Instrumental (22 page)

We simply cannot on the one hand have sexualised images of children on billboards and magazines, underwear for six-year-olds with pictures of cherries on them, ‘school disco' themed nights at bars and community service sentences for downloading ‘indecent' images (indecent? Saying ‘shit' in church is indecent – this is abominable), and on the other hand regard the Savile story with abject horror. It just does not equate. This is not about censoring what the press can write (typical example from one tabloid: ‘She's still only 15, but Chloë Moretz . . . The strawberry blonde stepped out with a male friend in a cute Fifties-style powder blue sleeveless collared shirt which she tied at her waist
– revealing just a hint of her midriff'), or what pictures they can publish. It is about protecting minors who do not have a voice, who are not capable of understanding certain matters and who cannot protect themselves.

This has all been said before. And nothing has really changed. We forget (who would want to remember this stuff?), we think shouting loudly will absolve our collective guilt and change things for the better, we point fingers and form lynch mobs. We paint ‘paedo scum' on convicted (or suspected) paedophiles' homes. And yet what we need to do is open our eyes fully and simply not tolerate this, rather like we've done and continue to do so effectively with homophobia and racism. We need to look at providing more visible therapy for both victims, perpetrators and those who have urges that threaten to make them perpetrators. We need to overhaul sentencing guidelines and start tackling the issues with more clarity and integrity. Whatever it takes for as long as it takes needs to be the guiding principle here, because otherwise we will, to use a well-worn but apposite phrase, simply continue the cycle of abuse.

‘At last: the Classic BRIT Awards exposed as a sickening crime against classical music'

Daily Telegraph
Culture Blog, 8 October 2012

PAUL MORLEY DESERVES A MEDAL
. One of the greatest music writers ever, Morley has in one fell swoop exposed the Classic BRIT Awards for what they really are – an offensive, unnecessary, manipulative and dangerous sham.

Sitting there last week at the Royal Albert Hall as a guest of Sinfini (the new classical music website funded, somewhat ironically, by Universal), he describes the horror show that unfurls before him. Morley says what so many of us in the classical world have long thought: ‘For those who have come to music through pop or rock, the way “classical music” was dressed up in candelabra kitsch and shop-worn corn would not have persuaded them that there was anything here for them.'

He goes on to discuss the tricks employed by the organisers to deflect the sort of critical perspective that might question its motives, and indeed its tenuous relationship to classical music, or to any music at all.

The key phrase here is ‘any music at all'. The people behind the CBAs (an assorted cabal of radio bosses, label heads, PR pundits, agents, promoters, journalists) have, for many years now, diluted and butchered classical music, throwing it into a blender alongside cross-over schmaltz,
movie soundtracks, pop-opera and greed, and tried to convince us that the gloopy, sick-making result is ‘classical music'.

I urge you I urge you to track down Morley's blog, to read and reread it, print out, laminate and send to the head of every company associated with the bile-inducing cesspit that is the Classic Brit Awards together with a card asking WHAT ARE YOU DOING?

I applaud Sinfini for having the guts to commission that piece – and it is surely no accident that they asked a rock journalist to do it. Most classical pundits would be too terrified to stick their heads above the parapet, given how small the industry is and the knowledge that they would most likely be blacklisted should they come out and criticise the CBAs.

I have wanted to write a piece along these lines for a long time now, but figured (or at least my manager did) it would have made me too easy a target for accusations of jealousy and bitterness, what with me being a concert pianist and therefore, one would think, hungry for a BRIT nomination myself. I was invited to attend this year and my response was that I would rather sh*t in my hands and clap than sit through that. I, naively, went four years ago and vowed never to do so again. Truth be told, I still suffer occasional PTSD-like flashbacks from the experience. I have so far kept my opinions largely to myself but Morley has, gloriously, inspired me to put my cards on the table as well.

