Why bother with the new in classical music?

Manchester Collective. Photo: Gaëlle Beri

Words notoriously fail us when we talk about the power of music. They take us to the shoreline but never into the sea. But here we are: sometimes we must try to say what we mean. More about that in a moment…

I was in my late-20s when I trained as an orchestral musician. I’d just lost mum to cancer and I was nurturing two very young kids. In an intense period of grief and early parenthood when life and death pressed in, music was the thing that cut through. It said what I couldn’t otherwise articulate. If you’d asked me then what I thought was the most precious, mysterious thing about human beings, I would have said it was just this – the incredible way we can craft and communicate through vibrations in air. Mind-blowing.

Once in the classical music industry however, things were different. Instead of music-making as a vital, uniting force, it was oddly alienating. There was widespread complacency and assumption. Exclusion. Criticism and inhibition. Lack of risk and imagination. Sheer boredom, even. Don’t get me wrong: it wasn’t everywhere, but there was too much of it. There still is.

Classical music is an art form I love. To me it’s amazing that you can find little riffs, grooves, snippets of song, that may be two, three, four hundred years old but still resonate, still get you dancing, dreaming. It’s something primal and spiritual at the same time. But I also believe that music is something organic. And if you are a musician, engaged in the world, how can you not be curious about where you might go next?

Outside of cultural echo chambers, where are the points of connection?

Let us not forget that artists serve a function in society. They are a mirror to our health; their work reflects and rebalances. Our contemporary society is in a watershed and classical musicians are a part of that, not separate from it: we must stay with its heartbeat. Outside of cultural echo chambers, where are the points of connection? If you put a hip-hop artist and a string quartet in a room together, how do they move towards a shared experience? When classical, folk and electronic musicians really listen to each other’s language, what new colours, textures, techniques are uncovered that can help us understand each other and enrich this generation, and the next, and the next…?

Inhabiting this beautiful alchemy is what I mean by the new: that sweet spot just beyond the boundary of what we already know. This is how art forms evolve.

So back to words. In 2007 the collected letters of the poet Ted Hughes were published. I read them as a performing musician in rehearsal breaks and lonely hotel rooms and there was one, which he wrote to his son Nicholas, which really got me. I copied it out and still keep it in my wallet. In it he describes our innermost emotional self as the ‘child behind the armour’. Passionately, he tells his boy that this vulnerable creature is our humanity, the carrier of all the living qualities, ‘the centre of all possible magic and revelation’. When we lose touch with it, when we stop listening, exploring, growing, challenging, we become one of the walking dead. As Hughes says, ‘the only calibration that counts is how much heart people invest, how much they ignore their fears of being hurt or caught out or humiliated’.

Having the courage to go beyond the known and familiar, being open to the new, is how we keep that flash of real life running through us, how we keep the child behind the armour breathing, playing, singing. It’s how we can hold on to the true power of music. And that, in my view, is something worth bothering with.

Linda Begbie is Development Director of Manchester Collective. Find out more about our new music commissioning scheme.