A Note from the Chairman – March 2023
The past few months have been a disappointing period for Government support of music in England. The Arts Council (England) has announced that it wants to see the English National Opera (ENO) move to Manchester. It has offered financial support to facilitate this move but said that it will be eliminating future regular annual support for the opera company. Financial support is also being ended for the touring programmes of Glyndebourne and The Welsh National Opera. Several other music groups are to loose Arts Council funding including the Britten Sinfonia, an outstanding regional chamber orchestra, based in East Anglia.
Shortly after these decisions were announced the BBC released the news that it would disband the BBC Singers in June 2023 after 99 years of operation and make cuts of 20% to the number of musicians in its three main orchestras.
The British music community has pushed back against these proposed changes. An on-line petition against the closing of the BBC Singers attracted more than one hundred and fifty thousand signatures. The BBC has recently announced that it will find funding to save the BBC Singers. As a result of pushback from the music community, the withdrawal of funding for the ENO has been delayed a year to allow for the proposal to be worked through and hopefully reconsidered. But there is still a great deal of uncertainty about future funding for music in the UK.
Stanford was an energetic campaigner for Government support of the Arts and particularly music. He advocated for the establishment of a National Opera House in the UK and for Government funding to support it. He supported a campaign in 1898 by many of the leading musicians of the day to lobby the London County Council to provide funding for this. Stanford had seen governments throughout Europe support opera houses and symphony orchestras and wanted the British Government to follow suit. He believed that this was needed to allow English opera to flourish and to create more stable employment for musicians. Unfortunately the 1898 proposal for a Government funded National Opera House did not meet with success.
Government funding of music only really started in the UK after Stanford’s death. Also, the BBC was founded in the early 1920s and it became a major supporter of classical music and employer of classical musicians through its various orchestras.
While the Arts Council (England) and BBC are theoretically independent of the Government they have both been under recent pressure to support the Government’s “levelling up” agenda and encourage more arts provision in Britain’s regions. The BBC has also been looking to cut costs and introduce more “popular” programming as its current funding model from compulsory viewer license fees has come under attack. Opponents of these proposed reductions in music funding have pointed out the devastating impact of Covid and of the UK leaving the European Community, on musicians’ incomes and employment prospects.
The UK currently has a world class classical music industry. The Government needs to step back and determine what sort of opera and classical orchestra provision that it wants in the country and how this can be supported and funded appropriately from private and public sources.
