London Violin Studio becomes a School in Westminster
1 May, 1 May… ah yes! 1st May 2005. That was the date that, as a naive undergraduate, I officially incorporated my own music company, funded with a prize from Deutsche Bank.
First as Court Lane, now as a semi-nameless entity that supports Fifth Quadrant, SHJ, London Violin Studio, Music and the City, Classical Revolution London, Road to Jericho, and various other projects that have come and gone. For whatever reason, I thought it would be the most secure route to artistic freedom, and I still do.
Somehow – I don’t quite know how, as it has been a long and winding road – it seems still to be trading and indeed growing. I’m still probably doing a lot wrong, indeed it took me the best part of five years to understand that financial and artistic value has zero tangible relationship except in exceptional circumstances, but I’m as convinced as ever that the core idea is fundamentally right.
Indeed, the whole philosophy – putting the great traditions of classical and contemporary classical music into a more contemporary, relevant context – has never wavered. And even through difficult times, sticking to that clear vision has helped realise some real change.
The next step is very real-world; I’m expanding London Violin Studio into a proper school and research centre, based next to Buckingham Palace in the heart of London’s Westminster. Today, I open two dedicated violin rooms in a location that I hope is something of a statement – I want to encourage culture and the arts to develop and thrive at the heart of the UK government and royal district. I was thrilled to see that there are several organisations doing the same – opposite the new school, in the same street, there is a THEATRE under construction. Yes, really! St James’s Theatre, the first new theatre in London in 30 years, which is being built upon the site of the old Westminster Theatre of 300 years ago, and will open in the Autumn. It’s an undeniably exciting place to be.
And indeed there’s everything to play for. I think that cultural values – as often articulated by the arts – totally belong at the heart of a society, because of the positive influence they have on other aspects of social development. England and the UK enjoy possibly one of the greatest heritages in the world (culturally at least; our international legacy is not so rosy in other areas, as I remember each time I visit a foreign country and find a plaque commemorating the destruction of the area by people based out of Whitehall…). Is that reputation fully justified right now? Is it reflected by the way the institutions that control our society operate? I’m not entirely sure. But I think it should be.
Classical Clubbing: Changing the Rules, or Playing the Game?
There’s an interesting article in the Guardian today, asking whether the ‘Classical Club Night’ trend is ‘tearing up the rulebook’ or ‘playing the game’. You can read it here:
And here’s my response… (I guess I’m coming down on the side of ‘playing the game’!)
A timely piece… we are launching ‘Classical Revolution’ in London tonight. It’s one of the longest established of these Club Nights, having been founded in 2006 in San Francisco.
The link is http://www.
For us, revolution is an easy word to use, but we’re not really reinventing the wheel – we’re putting really great performances of really great music into a nice bar. As I wrote here, there’s nothing wrong with the music, and it doesn’t need any help. Classical club nights just change the context and the presentation of Classical music. Why do this? To cater for two distinct types of people:
1) People who already love classical music but want to have a choice of environments to enjoy it in. Sometimes you’re in the mood for a full-blown tails-and-bow-tie evening out with a major symphony orchestra playing in a major concert hall. Other nights you just want a really intimate, low-key environment in which to experience a Beethoven String Quartet at close quarters. You get a very different experience if you’re on a sofa in a small room with a glass of wine, than if you’re sitting amongst a large audience in a big auditorium. Neither is the ‘right’ way of doing it, they’re just different.
2) People who aren’t already into classical music, and who are coming to it fresh. How do we make classical music attractive to people who haven’t spent several years going to classical concerts, and don’t really have any preconception of what a classical music concert might be like? (or who have a negative preconception). This isn’t an age thing – it’s equally applicable to young and old people. What’s important is that we’re re-imagining the context in which this great music is presented, so that it feels relevant to a contemporary urban audience. Then it won’t feel like a foreign or unapproachable culture to people who are new to classical music.
Once again, I’d reiterate, there’s nothing wrong with classical music itself. Classical music doesn’t need our help. It’s fine. What classical club nights can do is offer a unique type of setting in which people can enjoy classical performances in a different way. Offering these ‘alternative’ classical music experiences helps to reinforce the genre’s place at the heart of our musical culture.
Harry White is absolutely right to use historical examples of classical performance too – just take a look at 19th Century Vienna etc. and you’ll find plenty of examples of such models in action…
Emotion Drives Change
Conclusion from recent work:
Once you get someone to engage with an issue emotionally, they can see any human perspectives involved much more clearly. Once those human perspectives become apparent, the desire for change – if it is needed – becomes much, much stronger.
Is Music ‘Above’ Politics?
Yes but no but… 
On our news site 'Classical Music UK', I noticed our editor had published this story in which Desmond Tutu criticizes the Cape Town Opera for touring to Israel, and the director of Israel Opera responds that both organizations 'relate to culture as a bridge, the aim of which is to be above any political dispute'.
Road to Jericho
Today, Drew and I are travelling to Switzerland to perform and speak at the Agenda Setting conference, a major international event for the media and political sectors, examining the issue of 'trust' in international media.
We'll be performing music by Mozart and Bach, as well as delivering a keynote about our work in Palestine, to mark the start of our new project 'Road to Jericho', an international concert tour and documentary film in the UK and Palestine.
'Road to Jericho' will be Fifth Quadrant's major project for 2011, and we've just this week welcomed Aldeburgh Music and Spitalfields Music as our key UK partners. We'll be performing a concert at the Spitalfields Festival on 10 June 2011.
We've put together a website (still in semi-draft form, there's plenty more to do…) which you can find at http://www.roadtojericho.com/
We're about to start a big initiative to connect with sponsors and funders, so if you know anyone who would like to get involved, please let us know!
