Alan Davey's speech to the Association of British Orchestras

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Introduction

Thank you, Martin, for that fantastic performance. I know I speak for many of us here when I say how exciting it’s been to see the incredible journey you’ve been on since winning Young Musician, and to follow your outstanding career. It’s a real privilege to hear you perform, and I know there’s more to come. I’m delighted that you’re going to be joined by Jess Gillam - grand finalist at Young Musician in 2016 and the first saxophonist ever to win the woodwind final.

Watching that performance just now, and looking at the remarkable wealth of talent collected together here in this magnificent hall, reminds me of something Sakari Oramo said on the last night of the Proms in September. He said that for decades we’ve been hearing about the imminent demise of classical music... “But look”, he said, “at this”.

It seems to be the permanent condition of classical music in this country to be questioning its own future. I think we’ve now been at a moment of existential crisis for about 100 years.

Even back in 1895, Sir Henry Wood was told that there was no public for great music. But Robert Newman told him that they would make a public, and the Proms has never looked back.

All of you here, who live and breathe classical music, are living testimony to the fact that the future is in safe hands. So I want to begin by paying tribute to the incredible work that all of you do - day-in, day-out - to fly the flag for classical music across the UK.

It’s a responsibility we all share. And we all know that it’s by working together across the sector that we can have the biggest impact.

That’s why I’d like to thank our hosts - BBC National Orchestra of Wales, Sinfonia Cymru, and Welsh National Opera - for bringing together a conference that is all about that spirit of collaboration. And I want to pay a special tribute - here at its home in Hoddinott Hall - to BBC NOW, celebrating its 90th birthday this year.

From 1928 as an orchestra of 30 players to its full symphonic form today, BBC NOW has premiered over 100 new works. And the fact that another five are planned in just the first three months of this year is yet more proof that new orchestral music in the UK is very much alive and well.

But, of course, none of this means that we can afford to take the future of classical music for granted.

All of us are very much aware of how hard we must constantly work to reach our audiences, old and new. How, together, we have to respond to changing times with new ideas and new ways of connecting with and engaging the public. This is what I want to focus on today.

I want to talk about what we’ll be doing at the BBC to deepen our commitment to classical music even further over the years ahead, how we’re going to enhance what we offer and boost our impact. I want to tell you about the plans we have in place to celebrate classical music in 2018. And I want to talk about how we’re planning to build on all this to strengthen our mission for lifelong education in classical music - which I can tell you is something close to Tony Hall’s heart too.

A confident, classical music nation

Last September, at their Shine event at the Barbican, ABRSM sent a young reporter backstage to ask musicians what one word summed up the way classical music makes them feel.

Jess was among them, and she wasn’t the only one to say “alive”. Others said “excited”, “ecstatic”, “happy”. All of them were about joy.

It’s unimaginable to think that anyone involved in classical music would choose a word like “intellectual”, or “worthy”, or “elite”… It’s ridiculous. Yet words like these are still so often at the heart of perceptions around classical music in this country. Too often it’s seen as something out of reach, something you need to be qualified to have an opinion on, that requires some kind of initiation above and beyond simple pleasure.

The result, I believe, is that we are too diffident, too apologetic in this country about what a powerhouse we are.

We’re comfortable celebrating our excellence in other areas of culture - even other genres of music - but less so with classical, we get self-conscious, wary of somehow sounding pompous or affected.

I’m sure all of us agree that we should be really confident about ourselves as a classical music nation; about our extraordinary wealth of singers and instrumentalists, our conductors and orchestras up and down the UK producing world-class music and pulling in passionate audiences; about a country that can rely on the next generation of composers as well as the great composers of the past. We should never be afraid to shout about what we have to offer.

But, in doing so, we must always send out a strong message that classical music is for everyone, and that there are no barriers to experiencing or enjoying it.

The role of the BBC

I’ve talked to this group before about my gradual discovery of classical music which coincided with Simon Rattle’s arrival in Birmingham, and which also involved cheap LPs in Woolworths. How that lifelong passion started.

