In a presentation under the heading 'The radio as a virtual concert hall', former radio producer and contributor to this site, Chantal De Waele, makes a passionate plea for more, much more new music on public broadcasting.
What is new music, anyway, Chantal asks herself. She shows a video fragment with composer Hanne Deneire, who works a lot with children. For a five-year-old, all music is new; the child is completely absorbed in sounds that quite a few people in Chantal's hearing seem to find somewhat problematic.
Before the presentation –officially a 'lecture'– the chairman of the organizing Orde van den Prince says he is very pleased with the turnout: some hundred members, I estimate, have shown up, better than he had feared, because the subject is –he says– quite 'difficult'.
Chantal's presentation was given at the request of Matrix, the Centre for New Music affiliated with KU Leuven. There was no money for scientific research, so she gave a historical overview based on her long experience at the public broadcaster. She started at the broadcaster in 1989, at Flagey, the magnificent art deco building in Elsene, which in the 1960s was still a 'sound factory', where a select group of composers who were often also sound engineers had set up a hothouse for new sounds. A major figure was Louis De Meester, "musician-modulator", also director of the Institute for Psychoacoustics and Electronic Music (IPEM) in Gent, composer of a radio opera, 'De grote verzoeking van Sint-Antonius'.
I detect in Chantal De Waele a nostalgia for that time, when the concert hall, with much –measured to the time slot– new music, was prominently brought into the living room. She quotes approvingly John Reith, manager of the BBC in 1922 –then a commercial enterprise– who argued that you should not ask the listener what he likes to hear. This creates 'a fictitious demand for low standards'. No, radio makers should educate the public: Horresco referens, now, that Enlightenment-derived Bildungsideal.
The pivot year was 1973, Chantal argues: the year of the Club of Rome Report and the oil crisis ended the trente glorieuses, the short thirty years after WWII in which faith prevailed in progress and feasibility (an American on the moon!). Since then we have looked at the world as a theater of crises, and the market has taken over from the distrusted government. Thus also from the public broadcaster. Nothing like Bildung. Rather the sanctified couple Supply & Demand.
Where the –entire-- NIR was asked at its founding in 1930 by the government to be a 'qualitative and prestigious culture broadcaster of high level', Klara is now given the task to be a 'refuge' in the hectic life of the listener. A string quartet by Luigi Nono will not be easily programmed by a radio maker, with that task in mind. There is 'no demand for it' and a listener cannot mindlessly retreat into it. Although Chantal did manage to program Nono in her program 'Meesterwerk' (2008-2012), with a communicative musicologist as a guide.
Where the public broadcaster broadcast direct and daring concerts until the 1970s, and composer-producers like Karel Goeyvaerts and André Laporte were leaders, there is now no longer an in-house orchestra (since 1997) and recordings are left to the market because they are 'too expensive'. Since 1995, supervision over the VRT has no longer been with the minister of Culture, but with the minister of Media. The VRT's mission now is: to be a turntable in a media market.
Within that overcut economic model, there is very little room for new music. Although attention has not completely disappeared. In 2019, for example, Klara crowned Annelies Van Parys as personality of the year.'All or nothing', says Chantal: how often is her music heard on the Classic Radio KlaRa?
Much more time and resources go into audience development. The heavily marketed Top 100, for example. I myself put it to the test: on the site https://klara.be/stem/klaratop100 you can type in the name of the composer of your choice, and then you get a list of works you can vote for. Handel: 59 search results. Schubert: 34. Brewaeys (himself a contributor to Klara until his untimely death in 2015): 1. Ligeti : 0. Nono: 0. Goeyvaerts : 'Sorry, we couldn't find a song or artist. Maybe try a different search term?' You could vote for Pärt: last year he was number one (and further down the list he appears a couple more times), Gorecki at 22, Richter at 30. The New Simplicity –in some people's ears Noble Kitsch-- does well on the market. And so it is also heard during the day on Klara.
New music has not completely disappeared, Chantal also notes. She wants to warm the audience up to Klara's Late Night programs: Valckenaers & Vanhoudt (Gerrit Valckenaers is the only composer still working for Klara, and it was he who asked Chantal on behalf of Matrix to give this presentation), and especially: Late Night Lab. They are not prime-time broadcasts, but via the Klara app you can of course also listen during the day.
Chantal finally sends us into the night with a number of questions: why does Siegfried Bracke propose making Klara a digital broadcaster? Why are there no scandal concerts anymore (prime example: the Sacre in Paris, 1913)? Is it because we have become indifferent? And: why is there no Jan Hoet of new music?
Werner Trio attended the lecture 'The radio as a virtual concert hall' in its premiere, at GC Den Bussel in Keerbergen, on Friday, November 4, 2022.
The presentation is available as a guest lecture in academies, arts humanities schools, cultural associations and clubs, for the curious music lover, …
It was developed on commission from Matrix, Centrum voor Nieuwe Muziek.
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