The girl taking tickets on the door is wearing odd stockings. It’s the middle
of June, but one of the bar staff is sporting a woolly hat, complete with a
strategically draped bobble. It’s 9.30pm on a Wednesday night at the Macbeth
on Hoxton Street, and this is exactly the kind of crowd you’d expect to find
in this terrifyingly trendy corner of East London. It’s not what you’d
expect at a classical music concert, though.
But this is no ordinary classical music concert. Nonclassical, run by Gabriel
Prokofiev, DJ, producer, composer and grandson of the great Sergei, is a
monthly classical club night that mixes live performances from
instrumentalists and singers with sets from electronica DJs. Talking during
the performances is not frowned upon – in fact, it’s positively encouraged –
and drinks are served at the bar throughout the night.
The event is just one of a host of classical club nights springing up in
cities across the country, aimed at younger punters who are open to
classical music but deterred by the formality of the traditional concert
hall. According to Prokofiev, young people are put off going to formal
concerts because they don’t know what to wear or when to clap, and hate
being forced to sit in silence throughout a performance.
He shunned the classical tradition after studying composition in Birmingham
and York, turning instead to the underground electronica circuit. “I got
very frustrated because I knew that at least 50 per cent of the people who
came to hear my music had white hair and the other 50 per cent would all be
composers or academics themselves,” he says. “I wanted my friends to hear my
music. Classical music has kept itself isolated in a lot of ways. It’s time
to loosen up and take a look around and stop being afraid to embrace other
genres.”
It’s not the first time that classical music has migrated to a club. In 2001
there was the launch of the Siren Suite, mixing dance music with Satie,
Stock-hausen or Cage. But attempts to bring classical music to new, younger
audiences have often ended in ridicule. When This Isn’t For You, a series of
themed hour-long chamber music programmes at Shoreditch Town Hall, started
in January 2006, Gramophone magazine neatly concluded: “It really
wasn’t for me.” And when the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment started
its “informal” Night Shift series last year, critics found it contrived, a
self-conscious halfway house between the formal concert hall and an informal
style that didn’t really work.
Prokofiev’s event feels much more natural. Most of the crowd at the Macbeth
are not new to classical music; they are either students or working in the
music industry. But they are almost all under 30. And apart from the odd icy
glance towards the bar when there is a particularly loud crash of glasses,
they seem very much at ease with this new format. This vocal night consists
of short sets of around ten minutes each, incorporating everything from
traditional classical songs to throat-singing and beatboxing.
Juice, a three-piece contemporary classical vocal ensemble, perform a number
of works by composers in the audience, including one by Richard Barnard
based on real and synthesized recordings of birdsong. A soprano, Kathleen
Garner, serves up a helping of Stravinsky and Villa-Lobos, and an
experimental vocalist and visual artist, Mikhail Karikis, performs some of
his own works, including the strangely compelling Untitled in Cof Minor,
which includes meditative droning alongside a bout of coughing. With the
performances in full swing, the punters discuss the music, order drinks and
even throw in the odd wolf-whistle. If I’d turned up at the last instalment,
I’m told that I would have been rubbing shoulders with Björk.
Will Vollar Bell, a student at the London College of Music, with a swath of
wild curly hair tucked lopsidedly under a black cap, says: “You feel closer
to the music in this kind of environment. It’s the same with any kind of
music – if you go and see someone play at Wembley Stadium you’re not going
to get as much out of it as if you see them in a small club.”
Now, more than two years since its slightly shaky start, This Isn’t For You is
about to move to a larger venue in the new arts complex at Kings Place when
it opens in October. The Night Shift is still going strong. And there are
similar nights springing up in pubs and clubs all over the UK. Juice had
performed at an electronica gig the night before and as part of
ElektroStatic in the bar of Colston Hall in Bristol the previous week. “We
are doing more and more of the club stuff,” says Kerry Andrew, of Juice.
“There’s a real demand for this stuff.”
If I were a traditional concert promoter, I’d be rushing to the nearest
board-room to try and work out how this kind of atmosphere can be recreated.
Prokofiev points out that it takes time to build audiences for something
new, but it looks as if he and his contemporaries may be laying the first
bricks.
When Matt Fretton set up This Isn’t For You, he realised he was in uncharted
territory. “I felt it needed to be done,” he says. “Someone had to take the
initiative and look at the way classical music was being presented. I hated
the fact that people were not allowed to clap or make any noise during
concerts. And I don’t like the ridiculous waiters’ outfits. Musicians are
not there to serve people; they are artists and should be respected.”
Fretton wanted to strip away all the trappings associated with classical music
so that only the bare essentials remained: “You’ve got an audience,
performers and music, and that’s it,” he says. “We took out the seating and
the interval, which is pointless anyway. Why should it be so awfully
formalised? You throw down a terrible glass of wine and then you’re ordered
back to your seat.”
The new series at Kings Place will be much the same format, only in a bigger
space with proper ticketing – and, of course, a bar. “That’s absolutely
essential,” Fretton says. “If people think, ‘I can’t stand any more of that
Conlon Nancarrow,’ they can just go and get a drink. In an art gallery, no
one’s going to force you to stand in front of a painting you don’t like for
half an hour. The respect between the audiences and the musicians has to be
natural, not enforced.”
The classical club approach lends itself particularly well to music that sits
towards the avant-garde end of the classical scale. It feels very much at
home against a backdrop of chinking glasses and psychedelic lampshades.
Another popular night, Rational Rec, which started life in Bethnal Green
Working Men’s Club, blends contemporary composition with visual and
performance art and literature.
But the classical club night is not limited to contemporary music. The
Yorkshire Grey, a postwork waterhole in Holborn, has been hosting monthly
chamber music performances since January. Here, the repertoire is much more
traditional (a violinist and pianist play Bach and Schubert) and the crowd
much better behaved, but this is still not your average chamber music
performance. Two halves of 20 minutes each are separated by a 30-minute
interval, and again, drinks are served throughout.
Harmonic at the Arts Club on Dover Street in Mayfair also sticks to a more
traditional, core classical format. Begun this year by Steve Abbott, of the
artist management agency Bedlam Management, it has attracted performers such
as the violinist Nicola Benedetti, the soprano Danielle De Niese and Julian
Lloyd Webber, and draws crowds of around 300 each month. It combines chamber
music in one room with a classical music DJ in the bar next door.
“The fact that a lot of people are doing this is a reflection of the fact that
a lot of young people are feeling very alienated by the traditional way in
which classical music is presented,” Abbott says.
As I leave the Macbeth to catch the last Tube home, Juice are on their third
set of the night. People have started dancing. On the way out I pick up a
beer-soaked flier advertising another classical night, Blank Canvas, at 93
Feet East on Brick Lane in July. The revolution marches on.
Next Nonclassical night, July 2 2008: www.myspace.com/nonclassicalmusic
