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Sydney Symphony
Anniversary Stuart Challender Lecture
Norman Lebrecht
Monday 27 August 2007
75th
Thank you very much. Thank you, Libby. Good evening, Lord Mayor, ladies and gentlemen.
It’s a great honour and a privilege to be asked to give the Stuart Challender memorial lecture.
Stuart was a man who applied his talent to a very clear sense of purpose in the service of his
city and his culture and his country. He was not, like some others, one of those who
hightailed it out of here on the first offer of a foreign dollar. He knew what was needed in
Australia. He knew that he had to invest heavily in Australian culture and that is what he
applied his life to. And the results of that application are still felt today in the orchestra and in
the society. Stuart Challender is a role model for Australian artists of today and, indeed, of
the future. And we honour his memory.
It would be remiss of me also not to mention another young person who sadly lost her life in
the past few days and for whom a memorial performance is being given concurrently this
evening. And that’s Tanya Liedtke who was about to have become chief choreographer for
the Sydney Dance Company and, again, another young person with a very clear and strong
sense of purpose. Prepared to give her all for a dance company. A life sadly, tragically and
unnecessarily cut short.
The state of the arts in the twenty first century. Let me briefly run through my credentials for
discussing this topic or, indeed, presenting it to you. I’ve been writing about music for half
my life, which is almost thirty years. Somebody described me as ancient and embittered in
one of your newspapers. Ancient? I’m ten years younger than your prime minister and he’s
still running. And what do I have to be embittered about? I’ve been able to spend my whole
life within the arts, doing the things that stimulate me, writing about them, making a living out
of them, writing novels and winning awards. Bitter? What’s bitter?
I’ve been writing about music for thirty years. For the past five years I’ve been assistant
editor of the Evening Standard in London. That’s assistant editor of the paper and not of the
arts. The Evening Standard has a higher impact at box office than any other national
newspaper in the United Kingdom. So I’ve gained an overview of the arts as a whole and of
the state of classical music and of opera within them. And I shall be discussing some of
those inclusions here this evening.
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I’m also a novelist and therefore part of the creative process. And I suppose I’ve earned
myself a reputation as somebody who tells it as it is. So those of you who came here hoping
to hear the good news bible, you may be disappointed. Those of you, on the other hand,
who have a bi-polar condition or depressive disposition, you might like to pop your lithium
and your Prozac now because the first half of this talk is not going to be very happy listening.
I will pause while you pop.
What is the state of the arts in the twenty first century? In a word, critical. We are, it’s often
said that the information revolution is the biggest thing that has happened to humanity since
the industrial revolution two hundred and fifty years ago. I would say that for the arts, it’s
bigger than that. It’s the biggest thing that’s happened since Guttenberg invented printing,
and you remember what that did to the calligraphers? That’s what we are facing. We are
facing the challenge of a complete new world of technology which, if we’re not prepared to
grasp it, threatens us with marginalisation and possibly even extinction that faced those poor
monks and their beautifully coloured curlicues. As far as classical music and opera is
concerned, the threats are very specific. Let me give you a categoric statement: since the
turn of the century, the five economic pillars of classical music and opera have been either
destabilised or destroyed. The crisis is very real and it’s upon us and it’s here and now.
Those five pillars, the means of income, the income flow for classical performance, for live
performance, are these: public funding; private and corporate funding; attendance and box
office; touring and recording.
Let me tell you what’s happened to them. Public funding across the western world is either
in decline or is being divested to other and greater social concerns. Governments have got
their tables so full with problems of education and of health and of pensions, that the
pressure on the tiny amounts of money that goes to the arts has become intense and
increasingly governments across Europe (there is no public funding to speak of in the United
States), governments across Europe are slicing off bits of arts funding and putting it out into
these other areas of social concern. Where they’re not doing so, there is an even greater
danger to the arts. Increasingly public subsidy comes with strings attached, with conditions.
We want you to fulfil this, that and the other in society if you’re going to receive this money.
We want you to cover for our failures in health and education and integration. And, unless
you can do that, we’re going to have to think very carefully if we’re going to give you subsidy
next year. There is a whole list of boxes that you have to tick now before the government will
give you any money. And some organisations are beginning to ask themselves very
seriously, is it worth the candle? Should we actually continue to receive government money
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when it comes hedged with so many things that we don’t want to do and that we’re possibly
not very good at doing. We are performing arts organisations, we’re not pedagogues, we’re
not social workers, we’re not criminologists, we’re not social engineers. Why should we be
asked to do these things unless we want to do them ourselves of our own volition in creating
the kind of society that we want? So these are the threats to public subsidy.
