“Live and love with open mind/Let our cultures intertwine.” In April, at a performance by the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra (BSO), the bass sang that ode to mutual understanding by Wordsmith, a rapper, in the final movement of Beethoven’s ninth symphony. The original text, by Friedrich Schiller, begins: “Joy, bright spark of divinity/Daughter of Elysium.”

Classical music is often thought to be intimidating. Performed by white men in white bow ties, the art form is perceived to exemplify snobbery, stuffiness and racial privilege. Ensembles such as the BSO want to change that. Some groups are taking classical music from hushed concert halls to car parks and trendy nightclubs; many orchestras are performing film scores as well as symphonies (the Lyon National Orchestra, pictured, among them). The Pierre Boulez Saal, a hall in Berlin, invites parents to morning chamber-music concerts—baby, not jacket, required.

To many in the classical-music world, increasing accessibility is a way of staving off irrelevance. Just 1% of music sales and streams in America are of classical pieces, according to MRC Data, a research company. Before the pandemic 58% of concertgoers in Britain were aged 65 or older, reports a study commissioned by the BBC. The BSO’s main hall was more than 60% full on average before the pandemic; recently it has been 40% full.

Many people have not felt that they belong in a concert hall. Black Britons were less than 1% of the pre-pandemic audience. Reginald Mobley, a black American countertenor, says that when he was growing up in Florida his family thought of classical music as the music of cross-burners. Some scholars view the Western canon—roughly the masterworks of composers from Josquin des Prez in the 15th century to Igor Stravinsky in the 20th—as a product of privilege. Beethoven, an “above-average composer”, has been “propped up by whiteness and maleness”, contends Philip Ewell, an American musicologist.

Such notions did not deter Mr Mobley. A professor who heard him singing in a barbershop quartet identified him as a countertenor. Now Mr Mobley sings baroque and other music with major ensembles in Europe and America. “People of colour coming into the arts should not be a fluke like it was for me,” he says.

Cultural gatekeepers increasingly agree with him. In July the BSO appointed Jonathan Heyward as its first black music director. Mr Mobley is the first programming consultant of the Handel and Haydn Society in Boston, with a mission to diversify its repertoire. Works by neglected black composers, such as Florence Price, are heard ever more often.

In some ways the pandemic helped pry classical music open. It prompted Wigmore Hall, a chamber-music venue in London, to stream free concerts. This “democratised” its audience, says its director, John Gilhooly. When the hall reopened in September 2020, younger folk filled more seats. On streaming platforms, classical music is “finding a way to people who don’t think of themselves as classical-music lovers”, says Tom Lewis, co-president of Decca Records. A third of classical-music streaming is by 18- to 25-year-olds; some are mixing it with other genres.

Such enthusiasm is to be celebrated, but eagerness to expand the audience can come at a cost. The issue of accessibility is “an absolute minefield”, says Paul McCreesh, artistic director of the Gabrieli Consort & Players, a choir and orchestra. That is because the clamour for classical music to be more approachable and relevant risks drowning out the music itself. There is also now an added expectation that it will promote social justice. Classical music must respond. Its artistic health depends on how it does so.

One concern is that classical music’s civic mission will overshadow its cultural one. In a recent radio interview Michael Tilson Thomas, music director laureate of the San Francisco Symphony, worried that many young musicians’ commitment to social causes was not matched by their dedication to music. Anthony Tommasini, formerly the New York Times’s chief classical-music critic, has proposed that orchestras stop “blind auditions”. He hopes that making visible the race of musicians applying for jobs will increase the number of non-white performers, but this would mean, as he acknowledged, ending a practice that from the 1970s helped raise the number of women in orchestras.

“Powerbrokers” such as funders and broadcasters are a big source of “extra-musical concepts”, thinks Mr McCreesh. The consequences of that came to seem more alarming this month when the Arts Council England, which distributes money from the government and the lottery, ended grants to some top-flight groups in London, such as the English National Opera, as part of a policy to boost the arts outside the capital. Jennifer Johnston, an opera singer, spoke for many classical musicians when she lamented on Twitter the “permanent watering down of our industry so [that] the government can say it’s not ‘elitist’”.

The quest for accessibility can add to other forces that push classical music, perhaps the form that most rewards concentrated listening, to the periphery of people’s attention. They are not new. Popularisers have long recognised that getting people to sit still and silently is at odds with getting them to show up. When the “promenade concerts” that became the BBC Proms, Britain’s big summer classical-music festival, began in London in 1895, Beethoven was played “to an accompaniment of popping corks”. In his day, Mozart expected audiences to be boisterous.

Eager as musicians are to broaden their audience, there’s no getting around the fact that many classical works demand patience, especially in live performance. “In a classical concert, you just sit in a rather uncomfortable seat and you try not to make too much noise for two hours,” says Sir Stephen Hough, a British pianist, composer and author, “but you should leave feeling a different person.” Even Mozart lamented playing to a salon of aristocrats who were making sketches of one another: “I had to play to the chairs, tables and walls.”

To present classical music as hard work risks keeping audiences away, but suggesting that it is easier listening than it is risks disappointing them. It is best, both for audiences and the art itself, when accessibility is paired with ambition. Robert Newman, the impresario who helped launch the Proms, wanted to guide listeners up to Olympus, not to bring the music down. His grandiose aim was to “train the public by easy stages. Popular at first, gradually raising the standard until I have created a public for classical and modern music.” The Pierre Boulez Saal calls its fare “music for the thinking ear”.