The awards were inaugurated by the BPI, and voting is done by ‘an academy of industry executives, the media, the British Association of Record Dealers (BARD), members of the Musicians' Union, lawyers, promoters, and orchestra leaders', except for ‘Album of the Year' which
is voted for by listeners of Classic FM. How did any of these people decide that, in 2011, it was in the best interest of classical music to award Il Divo (the crossover ‘opera' quartet signed to Simon Cowell's label) ‘artist of the decade'?
Decade.
The most phenomenal classical artist of the LAST TEN YEARS is an operatic pop vocal group created, signed and managed by Cowell! Not Claudio Abbado, Martha Argerich, Stephen Hough, Gustavo Dudamel, Sir Simon Rattle or any one of a thousand internationally acclaimed core classical musicians who have trained, sweated, worked, honed, polished, refined and slaved hours a day for decades to raise their talent to the level necessary to play at Salzburg,Verbier, the Proms, Carnegie Hall. No. A photoshopped, shiny-toothed, suntanned, faux-classical Frankenstein.

Who are these people to purposefully try and convince the general public that Katherine Jenkins is a proper opera singer, that Russell Watson really could handle a week at Covent Garden, that Ludovico Einaudi belongs to the same world as Benjamin Britten, that André Rieu, Andrew Lloyd Webber and Andrea Bocelli are amongst the greatest classical musicians alive today? When did MasterCard give themselves the go-ahead to, year on year, sponsor a conglomerate of people who are force-feeding the musical equivalent of KFC down our throats?

I would, with a bucket of Xanax and an obliging shrink, be able to let this go if I felt it were a case simply of naivety on behalf of the organisers, or indeed even of good intention. But this is not the case. Instead, I am convinced that what we have here is a purposeful, well thought-out, structured plan to chip away year on year, track by track, album by album at the general public, convincing them over time that
classical music really does not distinguish Russell Watson from Caruso. That Howard Shore and Beethoven can be mentioned happily in the same awed breath. That Mylene Klass and Vladimir Horowitz are both pianists.

It makes me sick to my stomach. I experience a rage that threatens to overwhelm me listening to those people bleating on about the problems in the classical music industry. YOU ARE THE F****** PROBLEM. Classical music always used to be the music of the people. It is cheap (there are some incredible box-set bargains around), accessible (Spotify puts almost infinite amounts of classical music on every computer connected to the internet) and can be overwhelmingly, brilliantly, aggressively life-changing for all who listen to it.
The Phantom of the Opera
(played with gusto at the awards) is not without its charms, but it is clearly no
Figaro.
And when you invite Gary Barlow, Andrew Lloyd Webber and André Rieu up on stage in the same venue where the Proms provide the real thing, and hold them up as classical musicians you not only belittle classical music, but you belittle us. All of us.

I understand that this is your moment to shine. That this is, in your eyes, the only chance you guys have to be close to the real Brit Awards. You get to be on TV (terrestrial TV, albeit at 11 p.m. on a Sunday), you get to walk the red carpet and smile for the paparazzi (who have no clue who you are or what you do), you get to pretend for one solitary, gauche night that you matter. That you are players. But you're not.

It is an undeniable truth that we will still be listening and talking about Bach, Beethoven, Chopin et al in 300 years. Celebrate that. Glory in that. It is magnificent, profound, enlightening and stupendous. Don't cheapen it with your need for self-esteem. Go hate yourself on
someone else's time. The rest of us want actual music. Take a long hard look at the Gramophone Awards or the BBC Music Magazine awards, the genuine Oscars and Emmys of classical where bona fide classical musicians are honoured, and see how it should be done.

The truth is that there is simply no need to go down the Classic BRIT route. What you are in effect saying with this monstrous spectacle is that Joe Public is too uncultured, too dense, too stupid to deal with an unedited, beautifully played Chopin mazurka, Mendelssohn concerto or Beethoven sonata. That instead they need to be drip-fed music from the Hovis ad, complete with funky lighting, glitzy staging and music-hall pomp and told that this is classical music. And that mentality is simply unforgivable, all the more so as it is coming from the very people who should be ambassadors for classical music. Instead you continue to bastardise and cheapen it until very soon it will have been eroded beyond recognition. That, despite all of your empty lies about wanting to bring classical music to a wider audience, is the legacy you are leaving us.