Private and corporate sponsorship has turned extremely volatile. There are more
millionaires, and indeed billionaires in the world today than there have ever been before.
There is probably a greater part of the world’s wealth in fewer hands than there has ever
been before. And it is disposable wealth, people are inclined to give it away either shortly
before they die or shortly after. But it is not, it’s not stable and we’ve seen some huge
examples of private donations that have simply crashed to earth. The greatest of these was
the case of Alberto Vilar, a Cuban American who pledged more than three hundred million
dollars to the arts and seemed to be intent on revolutionising the way that private money was
given to the arts. He got into difficulties; he’s now facing criminal charges. Out of that three
hundred million dollars, I think only about a quarter was actually given. And it created, his fall
created a great disillusionment with the idea of these great promises. Another was a man
called Axelrod who donated a large amount of supposedly valuable instruments to the New
Jersey Symphony Orchestra. I think he’s recently been let out of jail and many of the
instruments are up for sale.
Then there’s corporate scandal. We have been pursuing, we in the arts have been pursuing
corporate money but what happens when we accept money from a firm which turns out to be
Enron? What does that do to our future planning when that money dries up over night? We
have committed in the arts four, five years ahead expecting that the money is going to come
from Enron. Suddenly Enron is no longer. And it needed necessarily be an Enron. It might
even be tomorrow morning’s headlines; suddenly your main sponsor is being accused of
polluting half the Antarctic. Do you want to take money from that company any more? Do
you want to be associated with that? You are an arts company; you are out of all of that.
You are above all of that. So the whole question of corporate funding has now got, is now
hedged by doubt and fear and anxiety. Yes, of course there are occasional large donations.
There was a lady who gave thirty million dollars to the San Francisco Opera, uh.. fifty million
dollars. There was another who gave thirty million to the Met. But we have to look upon
these as windfalls, as occasional comets that drop out of the heaven. We can’t actually
include them in our planning for a future in the arts.
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Public funding, corporate funding, the third factor, attendance and box office. We used to be
able to rely on a steady part of society that was going to turn up to our performances. 9/11
changed all that. Suddenly people were frightened about going out and congregating with
others in a central place at night. 9/11 caused havoc across the American performing arts.
Box office just died. Seventh of July, 2005 did the same in London. And those ripples
spread outwards psychologically. If you asked among yourselves and indeed your fellow
members of the audience every time there has been a major incident, people think twice and
three times before going out to a concert, before going to the opera, before going to the
ballet, before going to the theatre. We’re living in very nervous times and we’re affected by
them in the arts.
Another pillar of orchestral funding was touring, especially in the northern hemisphere.
Touring is important for orchestras. It gets them out, it gets them away from home. It’s a
bonding exercise within the orchestra and it enables them to play in other halls and hear how
they sound in different environments. It’s important to get a rave review in another city, in
another country. That’s good for morale. It’s also, it also made very good financial sense.
People payed a lot of money. Companies, corporate sponsors paid a lot of money to tour
orchestras as their flag bearers to other countries. 9/11 almost put a stop to that. There was
a ‘can’t go, won’t go’ mentality among musicians, which was perfectly understandable. Why
do you want to put yourself at any risk from travelling at this particular moment in time and
that’s destabilised the whole of orchestral touring to the point where it’s now been taken over
by cheap orchestras from Eastern Europe and touring is no longer an economic factor in the
life of orchestras.
Finally, and crucially - I’m not hearing any sobbing or weeping but I expect I will - classical
recording has gone fut. It’s over. A simple statistic will tell you all. Ten years ago there were
six major labels producing seven hundred new classical releases a year. Today there are
only three major labels left, one of them has been dormant for a year and has just been
revived but could be instantly switched off, and another has been sold to equity asset
strippers, in plain English. Its future, and indeed the future of its classical side, is very much
in doubt. Seven hundred new releases ten years ago are down to fewer than a hundred new
releases today. And of those hundred new releases, fewer than half are classical. The rest
are made up of crossover and young people with teeth and no talent.
