As we say goodbye to a tough year, what do we hope for music in 2024?
I suspect that most people in the UK who make a living from classical music, or who simply love it, are glad to see the back of 2023. It was a year when things upon which you thought you could rely suddenly seemed far from certain. Things like opera being performed widely across the UK. Or the people in charge of dispensing public funding for culture showing some enthusiasm for serious artforms. Or well-regarded universities continuing to teach music as well as the other humanities and sciences. When you realise that there are powerful figures high up in politics and public institutions who would not agree with any of those propositions, you become scarily conscious of how precarious the future is for classical music.
On top of all that, 2023 also brought chronic economic problems for the arts – even more so than 2022 and 2021, when the government’s culture recovery fund was still cushioning the impact of the pandemic. Local authorities that once handsomely supported the arts, such as Birmingham, effectively went bust, leaving world-class institutions hanging by a thread. And, despite what government ministers claim about their commitment to music education, the subject still seems barely tolerated in many state schools, while music hubs – the organisations responsible for delivering instrumental tuition and running youth bands and orchestras – face severe financial difficulties.
In such circumstances it’s easy to be overwhelmed by gloom. Pessimism, like Covid, is not only infectious but lingering. When I feel it coming on, I usually fortify myself by re-reading Thomas Hardy’s great poem The Darkling Thrush. You remember it? The writer ventures outdoors on a bitter winter’s day when ‘every spirit upon earth’ seems ‘fervourless’, the very landscape appears dead, and rebirth is almost unimaginable. Suddenly, however, he hears a thrush singing, and this unexpectedly joyous burst of sound sets him wondering if the bird is conveying ‘some blessed hope, whereof he knew and I was unaware’.
So where’s the ‘blessed hope’ for classical music in 2024? I could natter on about what a new government may or may not do for the arts, or what the survival options are for English National Opera, or what cultural riches I would put into the national curriculum for schools if I ruled the country. But these specific things, though important, are not the fundamental causes of classical music’s problems. We need to step back and look at the bigger pic
