Things music has lost due to Brexit
OrchestrasThe New European newspaper has published an extensive article on the various negative ways that Brexit has impacted on the lives of British and European musicians.
Here are some grassroots examples:
…Swiss baritone Felix Gygli, a recent English National Opera Young Artist programme and 2023 winner of the prestigious Kathleen Ferrier Award. He has a network of contacts and a good social life in London, but says it’s simply unaffordable.
Brexit blindsided Gygli while studying for a masters at Guildhall conservatoire — his annual fees suddenly doubled to around £24,000, forcing him to rush through his studies in one year. He would now need a Global Talent Visa, which is hard to get. Instead, he is joining the International Opera Studio at Opernhaus Zurich, alongside Willoughby. He worries many other Europeans will do the same, to the detriment of standards in UK institutions.
“The UK used to be a very attractive market for European singers but has really lost a lot of attractiveness. After funding cuts it’s less well paid,” he tells me. In any case, the amount of work offered is less because of visa restrictions.
“Honestly, this might be rich coming from a European but in the end at some point the quality will suffer because it will be harder to cover all these roles and all the odd jobs that need to be done with all these singers, however good they are.”
Tellingly, Hack has not yet performed in the UK and hesitates to apply to UK music programmes: “I felt a little insecure about it because the visa situation hasn’t been clear and it hasn’t been super inviting.”
The loss of European musicians isn’t just bad for them, but for whole institutions and the British students they would have been studying alongside, agrees Anna Wolstenholme, senior lecturer and Artist Development professor at the Royal Academy of Music. This was a completely predictable part of Brexit for which conservatoires are trying to compensate.
The Academy set aside funding for scholarships enabling some of the best European applicants to study in the UK, while Sir Elton John — a former student and one of its biggest donors — is funding British students to go abroad.
Read on here.
It’s simple, led from the top, the UK no longer considers the arts to be of any importance at all despite the fact that, for example, during the pandemic, it was the arts that fed the souls of so many people and kept them sane.
It has to be said that the masses throughout the UK are extremely indebted to the likes of Xenakis, Boulez, Dillon and Ferneyhough as their music must have been a major contributor to their health and mental wellbeing during the pandemic!
If there are composers you loathe, don’t listen to them. Because there is a few you consider awful doesn’t mean they all are.
It never did tbh, certainly not classical music. And yet the musical contributions to both the funeral of QE11 and coronation of KC111 were excellent and indicative of the quality of British classical musicians.
Too many musicians, a shrinking demand for them and a global recession on top of local Brexit woes. Then there’s massive choice opening up in media and streaming services taking revenue from previously safe sources.
This has nothing to do with an abandoning of culture and everything to do with the fact that people have more basic financial concerns to deal with and the times they are a changing.
That’s something that some in the arts just don’t seem to grasp – as if their fees just drop from the sky into a government or BBC barrel and everyone is duty bound to employ them.
Find better criticisms and arguments to make your case because this comes across as a kind of denial and failure to engage with the real problems.
OK Feinman, you make some points that sound valid, superficially at least. Too many musicians? Possibly. But what about for those of us who have been working musicians for decades? We all go into it realising we can’t expect above-inflation pay rises, promotions, bonuses etc – the kinds of things that are common in many other professions. In return it would be nice if a baseline level of funding was maintained through bad times as well as good. After all, the amount is such a trifling proportion of government spending that it can’t make a meaningful difference to any other field of spending, even if the whole lot gets cut. As it is, I and my colleagues in the funded sector have salaries that would need to increase by 40-50%, just to recover the ground lost to inflation since 2009-2010. That’s a huge loss of income and living standards. I’m not writing this as a complaint, but I think you need to know the implications of what you wrote. I can probably justify staying in the profession at this late stage in my career, but many of my younger colleagues won’t be able to if this pattern keeps up, and there’s no way I could possibly recommend this career in the UK to a young and extremely talented person considering their future. I ask this question of you, Feinman: consider the implications of what you wrote and ask yourself again – is this really the outcome you want?
I think it was the people who worked in supermarkets and on deliveries who were the real heroes. But no clapping or pot bashing for them at 8pm on Thursday evenings.
The “wrong” sort of people.
The tories ruined my academic career in 1980 by cutting university expenditure. Now they are ruining the careers of British musicians.
Diddums. Now you know how we anti-woke people feel. Wokesters have ruined our societies.
Can you give a specific example to illustrate what you mean please, Sue?
I’m not a UK citizen, but if I were, I know music would have been the furthest thing from my mind when it came time to vote stay or leave.
The UK music industry’s contribution to UK economy in 2021 was £4 billion
Yet many people in Britain voted for Brexit as they mistakenly assumed it would help the U.K. fishing industry which is worth less than £1bn
Yes, you touch upon the point but only slightly. The arts in UK are made up largely of lefty lovies. They enjoy no understanding of economic issues. They are known largely as remoaners having never understood that the issue of Brexit is NOT about me, it’s not about you nor anyone else. It is about the position of the government. It was about what was good for the nation and in whatever small way that all of us were affected that was of lesser relevance.
Now that the Governor of the Bank of England has told us that Brexit was after all the right route, and the claims of Project Fear were false I suggest it is time to move on and “put a sock in it” !