The regular stream of classical recording that sustained orchestras and sustained public
interest in what orchestras did is over. It’s diminished to a trickle and it’s not going to last
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much longer. What are the effects of this collapse? For orchestras, absolute disaster.
Absolute disaster. For those who made records regularly, it’s a complete loss of brand
recognition. Ten years ago the Concertgebouw of Amsterdam was a famous orchestra, a
major orchestra. It still is a very good orchestra but you don’t hear of it any more because it’s
not making two records a month. The four London, London has four independent self-owned
symphony orchestras. They preserve their identity through being associated with different
labels. And the public knew that the London Philharmonic was perhaps on EMI and the
Philharmonia was on Deutsche Gramophone and that fostered a distinction between them.
Now that they don’t make records any more, who’s to tell the difference between them? And
if you can’t tell the difference between them, why do you still need four? So there is an
actual existential threat to these orchestras from the loss of recording.
For young artists the situation is quite simply tragic. We have a huge flow of new talent
coming on stream, there is more young talent, when I say young, in classical music – well for
conductors young is normally sixty. When I say young I mean thirty. We have more young
conductors today of real talent, of real merit, than I have ever seen in my career. You won't
have heard of half the names because they don’t make records any more. There are some
astonishing young singers, young pianists, young violinists, they can't get started. Because
there is no, there is no record opportunity for them any more. A record was a calling card, it
was an arbiter of quality, if you had your name and your work on a label then it went around
the world and you were getting invitations form Buenos Aires and from Sydney and from
Tokyo and from Osaka. The record was what made your career. Without it how do young
artists ever get started.
There's a girl in London, her name’s Ruth Palmer. She was the best violist at the Royal
Academy of Music, she was absolutely outstanding. Then she went to Vienna for a year,
then she came back to the Royal Academy to finish off. She’d been promised a solo career
but she was twenty five years old, that’s too old for any agent to look at. Because they want
them young and toothy at eighteen. And there was no possibility for her to make a record.
So she somehow by tremendous initiative and gumption, she raised thirty thousand pounds
so that she could record the work that mattered most to her, which was the first
Shostakovich concerto with the Philharmonia Orchestra. And she got some coverage for it as
a result, and she now has the beginnings of a career, and by the beginnings I mean a dozen
dates, nothing more. But she had to go and find that thirty thousand pounds in order that she
could sponsor her own recording. And somehow or other get it out there on her own website.
Because otherwise there is no career at all. That is what young artists are facing today with
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the collapse of recording it is an absolute black hole and nobody has yet worked out how we
are going to surmount it.
The loss of recordings has also meant loss of media space. The record companies used to
employ large publicity departments, they are not there anymore therefore they are not getting
media space, therefore the whole space for classical music is shrinking within the media.
And the consequent lack of media attention has also meant a decline in attendance of live
performance. So it’s a vicious cycle, it goes round and round and round and round. And we
seem to be swirling into decline. How are people within classical music and opera dealing
with these threats? What has the response been? The response has mostly been to do
more of the same. Carry on doing what you’ve always done and it will come right dear.
That’s not much of a solution. For orchestras that are no longer asked and paid to make
records. When I say paid to make records, recording used to bring in between a quarter and
a third of the revenue of some orchestras. For players in the Berlin Philharmonic it was half
of their income. When recording collapsed, Simon Rattle had to go to the government and
beg them to put in the extra money that would make up the players’ salaries otherwise Berlin
would lose its best players and they'd go somewhere else. Somewhere perhaps more
convenient, more comfortable to live. That's what recording meant. So now many orchestras
say, well we will make our own records. We’ll put them out there to the public, we have
London Symphony Orchestra does LSO Live, Sydney Symphony Orchestra is starting to put
out its own records. The musicians have been incredibly cooperative and signing away their
rights and giving buyouts to the management to enable them to be more flexible in what they
can do with the product, with the music. But that's not going to make any money, that's only
going to sell at best a few hundred copies here and there. I happen to know what the players
in the LSO, in the London Symphony Orchestra get for their entire annual revenues from
LSO Live. Now LSO Live has a catalogue of more than fifty recordings now and they are out
there in the shops, you can buy them. And at the end of the year, if there is a profit, the
players divide that profit between them. The total profit per player is less than he or she
would have earned from one mornings work of commercial recording at Abbey Road Studios.
