Strings attached

The classical industry’s reliance on government grants is no secret. The sordid ramifications, however, are hushed up.

For the past fifteen years, I have been making a quiet, modest but reasonably stable living as a classical composer, as impossible as that sounds. As a consequence, I frequently receive messages from other composers and performing musicians, asking me to refer them to someone in the business who might “discover” and promote them. The general notion seems to be that all it takes is a single powerful enthusiast to take them under their wing, and that such tutelage will subsequently propel the young talent to stardom – sold-out concert halls, chart-topping classical recordings, financial freedom, the lot.

Of course, as anyone in the business knows, this is not how things actually go down, and cannot go down, not even in this highly unrealistic fantasy scenario, were it ever to happen. Even the most arduously-prepared, prestigiously-staged, sold-out concert is but a tiny blip in the life of the paying audience; one success doesn’t guarantee another; classical recordings sell in the dozens to hundreds rather than in the thousands; generally speaking, there is very little left of artist fees and royalties after every middleman has taken their cut; and once the musician finally receives their share, there are still individual taxes to be paid.

Considering these constraints, it isn’t surprising that the vast majority of the European classical industry cleaves to government grants as its predominant lifeline. For most conventionally successful classical artists, ensembles and concert halls, scrambling for subsidies is a daily reality. But before any youngsters start dreaming about state-funded stipends, let it be said that there is a major pitfall to this practice, which everyone in the industry knows, but nobody likes to talk about in public: Musicians who rely on politics for their daily bread effectively sign up for serfdom to the politicians controlling the grants – both artistically and personally. After all, he who pays the piper calls the tune.

Sign up for serfdom

In my native Vienna, classical music’s supposed capital, this is euphemistically known as Freunderlwirtschaft – roughly: murky business with friends, or less charmingly: cronyism. To see local and national politicians invited to, and courted at, events and fairs for composers is the norm, not the exception. The director of Vienna’s largest music university, MDW, even went so far as to open the Austrian Composers Association’s annual meetup a few years ago with the words: “It is our first and foremost duty as creators of music to spread a political message.” I was struck with disbelief; truculently, I had always thought the first and foremost duty as a creator of music was – to create music. The director, meanwhile, didn’t hesitate to go into detail about what the current political message was supposed to be, much to the contentment of the politicians dappling the audience.

Vexingly, Vienna is not an isolated case by any means; indeed one would struggle to find any territory in Central or Western Europe where things are any different.

It takes no genius to recognise that culture’s entanglement with politics is enormously detrimental, and on many different levels. For one, it degrades music to being a divisive perpetrator of ideology – when it should be the very opposite, a unifying, peacemaking force transcending political, perhaps even national boundaries. Then there are the unpleasant consequences for the individual: In the performing arts, nobody is allowed an opinion contrary to the state-proclaimed political catalogue du jour, unless one is willing to kiss one’s career goodbye and to play the pariah forever. But most significantly, on the much larger scale beyond the contemporary or the individual, the financial chokehold of politics is a loss to humanity at large: because it effectively hinders the art, the music, from evolving.

One only has to attend a random premiere of serious music – virtually always atonal or at the very least, glaringly dissonant – to witness this in action. Short of developments in technology, contemporary “classical” composition has barely differentiated itself from its atonal predecessors over a century ago. In the meantime, the ever-dwindling audiences have grown weary of this pervasive lack of originality, as have the performing musicians. So why is the entire classical industry still compelled to program atonal music, of all things, in order to receive any kind of grant or subsidy? The answer is uncomfortably rooted in the political philosophy of the parties distributing the grants. In Western countries, culture ministries have tended to be firmly gripped by the political Left for several decades. And the key feature of the political Left is its distaste for hierarchy – hierarchy of any kind, but especially one based on binary evaluations like “good” or “bad”, such as in the traditional judgement of art. What was once a noble idea supposed to bring about progress, now brings about the opposite: stagnation.

Politically encouraged mediocrity

Here we arrive at the old split between the abstract and the concrete: If you tell a painter to realistically paint a cat, and they fail, every child will be able to tell. The same goes for a classical, tonal symphony – if it is badly written, boring, kitschy, or otherwise pitiful, it will be obvious to almost anyone. Take an abstract work, however, a modernist painting or a piece of atonal music, and the differentiation suddenly cannot be made so easily anymore. The deciding power in the hierarchy between “good” or “bad” is therefore snatched from everyone but the connoisseur. And even the few remaining intellectual challengers are easily eliminated by simply declaring: Everything is art, as long as the artist or composer says so. If you don’t agree, you’re a philistine. (In music, it also helps to not accept composition students opposing this “Emperor’s New Clothes” philosophy into music universities and conservatoires, a widespread practice on the Continent.) – The elimination of judgement was once supposed to foster artistic freedom, and possibly did; but now, after over one hundred years without any public scrutiny, it fosters artistic mediocrity more often than not. Indeed, mediocrity is in fact encouraged, because it happens to be quite convenient for the politicians in question: An artist who wouldn’t succeed in the free market keeps being tethered to the politican’s and party’s favour – and thus, not only remains an accessible mouthpiece for public ideological messaging, but also silenced in every other regard.

This criticism is in no way confined to the Left; a similar stagnation would likely eventually occur if the political orientation was inversed. Music that serves political rather than artistic interest can never be great, for the simple reason that it fails its own purpose. The point remains regardless of ideological alignment: Marrying music to politics is a terrible idea, both for the individual and for humanity at large.

While one may wish that fewer colleagues would forsake artistic and personal integrity for a meagre government subsidy, the reality looks very different, and often for very good individual reasons; it’s hard to turn down a paycheck if you’re desperate or have a family to feed, or both. One must point out, however, that this is not a sustainable business model in the slightest. Any musician who’s been in the industry for more than a few years knows a chamber orchestra’s worth of personnel who were laid off because a new government slashed grants it suddenly deemed dispensable. This happens all the time, regardless of political affiliation.

What, then, is the alternative? The bright-eyed junior colleagues asking for advice may have it right in one regard: sometimes, it does only take one enthusiast, or a handful, but not in the way people commonly think. There are no benevolent discoverers or promoters who magically create music careers; there are, however, plenty of people who love classical music. For every Beethoven, there is a Lichnowsky – both two-hundred years ago and now. Thankfully, private patrons generally do not require quasi-religious adherence to their personal principles; they are mostly in it for the music, after all, not for public profiling like the local or national bureaucrat trying to put artists into their political pocket. The artist-patron business model has worked for hundreds of years for a reason, regardless of political upheaval, and it is very much alive. Of course, such a trade requires composing music that people actually want to hear, but this should be the bare minimum anyway; otherwise, what else is the point? For composers who aren’t particularly interested in the limelight, or who are actively trying to avoid it to focus on their art, a single Maecenas can already be sufficient to tide them over while they complete a seminal work. And even sourcing funds to stage an entire concert series to gain industry recognition, while more difficult, is not impossible – but it starts by figuring out how one can make such a project useful, better yet: profitable, to a potential sponsor, who will likely be a private company rather than a private individual. This tangible, economic cost-benefit equation is one that has long been neglected by the classical industry; but solving it on a systemic level would greatly enhance artistic and individual liberties, and thus, the development of music itself. It may seem crudely utilitarian to a young artist, but it certainly beats the alternative. At the end of the day, money talks. It is our job as musicians to ensure that the music does, too.