Tim Rutherford-Johnson

Richard,

I didn't attend your ABO lecture, so I'm relying to a great extent on second-hand reporting of what you said there. I apologise in advance if I've missed something crucial.

I agree absolutely that middle class voices lobbying for middle class entertainments is not the best use of taxpayer money.

However, I'm not sure that I follow the argument you make here. Your post seems to slip too easily from a (relatively controversial) suggestion - cutting orchestral funding - to a (relatively uncontroversial) one - expanding music education. The figures from the five conservatoires you list are indeed shocking, but it's not clear to me why orchestras should be the ones held accountable for the failure of these institutions to reach less affluent students. Orchestras, and attendance at their concerts, are the end product of a musical education, not the starting point. Enrolling at the RAM is also quite a late stage in that process. If there are systemic, class-based flaws within the way that classical music is accessed, then those flaws lie much earlier in the process: in the diminishing provisions for music tuition in primary and secondary education. Without proper funding here, classical music is doomed to be the preserve of the affluent. Orchestras already know this and are hamstrung by it, but further punishing them with cuts to their funding doesn't sound like the appropriate solution to this problem.

Tim

Peter Newman

I wasn't at the debates you mentioned, so I don't know what was discussed in detail.

I'd like to add two criticisms if I may. Firstly the issue of ticket price, which is (I believe) the plain-English for the issue of "Access".

I believe the broadly understood situation is that people with lower disposable income tend not to spend their scarce funds on expensive single-event sensory experiences. For the price of one ticket to see an orchestra you can get a comprehensive Sky TV package for a month, for example.

Rather than trying to sound like social engineering politicians, I believe that the people responsible for the orchestras shouldn't feel compelled to wave the "access" banner. Clearly this is an argument that has worked for them before, and I can understand why they would stick to this position under the circumstances. I find this position disingenuous and pandering to the socialist attitude which seems (to an outsider like me) to govern this process.

On the other hand I find your argument or assertion that as people who attend these events tend to have tertiary education that the leisure (and study) activity of listening to orchestras does not deserve to attract public funding. My second criticism is with this line of thinking. Why shouldn't "middle class" people, who after all contribute the most taxation, benefit from some of that being spent on their interests, if indeed audiences are "middle class" (however you measure that).

Let's face the facts. Orchestras are expensive to fund because they are organisations of excellence, with expert performers, who require a lot of investment of time and funds to maintain that excellence, and for which there is a relatively small group of direct consumers (i.e. the people who buy tickets and go and listen to a performance).

If there isn't taxation-sourced subsidy available then to keep the cost of tickets at the same level other funding would be required, be it from corporate, local government, charitable, lottery or private donors. Or the price of tickets will have to go up. Or orchestras will have to perform more often. Or sell more records, t-shirts, branded memorabilia, etc. to make up the difference.

As a rational consumer and citizen I can make my own mind up on how I spend my leisure time and (little) disposable income. If tickets are a bit cheaper and the prospect of an evening listening to music a bit more exciting, then it is reasonable to expect that I am more likely to spend my money on going to a concert. I suspect most other people in this country, who have at least a passing interest in classical music and who live near urban centres where orchestra usually exist.

As more people have now reached tertiary levels of education that may be too broad a measure to have any real meaning.

Again there is nothing wrong with "middle class" people benefiting from a bit of tax subsidy.

The real shock from the figures you quote is that it is clear that there is not enough "opportunity" (plain English = "funding") of quality music education as part of the free (i.e. completely Government subsidised) schooling system, which most students from "middle class" backgrounds still attend. At my daughters primary school there is a good choice of musical instrument lessons available, but at extra cost to parents and that take the children out of other lessons. Patterns of attitude and behaviour toward learning instruments is therefore set early on - you have to give up something else to participate. This is a shame.

If subsidy broadens the appeal because some more people consider the cheaper ticket cost a better bang for their entertainment buck, or just makes it more affordable for existing fans, so more people are exposed to civilising and excellent quality entertainment that enriches their lives and uplifts their spirits, then that is a good thing.

The world would be a much, much poorer and less civilised place without excellent classical orchestras. Even if people just listen to them on Classic FM. Which is what I do.

Simon Woods

Richard, my big problem with your whole argument, and the reason I described it as “facile and poorly thought through” (which I hold to) is that I think you have it entirely backwards. Since the 1980s British orchestras have led the way in developing access and education programmes which reach deeply into communities. No other country on earth does this as well as our sector here does. Tim, above, is absolutely right that we struggle against a music education system in the UK which does not deliver access across the social spectrum to anything like the degree that is necessary. What British orchestras do so effectively is work very hard to supplement current levels of school music, and to take music into communities, rural and urban, which are not served by traditional provision. Orchestras across the UK have increasingly brought these kind of social programmes into the absolute core of their thinking and strategy, and they are only able to do that because of subsidy. The only entitlement mentality we should be talking about here is the entitlement of everybody in society to have access to the inspiration of great music – and in that respect orchestras are part of the solution not part of the problem.