So that economic possibility, that’s gone.
And for orchestras making their own recordings they are really only doing it as a form of
advertising. Not as a form of revenue. When the worst comes to the worst they go to
government and they ask for more subsidy. But they ask from a position of deference, and
almost a position of defeat, they’ve come pretty close to begging. Look, we've lost all of this,
can you just help us out here. At the worst what we have is whinge and cringe. A process
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where when you go around the arts, all that you hear is grumbling and complaint. And when
it comes to fund holders, a kind of grovelling, maybe you can help us out here.
There is a loss of pride. There is almost an atmosphere of apology, what Cardinal Newman
called, a prolovia proweta sewer (sp), an apology simply for being alive.
What do I find here in Australia, its eleven years since I've been here, I am so glad to be
back. I was smitten by this country at first sight. I love the open eyed way with which
audiences receive each performance as if it is a precious thing. We in London and in the
northern hemisphere, we’re jaded by too much performance, there is too much happening
every night ever to be able to assimilate all of it, and if you miss something, well there’ll be
another one behind. And here, because you have art in a kind of scarcity, you treasure the
things that you have and it was tremendously revitalising for me to witness that eleven years
ago. It’s equally revitalising for me to witness that here and now. What's happened in these
eleven years? When I was here last time you had two thriving opera companies, Sydney
and the Victorian State Opera. Then the Victorian State Opera was shut down. Now it’s
been restarted. But it’s been restarted in a very wobbly way, nobody quite knows what's
going to be happening there next year. And the Australian Opera here in Sydney loses its
music director because it can't fund the artistic plans for which it originally hired her. What
kind of confidence is that? What kind of message is that projecting to the public, to
government?
The Opera House is Australia’s greatest international symbol. Does its content match that
symbolism? One used to see Australian ensembles, orchestras, dance companies, touring
more in the northern hemisphere. That's dried up. I hope it’s going to restart, but it’s at a
very low level now. I look at the Sydney Morning Herald, I look at its wonderful art
supplement, its terrific, Spectrum. I go from page to page, start to finish, no classical music,
no opera, apart from a couple of advertisements. The performing arts are being marginalised
in the media, and therefore marginalised in the society. The crisis that I'm talking of is biting
deep here in Australia, that hurts.
And contingent to that is a fear of criticism from within and without, it staggers me that
Australia can produce a Robert Hughes and a Clive James, but within its own media, within
its own newspapers, and radio and television, there is no robust criticism. Nobody is getting
to grips with the issues that affect Australian art. Nobody is saying what is right and what is
wrong.
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It’s okay, it doesn't get much worse.
Let me ask you this. Are we alone? Are we the only ones who are suffering these things?
Of course we’re not. I have another life in media, I'm assistant editor of a newspaper, there is
no newspaper that doesn’t feel that it’s going down a vortex. Find me a newspaper that is not
losing sales to the internet. Find me a newspaper that has not lost all of its advertising to the
internet. You know the most profitable part of managing a newspaper used to be the linage,
the small ads that people took to sell their cars and um, and whatever it was that granny had
left them, and sometimes their houses. And every line, it only looked like a few cents a line,
but it really totted up and those pages were very, very high revenue. All of that’s gone to the
internet. So newspapers are looking at a very, very bleak future. And they’re fighting not only
the internet but also the advent of free newspapers some of which are owned by the very
groups that publish the paid for newspapers, so they're competing against themselves.
I look at radio and television and I see media that are in thrall to what they call reality shows.
They're not reality, they're not even virtual reality. They're a degrading caricature, a
simulacrum of reality. And they too are going down the tube. Television is now running away
from reality shows because television’s been so smeared by the things that itself has put on,
that it no longer knows where it’s going, and it too is under competition form the ever
ascendant, ever ravenous internet. What does the internet do? It gives people more and
more reasons to stay at home. An ever greater incentive not to go out, not to go and see
performing art, because you have the assumption that you can have everything onto your
own LCD at home.
So where do we go form here? Do we give up?
There's a glass half full and there's a glass half empty. And it depends which you look it at –
look at it.
My inclination contrary perhaps to my reputation is to say that we are living in a time of
greatest imaginable opportunity for the performing arts. And if we stop seeing these
phenomena as threats and dangers and disasters. And we look upon them as challenge, I
believe we can build a future for classical music and for opera and for the performing arts
that is more prosperous and more wide spread, and has a larger audience than ever before.