In 1962 I attended 53 performances at the ROH alone and saw all the great singers of the time whilst British singers began travelling the world – the EU was nowhere to be seen and can be given little credit for any of its actions.
I then lived 30 years across Europe working for international music companies – and, naturally, ended up a confirmed Brexiteer. Today I am delighted that Andrew Bailey (at the BoE) has finally admitted he was wrong.
It’s so sad to see countries willfully destroying their own great cultural institutions (and so many other aspects of their societies e.g. labor rights, access to health care etc.) due to their citizen’s short-sighted nationalistic selfishness, conservatism, and bigotry – particularly in the UK and here in the U.S. Will forever stand as the true long-term legacy of both Tory and Republican party rule as well as such criminals as Rupert Murdoch and his Die Sturmer-style journalism which has done so much to infect each of the nations he has been allowed to infest.
Not like BLM trashing American cities or the unrestrained hoards breaching the southern border – or anything!!
Ok Sue, back to bed
Why? The point is more than valid.
Ridiculous comment.
Well then…..
Since I’m completely anonymous I’ll allow myself a “hot take.” Personally I don’t care much for the woes of musicians here in the face of Brexit and the ACE cuts. This isn’t necessarily their doing, but you’d think that in the face of this calamity the UK classical music industry would be desperate for anyone willing to join their ranks and add to their numbers. Yet time and time again they’ve held on to their insular mindset and pushed outsiders away from them.
I moved here for my final stage of orchestral training, hoping that it would be a springboard into the profession. After being rejected at the CV phase of auditions for:
– RLPO
– LPO
– LSO
– RPO
– Royal Northern Sinfonia
– Bournemouth Symphony
– Opera North
– Welsh National Opera
– BBC Symphony
– BBC Philharmonic
– Philharmonia
– AND THE NORTHERN BALLET ORCHESTRA
…and the stated reason for my rejection being “you’ve done a lot of professional work, just never in the UK.”
If that’s the attitude orchestras in the UK take towards outsiders showing an interest in applying to their vacancies, I see no reason to care about these (admittedly stupid) cuts.
This is just my opinion, and I’m heavily biased, but in the case of this particular disgruntled musician the plea for help is falling on deaf ears.
You write “the stated reason for my rejection being ‘you’ve done a lot of professional work, just never in the UK’.” Really? This was the actual response from every orchestra? Frankly this sounds like porky pies.
Yep. At least every one that bothered to give an answer. The rest said ” we are not able to give any feedback at this stage.”
I have an internationally spanning CV, just happens to be that none of my professional work was in the UK. You can’t get any dep work in the UK unless committees hear you in an audition setting and like you, so it ends up being a really closed-off system.
I won’t regret coming off as petty, but this is a direct case of “when I was younger and desperately looking for work you refused to even give me a chance, so why should I give a damn when your funding gets cut”
And the stated reason for my rejection being “you’ve done a lot of professional work, just never in the UK.”
You can put me down as a vote for BS on this too. What are the chances that each orchestra would respond in exactly the same way with a reason that makes no apparent sense?
Orchestras want people who can do the job. Your post serves as a testimony to what must be apparent to anyone reading it. You did not understand the real reason for your rejection probably because you have no interest in knowing it.
As a (very!) long-serving member of one of the orchestras listed above, I doubt your story. I’ve served on many audition panels over the years and the matter of a candidate having extensive overseas experience has never been a handicap – on the contrary, high level professional experience is always a plus, regardless of where that experience has been obtained. In our orchestra we have appointed many players, in all sections, whose previous careers have been outside the UK. Post Brexit we have had to consider a candidate’s ability to reside and work in the UK, causing many excellent applicants to be rejected at the CV stage of sifting.
Disgruntled…. Looking at just one of these orchestras ….The LSO, how do you account for the fact
that the following members audition/trial experience was so different to your own?
Diego Incertis
Carmine Lauri
Roman Simovic
Andrej Power
Ginette De Cyper
Stefano Mengoli
German Clavijo
Julian Gil Rodríguez
And:
Joost Bosdijk
Olivier Stankiewicz
Mizuho Ueyama
Laurent Quenelle
Sylvain Vasseur
Juliana KochUeyama
Sofia Silva Souza
Alex Lagasse
Iwona Muszynska
And probably other LSO Members. They all did auditions so must be sour grapes on your behalf.
Check the facts.
It’s “all about you” then?
Just wait until 2024 when that farcical ETA thing comes in, so when folk from EU arrive in Dublin and want to visit Giant’s Causeway etc, they will have to fill in an online ETA form. None of my folk will be filling it in, when they visit, so who will be checking the aircoach bus/train from Dublin, not to mention the wee back roads over the border. Impossible. The English Tories never understand Brexit and its legacy.
Too bad they’re White Europeans and not Syrian, Afghan, or African POCs, then it would be no issue getting visas to live and work in Britain.
AC Grayling said at the Rejoin EU march in London that the current load of politicians running UK are terrible. He went on to point out that 60% of voters in UK want to rejoin EU and more than 80% of under 25s. The folk who voted leave most perished in the pandemic. I think Starmer if he wins a landslide in 2024 needs to fire up yet another referendum and cancel Brexit. This is one form of cancel culture I would support 100%.