Below is the text of an article published in Classical Music Magazine in November 2009. Today, I received an email back from a music publisher after enquiring about hire costs of Schoenberg's Chamber Symphony no 1 Opus 9 and Webern's 6 Stucke Opus 6 - the Schoenberg would be £176 for one performance or £264 for two. The Webern £150 / £225. So to put on two concerts will cost £489 in hire costs. (This is normal and I am not singling out this specific publisher)
We'll be lucky if we get 30 people in the audience to either concert - even if they pay £10 each we can't afford it - we'd still be £190 in the red. And that's before hall hire, publicity, etc. etc.
And paying the musicians - it's another of those 'please can you donate your lifetime's experience, expertise, talent and goodwill again for free'.
This music is 100 years old!
And these 2 pieces are only half a programmes worth.
Richard Gonski gives encouragement to amateur orchestras wishing to perform 20th century music, and outlines some of the difficulties in getting it onto the concert stage. In particular, he argues that music publishers should reassess the price of hiring music still in copyright to amateur orchestras – thereby encouraging the exploration of this repertoire at grassroots level.
Ten years ago, much of this article would have been devoted to convincing both our professional music making bodies and their audiences that they should put aside their pre-conceptions and give new music a chance. Happily, times have changed, and more and more 20th century and contemporary repertoire is being performed by our major orchestras and ensembles. The major colleges of music are doing their bit too – a new generation of young musicians, exposed from an early age to modern technology and the weird and wonderful sounds that it can produce, are now much more open-minded and ready to embrace the various musical idioms that have emerged over the past hundred or so years.
It is interesting then, that by and large, the hundreds of amateur and non-professional orchestras and ensembles in the UK have not followed suit. There are of course exceptions, and organisations such as PRS Foundation for New Music (www.prsfoundation.co.uk) and COMA (www.coma.org) do amazing and wonderful work, the former providing new commissions and various schemes for promoting new music, the latter commissioning composers to write music specifically for amateurs. However, a quick Google of ‘Amateur Symphony Orchestra UK’ shows how few amateur orchestras are actually performing music composed after about 1900.
Amateur music making is the bedrock of musical life in the UK. There are hundreds if not thousands of choirs, orchestras and ensembles dotted around the country. The vast majority of professional musicians began their careers in a local youth or amateur orchestra and for many audience members, the performances by these groups offer a rare opportunity to attend a live concert – not everyone lives in Birmingham or London. In the southwest, where I live, there are four excellent non-professional orchestras in the 50 mile stretch between Exeter and Plymouth. It makes sense then, to prepare the ground at this level and to promote and encourage the performance of 20th century and contemporary repertoire.
One way of doing this is to commission works that are suited to the technical abilities of amateur ensembles. I am not at all critical of this, as it has proved to be an invaluable and effective way of introducing amateurs to a range of recent musical languages and styles. However, my own approach, primarily as Music Director of the Torbay Symphony Orchestra, has been to gradually introduce the orchestra’s musicians and audiences to mainstream 20th Century and contemporary music, despite its perceived technical difficulties. I chose this path partly because I wanted to perform this repertoire, and partly because I believe that its wider dissemination is crucial to the future of classical music as an art form.
Over the past few years we have performed music by Schönberg, Webern, Bartok, Shostakovich, Berio, Ligeti, Feldman, Lutoslawski, Scelsi, Penderecki, Ohana and Bryars, to name but a few. We have also commissioned a number of works, most recently from Sam Richards and Ruth Wiesenfeld.
Initially, it was not an easy ride. Although some of the musicians (and audience members) were open to the experience right from the start, there were many who were not. Musicians and audiences do not generally like being pulled out of their comfort zone. There is also a widespread belief that programming contemporary music will drive away audiences. Our own experience with the TSO is that most audience members are prepared to listen with open ears and mind, providing the programme contains conventional repertoire as well. We have lost some, but we have gained some too. These tend to be mostly younger people (perhaps the concertgoers of the future) who often come to our concerts specifically to hear the post-1900 repertoire.
In my experience, overcoming these ingrained perceptions is the biggest obstacle facing a music director determined to introduce modern repertoire. It takes a mixture of sustained commitment and enthusiasm without which it simply won’t happen. However, once that commitment is there, one can begin to address the many other issues that inevitably arise.
Compared to previous eras, the music of the 20th century is unique in its stylistic diversity. The main difficulty therefore is one of language, or perhaps languages. Apart from the minimalists, most other ‘schools’ do not reference the tonal system we all feel at ease with, making getting the notes right much harder. They jump about to unexpected places or use scales, modes and systems that most musicians are unfamiliar with. The rhythmic patterns are often replete with complex time signatures, note groupings and sub-divisions. New instrumental techniques require hours of practice for a perceived minimal return. Improvisation, free or partly structured, is another difficult area for classically trained musicians who have always relied on the prescriptive framework of notated music. In short, mastering modern repertoire requires a willingness to ‘go back to basics’.
