There are few art forms with more colossal barriers to entry than classical music. Picture yourself finally plucking up the courage to go to your first classical concert. You arrive late, because at that gig last Saturday you had to sit through two ill-judged warm-up acts, an act of charity you’re not inclined to repeat; but here, even the slightest tardiness has you waiting outside until that gruelling pause, presumably marked in the programme, when the orchestra falls silent, the conductor slowly and disapprovingly turns to look at the doors, and you and a couple of other heathen shuffle in, mumbling about taxis and Bob Crow. What’s more, you go and clap after the andante, to the sneering delight of your more sonata form-savvy neighbours. And, before all this, you somehow have to find out the performance is actually taking place, which is difficult when hardly anyone’s tweeting about it.
Enter Charles Hazlewood, a conductor who has taken it upon himself to widen the reach of classical music beyond the refuge of the élite it has become. ‘My own love of music is very broad,’ he says, ‘and for me there are only two types of music: great music and bad music.’ (The former spans everything from Bach to The Prodigy, but he doesn’t elaborate on the latter.) So, in the spirit of taking great music to the masses, he’s leading two concerts at the Royal Festival Hall in February that will involve more than 300 young people from Southwark, as part of the Southbank Centre’s annual children’s festival. They’ll be joining forces with the Philharmonia Orchestra to perform Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition and Dvorák’s New World Symphony.
The choice of the latter sheds some light on Hazlewood’s motives, as it was composed as a response to Dvorák’s immigration to America. ‘London is the most multicultural city in the world,’ Hazlewood tells me, showering me with statistics (did you know that this year’s Olympics will be the first in which the native language of every competing nation is already spoken on the host city’s streets? I certainly didn’t); and part of his mission is to present classical music as a way of celebrating that multiculturalism, as opposed to the white, middle-class playground it can resemble to outsiders.
Of course, promoting classical music is one of those ideals we’ve come to accept unquestioningly; like the pious being told to spread the word, we nod along absently from the pews, content to let others do the actual converting legwork. Only when something particularly indigestible is said are we jolted to our senses; and, in this case, the jolt was a reference to classical music as a ‘birthright’. Can we really say it’s a birthright? A pinnacle of human creativity, very probably; a pleasant way to sandwich interval drinks, certainly; but a birthright?
A more persuasive argument is Hazlewood’s assertion that ‘everyone needs some Beethoven and Mozart in their lives — the world is a brighter place’. It’s a sentiment that’s even scientifically proven (though you have to be a bit selective with your evidence). ‘It’s illogical to assume that music only has traction or value if it was written in the last 20 years,’ he continues, likening such a stance to dismissing Michelangelo as a bit old-fashioned. But following this line of reasoning can lead to the unintended admission that classical music should be treated as a relic, a sure-fire way to have the newcomers running for their cars before the first downbeat.
For Hazlewood, though, the power of live music puts paid to the relic theory. Every time you play a Beethoven symphony, he says, ‘the ink should still be wet’. It’s not that he’s against iTunes, Spotify and other such digital wardrobes into worlds of music; in fact, he wholeheartedly supports them, as they and he share a common goal — the democratisation of music. But live music, he says, has a power over people that can’t be recreated by a couple of pieces of plastic nestled in your ears. ‘When you hear an orchestra live, you realise in that moment that these are red-blooded human beings, working together to create that music in that moment. And that’s unique.’
So the kinds of people he wants to entice into the concert hall are those with iPods that are already full but that skip from blues to dance when scrolling by genre. His is a challenge to Steven Pinker’s notion that ‘music could vanish from our species and the rest of our lifestyle would be virtually unchanged’. But perhaps he should embrace Pinker’s argument: because, by the same logic, you could delete every track from your iPod and be confident that you would soon find new songs and styles that you’d learn to love just as much. And perhaps classical music would be a good place to start.
Charles Hazlewood conducts the Philharmonia Orchestra and young musicians from Southwark at the Royal Festival Hall on 11 and 18 February as part of the Southbank Imagine children’s festival; Hazlewood’s Orchestra in a Field takes place at Glastonbury on 30 June and 1 July.
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