BRETT PYPER argues for and against maintaining and funding national symphony orchestras in South Africa
An outcome to the question of how South Africa’s existing symphony orchestras will relate to the imperatives of a multi- cultural democracy has been a long time in coming. Last week’s announcement that the SABC will discontinue its funding of the National Symphony Orchestra (NSO) as from April follows on the near-closure of the Cape Town Symphony Orchestra during 1996. It indicates that crunch time may finally have arrived for the country’s orchestras as the debate that has generated years of conventions, think tanks, task groups and White Papers draws to a conclusion.
Emerging consensus has increasingly indicated that additional public funding of the country’s five permanent symphony orchestras will depend on a transformation of their perceived elitist role as custodians of Western high culture. The SABC’s announcement has therefore come, if not as a surprise, as an irony to those who see the NSO’s work over the past few years as one of the more progressive contributions in an area of cultural activity which is prone to conservative thinking.
Apart from developing a strong audience base for its regular symphony concerts (doubling the number in recent years), the NSO has repeatedly demonstrated a willingness to move beyond the rarefied atmosphere of the concert hall to bring its music to a broader section of the community. During 1996, a full 50% of the orchestra’s 120 performances were non-orthodox concert presentations. Under the energetic leadership of music director Richard Cock, the standard NSO schedule has come to include an array of programmes bearing titles like Spring Light Classics, Musical Fireworks, Songs of Praise and the Last Night of the Proms at venues ranging from the Johannesburg Zoo to the Standard Bank Arena and Vista University.
But the orchestra’s “outdoor” work goes beyond the kind of middle-class populism that is normally associated with “Symphonic Pops”-type programming. The NSO’s substantial engagement with African choral music, which Cock traces back to the 1970s, highlights an area of considerable, mutually enriching interaction that has been built up through the orchestra’s involvement in projects like the Soweto nation-building initiative and the annual Soweto Messiah.This type of work can be seen as a precursor to Mzilikazi Khumalo’s epic piece Ushaka, a work recorded by the orchestra during 1996, which invites emulation.
As a result of projects like Rhythms of Africa in 1994, the NSO now counts among its guest performers luminaries like Abdullah Ibrahim, Rebecca Malope and Yvonne Chaka Chaka, and the orchestra’s relationship with local diva Sibongile Khumalo goes back some time before her ‘discovery’ by mainstream audiences.
The point is not to deny the importance of the NSO’s work in what remains the primary focus of a symphony orchestra’s activity, the classical repertoire. In this respect the orchestra has well served an appreciative, necessarily small segment of the country’s population (attendance at live concerts is estimated at 250 000 people per year, with a radio and TV audience of “some millions”).
But under a new cultural dispensation, public funding of classical music must increasingly carry the tacit assent of the absent majority for whom the performers are silent. Music has no direct bearing on the imperatives of socio-economic upliftment; what role it can play is largely symbolic. Public response to the NSO’s predicament has suggested that many South Africans feel that orchestras should be part of their civil environment. The challenge is to achieve this without such symbolic value merely denoting white privilege.
The cause is not aided by supporters of classical music who are prone to representing the classical canon as the only music of intrinsic worth to South Africa. The truth is that much indigenous music, both traditional and contemporary, shares the NSO’s predicament – if it is that lucky. While the five permanent orchestral bodies fear for their continued existence, South Africa has no permanent national song and dance companies. Jazz, an area in which South African musicians have made true international impact remains largely dependent on the vicissitudes of a fickle market.
If classical music is to take its place among these other substantial traditions, it will have to be for different reasons to those that enabled it to thrive in the past. Under the rubric of “own affairs” the country’s major cultural institutions of the apartheid years, most of which housed orchestras, were created and sustained on an ideology of amorphous internationalism that can still be heard alongside more legitimate calls to “save the orchestra”.
It is as yet far from clear what it would mean for orchestras to be a national asset to the new South Africa, as is the question of how to give substance to the notion of a national culture. What is evident is that, if classical music is to perform a meaningful role in the changing environment, it needs to shake off its image as a minority interest claiming a majority’s portion of the cultural resources.
Richard Cock says that extending the NSO’s activities into new areas is expensive, and until now has largely rested on extra funding. As the continued existence of the orchestra itself now appears to depend on such external sources, it stands to reason that the orchestra will have to curtail its initiatives in this field, even if it does manage to survive the withdrawal of the patronage of the SABC. About the orchestra’s community programmes, Cock insists that these concerts are so important that we should keep them going at all costs.
One hopes that the NSO’s current crisis will serve as a catalyst in this process, rather than the disruption of some of the more significant moves that have in fact been made in this direction.