It's a cultural revolution

Bayan Northcott reflects on Michael Berkeley's recent lecture about the future of British music and why the confident post-war consensus about its public funding has gone

It is 40 years since Benjamin Britten told a sympathetic interviewer: "I remember at a tennis party at Lowestoft once, about the time I was leaving school, I was asked what career I intended to choose. I told them I intended to be a composer. They were amazed! 'Yes, but what else?' " Even at the height of his success and influence, Britten evidently continued to regard this provincial response as typical of an inveterate British philistinism: "The average Briton thought, and still thinks, of the Arts as suspect and expensive luxuries."

Two years later, he developed this theme in what was to remain the only formal statement of his position as a composer he ever wrote, in his much-reprinted lecture "On Receiving the First Aspen Award". True musical communication, he argued, only occurred within the "holy triangle" of composer, performer and listener if each was actively involved in the experience. The composer's part in this, Britten thought, was to serve the needs and aspirations of performers and listeners, and through them, the larger community, with the utmost adaptability, skill and artistry he or she could command, and limited only by the promptings of his artistic, social or personal conscience.

Admittedly, listeners' powers of focused attention were increasingly menaced by the rise of canned background music; admittedly, composers could all too easily be deflected from their natural gifts by "pressure groups which demand true proletarian music; snobs who demand the latest avant-garde tricks; critics who are already trying to document today for tomorrow".

Nonetheless, Britten was firm in demanding what he felt to be the genuinely involved composer's due in the "semi-Socialist Britain" of his day: that his art should be accepted as an essential part of human activity and consequently of value to the community and that, in return, he should be adequately paid – "we must at least be treated as civil servants".

The quaintness, as one might now think, of the latter formulation, is doubtless an index of how much seems to have changed since then. Or has it? Only last weekend, in his Royal Philharmonic Society Annual Lecture entitled "Public Culture, Private Passions", the composer, broadcaster and festival director Michael Berkeley – Britten's godson, no less – lamented that most of his British contemporaries were still compelled to buy their own composing time out of some other occupation. Not only were commercial publishing and performing rights falling away, he said, but public funding bodies, translating their residual utilitarian suspicion of artists into ever more strident demands for "accountability" and "accessibility" seemed ever less willing to subsidise risky work.

For instance, Berkeley continued, the Arts Council grant he receives to commission pieces for the Cheltenham Festival is now less than a third of that of seven years ago when he first became artistic director. And this at a time when, building on the achievements of Britten and Tippett, this country currently fields an array of compositional talent that compares favourably with any other in the world.

How was it, he asked, that, not just the general public, conditioned by the short attention spans of mass entertainment, but also an intelligentsia, still trying to keep up with the latest in books, films and fine arts, seem so indifferent to our serious composers, compared with equivalent publics on the Continent? And how could this be reversed, save by ever more enlightened education of the young?

In so saying, Berkeley was of course recapitulating an ideal not just of Britten and Tippett, but Holst and Vaughan Williams before them, running back to William Morris's famous declaration: "I do not want art for a few any more than I want freedom for a few or education for a few."

It was in this spirit that such publicly funded institutions as the BBC and the Arts Council spread their cultural bounty in those hugely productive decades of semi-Socialist consensus after the Second World War. What Britten died too early to detect and Berkeley failed quite to focus was the fierceness with which this very ideal has latterly come under attack.

It was Alexander Goehr, in yet another diagnostic lecture entitled "The Songs We Love to Sing", at the 1998 Aldeburgh Festival, who asserted that in the last decade we have been living through the turmoil of nothing less than an ongoing cultural revolution. The most obvious symptom, he claimed, has been the denunciation of precisely those ideals and institutions of high culture bequeathed by the post-war consensus as elitist, paternalistic, often extravagantly mismanaged and irrelevant to the concerns of young people or an increasingly multi-cultural Britain.

Yet behind all this Goehr discerned a more fundamental confrontation "between a high culture, demanding an actively participating listener, and a commodity-producing music industry with all the modern means of selling its products". The latter, he suggested, reflects the drive towards "a new commercial utopia – a controlled environment in which nothing unsaleable or disagreeable is to be seen", or, presumably, to be heard. Accordingly, genuinely participatory musical experience epitomised by Britten's "holy triangle" is increasingly being subverted or replaced by the passive stimulation of pleasing background music, or foreground music – Glass, Nyman, Adams – composed out of the same bland cliches.

"If, as it seems, the industry must win, then the cultural revolution will have been accomplished," concluded Goehr. Except that, "I have the impression that, if anything, a greater number of our young grow up deeply committed to music, playing, listening and even composing it."

Just as the Western classical tradition in the past often seems to have attained its most intense and meaningful expression under conditions of privation, warfare or political repression, so it seems there will always be those musicians and music lovers, however small a proportion of the total population, who wish to perpetuate the heritage as an alternative or irritant to whatever consumerist utopia might seem to threaten.

On the other hand, given the genuinely diversifying society of this country, it seems improbable that the surviving directors and institutions of our post-war high culture will ever regain quite the centrality and influence they once exercised. The support that composers can expect from that quarter, therefore, will doubtless remain restricted.

Yet then the likeliest immediate development seems to be along a third path which Berkeley touched on when he noted the increasing tendency of funding bodies to direct what music subsidies they still have less into commissions than into "outreach" programmes – sending composers and performers into schools, prisons and whatnot to try to raise the interest of the young and the marginalised in creativity and new music.

At best, such activities can achieve positive results and may indeed seem to fulfil Britten's ideal of being musically useful to the community. But in the last resort, they depend more upon the abilities of a composer as an animateur, even as a social worker, than upon his or her creative individuality. For those who continue to believe in the Western ideal of composition, at best, as a means of revealing aspects of human thought and feeling that can be grasped and articulated in no other way, this third path could well prove the least rewarding of all. Then one remembers Stravinsky's injunction, that composers ultimately "have a duty toward music, namely, to invent it."

More details of Michael Berkeley's lecture on www.royalphilharmonicsociety.org.uk