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. Opportunity doesn’t. 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. I’d turn up starving, pretending I wasn’t hungry while everyone else ate. It was humiliating.
Now imagine another young musician trying to build an orchestra – but they have family money behind them and help with housing costs. Both musicians put in the same amount of work and spend years without properly paying themselves; but, while on paper they are taking the same risk, in reality, the consequences are not remotely the same.
That, to me, is class in a nutshell: two people can work equally hard and take the same gamble but one has a much bigger margin for error. The ability to work for little or nothing is itself another form of capital.
More than 70% of musicians working in the UK today are self-employed or freelance. Under the current Musicians’ Union/Association of British Orchestras category 1 agreement, the minimum fee for a section musician for a rehearsal and concert day of up to six hours is £163.18. But behind that can sit 15 years of training, an expensive instrument and hours of unpaid preparation. The six hours on the call sheet, though, is the only bit you’re paid for.
after newsletter promotion
This is why I lose patience with some of classical music’s language around diversity. There are brilliant schemes and brilliant people doing the work, but eventually you hit the economics. You cannot outreach-programme your way out of London rent, and you can’t diversify a workforce while refusing to talk about who can afford to stay in it. I have watched so many excellent musicians give up early in their careers. People who were absolutely good enough, but simply couldn’t afford to keep doing it. It is easy to say they lacked commitment or didn’t want it enough. Maybe they just ran out of money.
If the people who make it through the industry’s elite training programmes increasingly come from similar economic backgrounds, classical music doesn’t just look narrower; it thinks narrower. It hires, programmes and talks to that small group of people, then acts surprised when people call it elitist.
Some will say I’m encouraging the lowering of standards. In fact, I want higher standards. If we care about excellence, why would we only search for it among people whose families can afford the training and to subsidise the years of professional uncertainty that follow?
I made it through and now have a conducting career I adore. But if I only just managed it in the relative comfort of the Blair years, with incredibly supportive parents behind me, what on earth are working-class kids with musical aspirations going through now?
Or, more worrying, are they looking at the whole thing and deciding it’s not even worth trying?