There’s another point. One of the other themes of the ABO conference this year was that audiences for classical music across the UK are buoyant, and in many areas growing. This is in stark contrast to the US (a funding model based almost entirely on private support) where classical music appears to be losing audiences at an alarming rate. Why is that? We can hypothesise until the cows come home, but one reason we can certainly agree on is ticket prices. Ticket prices in the UK are low enough that going to a concert can be no more expensive than going to the cinema, and is often a lot less expensive than going to a football match or a rock concert. If you want to restrict social access to classical music, the very best way you could do that is by reducing subsidy. Orchestras, like so many forms of organised cultural experience, are expensive endeavours, requiring many people to be on stage, all of whom deserve to make a living wage. The ticket price that we believe is reasonable to ask people to pay will never cover more than a small proportion of the cost of putting on the event. If what you want is the UK no longer being a world leader in the quality of its performing arts, the restriction of access to the performing arts being limited to a middle class minority, and a curtailment of music’s inherently democratic ability to speak across social boundaries, then your recipe would be a great one. I don’t think you want that, and I don’t think most people in the UK – whatever their social background – want it either.

James Murphy

Hi Richard,

Of course we’ve been tweeting with you since the ABO conference but I thought I’d expand my thoughts beyond 140 characters.

I enjoyed your feisty provocation at the ABO conference. As a sector, we should be ready for such invective, and have the confidence and conviction in our craft to justify why orchestras truly matter and what they give to the national ecology as a whole.

As I listened to your sizzling tirade, I reflected on who else this year has left me more enlivened, and I’m sorry to report that it was your nemesis Bartók, namely his cosmically dazzling Concerto for Orchestra performed by the National Youth Orchestra to a packed Liverpool Philharmonic Hall in January. I’m sorry you weren’t there to experience it but for the 165 teenagers onstage and a further 200 teenagers in the audience it was an incomparably, indelibly rousing experience (I have quotes from a handful of them articulating this, if their deafening cheers and standing ovation at the end weren’t enough to prove it).

Let’s set aside for a moment the fact that Bartók played by young people with passion is far more exciting and three-dimensional than Avatar. What matters is that we had enticed 200 teenagers with £5 tickets who wouldn’t otherwise have the means to take the best seats in the concert hall: a new venture that on this occasion we entirely subsidised ourselves. Wherever the NYO now goes, we aim to meet, connect with and inspire young people locally. Experiencing the pure dedication, passion, energy, leadership and teamwork of their peers has the power to change the lives of a young audience and give them a renewed and uplifting sense of what they can accomplish themselves, as musicians or frankly in any pursuit.

You’ve missed our Bartók this year but I warmly invite you to join us in Birmingham this summer where we are spending two weeks meeting young people from across the West Midlands, giving those with some instrumental ability a chance to perform alongside the NYO, and many others their first taste of the stirring, motivating force of orchestral music. We'll also be hitting the streets of Birmingham and helping to awaken the inner rhythm and musical instinct that exists in literally everyone.

You care deeply for the young people of Britain, which is great. I invite you to see that giving them aspirational entities like the NYO (and the professional orchestras which they in turn aspire to) could perhaps just be an essential component in helping liberate more of them from disadvantaged backgrounds. Among our ranks right now are young people from such backgrounds for whom orchestral music has been a salvation. We are constantly working to find more young people like this.

On this note, let me delve into stats and dispel the inaccuracy that ‘the National Youth Orchestra relies increasingly on pupils from private schools’. At almost 600 auditions in 2009, 43% of our applicants were from state schools and only 35% from private schools (and 86% of the latter are only there with financial support of scholarships and bursaries). The remainder of our applicants were from government-supported specialist music schools and likewise 75% of these only there because their fees are paid by scholarship and bursary.

I don’t think you would have come to the ABO conference if you were simply out to slate the sector. I think you want to be told of its relevance, I think you want to be shown its power. I think you’re simply encouraging us to make a more luminous case for this curious property that we’re all clearly entranced by. I therefore urge colleagues across the orchestral sector to follow Mark Pemberton’s lead and share with you more of the transformative and vital properties of our work.

You’ll see, my friend, it matters.

Bartók rocks.

James Murphy
Director of Communications
National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain

Jo Johnson

I'm going to concentrate on one particular part of the article, which is the assertion orchestras are "taking taxpayers’ money to pay middle class people to perform to middle class audiences".