And it’s not that complicated.
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Let me start with this. For the first time in history orchestras and opera companies and dance
companies and theatre companies actually own their own product. They're no longer enthral
to anyone else as to what they can do. They are no longer bound by – they no longer have to
pay the musicians every time something gets broadcast or gets used somewhere else. They
no longer have to be confined to one particular hall. They have now so many opportunities,
they can deliver music on their website, they can deliver it for free selectively, if they like.
They can deliver it on disc in whichever way they care to do so. They can deliver it no longer
just to their own city, to their own community, to their own country, they can deliver it
internationally by their own strategy in which ever way they wish. And they can deliver it on
demand. We are no longer confined to space or time. The whole of music, the whole history
of music has been a story of how musicians came together within four walls, we no longer
have four walls, the walls don't exist, they're gone. Without walls there are no limits to what
we can do.
A couple of years ago one of the two arts centres in London, the Barbican, were staggered to
discover that their on line bookings had gone up from single figures, something like eight or
nine percent to twenty percent, almost overnight. And then over the next year they went up
to forty percent and now they’re above fifty percent, more than half of all bookings for events
at the Barbican are being booked on line. And suddenly there was realisation that this is a
completely new ball game. Because first of all, when somebody books your event on line,
you know everything about them. You know their name, their address, probably their date of
birth, certainly their banking details, maybe even their inside leg measurements. But you
know where to find them when you need them. You have the beginnings of a process of
communication with them that never existed before between performing arts organisation
and audience. You have the beginnings of a dialogue.
You can communicate with them simply, you can send them an email after the performance.
The computer will do this for you automatically, you don’t need somebody there tapping it
out. You can communicate with them after the performance asking them what they felt.
Asking for their response. You can put up a chat line for them as some organisations have
done so that they can communicate with other people about their performance and share
their views. You can send them excerpts of the performance in advance, you can educate
them, you inculcate them in what they're about to receive. You can send them the program
notes in advance, so that they are better acclimatised. Before they even enter the hall. You
can send them something for their birthday. You can send them part or whole of the
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performance that they’ve just received. You can deliver special offers, you can make your
compact disks and you can send it to them either as a file or as a compact disk. So the
opportunities here for communication, I won't use the word marketing, it’s a crude word, but
the opportunities for communication between the performing arts and its potential audience
are simply limitless. The second aspect is where are these people coming from. When you
look at it you will find that many of them are not coming from your town at all. They're people
who've seen your list of performances on the internet and they happen to be about to be
visiting London or they're planning a visit to London three months hence, or they are
planning a visit to Sydney and so they book in advance. And they could be coming from all
over the world. So suddenly you are an international brand of your own. And if they like what
they’ve heard, they're going to come back. And they're going to tell their friends. And so the
whole idea of audience development goes out of the window. You don’t need to develop an
audience, the audience develops itself.
What do I mean by on line offers? A couple of years ago discussion started at Radio 3 on
the BBC where I present a show about the possibility of doing a Beethoven cycle and
delivering it free on line. And we talked about it, around meeting tables and in the corridors.
And there were the those who said, yes go on, put up Beethoven symphonies on line, but
who wants that, everybody’s heard Beethoven symphonies before and people have got the
recordings, why are people going to download Beethoven symphonies? How many people
are going to do it? Five thousand? Ten thousand at most. And I was one of those who said,
you're going to be astonished. I was in Prague and the phone rang, and it was Roger Wright
who was head of Radio 3. And he said, Norman sit down, said go on. He said, we've got the
figures in from the Beethoven cycle. This is the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra, which is the
number two BBC orchestra, the conductor was Jean Andrea Noseda, who was not
internationally known. One point four million people downloaded those symphonies, one
point four million people took the trouble to download Beethoven’s symphonies, it’s not an
easy thing to do. You have to fiddle with the computer and then you have to wait while it
goes, and if you don't have broadband, it’s going to take a year and a half.
