It has to be the best £50 ever spent. Exactly 200 years ago, Britain’s Royal Philharmonic Society commissioned Beethoven to compose his ninth symphony, a work that cracked open the form (and gave us the Ode to Joy melody). It has been in performance ever since.
Now, just as in Beethoven’s time, classical music is the definition of a gig economy, with composers dependent on the haphazard arrival of patrons and their commissions. Yet the landscape in which they operate could scarcely be more different. Classical music, though in many ways a vibrant scene, sits mostly at the margins of contemporary culture: it made up just 53m of the 1bn hours of radio Britons listened to last quarter. Cash-strapped schools are cutting music from the curriculum. And while Beethoven has 2.5m monthly listeners on streaming service Spotify, Katy Perry has 22m.
The main way of making a living in this world occurs when orchestras, festivals, broadcasters or (occasionally) private individuals ask a composer for new work. Yet apart from the very top composers, the fees are often vanishingly low. “A pop tune may take an afternoon to write — a symphony will take several years to write and may only be performed once. The remuneration for those things should not be the same,” argues Sally Cavender of publisher Faber Music.
Tom Coult is a young composer with a big commission. On July 14, the new season of the BBC Proms opened; Coult, 28, was commissioned to write the First Night’s first piece. The Proms are as mainstream as classical music gets: an annual series of more than 90 classical concerts — with excursions into jazz, gospel and theatrical music — featuring the world’s best orchestras. Founded in 1895, they attracted more than 300,000 attendees last year and the Last Night of the Proms, which reached 9.1m people on TV in 2016, is adored or derided for its flag-waving audience and sequence of patriotic tunes. The First Night gains second-most attention; Coult set the tone, quite literally, for the whole season.
Coult heard the news in February; the six-minute piece had to be delivered in May, so it was “action stations”, he says, given such short notice. He took a 21st-century approach to inspiration: he would watch YouTube videos of previous Proms, see the conductor come on, wait for him to lift his baton — and then press pause. “I’d think, right, what would I do to puncture that silence?” He finally settled on a “very hesitant solo violin” that leads into “a series of dances, but all of them in various ways spiral completely out of control”. When performed by the BBC Symphony Orchestra on the First Night, tubas thumped out a hefty rhythm and a xylophone broke in while the strings flew wildly, seeming to open up a space for the two months of music to follow.
The BBC is a big commissioner — about 30 pieces a year, overall from Christmas carols to symphonies. Other prominent orchestras vary in their appetite for commissions: the London Symphony Orchestra has had 27 world premieres during the past five seasons while the Vienna Philharmonic has had only 11 since 2010. All stress their commitment to new music, though a Vienna spokesperson conceded that “part of our audience isn’t too fond”.
Coult demurs when asked what his big commission might mean for his career, only saying it is “easily the most public thing I’ve ever had and possibly even ever will”, but Cavender, who publishes him, alongside major living composers such as Thomas Adѐsand George Benjamin, is definitive: “That single fact will now help build his career further on.”
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The task of publishers is to create, filter and recommend these opportunities, shaping careers, and ensuring fees stay sufficient. Janis Susskind, managing director of Boosey & Hawkes, which publishes John Adams and Harrison Birtwistle, says that “for any composer with a name, we would always begin at least £1,000 a minute”, and often several times that. The music is not actually sold by quantity, like cloth, but “that’s how you get to a ballpark figure”.
Yet even if a composer can achieve near this rate for a piece, it is distressingly far from a sustaining income. Coult reckons about £800 a minute is his maximum so far, but given his current rate of commissions, “I might make £10,000 a year, with a couple of grand either side, let’s say, for those two or three pieces.” Since living in London on £10,000 a year, plus or minus, is almost impossible, Coult supplemented his income with a funded PhD in composition and, as of [October 2017](http://www.tomcoult.com/biography/), will undertake a two-year residency at Trinity College, Cambridge, with an annual stipend of £25,000. Academia and benefices, not the act of composition, make music pay for him.