It’s worth making the effort. As with learning any new language, the first part is the hardest – get past that, and the learning curve begins to ease. Very quickly the rewards begin to manifest themselves.
Having gone through this process, TSO musicians are ready to tackle most pieces put before them. It still takes a lot of work and rehearsal, but so does preparing a symphony written in the 18th or 19th century. ‘Mozart is harder than Schönberg’ makes a serious point. I rarely perform Mozart with the TSO because Mozart demands a degree of refinement which is extremely hard to achieve, whereas the energy and exuberance of Schönberg (while still refined, of course) allows the music a certain leeway (of intonation, phrasing and so on) that the Mozart doesn’t.
The benefits of tackling modern repertoire are huge. There is a multitude of wonderful, exciting and beautiful music waiting to be discovered and experienced. Performances of Lutoslawski’s ‘Livre Pour Orchestre’ left our musicians buzzing for weeks, as did a performance of Scelsi’s ‘Quattro Pezzi’. Overcoming the technical demands of contemporary music also influences the way conventional repertoire is played – performances are tighter, the quality of listening is significantly better and the ability to focus, often a problem with non-professionals, becomes much less of an issue.
The elephant in the room is the cost. Most amateur and non-professional groups work on extremely limited budgets. Their income stems from member subscriptions, ticket sales and possibly the odd grant. Performing conventional repertoire is mostly low cost – the music is available in public libraries and the instrumental forces usually fit into the double woodwind/brass/timpani and strings format. Finding the odd extra player or two is not normally a big problem when the music demands it.
Contemporary music is wholly different. Often, the instrumentation is diverse – harps and celestas, exotic and extensive percussion, bass clarinets and alto flutes appear with alarming regularity. You therefore have to budget for instrument hire, transportation and often to pay professional musicians who have the required instruments and the skills to play them. Orchestral committees do not normally welcome this raid on their limited resources. Time once again for the Music Director to employ his or her powers of persuasion.
Then you inform them that because the music is still in copyright, the cost of music hire runs to many hundreds of pounds. Silence ensues…
The charges levied by publishers for the hire of copyright music are therefore a significant obstacle to the wider dissemination and performance of this repertoire by non-professional groups. For example – the TSO wanted to perform a programme in June next year including Stravinsky’s Firebird Suite and Lutoslawski’s ‘Mi Parti’. The bill would be nearly £1000 for 3 months hire and two public performances. Of this, the Stravinsky, now a hundred years old, costs £600 and the Lutoslawski (15 minutes long) £318. Hiring a Beethoven symphony would cost £15. Sadly, the Stravinsky has to go…
Publishers have a formula for pricing based on instrumentation, duration, length of hire and number of performances. There are discounts for multiple performances and hire periods of more than a month. There is also a modest discount for non-professional groups. It all sounds reasonable until you see the bottom line which sadly bears no resemblance to the reality of how amateur groups operate or the budgets at their disposal.
The more you look at it, the more irrational it becomes. A professional orchestra will put together a contemporary piece in a few rehearsals – an amateur group, meeting once a week, will probably need ten or twelve rehearsals spread over two or three months.
Most amateur groups perform to audiences of a few hundred who pay on average between £8 and £10 a ticket. Many will have much lower ticket prices, and most offer concessions to young people and pensioners. A few minutes with a spreadsheet shows that after paying for rehearsal space, publicity, essential administrative costs and all the extras detailed above, spending 25% or more of your income on music hire is a non-starter.
I have a lot of sympathy with the publisher’s predicament – in a fast changing world they are in a difficult position, and it is no surprise that they must maximise profits. Part of the problem, too, is that there is no industry standard and each publisher has its own rates. However, seeing as they are potentially facing the kind of meltdown experienced by the rest of the music industry over the past few years, it would be beneficial to all concerned, if some alternative models could be found.
Despite the difficulties, the regular performance of contemporary music is absolutely essential to the survival of classical music. Music is a living thing, and although we revere the works of Bach, Mozart and Beethoven, their music is by definition rooted in the past. The music of our time reflects the society and the world we live in now, and that in itself is reason enough to make every effort to ensure that it gets heard.
Richard Gonski is Music Director of the Torbay Symphony Orchestra, the Exeter University Symphony Orchestra, a composer of electroacoustic music, a founding member of Totnes Music Now! and a Director of Thinking Arts and Digital Music Archives
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