{"id":9729,"date":"2023-01-06T19:56:33","date_gmt":"2023-01-06T18:56:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/kennethwoods.net\/blog1\/?p=9729"},"modified":"2025-01-08T16:03:55","modified_gmt":"2025-01-08T15:03:55","slug":"goodbye-2022-the-year-music-was-made-redundant","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kennethwoods.net\/blog1\/2023\/01\/06\/goodbye-2022-the-year-music-was-made-redundant\/","title":{"rendered":"Goodbye 2022 \u2013 The Year Music Was Made Redundant"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Well, that didn\u2019t go to plan.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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 \u201921 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s savings? Was it the rising interest rates driving up listeners\u2019 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\u00a0 pass\u00e9?<\/p>\n

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\u2019t coming back to the arts, or had folded altogether.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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, \u201corchestra managers\u201d 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019t perfect, and grants to individual freelancers left a lot of deserving musicians completely out in the cold, that support kept us going.<\/p>\n

But in 2022, the message was clear \u2013 you\u2019re on your own<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

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 \u2018decolonisers\u2019. 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n