UK orchestra aims to boost health and happiness
OrchestrasThe season announcement by the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra marks a significant change of tone. Instead of flagging up the names of visiting stars, the BSO promises ‘ a new artistic team (pic) and a raft of new initiatives to support wellbeing.’
The latter is groundbreaking. Read this:
The BSO’s Recovery Orchestra, in partnership with Bristol Drugs Project, continues along with further BSO Wellbeing Orchestras in partnership with mental health support organisations in Cornwall, and in Somerset with The Octagon, The Ark at Egwood, and Chard Watch.
A new partnership with NHS Dorset commences in July, with creative health experiences in communities across the county as well as with patients and staff in Dorset County Hospital, Dorchester. Programmes will range from early intervention care for young people to music for the most elderly patients.
In its tenth year, the BSO’s Associate Musicians programme expands, welcoming two new community music leaders in Dorset and Somerset — and the BSO Young Associates training scheme extends into its third year, creating opportunities for the next generation of music leaders.
The Orchestra’s extensive music education programme also continues with a series of live symphonic concerts, workshops, and assemblies — and the BSO deepens its close relationship with Bristol Beacon, sharing a vision of how a venue and its Orchestra in Residence can empower access and opportunity across a range of activity. Highlights range from a new inter-generational ensemble to curriculum projects with schools, care home concerts and more.
Deepening its commitment to inclusion, the BSO continues its partnership with the National Open Youth Orchestra [NOYO] expanding its work with the Bournemouth NOYO centre. The Orchestra’s popular touring series of performances in SEND schools continues, in Weston-Super-Mare, Bristol, Hampshire and BCP — and its ground-breaking, inclusive side-by-side Symphony from Scratch weekend will test Open Up’s Accessible Musical Provision (AMP) Toolkit for the second year, alongside further innovation and growth of disabled-led ensemble BSO Resound.
Way to go.
It is an attempt to anchor classical music into society in a way, different from the music as such. It is making music FUNCTIONAL, serving communities in a way people can relate to, because it is assumed that the art form is loosing contact with the modern world – that is, the world as it is seen as changing into a much less understanding one concerning culture.
The assumption is that ‘future music leaders’ (take note: not ‘musicians’) will turn classical music into a form of self-help, like spas, and thus will be instrumentalised to serve aims that are in themselves not musical. It is to be expected that music then will be adapted to the need of people who have no idea what classical music is.
But does classical music not have therapeutic qualities? Yes it does, but as itself, pure, not in some adaptation. Helping people to understand what the art form is in itself, would open-up many more opportunities of making classical music more relevant for society.
“It is making music FUNCTIONAL, serving communities in a way people can relate to, because it is assumed that the art form is loosing contact with the modern world.”
What do you have against serving communities directly with music the way the press release stated? Are you also assuming that the community outreach that the UK orchestra chooses to do is not pure? What about Elgar when he played at the mental asylum?
I think the issue is more complex than the well-meant aims as stated in the press release.
Classical music is therapeutic in an indirect way: by experiencing it in the way it is meant to be experienced, it has a beneficial influence (maybe except some works that celebrate depressing subjects like Stravinsky’s “Les Noces”, and of course modernist works). To ‘apply’ it in a direct way, its value is diminished, like in every setting where the music is instrumentalised (no pun intended).
I don’t know about Elgar, I just hope he was released afterwards.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31877362/
How do you justify your claim that the value of classical music is diminished when it is used clinically, for example in this link? Would it not be of more value since patients would be in less pain?
Mmmm…. yes maybe. But is this example not a bit extreme? Was the mentioned press release meant for such individual cases? And if so, there is quite a difference between a recording in a hospital and the tasks of a symphony orchestra.
How is classical music meant to be experienced? Please can you be more specific.
It seems to me: experienced as such, i.e. with all attention focussed on the work in an acoustic way, and not being distracted by visuals, instrumentalisation, politics, etc.
Classical music is an abstract art form, in the sense that there is no concrete subject, but life experience filtered into the purely musical realm: as something to be heard, not seen, or used as a function for something else. Psychologically the focus of attention is different when music is instrumentalised.
Of course I know that in many instances there are ulterior motives at performances. But the work itself should be as central as possible.
A comparable issue has occasionally risen with literature, where (in the ‘School of Life’) Proust is reduced to self-help and Allain de Botton wrote a booklet with the title: “How Proust Can Change Your Life”, which turns P’s novel into a how-to guide: ‘How to love life today; How to read for yourself; How to take your time; How to suffer successfully; How to express your emotions; How to be a good friend” etc. etc.
What definition of musical modernism do you use? Wikipedia (you can look through the list of sources which it cites) would have the entire range from Poulenc to Xenakis as modernists!
Elgar played in a band for psychiatric patients – in his old age he would scare off people at gatherings by saying “When I was at the mental asylum…”
There are many descriptions of modernism, but the most correct is: atonal Klangkunst, which is often as depressing as a concrete housing block in the rain. With the exception of some colourful meditative works.
For instance, playing a recording of Eclat Multiples by P Boulez to psychiatric patients would surely not contribute to a better condition:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ggRDq8SWnw&t=311s
… that is, for patients who were normal, healthy people before their break-down. If they had been a modernism enthusiast, it may bring them back to their real Self.
“making music FUNCTIONAL” – music has always been a functional part of human communities. Look only at its role in most religions. What is so frightening about the idea of the practical usefulness of music? Is this another example of the aristocrat looking down on mere tradesmen, or the middle-class manager looking down on working-class plumbers? Mustn’t dirty our hands with money or manual labour!
Why on earth shouldn’t classical music serve the need of people who have no idea what classical music is? Are such people like the undeserving poor of the Victorians? I have only the vaguest notion of how wireless communications actually work. Should I be barred from using the internet?
Snobbery is an unattractive trait of character.
Music in the service of a text is another matter, and again, the focus of attention is the music itself, in combination with the text, in the proper way as it was meant. In such combination the music expresses the meaning of the words, they form a unity. The music is not made functional to the words, but expresses the ‘content’ of the words, and that expression is exactly what was meant by the composer.
Why is this so difficult? With snobbery this has really nothing to do.
The urge to make classical music ‘functional’, is populism, based on ignorance, and that diminishes its value.
If we put pictures of Van Gogh’s paintings on T-Shirts and cookies boxes and chocolat boxes, in that form the value of the painting is diminished. So it is with classical music when it is ‘put to use’ outside its proper context (and that can also be music in a religious context, or opera). Doesn’t the Mozart Kugeln diminish, in that form, the value and meaning of the artist and person Mozart was? Etc. etc….
Certainly music and words together form an expression. But for what purpose, in religious music? Surely communal worship of god. Taking away that sense of a worshipful community renders the music sterile – beautiful, satisfying to the individual, but drained of its essential purpose.
All music, before recordings, was communal, performed and enjoyed by people in groups, for dancing, for singing, for relaxation, for stimulation, for comfort in distress, for joyfulness.
I disagree that the debased use of art and music in adverts and as popular ‘memes’ damages the art and music itself. A Van Gogh painting is no less valuable for having been printed on a T-shirt. If anything, it has been made more accessible to a much wider group of people (populism?), some of whom may come to see and appreciate more the original.
No.
I checked the press release linked from Twitter, and the orchestra did in fact publish the names of soloists and conductors who will be playing in Bournemouth, contrary to what you said.
So no actual music, then?
Music must not be permitted to trigger any emotions that are deemed to be “unhealthy” by government functionaries.
This made audiences ill at the premiere in June 1969 at the Canadian national Arts Center in Ottawa:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S3mHXaO88Pw
…… but government funcionaries really liked it.