Alongside Radio 3 and the Proms, it also set me on the path to the Arts Council as Chief Executive and prior to that in policy for the arts and classical music at the DCMS.

That background has helped me to shape and craft ways to get more people hooked on classical music - of all backgrounds and all ages.

When I came to the BBC, I was determined to do the same: to make sure we do everything in our power to bring down barriers and get classical music to everyone. After all, it’s why we exist. It’s part of our fundamental, democratic mission: to make sure everyone has access to things that are really high quality, to the very best. And not just to provide people with what they love, but also to offer them things they might like or want to discover - things they don’t yet know they love.

I know that hearing a favourite piece or work performed by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra or National Youth Orchestra or other ensembles on Radio 3 will start another journey of curiosity.

Just this week, our audiences might have heard the London Sinfonietta celebrating their 50th Anniversary - a fantastic milestone - with a special concert from the Royal Festival Hall.

I hope that it might have introduced listeners to brand new works from contemporary composers, as well as reacquainting them with some of the work that has helped shape the Sinfonietta’s identity over the past half century. And I hope it might have inspired them to look further: to seek out more works by those composers or discover more programmes on the BBC that take a closer look at their work and their importance in the wider context - it’s the kind of journey BBC Music can take you on.

That’s our job: to bring great arts and music to everyone - young and old, whoever and wherever they are - and offer the whole of the country the chance to find their own lifelong passion.

A strong track record

When it comes to classical music, I believe this is something we at the BBC do very well in partnership with all of you:

• As the funder of five major orchestras and three choral groups
• As the country’s most significant commissioner of new music
• As the producer of the world’s biggest live music festival in the BBC Proms
• As the biggest provider of live broadcast concerts from all of the country and internationally, and the biggest supporter of new talent - with schemes like New Generation Artists, BBC Introducing, Proms Inspire, and BBC’s Young Musician, now in its 40th year
• Through iconic programmes like Composer of the Week, which has been informing, educating, and entertaining our audiences for nearly 75 years
• By reaching the equivalent of over 250 concert halls each week with our Radio 3 concert broadcasts, from partner orchestras in this very room, and around 20 million people with classical music each year across our TV channels.

It’s our mission to bring the very best - not only from our own Orchestras and Choirs, but from the whole, extraordinary classical music ecosystem in this country - to the biggest possible audience. And we’re always open to new and creative ways of working with others to engage new fans.

You all know about Ten Pieces - plenty of you are directly involved. It’s one of the projects of which I know that many of you, like me, are particularly proud and I know you all have your own examples of successful learning projects. And it’s a great example of what we can do for classical music in this country when all of us - BBC and non-BBC - come together behind a good idea.

The goal is to introduce a generation of young people to classical music, and to encourage them to develop their own creative responses - not just in music, but art and animation, poetry and dance.

So far, in its first three years, it has reached over four million people, won a BAFTA for the Ten Pieces II film, and created three hugely successful Proms concerts. And anyone who has witnessed one of these will be able to testify to how extraordinary the response has been.

Last summer saw the fantastic Rory Kinnear as Sir Henry Wood, summoned from the past to explore musical inspirations through the ages and do battle with Mozart’s Queen of the Night. And the year before saw nearly 500 children from schools right around the country performing Dies irae from Verdi’s Requiem. There was barely a dry eye in the house. One mother wrote to us afterwards to say it was one of the proudest moments of her life - one she’d never forget.

We’re now well into Ten Pieces III, with a brand new set of classical pieces from Elgar and Orff to Kerry Andrew and Mason Bates.

This time we’re doing even more to make it accessible to young audiences. We’re making resources available on their phones so they can have Ten Pieces in their pocket and we’re also making it part of BBC Music’s The Biggest Weekend, taking place in four sites, in four nations, over four days, on the late-May Bank Holiday weekend. In a year with no Glastonbury, we think this will be a musical highlight of 2018. It’s certainly the biggest music event the BBC has ever attempted.

