Music in Britain

By MARTIN COOPER

IN November, 1941, the Dartington Hall Trustees set up an Arts Enquiry to investigate the position in England of the visual arts, the factual film, music and the theatre. The' first two reports were published in 1946 and 1947, and the third* has appeared this week. It is admirably thorough, frank in its admission of defects and anomalies and ready with constructive, if often Utopian suggestions for their correction.

The general picture is of passionate but quite uneettnomic activity in all branches, of a vast system of State subsidies which is annually expanding, and must, according to the authors, continue to expand. They are aware of the disadvantages of subsidising artistic activity, but the facts are there to show that there is hardly a single musical body in the country which is able to pay its own way without any support from the State, the municipality or the occasional private individual. The chief body concerned is, of course, the Arts Council, and the report regards it as essential that this, "while growing to meet present needs, and new ones as they arise, should remain a comparatively small and unpretentious organisation and continue to be free of both political and professional pressure." To safeguard the municipal bodies from such pressure is probably much more difficult and has already in some cases proved impossible, but of this the authors of the report say nothing.

Financial considerations are unfortunately paramount in every department, and lack of money can be reasonably pleaded as an excuse for most of the defects in our musical organisations. Whether a vast increase in State subsidies is at the moment, or will for some time to come be, possible is of course very doubtful ; and so, I think, is their effect should they ever be granted. Anyone who reads this report will be tempted to compare even the present scale of support and encouragement of music with the neglect and indifference of the past ; and to pass from that to a contrast between the standards of both creation and performance in the bad old days and now. Concert conditions in Vienna, for example, between 1780 and 1830 would certainly have amazed and horrified our modern planners, and yet it was there and in those years that Haydn, Mozart, Schubert and Beethoven brought the art to classical perfection.

This primary importance of the composer in any musical com- munity is generously acknowledged by the authors of the report. and one of their chief concerns is "to give the composer the opportunities he needs." At the root of the difficulty lies, of course, the fact—accepted and stated without comment—that "the public has lost touch with contemporary music." (Though would it not be truer to say that contemporary music has lost touch with the public—music, like the Sabbath, being made for man rather than vice versa ?) The report's suggestions for bridging this disastrous gap are good as far as they go. State and local authorities, they say, should see that the musical organisations they assist are in a position to perform contemporary music and allow composers an opportunity of rehearsing with them. They can see, too, that institutions formed with new and enterprising aims are given special

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* Music. A Report on Musical Life in England. Published on behalf of the Arts Enquiry by P.E.P. (Political and Economic Planning.) 15s.

consideration, and help by giving grants and fellowships to enable composers to travel and study. Any composer should be grateful for such things, but he might well, like Phedre, sigh as he accepts

them: "Mon ma vient de plus loin." It is indeed a disease of our era rather than our civilisation, for by all accounts the bridges

between composer and public constructed in Russia under Govern- ment orders and by slave-labour have proved so far wholly inadequate.

The comparative rarity of great British executant artists is faced in the report and accounted for by the vicious circle—the absence of a discriminating public to produce the artist and the absence of the artist capable of creating the public. Yet it is hardly true to say that most British artists now famous in this country have first had to establish their reputation abroad. Where but in England

did Myra Hess, Sir Thomas Beecham, Kathleen Ferrier and Benjamin Britten make their reputations ? Much nearer the truth, and freely

admitted by the report, is the fact that musical training in this country does not at present provide any satisfactory form of apprenticeship—any field of activity, that is to say, between the music-school or conscrvatoire and the world of competitive concert- giving. In at least two cases, that of the singer and the conductor, this apprenticeship would elsewhere be provided by the opera- house ; and it is perhaps partly for this reason that the report stresses the importance of operatic activities.

We have to face the fact that opera is the most expensive of all musical forms, at no time and in no place self-supporting ; and that it is in this province that most is being done, not to supply but to create the demand. The 1948-49 grant of LI20,000 to Covent Garden (to which L35,000 to Sadler's Wells should be added) looks small beside the £600,000 granted by the French Government to the Opera and Opera Comique or the pre-war figure of over L450,000 to German opera-houses. And yet it is a considerable sum of money for a country in our present position to spend, unless the public can be assured that it is in the very best hands and yielding the maximum results ; and on this subject the report is silent.

I was cheered at Edinburgh to hear what I take to be perhaps the average educated American's attitude to the present Government's expenditure on cultural objects. "Why," said he of the Edinburgh Festival, "if you didn't provide such things as these, I reckon you

might as well be quite dead, and I for one should be against granting any loan at all to this country." But I should very much like to

see introduced in London the Milanese practice by which, according to the report, all cinemas are directly taxed to contribute to the upkeep of La Scala. If Miss Blandish could be made to support, even in the smallest way, Leonora and Briinnhilde (let alone her nearer, though poorer, relations like Violetta or Lulu), I should be more than willing to turn a blind eye to what might, to strict moralists, look uncommonly like a case of living on the immoral earnings of a prostitute.

Beneath all the findings of the report and implicit in all its pro- posals lies a single problem. How is it possible to create in this country an attitude towards music and musicians comparable with that of the average German (at least before the war) or with that of the French towards their writers ? By forced contributions (or in other words taxation) the public can be made to a greater or lesser extent to give practical support to the arts and their practitioners ; but this in itself is only half the battle. The education of the public taste by the B.B.C. and heavily subsidised concerts and operas is pre- sumably proceeding rapidly, but it is a strange fact of psychology that the more nearly any activity approximates to a free public service the less respect it engenders in the ordinary man. Casual remarks overheard during railway journeys would seem to confirm this even in the case of a body so far from providing a free service as British Railways ; and a corresponding fall in the status of the medical profession is one of the greatest dangers of the Public Health Service.

The Musicians' Union, admirable in its efforts to protect members from exploitation, has nevertheless lowered the status of the pro- fession in the eyes of many who feel, obscurely but strongly, that strict trade-union conditions of work are incompatible with the

highest ideals of any art and the highest standards of performance. Is it not possible that the vast and efficient public musical service envisaged by the report as an ideal of the future might inspire the average citizen with less, rather than more, respect for the art, and, by minimising difficulties, open the profession to a huge number of poorly-gifted and unenthusiastic people who arc at present rightly shy of the rigours and uncertainties of life for all but the most successful professional musicians ? All advance has of course to be paid for, but the price can be too large, and then what appeared to be progress may prove to be retrogression.