In the Global North, music is integral to our identity. Yet, interest in classical and early music is declining despite attempts to attract younger, more diverse audiences. Concert halls and HIP (historically informed practice) venues mainly draw aging “white” audiences. Musical instrument museums also struggle to attract visitors. Cultural organisations face pressure to be more inclusive, which is challenging. Museum Geelvinck, with its extensive early keyboard collection, has successfully engaged non-Western communities, drawing new audiences. However, across Europe, HIP venues struggle to connect innovative productions with new audiences, impacting musicians, ensembles, and craftspeople like tuners and instrument makers.
Challenge: Live music venues in Europe face the challenge of attracting new, diverse audiences for classical HIP and early music. The aging “white” audience and the difficulty in connecting innovative productions with new appreciative audiences affect the entire sector.
Objectives:
- Develop new audience strategies for live music venues, ensuring outreach to local communities, often with non-Western roots.
- Stimulate artist circulation within Europe for classical HIP and early music.
- Ensure financial viability for innovative productions.
HIP has focused on Euro-centric early and classical music, attracting an aging “white” audience. Younger generations show little interest, and non-Western audiences are rarely engaged. In the 1970s, musicians like Frans Brüggen and Gustav Leonhardt popularised HIP by breaking traditions, but these standards became rigid over time. Now again, emerging professional musicians and ensembles are exploring cross-cultural arts, using period instruments from diverse origins. They embrace various music genres without bias, potentially renewing interest in historical instruments. The old approach of presenting music sequentially, distinguishing Western from ethnomusicological regions, is outdated. Younger, multicultural audiences find such distinctions irrelevant or unacceptable. A more inclusive presentation is needed, using music to reflect societal changes.
To support this approach, venues should become spaces for social themes related to music, encompassing traditional instruments from various cultures. This concept aims to present music inclusively, appealing to a diverse new generation. Collaborating with local communities ensures support for safeguarding living musical heritage. This concept aligns with both the revolutionary ideas from the 1970s that revived interest in HIP, and todays Faro Convention.
In short, music venues must learn to attract new audiences for innovative productions, often with a social focus, breaking boundaries between Western HIP, traditional non-Western music, and contemporary interdisciplinary crossovers. We target the smaller venues, as these usually have more difficulty in exploring new paths. Our objective is to support the creation of a Europe-wide network of music venues which relate to the HIP-scene and which are welcoming innovative and experimental productions. If there is more potential for new innovative production to be staged in various countries, this makes these productions more financially feasible and rewarding too for the ensembles and creative makers. Important, if not essential is that there is interaction created between these productions and local communities, whether from non-Western diasporas or those feeling excluded from traditional venues. Our project aims to help venues in their ability to create such match.
Mission
The challenge is twofold: on one hand, there is waning interest from the existing audience; therefore, we aim to reach a broader and more inclusive public. If this fails, not only will the relevance of music venues dedicated to HIP evaporate, but the livelihood of musicians and skilled technicians specialising in this field will also disappear. Consequently, the living musical heritage, a vital element of European identity, will vanish.
On the other hand, a new generation of creative makers is emerging, including composers, choreographers, designers, light artists, and performing artists such as musicians, dancers, vocal artists, instrument makers, and others. They aim to create productions, often with social significance, targeting a different audience—one that is potentially broader and more inclusive than the current audience that appreciates HIP in its current “civilised” format, which is not socially critical and does not challenge the audience. For the existing audience the more experimental, cross-cultural, interdisciplinary, and multimedia productions that the new generation ensembles want to create, are often not appealing. This may have detrimental financial consequences for the music venue. If productions are not staged by music venues, this is not an incentive for these emerging creative makers to continue that path. Therefore, it is essential to search for new audience which are attracted by these new productions. Moreover, it is highly beneficial to establish across Europe a network of music venues, which do program innovative productions, allowing such productions to tour and reach a continent-wide audience, and, importantly, making these productions financially rewarding for the creative makers and performers.
It is crucial for music venues to establish a match between the productions they program and the audiences, they reach out to. Productions should resonate with and motivate the audience to attend the performance. The music venue acts as a bridge between the production team and the local audience, the local communities in all their diversity, that they aim to reach with the significance of their production. The music venue cannot remain passive in this process. It is an integral part of the production’s success, and, in this sense, the music venue is a co-creator.
Our project aims to support music venues—specifically the small HIP-focused music venues (often in historic locations)—make this shift in their thinking: their policy towards a new audience, specifically an audience encompassing communities with non-Western cultural roots.
The underlying challenge is to stimulate the living heritage of our European musical heritage among a broader and more culturally diverse audience, ensuring it is passed on to future generations. In short, to give it a future, because as it stands now, the niche risks perishing, possibly already within a decade.
Vision
Perhaps one of the most important elements binding the area we know as Europe is classical music and before that, early music. A characteristic feature of European music is the development of music notation and its connection with keyboard instruments, a typical European invention. The awareness of a European culture is closely linked to the feeling of a European musical culture, transcending language barriers. While each region had its own folk music and the 19th century saw attempts to develop national musical characteristics, classical music undeniably helped to unify what can be called a European culture. This is strongly reflected by the choice of a work by Beethoven for the European anthem.
The feeling of European unity is strongly connected to an European musical culture, particularly classical music. There is a clear European interest in keeping the flame of the living musical heritage of classical music burning and passing it on from generation to generation. However, there is a danger: classical music is inextricably linked to the global hegemony of Western culture and the dominance of the white elite. In the Western world, classical music is commonly accepted as a universal value. Other, non-Western music genres are swept together under the term ‘world music’. Traditional non-Western music is studied within ethnomusicology, revealing a structural colonial perspective. European citizens with (bi-)cultural roots in non-Western cultures may feel excluded. Therefore, it is important to raise awareness about the origins of European musical culture. Particularly within early music, the influence of various other musical cultures can be clearly heard and seen. This makes early music an interesting tool to engage communities with non-Western roots in European culture. Jordi Savall’s work, such as his production ‘The Routes of Slavery’, is a prime example. Even in modern times, European – and broader Western – musical development is influenced by other musical cultures, such as gamelan, Afro-American and Latino rhythms, traditional Ashkenazi music, etc. Instead of presenting classical music as an exclusive product of the Western elite, it can be interpreted as an interplay of diverse cultural influences from within and outside Europe. HIP venues are particularly suitable for providing this explanation, as HIP returns to the origins of music.