I’ve spent most of my adult life working in classical music – for the past 18 years as the co-founder and conductor of the London Contemporary Orchestra (LCO), an organisation I’m stepping down from today. During that time, I have found myself increasingly angry at how much harder it has become for someone without money behind them to build a life in the sector. There used to be a route in.
As a child from a working-class background, I could pick up an instrument at a state school, get cheap lessons through the local, council-backed music service and play in youth orchestras (borrowing a viola because my family couldn’t afford one). The route was never easy or fair. As a teenager, I spent summers doing everything from being a binman to working on a farm to pay for music courses.
During those weeks, of course, I wasn’t practising – people from more privileged backgrounds could spend the summer getting better while I scraped together the money to access some of the same opportunities. Still, the route existed. Now we are dismantling it while talking endlessly about “access”.
Today, working-class musicians are being priced out by countless unavoidable costs: lessons, instruments, train fares, courses, high rents (especially in London), unpaid preparation, cancelled dates. I’ve worked with enough musicians to know that talent turns up everywhere. After my undergraduate degree, I was determined not to leave London.
It was the strongest freelance market in the country and leaving felt like walking away from my best chance of building a career. I couldn’t afford the rent, so I sofa-surfed for months at a time. Occasionally, I slept rough.
I wanted to be a musician and assumed this was simply what I had to do. When I co-founded the LCO, I went years without making any meaningful money from it. I remember early business meetings in posh restaurants when I didn’t have enough money for a Tesco meal deal.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
