Is Classical Music a Living or Heritage Art Form?

Abstract

This chapter provides an agreed level of resources and support, as well as a regular sounding board, but otherwise the Composer-Curators are in full control of what they want to programme, where it happens, how they describe it. The Southbank Centre's year-long "The Rest Is Noise" festival explored the soundtrack of the twentieth century and showed it was possible to programme music often considered difficult, helping an engaged, curious, and gratifyingly large audience to discover and be enriched by a world with which it had previously been largely unfamiliar. The baked-in associations and formal clarity of classical music can be problematic when it comes to contemporary music, and in particular how it is treated by the wider classical music sector. The majority of classical music organisations are still structured around the artistic and financial decisions of a handful of very senior people, who are in no sense diverse when considered as a group.