It requires a
conscious act more difficult and more concentrated than buying a book from Ebay. One
point four million people. And I said, Roger, I'm back in a couple of days, when I get back can
you please go through those figures and see where those people came from? Okay. About
um, if I remember rightly the two largest components were the United States and the United
Kingdom. Between them accounting for about forty percent of all the downloads. As was to
be expected, it’s in English, it comes easily to them. The third largest was Holland. Now in
Holland nobody lives more than fifty kilometres from an orchestra. But in Holland, they felt
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the need to have a new Beethoven. And they did. And the most staggering aspect was when
you went down the list of countries and you found that there were seventeen thousand
downloads in Vietnam. Nobody imagined there were seventeen thousand computers in
Vietnam that were capable of download. Vietnam is a country that hasn’t had a symphony
orchestra since the French were there. How did people know about this? And what was
their appetite for it? Evidently immense. And what did it mean to people in Vietnam or to
people in Taiwan, they also downloaded in huge numbers. Or in Mexico or in Poland.
China, incidentally blocked the BBC. You can't get the BBC in China. If it had been available
in China, one point four million could easily have been a hundred and forty million. Heavens,
let's not even go there. But what does that mean? It means that somebody in Vietnam who
has downloaded a Beethoven symphony or someone in Korea or in Mexico have only ever
heard of one orchestra and one conductor. And when they get on a plane and they go
abroad, wherever it is and if they happen to come to Britain, the orchestra that they are going
to want to hear is the BBC Philharmonic, which is incidentally based in Manchester. And the
conductor they are going to want to hear is Jean Andrea Noceda. Because to them he is
more famous than Toscanini.
So you’ve established immediately, global recognition of what it is you do. And you’ve
discovered that the appetite for what you do is enormous and insatiable, even when it is
something as familiar as Beethoven. What does this mean for Australia? Australia sits at the
edge of East Asia, what's going on in China at the moment? Thirty million children are
receiving private piano lessons. Not in the school system, private, their parents are paying for
it. Some of those parents barely have enough money to put food on the table, but they want
their children to learn the piano. Because they feel it’s going to be good for them
educationally, and it’s going to be good for them socially and in all sorts of other ways. And
there is a knock on aspirational effect, all it takes is for one kid in a tower block to start
plinking out his chopsticks and automatically you find there are uprights up the next twenty
six floors. Because other parents, other mothers want their little emperors to start playing the
piano as well. Thirty million children. And this is a conservative estimate, it may be more.
Let me be even more conservative than that. Not all of those thirty million are going to be
professional pianists. But a very sizeable proportion of them are going to become an
informed audience. As I say, let me give you a conservative estimate. Let's say one percent,
one percent of that thirty million becomes the classical audience of the future. That’s three
hundred thousand. That’s enough to fill the Sydney Opera House a hundred a fifty nights a
year. And what does that mean for the burgeoning economy in China, and in the rest of
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Asia, in India, where incidentally they have a symphony orchestra now for the first time since
the British have left. And where the interest in classical music and classical performance is
growing by the day. What does that mean? These people are going to be coming to
Australia on business and on leisure. There are going to be weekend breaks. And when the
Sydney orchestra gets – the Sydney Symphony Orchestra has its website up and running
they will be booking concerts on the Sydney Symphony Orchestra because that’s the one
they've heard of, because that’s the one that has delivered them a free movement of the
symphony the last time they booked. The potential here for a global audience for
performance, we haven’t even scratched the surface.
For opera too, now that opera organisations are generally going for buyout arrangements
with their audiences, it means that they can project opera outside the house, and they do.
The Met is doing it phenomenally successfully all over America on big screens. People are
filling movie houses all over America to see opera from the Met. Who would have imagined?
All it requires is a slight shift in attitude. And I know, I know, in the arts, change isn’t easy.
People don't like change. Its like the old, its like the old psychiatrist joke, how many
psychiatrists does it take to change a light bulb? First the light bulb has to want to change.