Point no 1 - about paying middle class people to perform. I wholeheartedly agree with Tim (comment no 1) about why music students in music colleges are the make-up that they are. The government took music off the curriculum in the 80s/90s, so therefore the only children that learnt instruments after this time came from families who could afford the money for lessons. It doesn't take a genius to work out the net result in 2010.

Point no 2 - middle class audiences enjoying music funded by the taxpayer. I think I'm middle class (although I've never actually been informed how this is qualified - is there a test you take?!). I pay taxes for all sorts of things, quite a lot of which I will never have the benefit of (and some I never hope to). But that doesn't mean that I shouldn't pay for them, it's part of being a civilised country. Arts fall into this category. Anyone who doubts the value of music simply needs to go on the next visit to a hospital with a musician and see the reaction of the patients when they hear the music. Music is vital.

I hate football, does that mean that the BBC shouldn't use my licence fee to buy the rights to the Premiership? No! And damn it, why can't the middle classes enjoy things too! OK, now I'm sounding a little bit Daily Mail...

As Simon said (comment no 3), orchestras are not the problem here, they are trying very hard to be the solution. It would take all day to list all the fabulous work that goes on by orchestras all over the UK taking music out to communities that don't/can't have access to them in their traditional setting, most of the time at absolutely no cost to the participant. The age range they cover is literally 0-100. They are trying to make the taxpayers' money work by taking the art back to them, even if they will never see the orchestra in the concert hall.

To punish orchestras by cutting their government funding just seems perverse. I can't help but feel that the problem was caused way down the line, and that since then orchestras have tried very hard to recitfy it, even though it wasn't their fault. The results of this work may not yet have come to fruition - the first orchestra education programme was only 20-ish years ago, and those participants will not yet be in their 40s. Maybe if we give it time the 'damage' will be corrected on its own.

(in the interests of clarity, I work for a UK orchestra, but these views are my own.)

Gareth Clark

Given that Demos and many other think tanks get a large percentage of their funding from the taxpayer (albeit indirectly via government departments) isn't this just an aggessive play by you for the same money?

The think-tank sector has developed an entitlement culture - understandably given their past successes - and has weak arguments for financial support from the taxpayer.....

......but the think-tank industry is in danger of becoming an echo-chamber, taking taxpayers’ money to pay middle class people to talk to middle class audiences – and branding anybody who questions this settlement a philistine. And that, I’m afraid, just won’t do. Will it?

Jo Johnson

I was about to come back to say I'd just looked at Demos's list of funders, which includes Arts Council England - the very same funder which provides large percentages of orchestras' funding from the taxpayers' purse. But Gareth beat me to it, and much more wittily at that!

Sarah Gee

A couple of comments: I agree that the issues are far more systemic than can be tackled completely by the orchestral sector, but they are trying damned hard! And what's more, they are working extremely closely with other initiatives, such as Sistema Scotland and Sing Up in England, to ensure that resources are spent as efficiently as possible, and that participation in music is available to all young people at the earliest possible age. That's the only way we'll change the figures you cite above (which, by the way, are only estimates, according to the source website)

Oh, and although I now work as a consultant, I used to work for the CBSO and the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields, and I trained at the RSAMD.

And I got free school meals.

Mark Pemberton

Great to see so many responses here. And interesting to see a developing theme around Richard's assertion that orchestras are "taking taxpayers’ money to pay middle class people to perform to middle class audiences". A case, at the risk of using a laboured pun, of any ABO member which receives subsidy (and many do not) being accused of being an Orchestra of the Age of Entitlement.

There is a fascinating table at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8417205.stm which shows that the top 1% of earners provide 24% of income tax revenues, while the top 10% provide more than half. The bottom 10% of earners provide just 0.6% of the tax intake.

And, of course, those top earners, and the companies they work for, will also be the major source of private support. One could therefore argue they are paying twice over.

I understand of course the powerful arguments around redistribution of wealth, and the need to target precious resources on the poor. But it does raise the question quite why those who pay most into the tax pot should be lambasted for a minute proportion of their contribution to the Exchequer going on funding our orchestras.

After all, Arts Council England is arguing that the arts budget is tiny, costing just 17p a week per person - less than half the price of a pint of milk. Just 4% of ACE regular funding goes on orchestras (excluding the opera and ballet companies), which by my calculation equates to less than 1p per week per person. So what's the big deal? Why pick on us?!

Andrew Naylor

Can we stop the state subsidization of policing football matches? I'd be interested to see a comparison of the public money spent on policing this form of mass 'entertainment' with the subsidies orchestras receive. Incidentally I have been to classical music performances described by the press as 'a riot' but thankfully I haven't yet witnessed the audience fighting and urinating in the street on the way home.