‘Classical music needs an enema – not awards'

Guardian
Culture Blog, 18 September 2013

CLASSICAL MUSIC IS NOT A
glamorous industry. The pay is generally shit and almost always requires vigorous chasing. The people behind it are for the most part stuck in the 1930s and constitutionally incapable of connecting in any way with those born after 1960. The industry has been divided into sharks on the one hand (anything for a buck, even if it involves bastardising the music to an unrecognisable degree) and the ‘purebloods' on the other – the Aryan race of the music world where this music is reserved for those who are intelligent and rarefied enough to understand it.

Meanwhile, the presentation and pomp behind it is antiquated, offensive, shrouded in self-importance and irrelevant. But, rather than try and change things, like a chubby, entitled, picked-upon child it looks in all the wrong places to boost its self-esteem. Award ceremonies for the classical industry (industry, not listeners) must have sounded such a terrific idea on paper. Sadly, the mutual masturbatory back-slapping and sense of ‘better than' that is so rife amongst those who claim to enjoy Varèse and Xenakis only serves to provide the perfect means to further separate what is truly important about classical music from what is deemed as oxygen to those behind it.

The Gramophone Awards are a case in point. First and foremost they need to be congratulated, hugely congratulated, for providing a
counterpoint to the Classic BRIT awards. I'm not even going to merit the Classic BRITs with column inches other than to say I would rather commit to a career in clown porn than support them, and let you know that this year, alongside Alfie Boe and Katherine Jenkins, Richard Clayderman's album
Romantique
(seriously) is nominated for Album of the Year. And that it includes a
Les Miserables
medley and his own, inimitable transcription of ‘You Raise Me Up'. For those wanting to learn about classical music you would be better off sticking spikes in your ears and necking meths.

Back to the Gramophone Awards. I love
Gramophone
magazine. I am a subscriber and inevitably spend at least £50 every month on CDs after reading their recommendations. In much the same way as someone devoted to trains would go nuts at a Hornby store while clutching his (pristine) copy of
Heritage Railway
magazine, I get off on reading about the latest Rachmaninov recording from (yet) another genius Russian pianist. It is
Heat
magazine for socially awkward classical music fans and nothing more. On the scale of worldly importance it ranks somewhere between peanut butter and Andrex moist wipes – it's rather lovely but by no means essential.

Unlike the vile BRITs, the Gramophones honour bona fide core classical musicians – Sir John Eliot Gardiner, Steven Osborne, Antonio Pappano and others all won much-deserved awards this year. This is a great thing. If Osborne, Pappano et al were footballers they would be household names. But they're not. And, for all the ceremony and spiel, this industry is doing less than nothing to give them the status and recognition they deserve. There was no laughter beyond the occasional inside joke, awkwardly scripted, uptight acceptance
speeches, not even the merest hint of inclusion for those who exist outside the classical music world. This was yet another awards ceremony about Self. Self-congratulation, self-celebration, self-importance, where music is kept as the property of a few individuals and yet another wall is erected between music and public. You would get more of a buzz watching a House of Commons webcam than watching last night's award ceremony, even if by some miracle it were televised.

The problem with classical music is that the whole industry is so deeply ashamed of itself, so unremittingly apologetic for being involved with an art form seen as irrelevant, privileged and poncey, that it has gone to unfortunate extremes to over-compensate. Classical, as a genre, has become the musical equivalent of cranking (look it up). And if it didn't break my heart quite so much, I'd simply laugh and get back to practising my little upright piano. But the legacy it is leaving us and the price we all will pay for this is too distressing to ignore.

EM Forster wrote that a Beethoven symphony was ‘the most sublime noise that has ever penetrated the ear of man'. Goethe called architecture ‘frozen music'. Classical music has been around for centuries because it has an unceasing, infallible and soul-shattering ability to take all of us on a journey of self-discovery and improvement in a world where most other means of doing so seem to involve either Simon Cowell or Deepak Chopra. It is a right, not a luxury, and, at the risk of sounding like a haughty middle-class mother at a children's birthday party, the industry behind it is ruining it for the rest of us.