Roger Wright moves to Aldeburgh Music

[Russ]

I think Honoured Guest's fear of audiences being 'driven away in droves' is a bit over the top, but I too wonder whether the new arts initiative is going to find much of a sustained audience, which is presumably what the BBC is hoping for. Claypole admits there will be no new commissioning, the increase of the arts budget will now only bring it up to approx 18m (small beer really, BBC1 spends that amount per week), and much of that is earmarked for the existing 'history' programming area. Claypole's "new ways of working" seems to me no more than a re-emphasis on iPlayer operation (nothing new about that), and the 'new content' will be be not much more than pointing a TV camera at some outside events, i.e. it's all derived content. Shades of R3 v CFM perhaps, but a reflection of the BBC deciding the only way it can do 'arts' is to compete with the Sky Arts channel?

In that perspective, I thought Gillian Reynolds' radio intervention, with her emphasis on original content, was spot on.

Russ

[Honoured Guest]

Claypole admits there will be no new commissioning,

To clarify, there will be new commissioning by the Controllers, etc. who are responsible for all commissioning. I was just echoing French Frank's point that the Director of Arts is a coordinating role and not a commissioning one, and French Frank pondered about the likely effect of the soft power or influence that the Director of Arts would be able to wield over the commissioners and Controllers.

[french frank]

or what others here have called "upmarket" or "elitist"

I don't think anyone here calls it 'elitist'. It's what people who aren't interested in these forms call elitist - in my view as an excuse for ignoring what they don't want to bother with anyway. 'Upmarket' has the principal meaning of being more expensive and therefore what marketing speak refers to as 'the top end of the market' (which can refer to anything from cars, audio equipment or food).

You don't have to give up the things you enjoy totally in order to enjoy other things as well. The reality is that young people will grow older (and most of what is 'cool' now will simply decline into the background to be replaced by what the 'new young' like): older people don't grow younger. Much of the arts which Hall is pushing were never 'cool' but they do survive, for decades/centuries from the past and contemporary art into decades/centuries into the future. That isn't a bad thing.

[Russ]

To clarify, there will be new commissioning by the Controllers, etc. who are responsible for all commissioning.

Ah, ok. Thanks.

Russ

[jean]

...Stella Duffy's Guardian Comment is very clear on the danger that what Tony Hall calls "the arts" are just a narrow, establishment subset, or what others here have called "upmarket" or "elitist"...

When you first used the word upmarket in this context as though you were quoting someone, I asked for a reference, but you didn't give one. Could you do that now?

A little later ff used the word elitist, but surely with irony. Nobody uses the word seriously except as an attack on those they feel are denying access to others

Stella Duffy stops short of using either word, but she does say

...Glyndebourne is probably brilliant too; I've not been. Like many people born into working-class families in the 1960s I have never felt I had much access to opera.

That's changed, yes, especially as I work with people who direct and sing opera, but I have the privileged access of someone who works in the arts...

This sort of thing needs challenging as often as it's said.

My childhood in working-class Liverpool was enriched by the visits to the Liverpool Empire of the Welsh National Opera. Access to Glyndebourne was restricted by distance and cost, certainly; but if anyone had given my father the chance to see a Glyndebourne production on screen, he'd have jumped at it. Isn't that offering access to people?

As to Shakespeare, Stella Duffy writes dismissively of

...yet another Shakespeare festival ...

but when she subsequently admires the (excluded) Liverpool Everyman for being truly innovating, she's missed the irony that the newly-rebuilt theatre has just opened with a production of Twelfth Night.

[ed: I wrote this before I saw ff's reply above.]

[kea]

This sort of thing needs challenging as often as it's said.

My childhood in working-class Liverpool was enriched by the visits to the Liverpool Empire of the Welsh National Opera. Access to Glyndebourne was restricted by distance and cost, certainly; but if anyone had given my father the chance to see a Glyndebourne production on screen, he'd have jumped at it. Isn't that offering access to people?

I think some of the comments have it right—

The real shame though is that you truly seem to think that all it takes to go to see something is buying a ticket. So very many people find the buildings themselves daunting, they don't know what to wear, they don't know how to behave (because they believe there is a way to behave), they truly don't think those buildings/places are for them. THAT's what access is about, and that's what 'arts for everyone' - helping everyone to feel that all arts are for (and by) all of us - should be about.

and after this attitude was claimed to be 'stupid' and 'daft'—

Maybe they're worried that some opera buffs will sneer at them for being deliberately stupid because they're not sure if they have to dress in a certain way or behave in a certain way to 'fit in' at the opera - which, whatever anyone says, has garnered itself a reputation for being high culture for those privileged enough to indulge themselves in high culture.
And they'd be absolutely right wouldn't they?

[Honoured Guest]

When you first used the word upmarket in this context as though you were quoting someone, I asked for a reference, but you didn't give one. Could you do that now?

Jean, you asked me in #232 for a reference and I supplied it to you in #233.

[Honoured Guest]

As to Shakespeare, Stella Duffy writes dismissively of

...yet another Shakespeare festival ...

but when she subsequently admires the (excluded) Liverpool Everyman for being truly innovating, she's missed the irony that the newly-rebuilt theatre has just opened with a production of Twelfth Night.