There are ways to make classical music more accessible without compromising it. Sir Stephen suggests shorter concerts without intervals. #SingTheScore, a series of videos by I Fagiolini, a British choral group, mixes silliness and sophistication. Good music education is crucial to diversifying both audiences and ensembles. The skills required to sing in the Gabrieli Consort are nurtured mainly in fee-charging schools, says Mr McCreesh. That mostly leaves out white working-class children as well as those from ethnic minorities. Gabrieli Roar, which works with state-school and other youth choirs in Britain, tries to correct that.

If every school offered such teaching, more children would cherish the hush that comes when a conductor raises the baton, knowing that the music that follows will transmute life in ways that hold in suspense their own lives. When it falls, after a moment, the ovation can begin. ■

The Canberra International Music Festival has announced its 2023 program, with 28 concerts, 150 international and Australian artists, and five premieres to grace the Australian capital in the midst of autumn. Artistic Director Roland Peelman highlighted the wonder and magic found at the heart of the Festival, which runs from 28 April to 7 May and centres around the heritage Fitter’s Workshop in Kingston.

“The Child Within, Listening to a New World is the festival’s theme for 2023, celebrating the enchanted forest of our children’s imagination. Through the magic of music, it seeks to find the child inside all of us,” said Peelman.

Following the success of The Creation in 2022, the Opening Night Gala will see the Australian Haydn Ensemble perform The Mozarts, the Haydns & the Bear, a playful program that celebrates the bond between friends and families intertwined through music. Tenor Andrew Goodwin and soprano Chloe Lankshear join as soloists.

Brodsky Quartet. Photo © Sarah Cresswell.

The festival’s headline acts begin with a captivating combination: the UK’s Brodsky Quartet plays with William Barton on 30 April in a program of Bach, Schubert and Barton’s own works. The program also includes the premiere of Andrew Ford’s String Quartet No 7: Eden Ablaze, written about the 2019 bushfires that ran through the town and the Gondwana Rainforests for the first time, as well as the first concert performance of Ford’s In My Solitude.

On 29 April, the Brodsky Quartet celebrates its 50th anniversary with a selection of its finest repertoire. Originally founded as the Cleveland Quartet, previous collaborators include Paul McCartney, Elvis Costello and Björk, and Katie Noonan, whose 2016 album with the quartet, With Love and Fury, was nominated for the Best Classical Album ARIA Award. 

William Barton also joins forces with Aunty Marlene Cummins for Marloo’s Blues, in which Cummins tells her story of adversity and triumph as an Indigenous musician and activist. They will perform with the Djinama Yilaga Choir, who appear with the festival for the first time.

Musical family ties re-emerge in a concert called Sibling Revelry, where the works of the Mendelssohns, Boulangers and Australian twins Martin and Peter Wesley-Smith are celebrated alongside each other. The concert also features the teeming talent of Melbourne’s own siblings, Flora and Theo Carbo, who premiere a new work for the Festival. 

The 100th birthday of Hungarian-Austrian composer György Ligeti  – whose music was famously used in Stanley Kubrik’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey – will be marked by the Festival in a collaboration with the ANU School of Music on 1 May.

French quartet Quatuor Van Kuijk return to the festival for a lineup of Mendelssohn, Fauré and Schubert. They also perform at Taste of the Country alongside violist Katie Yap, pairing wine, music and food. The Festival’s breakfast series is back as French For Breakfast from 1–6 May; a series of daytime events will take place at Verity Lane Markets as well as two Saturday night events, presenting the work of local BIPOC artists.

Marlene Cummins. Photo supplied

Alexander Gavrylyuk performs a solo recital, Andrew Goodwin performs by candlelight, and Sonya Lifschitz presents a new multimedia performance at the National Gallery of Australia, all in honour of Ukraine.

This thread is followed with a headline event of Britten’s The Children’s Crusade, to be performed by the Luminescence Children’s Choir.  Theatre pioneer and poet Bertolt Brecht had his words set to music in a pacifist’s plea that finds itself as relevent as ever almost 50 years after its first performance.

The Festival also presents a rare performance of the recently rediscovered Dunera Mass. In September 1940, 2542 ‘enemy prisoners’ from Britain arrived in Melbourne and Sydney on board HMT Dunera. Most were Jewish refugees who had fled Nazi persecution, and included musicians, artists, writers, scientists and philosophers. Interned in camps near Hay and Orange in NSW and Tatura in NSW, they became know as the ‘Dunera Boys’. Released in 1941, many of them chose to remain in Australia. This CIMF program re-enacts a concert held in Hay in 1941, which featured music written on board the ship by Peter Meyers, who arranged for the Mass’s first performance.

Other new works include Elliott Gyger’s Solitaire, a solo viola work to be performed by James Wannan. Katie Yap and harpsichordist/keyboardist Donald Nicolson premiere Black Cockatoos as part of Yap’s Freedman Classical Fellowship project Multitudes, where she aims to find unity and cohesion within a multifaceted musical approach. Dan Walker also offers a new work for dance, to be hosted in the Arboretum as part of the Festival’s new collaboration with Australian Dance Party in celebration of Danceweek.

The Canberra International Music Festival runs 28 April – 7 May. Tickets for members go on sale on Friday 18 November at 10am. More information can be found here.