All gloom and doom
Norman Lebrecht mourns the demise of the classical music business The trouble with being labelled a prophet of doom is that, unlike politicians, you are expected to deliver disaster within a single parliamentary term or lose your staff and mantle. In my case, the risk of cleselection has been minimal as a series of cautious predictions have been alarmingly over-fulfilled.
In the past decade I have written three books that anticipated musical upheavals. The Maestro Myth (1991, Pocket Books) argued that prolonged abuse of power and wealth by famous conductors would drive the breed to oblivion. Today, only two conductors, Rattle and Gergiev, can claim household-name status.
In Covent Garden: The Untold Stoty (2000, Simon & Schuster), I noted that the Royal Opera House's crises were rooted in its Keynesian foundations. It needed to be either a fully-funded state opera or a private theatre; the third way led to ruin. Since publication, the ROH has seen its top job shunned by experienced candidates and its chairman told that the Culture Secretary wants his head. No longer a flagship of British arts, the ROH is now a Flying Dutchman, a hazard to shipping.
But the book on which my gloomy reputation is most founded was When the Music Stops (1996, Pocket Books), a study of the classical music economy which warned that the sector was heading for meltdown unless it put making music ahead of making money. Here, too, nemesis arrived faster than a Virgin train on pay-day.
The record industry that had grown out of Caruso's £100 hotel-room encounter with a Gramophone Company horn in March 1902 folded like a house of cards. Six multinationals with an 87 per cent market share were merged down to four, stripping artists of their record deals and, in some cases, their careers. Output was slashed by two thirds as new readings of core symphonies were deemed uneconomic.
The knock-on effects were instantaneous. Leading orchestras like the Berlin Philharmonic were consumed by strife and defections as CD revenues dried up. Concert managers, noses to the wind, dropped eminent soloists and replaced them with bimbos. Television downgraded serious music and terminated live relays. Governments cut arts subsidies and music teaching in schools. The gentle decline of a noble art turned into a vertical rout.
Some attacked my title as alarmist for implying that music might cease altogether. In the United States, the book was (over my protests) issued as Who Killed Classical Music? — establishing its death as a fait accompli. For this misjudgment, and others unknown, the publisher duly went bust, owing me a fat tenor's fee in unpaid royalties.
Those who dispute my conclusions have adopted two lines of defence. The first is to question (but not challenge) their factual basis. If Lebrecht is to be believed' was a recurrent reviewers' phrase. If, my foot. No substantive fact in the book has, to my knowledge, been successfully refuted.
The alternative defence has been to adopt the half-full, half-empty glass metaphor. which Peter Phillips has applied in this magazine (Arts, 9 December 2000). There is some validity to his viewpoint. While the EMIs and DGs wrestled with corporate strategy, an alternative army of small labels seized the day with longneglected repertoires. The canon expanded at either end, into both pre-classical and contemporary music. The new spirit of adventure also attracted some younger listeners to replace demised or disenchanted concert-goers.
The major beneficiary of recording collapse was Naxos, a Hong Kong firm which issues a dozen CDs a month at the impulse price of £5 (or dollars, in the even more impulsive United States). Naxos grabbed almost one fifth of UK classical sales and half the Scandinavian market. Its success is founded on low price, low fees and a shrewd reluctance to promote its artists who, once famous, might command higher fees.
Naxos has indeed won a wider audience for classical recordings, but its failure to invest in star-making has deprived the concert hall of box-office draws and the art as a whole of celebrity. There is, as Phillips asserts, more music available more cheaply than ever before', but it is making appreciably less impact.
Other small labels enjoy a precarious existence, unable to crack the majors' grip on retail outlets. Peter Phillips knows the score. At the height of the CD boom, he sold his label, Gime11, to the Dutch-owned Philips multinational, retrieving it last year just before the Philips label was resold and wound down. He has done well to procure independent survival; others, like Yolanda Skoura's ingenious French label Opus 111, have been less fortunate.
Nor has the enlarged canon proved an unmixed blessing. Beautifully as the Tallis Scholars might evoke the baroque, mediaeval art is no substitute for the cultural centrality of a Brahms cycle, which has been destablilised by onslaughts of esoterica. The impetus to present pre-classical and non-classical music to multicultural audiences has led concert-hall managers into a veritable souk of world music — at the expense of orchestral concerts, which are being pushed to the periphery of metropolitan programming.
The omens are unpropitious. The New Year will see another major-label merger and the disappearance of more orchestras. Three are heading for the chop in Holland alone. There are small pockets of deliverance, like the well-run Wigmore Hall, and the Internet will eventually liberate performers from the middle-man tyranny of record companies, agents, arts centres and broadcasters.
But redemption is still some way off, and I am not quite ready to exchange my doom-specs for rose-tinted varifocals. I do expect, some day, to write a book with a happy ending, but it may have to be about something other than classical music.
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