We’ll be announcing all the details in the next few days, but I can tell you that as part of it we’ll be running Ten Pieces assemblies in primary and secondary schools across the country because we want to give students even more of an opportunity to engage with this inspirational project.

And we don’t want to stop here.

Working even harder for classical music

So we’re proud of what we do at the BBC. But we also know we need to go further, to make sure that we work even harder for classical music. That’s why, for example, we announced about a year ago that we would be working with the Arts and Humanities Research Council to shine a light on forgotten female composers and find and record some of their lost works.

Research shows that there are around 6,000 forgotten female composers whose work is not currently available for us to explore.
We wanted to start putting this right. Now we have selected five composers - including a Viennese prodigy, by the way, as well as an African-American composer from the time of the Harlem Renaissance - with work that ranges from chamber music to full-scale symphonic works. They have been recorded by the BBC Orchestras and Choirs, as well as some of our New Generation Artists, and we will be premiering them on Radio 3 to commemorate International Women’s Day on the eighth of March.

As well as this, I can also announce that listeners will be able to tune into a live concert from LSO St Luke’s that evening, where another five works from each of these composers will be performed by the BBC Concert Orchestra. It’s incredibly exciting to think that, in many cases, this is the first time these works will have been heard in 100 years. Or even the first time they will ever have been performed.

It means that we are not only expanding the canon of classical music, but also actually helping to redress its historic imbalance when it comes to gender and diversity.

Many of you will also have spotted that we recently announced a new choral commission written by relatives of Emmeline Pankhurst for BBC Radio 3 and the BBC Singers to perform, to mark 100 years of women’s suffrage. We’ll be making that available to all to share with an online premiere on the 6 February.

To enable audience participation and involvement, vocal scores of The Pankhurst Anthem will be available to download free of charge from the BBC Radio 3 website from Tuesday 6 February before its actual premiere performance at the Sage Gateshead on 9 March for the Free Thinking Festival.

Audiences are encouraged to send BBC Radio 3 photographs of themselves learning and performing the work, and to share recordings via social media.

We’d love for you to join in with both these project and help to change the canon forever in terms of representation.

And, while we’re talking about the country’s finest female composing talent, I’m delighted that the judges for this year’s Proms Inspire competition will include Kerry Andrew and Sally Beamish, Anna Meredith and Dobrinka Tabakova.

2018 marks the 20th anniversary of the Inspire scheme - an incredible opportunity for young composers to have their work performed at the Proms and broadcast on Radio 3, as well as receiving a BBC commission. I can tell you that, as of today, it’s open for entries. So I hope all of you will help us spread the word, encourage talented young composers to take part, and make this 20th Anniversary competition the best and biggest yet.

Then in May, of course, we’ll be celebrating the 40th Anniversary of BBC Young Musician.

Here in Cardiff, it’s a great opportunity to say what a fantastic job BBC Studios, Wales does in producing the competition, working alongside our colleagues in Radio 3, and I know they’re pulling out all the stops to make this an extra-special year.

I’m really pleased to announce that this year’s category finals and semi-finals will be heading to the magnificent new Royal Birmingham Conservatoire building - we’re very grateful to Julian Lloyd Webber for hosting us there. Then the Grand Final will be held at Symphony Hall Birmingham, accompanied by the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra conducted by Mark Wigglesworth. And I’m delighted that we’re today announcing the 25 young musicians who make up the 2018 category finalists.

But as well as the competition itself, we want to do much more to celebrate BBC Young Musician’s invaluable contribution to the classical sector.

So there’ll be a documentary telling the story of the competition through the lens of its previous winners and finalists, including Nicola Benedetti, Sheku Kanneh-Mason and Natalie Clein - not to mention Martin and Jess.

And I’m so pleased - I’m not sure I’m supposed to say this, I know we’re all duty bound to keep things tightly under wraps until April - but this year, for the first time, there will be a BBC Young Musician Prom to mark the 40th Anniversary, featuring a whole host of past winners and finalists.