Tansy Daviesis best known for her well-received opera Between Worlds, which was based on the events of 9/11, its characters trapped in the North Tower. As a “crazy-hard” worker, Davies, 44, says she might spend 18 months writing a 25-minute piece for orchestra (weaving in other compositions); even at the £1,000 rate, that does not seem a sufficient income.
For most, the returns are underwhelming: a work by a living composer earns 4.8 per cent of the box office for a concert; if there are works by more than one living composer, that percentage is split between them according to the length of the pieces. More lucrative are “grand rights”, where a composer has written an opera or a ballet — here the publisher will negotiate the cut, which can be 10 per cent. In any case, the composer has to share it with their publisher.
In her office in Bloomsbury, Cavender flicks through a composer’s income statement from TV and radio royalties. “Some of the earnings we’re taking about — one pence, £1.24, £12.85, £10.49, £1 . . . A penny for being played on the radio!”
The economics have not always been quite this bad, she says. About 20 years ago, the BBC and the PRS (which collects royalties for composers and performers) changed the formula for how fees were calculated. Previously, classical music received “a kind of multiplier” on its fees compared with pop music, in recognition of its smaller audience; now it is subject to “straight-lining”, where you are paid according to the number of people listening, genre regardless. The latest quarterly figures from Rajar, which measures radio audiences, show that Radio 3 reached 2.1m people; pop music station Radio 1 had 9.6m.
What publishers really do for composers is make a long-term investment. This manages to be both a conservative and strangely radical strategy in such a creative economy. “Because the returns are so meagre for the publisher,” says Cavender, “you’re thinking on a 20, 30-year timespan . . . not like detergent, [which has] got to make its money in two years.” This investment includes editing scores, digitising manuscripts, preparing parts for each instrument and, naturally, publishing them. Susskind says, “New music is very hungry on our infrastructure,” but she adds that this long-term approach works well: Boosey is profitable on its living composers, she says, and many have stuck with the company for decades.
British music publishers also have a striking deal with their composers, unlike in any other branch of music or the wider arts: the composers sign over their copyright for their lifetime, plus 70 years, to the publishers, and the publishers grant them (and their estate) a half-interest. (According to Cavender, Adès joked, “When I die, it will say ‘Copyright Faber Music’ on my tombstone”.) After a composer’s death, she says, “We’ll carry on earning the same amount but without the expenses.”
Giving up copyright is controversial: if a composer leaves the publisher, they leave their copyright with them. When Benjamin Britten quit Boosey & Hawkes to found Faber Music in 1965, Boosey kept the much-performed Peter Grimes while Faber has Death in Venice. American composer Philip Glass has argued against this copyright clause, and he has sufficient clout to have kept his, but he is rare. It is a tough deal, but hardly Faustian. “Composers have to have something of value to offer to the people who are going to invest in them and their music,” says Cavender. “If they want their music to be disseminated around the world, someone has to do that job.”
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Composers who work without a publisher are spared such a commitment. Yet without the commercial or administrative support of a Faber or Boosey, they have plenty of others. Samantha Fernando, 32, describes the “extra skill set” a self-published composer needs to get their music remunerated and heard: building a website; typesetting scores for sale on sites such as Composers Edition and BabelScores (a kind of Amazon for the modern Shostakovich); building relationships with orchestra managers and musicians; negotiating commissions and contract fees, armed only with the Musicians’ Union rates (unchanged since 2008) and whatever premium their reputation commands. The internet helps: Bach’s assistants hand-copied The Well-Tempered Clavier, his collection of works for solo keyboard, to ensure swift dissemination. Today, YouTube and Spotify allow an instantaneous global distribution he’d have envied.
At no point during Fernando’s time at a conservatoire or at Oxford for her PhD in composition did anyone explain to her how to live as a composer, which seems remiss. After university, young composers are often commissioned by trusts such as the Britten-Pears Foundation or win places on development programmes such as the London Symphony Orchestra’s Panufnik scheme, but entrepreneurialism has to kick in as these run out. Fernando’s forebears sought patrons, too: Ludwig II of Bavaria supported the premiere of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde; Haydn was a musician at the Hungarian Esterhazy court; the church funded the music for liturgies. But such figures and institutions — career-sustaining — do not exist now.
