandemic and weren’t coming back to the arts, or had folded altogether.
Arts organisations did what arts organisations do. They dug in and fought. I know of no other sector that treats the hard work of its administrators and support teams so dismissively as the arts. Of course, when one sees a giant, incredibly well-resourced and well-supported organisation like the Met betray its musicians in the pandemic, while other, smaller organisations seem to be able to rise to the challenge so easily, it’s easy for outsiders (including the moaning class) to assume all arts administrators are lazy and incompetent. I would say that, in my experience, that is simply not true. That it is relatively easy to zero in on which the poorly run organisations are ought to tell you how many organisations are well run by talented, serious people who really care.
But there were more and more fires to be fought. Just as it was becoming more and more difficult to draw an audience, so too it was becoming more and more difficult to put an artistic product on stage. In the UK, fixers (those who hire musicians, “orchestra managers” in US terms), were all experiencing the same thing. Many players had given up during the pandemic in order to find more stable work – that super-efficient new shift manager at Tesco might well have been the principal horn of one of the best orchestras in the world six months ago. Others had seen their petrol costs rise so precipitously that it no longer was economically viable to take work that involved travel. On more than one occasion, despite everyone’s best efforts, I found myself on the podium with ESO conducting colleagues that I had no idea who they were or how they came to be playing for us, and this was happening everywhere. Having grown up in the field when it was possibly the most competitive on earth this side of professional basketball, I never imagined I would live to see a musician shortage, but we have a musician shortage in the UK right now.
That we made it to 2022 at all was largely down to the emergency support of the UK government, as distributed by Arts Council England in 2020-21. Though the system wasn’t perfect, and grants to individual freelancers left a lot of deserving musicians completely out in the cold, that support kept us going.
But in 2022, the message was clear – you’re on your own.
Throughout the year, it was also clear classical music was in the firing line of the culture wars. Its place in higher education was being challenged by so-called ‘decolonisers’. Online agitators decried it as a sexist, racist and elitist field on the basis of very sketchy and carefully chosen evidence. Somehow that friendly string quartet playing at your grandma’s nursing home was actually the embodiment of the darkest aspects of the global elite. Tchaikovsky was to be rebranded from LGBQT hero and role model to exemplar of Russian military aggression, his music to be banned. For a field in which so many practitioners do what we do in large part because we want to make the world a healthier, kinder and happier place, it’s not easy to confront the idea that others perceive you as something like a Bond villain. Oh, and don’t forget, revenue from recordings has dropped to virtually zero while Spotify is making billions for Daniel Ek selling playlists of fake groups. AI music is next, then all performers can be repurpused as Soylent Green.
Click to view Rick Beato’s trenchant warning about the threat AI poses to musicians
As we reached the final quarter of 2022, the climate remained much the same. Some concerts were drawing brilliant audiences, but things were still unpredictable, and overall audience numbers were still down almost everywhere.
At the ESO, we’d spent almost my whole tenure (I did my first concert with the orchestra in 2013) working towards achieving National Portfolio status. I still can’t imagine a stronger application (or one more closely aligned with ACE criteria) than the one we submitted. With charitable giving in the UK only a tiny fraction of what it is in the USA, there are only really three ways to provide stable funding for an orchestra. The first is through broadcasting – hence the BBC orchestras. The second is through some kind of deep-pocketed private sponsor. And, with the other two not a realistic option for ESO, the third option is the National Portfolio.
I’ve written about the disappointing results of the NPO process before here, and there has been huge discussion of what the complete withdrawal of funding for English National Opera means online and in the press. The huge (but partial) cuts to Welsh National Opera have been noted, but less widely discussed, and the total elimination of funding for the Britten Sinfonia seems to hardly have been on anyone’s radar.
But the impact on orchestras, opera companies and other performing arts groups everywhere of the NPO result is huge. It means that ESO, and groups like us, will have to work a lot harder for fewer resources, and that we’ll be dealing with ongoing uncertainty over funding for years to come. Alternate funding sources will get getting vastly more applications from organisations, including NPOs with funding reductions, than they ever have. It means less work for musicians, and less time to plan and deliver work. We’re lucky to have a grant in place which was awarded in the last week of October. It covers projects between December and April, which meant we had barely any time to contract venues, set up box offices, put events on sale and hire musicians. At the same time, we now have to apply for the next grant – the results of that application won’t be known until the current grant is just about over (it takes at least 12 weeks to get a decision). The stress of working under these circumstances is frankly hard to describe.
And this is happening with every orchestra in the country that doesn’t have a billionaire sugar daddy or a national broadcaster behind it. [UPDATE – And look what’s happened since this was published with national broadcasters]
The few new orchestras in the Portfolio seem to have been chosen not for their artistic ambitions and achievements (which is not to say that some don’t have very impressive ambitions and achievements), but for their social welfare impacts. The message to artists seems to be that artistic achievements are no longer really valued, except as part of a therapeutic service to community. We’re basically social workers who use noise as a tool. The intrinsic value of music, or other arts, is not being recognised.
So, what is the result of all of this. Many are talking about whether ENO will survive. Will other opera companies go under? Will venues go bust (venues actually did very well in the NPO process)?
What I would like to encourage people to think about is the impact of all of this on individual artists. There is a hurricane of anxiety, depression and despair ripping through the arts world, consuming performers, composers and administrators alike in its unsparing wake. We are in the midst of a huge epidemic of mental health challenges, as a whole sector is having to confront the excruciating question of whether or not society has any enduring use for what we do and what we love. The message artists and the people who support them have been getting in 2022 is clear – that we’re not valued and not needed. That venues are valued, but not the artists that bring them to life. That we’re somehow on the wrong side of history with our concerts and our youth workshops. I don’t have any solutions to offer my colleagues, brothers and sisters, but I want you to know you’re seen and heard, and that you’re not alone.
The wholesale destruction of music education in the US and UK only makes the picture bleaker – we’re not developing the audiences nor the performers of the future. Will this still be a profession in ten years? Five years? Without practitioners and without listeners, what hope do we have?
The whole situation seems almost totally hopeless, and for no good reason. When governments can shake a billion pounds from a magic money tree to buy/bribe a coalition partner to stay in power, funding the arts and arts education adequately, giving it a national platform on TV, and making it a meaningful part of the tapestry of our communities should be an easy, and cost-effective, win.
I don’t know the solution, but my suggestion is that a once-in-a-generation multi-party task force on the arts is urgently needed. Perhaps our new monarch can summon up a Royal Council on the Arts? With energy, leadership and goodwill, these are easily solved problems. What is causing so much despair among my colleagues everywhere is not that our problems can’t be easily solved, but that nobody seems to want to solve them.
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