The current whirlwind of political upsets, inside which we all find ourselves blowing about like Dantean shades, might not appear to have much to do with writing music, or creating it by other means, or performing it or listening to it.
But it does, of course, and for the most obvious reason: music, like any other human activity, cannot be removed from the rest of life.
Fortunately for all of us, the question of exactly how music is connected to our lives is not an easy one to answer. And it’s anyway a question which goes a long way back – to Ancient Greece and maybe even further – and whatever more or less truthful answers each of us might find to it, they cannot lightly be reduced to slogans, academic or journalistic jargon, or made into props to support passing programmes of interference in school curricula or sticking-plaster attempts at social engineering.
Still, thoughts of this old question wandered across my mind again at a seminar on the subject of the future of composers and new music led by the London Sinfonietta at the South Bank. There were good voices there that day from all sorts of areas of music, including, inevitably, the field of funding. And of course, our colleague who spoke on that subject, raised the words “diversity” and “inclusion”.
There was a vigorous discussion that day, and there’s been plenty of argument down the years about what these two troublingly emblematic words might actually mean, what they are for, and what the use of them is intended to achieve, or provoke. But such arguments have been given a sudden sharpness and bitterness by the recent eruption of new (but not so new) “identity politics”, a gaudy firework display of intolerances racial, sexual, tribal, historical, religious, and indeed –although it’s become difficult to use this word nowadays – class.
Some of the musicians we honour in the British Composer Awards find themselves in the middle of this firework display, fighting with all their might to take music-making of “diverse” kinds into “diverse” communities. It’s heroic work.
Others operate in more obscure fields, writing music that is part of a conversation between much smaller groups of people, or even music that is hardly performed or heard at all. But now these composers too cannot avoid being drawn into the conflict, and especially into a depressingly stale folkdance of straw-women and straw-men with badges of shame dangling around their necks reading: “intellectual” and “‘elite”.
There’s not time to get lost in what to do next. But there is time to make a simple point. Or perhaps not so simple, but one which concerns us all, whatever kinds of music we are interested in.
Discussions of diversity and inclusion have often and especially recently been focused on questions of representation: who is represented by this art or in that art? In the last few months we’ve heard (and these are important examples but randomly chosen): How many women film-directors are out there? Why are there so few black faces in Hollywood? Why do we see so many fewer older women on our television screens? Why is there – and check this word – a “disproportionate” number of British male actors educated at Eton?
More immediately: Why do we see so few composers… or performers… or audience-members from this group of the population? Or from that? Why do so many of our most successful composers appear to come from similar backgrounds? What are the systems of power and privilege which mean that one form of music rather than another is credited with greater significance and importance? And credited by whom? Who makes these decisions? Who owns musical meaning?
Good and important questions, and there are thousands like them.
But there’s a problem...
Nearly all these questions are based on the idea that art should reflect us, who we are and the way we are. As though, when I go to a film, or read a book, or see a picture or listen a string quartet, I should always expect to meet myself staring back at me.
No doubt some art forms were originally intended by their creators to achieve exactly this effect.
But it’s an effect that’s also a game. If we surround ourselves with a wall of mirrors we might indeed reveal something about the way we live. And that something might be interesting and truthful. Or we might, if you or I are dictators or part of a dominant group – middle-class white males, to take the obvious example – use this wall to distort something fundamental about the way we live, to ensure our continuing dominance and exclude the rest.
But when I think of my own journey into music, especially my childhood journey, what I remember as most powerful about this beautiful art form is what it revealed to me about the existence of a world far beyond myself… and beyond the lives of the people around me… and most of all beyond and behind that wall of mirrors.
A writer friend once wisely said to me: Don’t write about what you know. Write about what you don’t know.
Or as the great Russian formalist Shklovsky put it: “Make it strange”!
Music it seems to me is an art peculiarly well-placed to make... and reveal... strangeness. And when we go back to that hoary old question about how music connects to life, the strangeness of both should be part of the answer.
As a coda, I would add that strangeness, far more than familiarity, can contain within itself the power of prophecy. And that can be important.
For example, in 1932, the young Shostakovich embarked on an opera. When his commissioners found out what it was about, they withdrew the commission, partly because it was too strange.
It told the story of a grotesque creature, half-ape, half-human, with luminous unreal orange hair, whose plan was to take over the whole world.
Now that is making it strange!
- More about the British Composer Awards at www.britishcomposerawards.com
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