Glastonbury, but crowdfunded - London Sinfonietta plays for free

Jonny Greenwood Copyright: @Ldn_Sinfonietta 

By Julia Hudson 

It’s been a while since I enthralled readers of this blog with my weekend activities, but thankfully it’s back on the cards, albeit rather tenuously. It was my twenty-seventh birthday on Saturday (I know, so old) and I had a lovely day celebrating with my family and boyfriend in the rain. It has rained just three times in my lifetime on 28^th June, and as everyone took delight in telling me, this year it was because my birthday clashed with a certain Somerset festival.

While Glastonbury in general isn’t usually what we’d choose to discuss on our classical music blog, this year there was something which caught our collective eye. London Sinfonietta (including one of our most loyal percussionists, Owen Gunnell) was booked to perform Steve Reich’s iconic Music for 18 Musicians, a spellbinding blend of voices and instruments, with Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood, who performed Electric Counterpoint. However, unlike Dolly Parton, Metallica, Johnny himself and the other world-famous artists who performed at Glastonbury, London Sinfonietta was asked to fund their appearance themselves, rather than being paid. Its website says:

“Our set of Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians and Electric Counterpoint will bring contemporary classical music to this world famous stage and a huge new audience – over 170,000 people.

But it's no mean feat taking all 18 players, their instruments and our production crew, more used to a concert hall, to a muddy field! The costs of doing so are substantial and we need to cover the large majority of these ourselves, but this is too good an opportunity to miss. This performance also enables us to extend our season with a repeat performance at Manchester’s Bridgewater Hall – increasing our audience even further.

So we really need your help: if you love new music as much as we do please join our crowd-funding campaign and break this new – hopefully not too muddy! - ground with us. In return we'll say thank you with a whole host of goodies, including access to a rehearsal, signed photos and limited edition t-shirts.”

Percussionist Owen Gunnell plays with Southern Sinfonia in 2013

The classical music world has responded with outcry. Composer Philip Lawton has asked London Sinfonietta for the reasoning behind Glastonbury’s decision, saying that “Glastonbury, it seems, are creating a sort of two-tier system: The people they actually want, who they pay, and the people who they think “Oh, wouldn’t that be fun/newsworthy/diverse of us?” who have to pay their own way.” He also makes the point that Steve Reich, the composer chosen, is one of the most popular and often-programmed contemporary composers today. The orchestra responded honestly: “When the chance came up, and we agreed to play there, we knew there would be a funding gap we needed to fill, but we decided to take the opportunity on the basis of the huge value there is in the exposure for us, and contemporary classical music more widely. We hope very much that [this performance] will bring new audiences to the rest of the work we do.” Admirable, for certain, and, as Philip says, it is Glastonbury rather than the orchestra where the real condemnation should be directed.

Quite apart from the huge scale of the festival and the dream ticket sales figures, Glastonbury is in the luxurious position of having multiple events and advance tickets. This is almost unheard of in the classical world, and means that there is an entirely captive audience to whom anything can be played. This means that the financial viability need not be considered, and truly new and innovative music can be programmed, rather than 40 year old music known to many already.

One of London Sinfonietta’s percussionists, Oliver Lowe, wrote a blog about the event. He includes an account of the sound check: “Our short sound-check was soon underway...making sure each of us could hear all the necessary parts of the texture so we could stay together. This mainly involved making sure Marimba 1′s on-beat pulses were fed round the stage, particularly to Marimba 3 who holds the repeating pattern for each section and keeps everyone else locked in. This combination of on-beat pulses and repeated ostinato groove forms the basic rhythmic track for the piece. Everything else that’s played locks into those things, including the off-beat pulses Owen Gunnell and I were playing. These basic components are re-orchestrated throughout the piece, most notably in Section V where the pianos take responsibility from the marimbas, requiring a shift in monitor mixes to focus on the new source of tempo....A wrong move could have left us scrambling around in the aural dark, slowly becoming unglued as we lost touch with each other.” I know I’m biased as a classical musician, so please don’t shout, but did Metallica require quite this much expertise and concentration?

The freelance musicians of the classical music world are left constantly frustrated by this assumption that they will play “for exposure”. In the wedding market, for example, caterers, florists and marquee companies would never be expected to give away their product “for exposure”, but string quartets, singers and jazz groups are asked repeatedly. To make a sweeping generalisation, let’s say the average LS player at Glastonbury was 40. If they have had music lessons once every week throughout their youth, and three times a week through music college, they’ve had an minimum of 1500 lessons. Not including the cost of their instruments, music college fees, travel or anything else, each musician had spent about £50 000 on instrumental tuition by the time they graduated. Ignoring too the running costs of the organisation, plus the cost of the performers’ time, Glastonbury seems to have placed a value of precisely nothing on their ability. No musical trust or foundation has picked up the tab, either, despite the orchestra’s plea that it will bring contemporary classical music to a wider audience. Although Oliver Lowe attests that the performance drew a large crowd, and I have no doubt that it did, I would love to know how many of them will be turning up to the Southbank Centre as a result of that exposure. On a side note, I would also love to know how many of those other Glastonbury acts would have been able to get back on the coach and perform that same day at the Royal Opera House – not many, I would suggest.

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