12 FEBRUARY 2000, Page 50

Music

For love and money

Peter Phillips

I wonder what Vivaldi said when the authorities at the Ospedale della Pieta asked him to compose another concerto for their orphaned girls. 'Oh Lord, not another one. Isn't it enough to have written 590 already? I'm sick and tired of the concerto. Ask someone else.' Or did he say, as one supposes he must have done since he ended up writing over 600 of the things: 'What a lovely idea. I have so much more to say in the concerto form, and funnily enough I was just humming a brand-new ritornello theme to myself as I saw you coming.'

For most composers in the past the issue of patronage was a fairly straightforward matter: they did what they were told. Com- posing was a job as well as a vocation and the job side of it, along with the perspira- tion, was 90 per cent of their lives. The idea of Palestrina refusing to write a new setting of the Mass, when asked to by the Church, because he didn't feel like it (he had written 107 of them by the time he died) is ridicu- lous. When a cloaked stranger visited the already ailing Mozart and asked him for a setting of the Requiem, the composer did not refuse, despite his fear that to comply would in effect kill him He needed the money.

I'm not sure very much has changed, despite the modern noise that is made about artistic freedom. Every composer I've come across — famous and unknown — needs money; and usually proves very pliable when a commission is in view. Beethoven's idea that he would compose only when he felt like it is a luxury which few have been able to afford in the 20th century, unkeen to share his extreme poverty. If I'm right this would throw the responsibility of the direction of contempo- rary music onto those who do the commis- sioning. Our impression of where current British music is going is very much in the hands of bodies like the Arts Council and the BBC, who recently have tended to avoid large-scale (expensive) conceptions and concentrate on chamber-music combi- nations. The Church, when roused, seems to go for enormous interdenominational works, or tiny liturgical ones. Few private citizens have the means to enter the ring. It is unusual for composers regularly to write pieces uninvited, and to pay for their first performances, since this path is only too likely to lead to oblivion.

An outsider to these categories is the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, who has recently asked Frederick Stocken to write a 'Symphony for the Millennium'. This commission presents a number of unexpected twists, of which the raiity of a borough council getting involved in such things is the most prominent. Very proper- ly, having decided to spend the money, the authorities have spared nothing in publicis- ing the fact. The blurb pulls no punches:

The municipal commission of a major sym- phony is a remarkably bold act ... This Sym- phony is certainly a work of importance for British classical music and heralds, it is hoped, a new trend for the patronage of composers. A country such as Britain, with a rich musical heritage, should not have been as unproductive as it has in terms of major symphonic works. Hopefully, Stocken's Sym- phony for the Millennium will begin to redress the balance, Apart from being sanguine avant la lettre, these remarks may well serve to mislead future historians of very early 21st-century music. For if one aspect of contemporary composition is certain, it is that the sym- phony as a vibrant creative form is a thing of the past, and in most countries of the dis- tant past. There is a certain irony in watch- ing these self-appointed guardians of our national culture earnestly expecting to revive a tradition which they would have had trouble keeping afloat 50 years ago, as if the symphony were something eternal. Committees from the right side of the polit- ical spectrum traditionally plan big and safe — most obviously in architecture — and I can't think of a better equivalent of this phenomenon in music than the symphony.

Which is not to say the music will be bad, nor that commissions from such a source are undesirable per se, for any patronage enables something to happen which would not otherwise have taken place; just that its parentage and the talk that such parents generate (the blurb refers to 'the great and the good' without a flicker of self-doubt) is of the sort that made sure British music was castrated for so long. There is a very deli- cate balance to be maintained between sponsor and writer these days, since in my view the writer has far less ultimate control over the future of his art than the sponsor, yet it is the finished article of the writer which counts. Two centuries ago and more this seemed to work perfectly well; in the modern context the most effective promot- ers seem to have been those, like the Arts He's still working on the ventriloquist act.' Council, who have made as few stipulations as possible. Stocken's Symphony, which is based on four paintings by Lord Leighton, for 40 years a resident of the borough in question, will receive its premiere at the Royal Albert Hall on 21 February, played by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, conduct- ed by Vernon Handley. I'm hoping that to call it a symphony is to understate the case.