That's a good point, Jean. Obviously I can't speak for Stella Duffy, but I think there's a distinction between Gemma Bodinetz opening the first season of the rebuilt Everyman with a single production of a Shakespeare play and Tony Hall and Jonty Claypole serving up another whole "joined-up" BBC Shakespeare season, hot on the heels of the exhaustive, excellent, all-encompassing 2012 World Shakespeare Festival, to which the BBC was a major contributor.

[jean]

Jean, you asked me in #232 for a reference and I supplied it to you in #233.

Sorry, I missed your reply. This is the relevant post:

...Lord Hall’s quotes prioritising the Arts are encouraging if taken as evidence of intent, rather than as merely a Whitehall-facing attempt to re-position the Beeb upmarket in advance of charter renewal...

I am not really sure whether Maclintick would use the word to express his own view or whether it's rather what he thinks Whitehall is probably thinking.

Possibly he'll explain.

[Honoured Guest]

My childhood in working-class Liverpool was enriched by the visits to the Liverpool Empire of the Welsh National Opera. Access to Glyndebourne was restricted by distance and cost, certainly; but if anyone had given my father the chance to see a Glyndebourne production on screen, he'd have jumped at it. Isn't that offering access to people?

Yes, but ... ! Presumably your jumping father had attended WNO operas at the Empire? I'd have thought that complete operas on tv would only be appreciated by people with some prior familiarity with opera, either through attending live performances or through education. It's not clear from Stella Duffy's Comment piece, but maybe by "especially as I work with people who direct and sing opera" she means that her practical professional collaboration has provided her with insights which have enabled her to engage with opera performance which was previously alien and inaccessible to her. That's my experience.

By the way, did you read Rupert Christiansen's Daily Telegraph piece last week on opera education in primary schools? I don't completely agree with it, but I think it's a very good conversation starter on the topic.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/opera/10711183/Will-children-ever-care-about-opera.html

[jean]

Yes, but ... ! Presumably your jumping father had attended WNO operas at the Empire? I'd have thought that complete operas on tv would only be appreciated by people with some prior familiarity with opera, either through attending live performances or through education.

Well yes, he'd attended performances. He also listened to opera a lot on the Third Programme, so I'm not sure why you seem to assume that live performance gives you a way into opera that you wouldn't get from a broadcast.

It's not clear from Stella Duffy's Comment piece...

A lot isn't clear, which is why I said on the other thread that IMO she doesn't hit any nails on the head at all.

...but maybe by "especially as I work with people who direct and sing opera" she means that her practical professional collaboration has provided her with insights which have enabled her to engage with opera performance which was previously alien and inaccessible to her.

I'd like to think that's what she meant, and that she'd like like to see something similar made available to others - but look at the title of her piece: isn't it the very opposite of your paraphrase above?

Arts for everyone on the BBC? Not with opera, ballet and still more Shakespeare

By the way, did you read Rupert Christiansen's Daily Telegraph piece last week on opera education in primary schools?

No, but I will - it looks interesting.

[Flosshilde]

I'd have thought that complete operas on tv would only be appreciated by people with some prior familiarity with opera, either through attending live performances or through education.

I wouldn't; I'd have thought that operas on TV would provide an ideal introduction - they require no financial outlay (beyond the licence fee), they can be broadcast an act a night, thereby not requiring an entire evening to be devoted to it; a well-directed broadcast can compensate for the lack of the visceral excitement of being at a live performance; and subtitles can be used more effectively (&, as in the early days of Channel 4 & their weekly opera broadcasts, TV broadcasts can provide subtitles that weren't available in the theatre). A TV broadcast could also be top & tailed by discussion about the work & the composer (ie background information) and comments from members of the audience (who could be carefully selected to demonstrate that it's not just toffs & poofs who go to the opera.

[french frank]

I wouldn't; I'd have thought that operas on TV would provide an ideal introduction [...] to demonstrate that it's not just toffs & poofs who go to the opera.

They also don't have to worry about what they have to wear or how they have to behave which is clearly not a problem for people like me who had no imagination and thought that you dreassed no differently from going to the theatre and that you sat quietly and attentively in just the same way.

And, of, course, they know they're perfectly free to switch over to another channel if it doesn't appeal.

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

Speaking personally, when I was young, I never liked opera on TV, but if there was a school trip to see an opera, I'd be the first to sign up. Watching an opera in glorious close-up can be most off-putting.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Yes, but ... ! Presumably your jumping father had attended WNO operas at the Empire? I'd have thought that complete operas on tv would only be appreciated by people with some prior familiarity with opera, either through attending live performances or through education.

But this was not the case when the complete Ring Cycle was broadcast, an act a week, on BBC2 in the early 1980s. People who had never set foot in an opera house, but who only knew there was this thing called "opera" out there somewhere, took the opportunity to watch and ended up watching the whole "serial".

A more usual response to the idea of opera on TV of "people with some prior familiarity with opera, either through attending live performances or through education" is given by Alpie.