Our Classical Century

All of this, I hope, is evidence of how we’re planning to deepen our commitment to classical music and enhance the impact of what we do over the year ahead.

But we also know we have to be even bolder, even more ambitious. That’s why, just as the Proms come to a close in September, we’ll be doing something we’ve never done before - certainly the biggest moment I can remember for classical music on the BBC.

Jan Younghusband, Head of BBC Music Television Commissioning mentioned earlier, exclusively during her panel session, that we’ll be launching a major, year-long season of programmes across Radio 3 and BBC Four, under the heading of Our Classical Century.

Across the year, we’ll be looking at key repertoire in classical music spanning the century from 1918 to 2018. Four series on BBC Four will each take a specific period and pick out its most important classical highlights, all illustrated by concerts from a BBC orchestra.

At the same time, Radio 3 will be identifying 100 of the most significant moments, events, and pieces of music from across the century to be broadcast or staged throughout the year.

The project will begin in the Autumn and it will end with a special performance on the first night of the Proms in 2019, making sure to celebrate important moments like the founding of the National Youth Orchestra in 1948 along the way.

All together it will represent the biggest-ever classical music season across the BBC - unique in breadth and scale, and designed to engage audiences of all ages.

Classical music education for life

It’s a project we’re hugely excited about. But, in fact, we want it to form part of something even bigger.

The role of the BBC is, of course, always to inform, educate, and entertain. But when it comes to classical music, it is our potential to educate that excites me the most. And it excites me more and more as the digital age opens up new opportunities to shape what we offer to our audiences’ individual wants and needs.

Not just the new possibilities of technological developments like voice recognition or virtual reality, though imagine being able to conjure up a concert hall like this one and fill it with music with just a few words, but also the potential of using the data that online audiences provide us with about what they like and love - what inspires them and moves them - to tailor what we offer uniquely to them.

It’s something that Tony Hall has picked out as a major priority for the years ahead: creating a personalised experience of the BBC for everyone who comes to us. And this is something important for classical music as we reinvent the BBC for a new generation in our second century. Our Classical Century will represent a major addition to the enormous wealth of educational resources we hold in our archives.

And we are looking at how we can make the digital resources of Radio 3 and the BBC Orchestras and Choirs more available. Over the next few months we’ll be looking at how we can make this a reality and I’d love to have your input and collaboration.

Our aim will be to help people of all ages to begin a new relationship with classical music - or take their existing relationship even further - and make it a habit and a passion for life. More about this will be announced later in the year but we are open and ready to collaborate with organisations who would like to work with us on this ambition.

Conclusion

Nothing can illustrate where a journey in classical music can take you, better than incredible young talents like Martin and Jess, so I’m delighted to be able to finish by introducing the two of them performing together, Marcello’s Oboe Concerto.

I remember in the run-up to the 2016 competition, when Martin was asked what advice he would pass on to aspiring young musicians. For all the insight he could offer on putting together the right repertoire, on finding a programme that can capture an audience’s imagination and show your very best, on performing under pressure and getting through round after round; it was a really simple piece of advice that he left that year’s hopefuls with: Have fun, and don’t allow anything to stifle your love and passion for making music.

All of us are here because we are passionate about classical music, passionate about its future in this country. This conference, with its focus on collaboration, has highlighted just what can be achieved by all of us reaching out across the sector, and working together for the benefit of classical music. We know there will always be those who warn that there are no new audiences for classical music. But we also know - as did Robert Newman over one-hundred-and-twenty years ago - that our job is to make new audiences. And we know that we will do it best by doing it together.

To bring the session to a close, I’d like to introduce two people who can illustrate the importance of collaboration in a way that changes everyone’s live; through music. Welcome to Jess Gillam accompanied by Martin James Bartlett for Marcello Oboe Concerto.

Related Media Centre Links

• BBC to chart century of classical music in epic year of programming
• BBC Radio 3 announces new choral commission by Pankhurst relatives