George Benjamin: British music has gone back to the 1920s
NewsIn an interview with Alan Rusbridger for Prospect magazine, the leading composer argues that Brexit and Government cuts have set the art form back 100 years.
‘After the austerity of the last 15 years, the infrastructure of contemporary music is crumbling. And then the BBC started on the journey to destroy its own musical fabric by cutting the BBC Singers (now granted a temporary reprieve) and by reducing the BBC orchestras by 20 per cent, which is akin to destroying them: you just can’t do that to an orchestra and expect it to survive….
‘So I’m haunted by worry—and almost shame, I’m afraid—that the situation has become as serious as it has. I love the musical culture of my own country, and the musicians, the fantastic singers, conductors and composers. But I think it’s at great risk.’
Benjamin’s fourth opera, Picture a Day Like This, is pplaying at the Royal Opera House in London.
I am always nervous at making a comparison between the arts and sport. However, for example, the previous, proposed reductions to the BBC orchestras that Sir George reminds us of would be no different to expecting a football squad to deliver excellence on the pitch with 20% fewer players. In the sporting world, people would be laughed out of existence for such a suggestion.
Awful music.
This is a perfectly reasonable if very sad comment from one of our most respected and erudite composers. It reflects a growing feeling of shame regarding the current government, the so-called Arts Council, and the cowardly BBC
Since 2010, the BBC has seen its license fee revenue reduced by over 20%. It had to cut thousands of jobs and discontinue a number of services. Those Britons who now want to blame the BBC should ask themselves if their protest sounded just as loud all those years when the BBC was mutilated. If not, they should apologize instead of blaming the victim.
It’s a question of priorities. I don’t know whether or not the UK, as many other countries in the world, also grants major multinational corporations obscene tax breaks, usually in the low single digits, while those who can’t really afford it are constantly being fleeced by increasing taxes. The money is there — it’s just a question of how it’s being allotted. This whole thing is unfortunately a symptom of the ubiquitous philistinism that is overtaking our entire world — money is everything, and the notion of something valued for its own sake is slowly disappearing. Arts administrations are being taken over by cynical paper pushers whose talent for empty rhetoric is only matched by their soulless determination to enforce specific economic agendas — all delivered with a big smile and with an Orwellian, hypocritical pretense to actually care for the arts and for those who produce it.
What the idiots at radio 3; have done is pure sacrilege. They must be middle class brainless wokeists if they had done this to depts of science we would all be dead
Whilst I have no particular wish to defend the BBC the money they receive goes across the spectrum of their output. The number of people who appreciate orchestral music, and I’m one are a minority. So it’s understandable that if there are to be caps to licence fees and consequent reassignment of funds the minority end will be the first to lose out. So rather than blaming the bbc perhaps a further line of funding should be the objective. As far as brexit goes well being the great satan it’s responsible for all our woes isn’t it? Yet another convenient wailing wailing wall A.R can make use of?
Brexit is hardly the great satan, but the data confirm that it has harmed the British economy.
Alas, the data also confirm the minority status of the taste for serious music.
Yes, both George and Alan, it has to be admitted, live in a highly privileged establishment liberal – left bubble, and while we’d all like things to be different, I wonder what George would care to do about it, maybe starting with his 250K prize money (which after all he hardly needs)?
Brexit has indeed been handled extremely badly, and yes, most of those in power are clearly philistines, we get that.
But for or the vast majority of people, contemporary music is the least of their concerns (and I speak as a composer) in the present time. But I do look forward to hearing George’s new opera, which I’m sure will be very beautiful.
I don’t know that many Brits in classical music, but the few I know are highly qualified and willing to work for less than my continental colleagues, and pay more in living expenses. I don’t know how they survive.
I am very sorry to read that Mr Benjamin’s new opera is only being pplayed at Covent Garden. Perhaps the ROH cannot afford to employ enough musicians to play it any louder?
Being from the (once) United States, I have always admired England’s support of music and the Arts. The USA abandoned that long, long ago. It is very sad to hear about the budget cuts to the BBC Singers and Orchestra.
Do not conflate the UK, which is basically a fine country, with the BBC, which is, basically, crap.
England is a small part of Britain but it’s the only part to get significant support for music. Time to sort out the discrimination but BBC is the World’s greatest organiser and supporter of the arts always having to fight when there’s a tory government.
What a lovely pirouette to blame Brexit and the Tories for recent cuts applied by leftist quangos and the never-knowingly-Conservative BBC.
Much as I admire Written on Skin, Benjamin just comes across as a whiney, metropolitan, pearl-clutching Labour voter merely spouting leftist-friendly red meat.
That was a good decade for British music. Unlike any recent one, apart from a few like John Rutter.