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The Bristol Proms 2013
Breaking down barriers? The Bristol Proms at the city’s Old Vic Theatre.
Breaking down barriers? The Bristol Proms at the city’s Old Vic Theatre.

Access all arias: how a 16th-century choral work is reaching new audiences

This article is more than 8 years old

Classical music will only survive if it persuades younger audiences to give great music a chance. In Bristol and across Britain, programmers are reaching out to new listeners in exciting and imaginative ways

Unless the classical music world finds ways to attract new audiences, it risks losing not just the baby and bathwater, but the whole bathtub. As I wrote last year, musicians and audiences are hungry for change. Here in Bristol at the Old Vic’s summer Proms week – now in our third year – our mission is to feed them with as much of it as we can dream up. Our concerts have included such innovations as big-screen live relays, digital imagery, lasers, robotics, and Google Glasses, all designed to bring audiences as close to the heart of the listening experience as they can conceivably get. We’re not the only ones heeding the call: the Hallé has just created a brilliant pay-what-you-like scheme for an informal concert later this year, and around the country there are concerts in pubs, in nightclubs, opera in the open air, and orchestras in car parks. But before traditionalists begin spluttering, I want to stress that this isn’t gimmickry. It’s about concentrating on the music, presenting it simply and directly, and breaking down the very real barriers that keep people from experiencing it.

Trumpeter Alison Balsom called the Bristol Proms an “anything is possible” kind of festival: and to prove her right, this year we’ve programmed an evening with no less than nine 40-part choral motets, seven of which are world premieres. One of them is nearly 450 years old and also shot to the top of the charts after it was featured in the novel Fifty Shades of Grey. Thomas Tallis’s Spem in Alium – composed in the 1570s - will be performed with eight other new works written for the same mind and ear-boggling choral forces. It’s going to be a surround-sound event like no other.

‘Anything is possible’, trumpeter Alison Balsom said of the Bristol Proms. Photograph: Antonio Zazueta Olmos

Tom Williams, founder and director of the Erebus Ensemble (a linchpin of the Bristol Proms since the beginning), had been on at me about Spem in Alium for years. The first performance of this iconic work most likely took place in an octagonal timber-framed hall in Arundel Castle, and would work beautifully in our timber-framed 18th-century theatre. And, in the context of a festival that is trying to embrace new digital technologies such as binaural sound, it seemed appropriate to respect Tallis’s extraordinary 16th-century technology that created surround-sound effects using pure, unamplified voices.

But the most powerful audience development tool is commissioning. That’s my theory, at any rate – and it seems to work powerfully well in my home-base art form, theatre. The companies and artists who really find new audiences are those who absorb the history and traditions of theatre, but create new work in their own theatrical language. Complicite, DV8, Gecko, Frantic Assembly, the National Theatre of Scotland and recently the National Theatre have all attracted new audiences with strikingly new work.

I started talking to composers whose work had sparked my curiosity. In my experience you can only do interesting work on meagre resources if a genuine and burning motivation exists in the artists, and it was heartening to see that they all leapt with incandescent enthusiasm at the challenge of creating a 40-part choral piece, and of thinking about the placement of sound in three dimensions.

It was also a vital element of the viability of the project that the theme of their works was “hope”. The original text of Tallis’s piece is about placing one’s hope in God – you can hear the effort Tallis makes to stretch towards the sublime in his music – and all the composers responded to this in their own ways. There are many reasons today not to be hopeful, but here, the artists wanted to explore why we should individually and collectively exercise our hope muscles.

The Erebus Ensemble, who will be performing all the new (and old) works.

The results couldn’t be more varied. Murray Gold (composer of the Doctor Who music since 2005) has written a complex polyphonic piece, dedicated to the memory of the victims of the Hillsborough disaster. Richard Thomas (Jerry Springer: The Opera) has composed a work based on attendance at Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. Other pieces are by the classically trained soprano Kate Miller-Heidke, who has a flourishing pop career; Nick Lloyd Webber dedicates his piece to the memory of the pianist and Theresienstadt survivor Alice Herz-Sommer. Jon Boden (from Bellowhead) has incorporated folk tunes into his work, and David Bednall has written something close in spirit to Tallis’s original idiom. And we’re thrilled that Nico Muhly has given us the European premiere of his In One Place, too. I’m still working on the staging and lighting, but the aim of the performance will be to wrap the audience up on every side in choral polyphony.

The thrill of presenting new music in new ways is as great as anything I’ve experienced. Whether the new audiences will follow is, of course, a different question, but after today’s rehearsal – the very first time the choir and the composers heard the music live – I’m clearer than ever about why it’s worth trying.

The works explore a huge variety of emotions, and this set me thinking about a riddle at the core of the season – the riddle of how abstract dots on a page, translated into particles in the air, can affect us as profoundly as they do. When I was working on Coram Boy at the National Theatre, music director Derek Barnes told me that when music moved us, it physically moved us by causing a mechanical reaction which has the capacity to make us feel things. He would sing directly into the small of the back of a volunteer, and sometimes that person would simply weep without knowing why.

When we consider why classical music might be deemed inaccessible, one reason might lie in the assumption that music lives solely in the imagination and memory of the audience – and not in the body as well. People instinctively understand this musico-physicality at, say Glastonbury, and can totally embrace the embodiment of sound. I want to show that the experience of listening to a 40-part choir can offer just as much embodied emotion as any piece of rock music on the massive stage of an open-air festival.

  • Songs of Hope – In 40 Voices, sung by the Erebus Ensemble, is at Bristol Old Vic on 1 August. Tom Morris is artistic director of Bristol Old Vic.
Handel’s Messiah at the Bristol Proms. Photograph: SWNS.com

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