How Technology Affects Music
So as I said, I'm running a 3 year research project at the Royal Academy of Music, starting in October. So what's it all about?
A quick preamble:
Many people now recognise that the digital revolution we're experiencing is changing our way of life more profoundly even than the industrial revolution did.
So why does music – one of the most creative of all human pursuits – have a mainstream that has been so astonishingly slow to recognise these changes, let alone to adapt to them?
Why, when there is so much creative energy and passion in our industry, has the infrastructure around which we work kept us focused on the past not the future, in a way that's only now beginning to see real change?
How Technology Affects Music
My research will not be concerned with answering the question of 'why' all this happened. Nor even with how to set it right, as it is already happening in many different guises across the globe. There are already people chronicling and analysing these problems, such as Greg Sandow of Juilliard, whose very fine book-in-progress about the 'rebirth' of Classical music I shall dissect shortly on these pages.
No, I want to drill down from a musicological perspective, to understand how technologies have altered the way we create and consume music, and therefore changed the music itself.
I want to know if there are any trends, any commonalities, any correlations between how music has historically changed in response to new technologies, and how it does so in the hyper-connected world of today.
Because think what we could have achieved! If we had known the principles behind the forces that changed our world so suddenly in the past decade, we could have risen to the challenge and met them in advance… Our educational institutions, record companies, and orchestras could have attacked head-on the challenges of reinterpreting a great tradition for a changing world, rather than passively standing by until all the money and attention was sucked out of the system. Instead, we had to retrofit our great heritage to the demands of a new order, with all the casualties that entailed, as arts organizations collapsed, and a few monied souls played God, feeding the preferred pawns on the musical chess board.
Technology is frightening, because it amplifies human behaviour without moral judgement; just as it will spread beauty and brilliant ideas, so it will spread evil. There's no stopping progress… all you can do is to stay one step ahead. What kind of culture do we want tomorrow's politicians, business leaders and scientists to emerge from?
We have to decide where we want our musical culture to fit into this brave new world. Music has no power to change anything per se… yet time and again, the values and heritage of our collective cultural experience have proved valuable, for everything from emotional solace to motivation to spiritual enlightenment.
I think music is like technology because it is a vessel through which you can channel and amplify your own ideas and prejudices.
But by definition that means music carries no moral value – it can be the conduit for whatever you choose. Your Wagner can be all-encompassing greatness or Nazi propaganda music, or something else entirely; it's up to you.
***
If we do not maintain the relevance of our work to the culture we exist in – if we rarify and exult bits of musical culture for no truly logical reason – and if we do not understand how profoundly and how rapidly technology is changing that culture, then we cannot begin to adapt that which is musically most precious to us to the demands of an ever-evolving world.
Instead, we become resistant to change, and our cultures become more and more at the mercy of an unpredictable future, until the incredible knowledge and wisdom of our most precious traditions finally become irrelevant.
New Directions
Thanks to the belief that some people have in my work, I have the opportunity to run a 3 year research project at the Royal Academy of Music (which I'll explain in another post soon).
It will incorporate what I've wanted to do since 2002, which is to record an ongoing program of MP3s, supported by a regular blog.
I'm going to use this as a chance to streamline what I do into three parts:
- Performance and Recordings (especially with Fifth Quadrant, which replaces what I was doing with Court Lane Music)
- Academic Research (at the Royal Academy of Music)
- Commercial Projects (through Consonart)
What links my work with these three organizations so tightly together is that they are all, in their own way, deep explorations of the effects of technology on music – looking at all the same ideas, only from three very different perspectives.
In particular, the effects of digital technology on the way we create and consume music should be especially fascinating. But I suspect the disruptive patterns of technology from a historical perspective will tell us a lot about the time of change we're going through now, as well as what we (by 'we', I speak especially for musicians) may experience as new technologies emerge in the future.
I think these are the right vehicles for both the practical and the theoretical challenges that I'm addressing, and in each case, I'm working with some of the most interesting and brilliant people I've ever known.
Soon, I'll tell you more about the research project, which will run through this blog for three years, beginning in October 2010.
I'm already starting preparations, and the regular blogposts and recordings will start in the early Autumn.
More in a month or so… 
National ‘Schools’ of Violin No Longer Exist
For many decades, if not a couple of centuries, people have spoken of the 'Russian School', the 'Franco-Belgian School', the 'German School' of violin playing, and others, in order to describe the different styles of violin playing that exist. Because, although many technical principles are universal, there are still many variations on how exactly to play the violin. I still hear people referring to these 'schools' today.
But the truth is that such delineations have always been subject to the demands of international travel. Even 300 years ago, teachers would sometimes move to a different country and establish themselves at a new Conservatory, bringing with them ideas that would influence a whole generation of violinists, and 'corrupting' the existing 'school' of that area.
This accelerated in the 20th Century, and mainstream teaching practices in major urban/educational centres started to reflect an increasingly more internationalized attitude to the development of the string playing tradition.
Since around the year 2000, this has started to happen even faster, as the effect of the internet takes hold. Even the presence of a specialist online community such as the Violinist.com forums can affect the forward development of violin playing way more than an individual 'national school' ever could.
I've been studying various pieces of evidence for a major research project that I hope to announce later this year, and it's clear that change is happening faster than ever. What's replacing the old 'schools' is not yet entirely clear. But I don't see how it can be a bad thing; having more information to choose from means that ever more effective techniques and ideas will be adopted by violinists around the world.
But filtering that information becomes a problem. It already takes years to consider the existing violin treatises, schools, techniques, and styles of playing. If that is multiplied, how will we know where to invest our attention?
Again, technology has caused this problem. I just hope that technology can provide the answer.