That’s the state of the arts. But we have to be prepared for change, we have to be prepared
to change the way we give performances, the time we give performances, the duration of
performances. It may be that meat and two veg – meat and two veg concerts are no longer
applicable all of the time. Maybe we want to give forty minute concerts or even thirty minute
concerts to appeal to a different kind of audience, at a different time of day. Maybe we don't
want to give it in traditional halls. Maybe we should be thinking of other venues. There are so
many possibilities, and that the audience is simply there. We don't need to think of audience
development anymore. Norwich Union, the international insuring group conducted a survey
recently in the UK. And the question that they asked was, what did people most regret in
their lives? What did they most miss out on? And what do you think the highest category
was in the answer? The first thing, the thing that people said they most missed out, not that
they didn’t get the girl they wanted, not that they weren't present when England won the
ashes. Not that any of other fifty common aspirations, not that they didn’t meet David
Beckham. What was the thing they most regretted? That they hadn’t done enough to
develop their musical ability. Can you imagine? That nobody had bothered to teach them an
instrument when they were a child. That they didn’t have the appreciation that they might
have wanted. And they knew because it had, its been shown in statistics that training on a
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musical instrument produces on average half a grade higher in every GCSC, which is the
sixteen year old exam subject. Half a grade higher simply from having that discipline of
having learnt to play any kind of musical instrument.
How should we be looking at the collapse of the record industry? How are we doing for
time? Oh, my goodness. How should we be looking at the collapse of the record industry?
As a disaster? No! It’s a blessing. It’s a blessing. What was the record industry anything
other than a parasite on live performance. It existed to make money out of music. Well good
riddance. Now that we’re free of it, we make our own music, and we make our own money.
And look at the way that kids, teenagers are now receiving their music, now that they no
longer buy records. Okay, they're downloading, sometimes legally.
I promise you that my kids do it legally, alright? I don't want anybody knocking on my door.
And when they download, what do they do? They have this little thing, it’s called an ipod, and
they download a whole lot of things onto that and they it—what do they call it, they call it my
music. And when they meet other people of their own age they present the ipod to them and
say, that’s me, this is my music. And that's you, and that’s your music, and we can
communicate because we have similar tastes. Music has become a defining aspect of their
lives. And what kind of music? Is it generic? Are they saying, I only listen to classical or I
only listen to garage or I only listen to blues or this and that? No, they're totally eclectic, they
record from every different kind of music. They will have Radiohead and Rachmaninoff and
they’ll have some rock and roll and they will have some blues and they will have some world
music and they will have Yusen Dor (sp). And that will all come together as my music. So
their whole experience of music is music without walls, music without barriers. Music without
categories. What are categories except conveniences for librarians.
I'm walking on thin ice here, I'm married to a librarian.
What are they engaged in? They are engaged in sampling music without any discrimination
as to which is better or which is worse. I like it, I want it, I take it, I have it. And if I like it I'm
going to want more of it. So if Radiohead has led me to Rachmaninoff, Rachmaninoff is
going to lead me to the concert hall. What can be bad about that? Thank heavens we've
broken down those barriers. And there's another statistic that I can give you. Ninety percent
of habitual record buyers never set foot in a concert hall or an opera house. They were
record junkies. I'm sorry for them, but we won't miss them. Maybe we will be seeing more of
them in the concert hall.
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The other thing that needs to change is our attitude to the people who provide funding. To
government, national government, local government, corporate sponsors, private sponsors.
We've got to get up off our knees, enough of the cringe. We can't, we've got to abandon the
whole attitude of deference and demand respect. In the first place we can actually say to
government, you know what, we can manage without. If you withdraw funding, are we going
to die? No, we’ll struggle, we won't die. And we can show you models of companies,
performing arts companies that function without a penny of public funding. You want the
names? Glyndebourne. Probably the best opera festival in the world. Lasts for four months.
Manages without a penny of public subsidy with two of the best orchestras in the world with
wonderful costs. They need to sell ninety two percent of the tickets to break even, ninety two
percent is high. Right, Libby? They need to sell ninety two percent to break even. They
usually manage on ninety eight or ninety nine. When the house grew too small, they
knocked it down and built a new one for thirty five million pounds. Again without a single
penny of public funding. And the Glyndebourne model is not one that’s in isolation. There is
an opera festival now at Garsington near Oxford. There is another one in Grange Park in
Hampshire. These things are growing. These are opera festivals, the most expensive and
intensive of art forms that function without public subsidy. It can be done. There are famous
orchestras that have managed for most or all of their existence without public funding. The
Academy of St Martin in the Fields. The English Chamber Orchestra, many others that I
could name. I see groups of young dancers leaving the big companies, leaving the Royal
Ballet and going off to start on their own. They had a cushioned and cosseted life in the
Royal Ballet. They get public finding there. When they go off as their own into Mathew
Bourne’s company. Doing that famous Swan Lake that's been seen all over the world.
