classical music prizes

Some fodder here for Macdonald. The writer, Tom Service, contemplates the lack of classical music awards to equal the Mercury or Turner in terms of "media impact and artistic seriousness". Do look out for concert etiquette in the mid-1820s. Those were the days ...


Tom Service: The Mercury music prize combines star power and industry credibility – isn't it time that classical music had something similar?

I return to the blogosphere to find there's another debate on concert etiquette going on, triggered by the nation's favourite grey-haired electronica maestro, Jonathan Harvey – I agree with commenter MVMountwood, who said he wished that Harvey's music "routinely attracted as much media attention" as his comments on classical music culture – and to see that Mark-Anthony Turnage has ripped off Beyoncé at the Proms. And also to find that minimalist indie band the xx have walked away with this year's Mercury music prize.

TD
These events prompted the following thoughts, in no particular order. Firstly, that classical music still lacks any award ceremony to match the combination of media impact and artistic seriousness of the Mercurys or the Turner prize (and no, the Classical Brits and their record-industry back-slapping don't count). The nearest we have are the venerable Royal Philharmonic Society awards and the PRS new music award.

The PRS gong ought to be the real Turner equivalent. The winner, announced on the 16 September, gets £50,000 for a new piece of music – more than twice as much as the Mercury victors will get, and double the amount Britain's most prestigious art prize nets its winner. The difference with the PRS award is that the cash goes on producing the composers's ideas, not straight into their bank account in honour of work they've already done. In previous years, this has meant digging a big hole for Jem Finer's Score for a Hole in the Ground, and creating a nationwide virtual instrument for The Fragmented Orchestra.

Collectively, however, the vision of "new music" the PRS advocates on its shortlist is just plain weird: a range of inoffensive, mostly genreless sound-art and new-instrument ideas that will upset no one, that ticks boxes marked "politically correct" and "innovative", but that will sadly end up making as much difference to the media and musical culture as a wet sock on laundry day.

I hope I'm proved wrong, but is this really the best use of the nation's most generous financial award for new music? How about giving the money for a piece the PRS can actually collect royalties from: a new orchestral work that uses live electronics, or an album that puts a cutting-edge classical composer alongside a studio artist (to pick only two of many ideas that might stand a better chance of pricking the public consciousness)?

Thought number two, regarding concert etiquette. Here's Hector Berlioz writing about going to the opera in Paris in the mid-1820s:

As I was intimately acquainted with every note of the score, the performers, if they were wise, played it as it was written; I would have died rather than allow the slightest liberty with the old masters to pass unnoticed. I had not notion of biding my time and coldly protesting in writing against such a crime – oh dear, no! – I apostrophised the delinquents then and there in my loudest voice, and I can testify than no form of criticism goes so straight home as that ... Accordingly, when the Scythian ballet [in Gluck's Iphigénie en Tauride] began I lay in wait for my cymbals ... Boiling with anger ... I shouted out with all my might, "There are no cymbals there; who has dared to correct Gluck?" ... But it was worse in the third act, where the trombones in Orestes' monologue were suppressed, just as I feared they would be; and the same voice was heard shouting out, "Not a sign of a trombone; it is intolerable!"

I have long wanted to try this at concerts when a conductor, orchestra, or singer is up there massacring one of my favourite pieces, but have so far lacked the courage of my convictions. Until now. Let's bring back Berlioz's instant feedback system at concerts. Jonathan Harvey would surely agree with me.

And so to the final item on the agenda: the Turnage-Beyoncé stooshie. It would all surely have mattered more if the new piece weren't so unimaginative in what it did with its material, whatever its provenance. But that's just, like, my opinion, man.

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