Blowing the door wide open
We’re not going to list the gazillion things Elizabeth Kenny does. The short version is that Liz plays the lute and teaches and she’s really good at both. In the midst of juggling an academic schedule that has not stopped with the pandemic, Liz writes about inclusion and belonging. It’s important.
I play the lute. And a number of other lute-shaped and related instruments. They live at the top of my house near where the hamster used to run up and down in the days when my children wished to care for (control?) small furry creatures. I bring down to the living room the one/s I’m playing most. I can measure how life has changed by the fact that I’m playing the less-used solo-only instruments. The workhorses - the long necked theorboes and guitars that I play in ensembles, in operas, and with singers - are resting. I have forgotten, for now, the essential skills of carrying them weaving between the crowds on trains, trying not to hit anyone with them as I go. Mostly succeeding. The others, made for introspection and self-exploration, are having their day. French baroque lute suites and Bach … that music is all about solitary Me.
But today I am on a train. In our new-old way of working a hybrid form of concert is emerging, the livestream to an empty hall. I’ve done two now, both with counter-tenor Iestyn Davies, and they feel like keeping the faith, sticking to a time and a place when the music will happen in “real” time The one-take video recording is something I still need to learn to love. I do hanker after the old do-or-die concert format, for the live audience’s benediction, where the mistakes don’t hang around in the ether waiting to creep out after dark, reminding me of my own imperfections. But making the appointment with the audience is the important thing: they agree to pause their life if we play. We are complicit. And that’s a great privilege. Waiting for people to scroll and happen upon you is one thing (will they get to the good ones or the iffy ones?); keeping our pact is another.
During the past few months we’ve heard a lot from musicians, actors, crew, recording engineers, festival events wizards and promoters, about how the music and the shows need to continue. Of course we would say that: this is our lifeblood, and we have the urge to communicate, to hone our skill. I’ve wondered, though, whether those who determine our financial future were waiting for the voices of the people we play to, to sound and be heard, before they made their welcome decision to create the £1.57bn support package whose details will unfold over the next months. We have to listen to who is listening.
Recently a friend sent me a gift which moved me and plunged me back thirty years. In 1987 I was at university, not studying music, day-dreaming now and then of what a musician’s life might be like (I didn’t know any). I was a classical guitarist by night, studying English literature by day. I was offered the chance to play the Rodrigo “Orange Juice” (Concierto de Aranjuez) with an orchestra of students. I’d been a Junior at the Royal Academy of Music, but ran away from all the general musicianship classes because I was neither studying music at school nor in possession of a piano at home to figure it all out, and I didn’t like being reminded of the gulf between my knowledge and everyone else’s. I would do that differently now. I kept on playing, if not understanding how the music worked, so with a lot of luck and a good wind behind me I felt I could accept the challenge. I spent the summer hammering away at it. When it came to it, I had nothing to wear, so my friend, who to me epitomised the kind of sophistication and glamour of the people I had met for the first time at university, took action. She designed and made a beautiful green silk skirt. I was moved and grateful. But at the same time a part of me thought “Why don’t I know this stuff? Why do I not have formal clothes? What are you meant to wear for a concerto? Are there beings whose style isn’t got from the sales in Top Shop and Chelsea Girl?” (Look that last one up if you’re lucky enough to be too young to know what I’m talking about.)
I hadn’t realised I wasn’t included, until, now, I was. That summer I overheard my mum on the phone to a friend, saying “I used to like the guitar, but now…” and I intuited a kind of gulf was opening up, that this music and the need for training, for repetitive practice, which we take for granted but is alien to everyone outside the club, was going to take me away from her world. When you get included in one place it’s likely you’ll be excluded from another. My parents didn’t attend many concerts: three of mine, I think, between that day and this. As bright people who left school in their teens, they made the leap into mixing in university circles as their children entered them, but somehow the classical music club was a leap too far. But they did listen to programmes on the radio. The social togetherness of live concerts is great, but the anonymity of radio and online is a real tool for getting us out of our bubbles, and allowing other people in.
My old university friend’s more recent gift arrived in the post last week: it was a Covid-mask made from off-cuts of green silk which she had kept since that time. Suddenly the past is now the present and I’m overwhelmed by this friendship. If the creative minds behind this blog promise to keep it as a tiny thumbnail, I will include a picture of train-mask-with lockdown-hair-me. (You can make the publicity picture of my other, curated, self as big as you like.)
Not quite a thumbnail. Sorry Liz…
Now I’m a classical music insider. My skin is white. I managed to study in elite places where my ignorance of the codes could be disguised and I could catch up on the musical understanding: a lot of work, but I realised it was just a kind of learning like any other, not the mysterious exclusive knowledge that I had feared it might be. I’ve had and continue to have, a great variety of performance opportunities. I’ve been able to travel through music in ways that I couldn’t have imagined, growing up. Right now I’m feeling lucky because this job and my just-completed contract as Director of Performance at Oxford, cushioned me from the financial hammer-blows that have rained on the freelancers around me. Just before lockdown I accepted a job as Dean of Students at the Royal Academy of Music. To start as a global pandemic unfolds wasn’t the plan, but it has been a learning like no other.
The pandemic has been followed by, and enmeshed with, a reckoning with who we have included and who we have excluded. Most British arts and higher education institutions issued statements supporting the Black Lives Matter movement – rightly so – and now have to turn words into action. One of my aims at the Academy is to build on work others have started, and try to include more people from diverse backgrounds in performance training. There’s a sharp irony to this: opening doors wider when the pandemic has exposed the precarious nature of the freelance careers for which students are preparing. But there are also positives: looking into the revealed void of the last few months is making us all question what “the profession” looks like, and we do have an opportunity to re-negotiate the old hierarchies. There seem to be much more openness about sharing ideas on how to make musical survival possible. Students and established professionals have taught themselves web and audio skills. Others are expressing themselves with words in this blog. A concert pianist friend works in Sainsbury’s, where he says he’s tempted to include champagne with all the orders, in honour of his pre-Covid concert lifestyle … He has his sense of irony more intact, perhaps, than if he was hiding the need to earn a living in order to preserve the image of a concert artist living somehow only on the music. As a student I never mentioned my other jobs to my teachers – cleaning, playing music on a floating restaurant, tutoring, waitressing – thinking it would mean people wouldn’t take my musical aims seriously. Sometimes I’ve earned my whole living from concerts. Sometimes I haven’t. I’m no better or worse as a lute player in either of these two states. The younger generation are more honest about all this, I feel. The Academy set about fundraising for students when lockdown hit: It’s been sobering and inspiring to manage the allocation of the Academy’s Response Fund, to students who have been doing all these things and more, when the work that sustained them through their studies disappeared overnight. The fact that the young are putting their futures on ice mainly to shield older generations from harm, speaks volumes about their ethical sense. I have great faith in them. Education is taking a battering, but it’s an extraordinary place to be just now.