There's no public funding, but they're getting pretty well paid, and they're having a terrific
time. And they don't have to dock their cap to anybody and they feel so much better about
what they do, who needs it. There is a theatre called The Windmill in Newbury in Berkshire.
No reason you should have heard of it, except many of its shows go straight to the West End
and from there to Broadway. It functions without any public subsidy. Many examples,
examples that have begun in Britain that are spreading across Europe of ways of doing
without public subsidy. We don't actually have to say this, when we go to the public funders,
we just have to know in the back of our minds that we can do without them. What we say to
them is this.
You should be privileged to be funding us. Because where you fail, we deliver. What are
you areas of failure? What are your great crisis, education? Let me give you a statistic. For
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the past ten years two countries have consistently produced the highest SATS results in
physics and maths. By international standards and by – we are not talking here of a grade
inflation, these are internationally verified and agreed standards. Two countries have
consistently produced the best year ten SATS results in physics and maths. Any guess who
they are? One is Singapore. And the other is Finland. Singapore is a ferociously aspirational
society. With a brand new concert hall and a very high degree of commitment to the arts.
Finland is a country where they teach kids to read and write music at the same time as they
teach them to read and write Finnish. This may be because it’s easier to read and write
music than it is to read and write Finnish. But let's not even go there, let's not even go there.
They do it because music is part of the fabric of their society because Sibelius is more widely
known to every Fin than the colours of the national flag. Because Sibelius defined the nation
with Finlandia, because music is the essence for them. But they didn’t perceive the knock on
results. The knock on results, what are the knock on results? One of them is in my pocket,
it’s a mobile telephone. There's no mobile telephone without kids who know how to read and
write music before they know how to read and write words. That’s what it does, it sharpens
the mind, it introduces discipline, it makes them more – it applies them better to their studies.
It makes them better people, it makes them better citizens. That's what we deliver.
We deliver in health in all sorts of ways. There are so many examples of what music does in
hospitals and what music does particularly in mental health. Crucially, crucially. We deliver
in terms of civic and national identity. Australia like every other western society is
undergoing massive demographic change. I understand that six percent of the voters in your
Prime Ministers constituency are now Chinese. I bet he didn’t expect that when he was first
elected.
How do we sustain and create a unity of nationhood, a new Australia. What are the role
models here? What are the aspirations to be? What actually defines these things? It would
be tempting to say that in Australia is an outdoors society and therefore it ought to be
sporting achievement. But sporting achievement is short lived. And sportsmen are
notoriously fickle. They’re not necessarily the best role models that you want for your
children. Or indeed the best ones that new citizens are likely to identify with. I gather that Mr
Shane Warne, of whom some of you may have heard has applied for German citizenship, in
order to obtain the convenience of a work permit in England. His mother was German. So
Shane Warne the pride of Australia the Australian national symbol has now applied for
German citizenship. Do you know what they're singing in Germany at the moment? By mer
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bis du Shane (sp). Sport is not a model for national identity. It may well be that Peter Carey
is now living in New York. But Peter Carey is, was and always will be an Australian writer.
And Australian literature will be defined and will help to be defined through Peter Carey.
Sydney Nolan may have lived in Britain for a long part of his life. But Sydney Nolan is
Australian art. It’s the arts that deliver identity with culture defines nationhood. And if
government wants to be part of culture, then it should be proud to be sponsoring us.
And as far as private and corporate sponsorship is concerned, money always follows
success. All we have to do is to shake off some of the bad habits of the past to show that we
can reach these wider audiences. The audience that is actually waiting for the things that we
have to deliver and the money will flow, I don’t think we need to worry about it. I would love
to deliver a short disposition on what's happened to the arts in England and Australia since
the war. There are many parallels, but I think my time is running out.
What I’ll leave you with is one question. Can it be done? Can we overcome the difficulties?
Can we embrace the challenge? Can we create a new world for the arts? I believe we can. I
think all we need to do, all we need is the will to change. To grasp the greatest opportunity
that has ever come our way in the performing arts. To embrace progress, to surf the rising
wave. If I might paralyse – paralyse? If I might, I hope the ABC edits that out. If I might
paraphrase the late Karl Marx. Arts of the world, arts of Australia, arise. You have nothing to
lose but your cringe. Thank you very much.
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