Nina Whiteman, 36, has had a similarly exploratory journey to Fernando. When she could not find repertoire for her ensemble — flute, cello and Whiteman as mezzo-soprano — she started commissioning it herself, which raised her profile, bolstered her network and in turn led to her own commissions, including one from BBC Radio 3, which was performed by the BBC Philharmonic. Whiteman says her typical fee is between £1,000 and £4,000, for which she might write a 10-15-minute orchestral piece, taking two or three months part-time. She, like the other composers I spoke to, stressed she did not write for the money (which would anyway be futile): their pleasure lies in composition conquered.
Surprisingly, perhaps, not every unsigned composer would jump at the chance to be represented by Faber, Boosey or their ilk. Whiteman talks about keeping her independence outside a publisher, and Fernando says that full-service system is a “dying model” in the internet era, despite its cachet and simplicity. But she sounds a regretful note, too: “There are times where I think it would be so much easier not having to do all these other things. Sometimes I think I should just be composing music.”
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All composers fall victim to one peculiar disease, which might serve to illuminate the art form’s parlous broader economics: Premiere Syndrome. An element of a composer’s livelihood ought to be the fees earned from the re-performance of works, but Premiere Syndrome, which crept up about 20 years ago, says Cavender, privileges the kudos of the new.
This doesn’t add up financially, says Mark Pemberton of the Association of British Orchestras: “What slightly backfires about all of this is that because it’s quite costly to get a work ready for performance . . . all the cost is loaded into that first performance . . . So we’re all a bit trapped and all keen maybe to find a way out.”
The paradox gets to the heart of classical music’s problem: composers would like older work performed more than once, but this would mean — in a market that is not growing — fewer commissions. Yet without re-performances, works stand no chance of entering the repertoire and building a composer’s long-term reputation.
It might also be bad art. Elena Kats-Chernin, who may be familiar to British readers as the composer of music used for several yearsin an advert for Lloyds Bank, compares a new composition to a “crinkled” baby just born: “It has to grow. It’s the next performance that will be much better, because I as a composer have time to look at it again and have time to maybe tweak a few things which I didn’t like. That’s when it’s really good, and then you don’t get that chance.”
Listeners, too, can wish for more opportunities to hear work again (and again) because new music, with its dislocation from traditional melody and harmony, does not always present itself as agreeably as a Haydn symphony might at first.
I have seen Davies’ Troubairitz — based on the songs of 11th-century female troubadours — performed at the Wigmore Hall, an Art Nouveau gem in London’s West End. But such is the spectrum of new music that I later saw the same piece — all the more thrilling — in the sweaty, dark back room of a pub in Dalston, east London, as part of the Nonclassical gig series. The singer was sly, defensive, seductive, defiant, and the audience — holding pints and sporting topknots — whistled and whooped when she was done. As long as the economics of classical music can triumph over their poverty and perversity, the 21st century’s troubadours can sing on.
Music Credits
- Tom Coult, St John's Dance, BBCSO/Gardner, First Night of the Proms, July 14 2017
- Thomas Adès, Polaris, London Symphony Orchestra/Adès, LSO Live
- George Benjamin, Written on Skin, Part One Scene VI, Mehta/Hannigan/Mahler Chamber Orchestra/Benjamin, Nimbus
- Tansy Davies, Neon, Azalea Ensemble, Nonclassical
- Samantha Fernando, Saxophone quartet 4 Illuminations (2012). Performed by the Xasax Quartet
- Nina Whiteman, The Galaxy Rotation Problem. Performed by Psappha (live concert performance)
- Elena Kats-Chernin, Eliza Aria, second movement of Wild Swans Concert Suite. Performed by soprano Jane Sheldon with the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra (ABC Classics recording)
FT inline audio story developed by Joanna Kao