JAM on the Marsh: Breaking down barriers to classical music

I sat down with JAM on the Marsh festival chairman, Ed Armitage, and head of marketing and fundraising, Sarah Armitage, to talk about their plans for the upcoming festival set in Kent’s Romney Marsh. The husband-and-wife team are fantastic ambassadors for the event, and their enthusiasm for the festival, which brings multi-arts opportunities and education to an otherwise deprived part of the UK, is tangible.

I asked them about how the festival’s Call for Artists is integrating visual and literary art into the festival, run by music charity JAM (John Armitage Memorial Trust), and how broadening the festival’s appeal is helping to break down barriers and attract wider audiences to classical music as a genre.

This year we'll see JAM on the Marsh's ninth festival season. What are you most excited about in this year's programme?

Ed:

I think one of the things I'm most excited about is the increase in numbers of exhibitions there are, which are resulting from our Call for Artists. JAM is very much a music charity, but the festival is a multi-arts festival and I think people sometimes think there are thousands of concerts and one exhibition. Well, it's not it's not like that, actually: we've got a couple of poetry recitals, we've got Changeling theatre company (pictured below), we've got seven exhibitions and I think that broadness is a really good thing. It doesn’t detract in any way from the music, which is very much the core and the heart of the festival.

Sarah:

Artistically, I think the range of what's in the festival is really exciting this year. We've got the world premiere of Judith Bingham's Concerto for Clarinet which will be premiered with Michael Collins and the London Mozart Players (LMP). Judith has always wanted to write for Michael Collins, and she's a huge reader, so she uses the clarinet to bring to life various characters from literary greats - it was a match made in heaven.

We've also got the London Tango Quintet coming for the first time, it will be fantastic to have that different vibe within the festival, and of course, we've got VOCES8 coming as well. We've just launched our 2022 masterclass series in collaboration with VOCES8 and there will be a workshop with them on writing for choirs.

We've got 14 different venues scattered all over Romney Marsh, and the biggest one probably holds 350 people. One of the really exciting things about JAM is getting these sorts of world-class artists into these intimate buildings which is quite rare. We've got Lucy Crowe and James Gilchrist doing Façade in a building that probably seats 200 people, which is different and interesting, and really, really lovely.

Ed:

Another thing I'm really looking forward to is another of the festival’s education elements. We’re in the middle of a two-year singing project with primary school kids on the Marsh, and in the festival they will perform Opening Night, a piece by Tim Jackson with Onyx Brass. Seeing those kids who don't have music, particularly after the pandemic, going from making a fearful row to performing with some of the best brass players in the UK over a six-month period, is really exciting.

Changeling Theatre

How has the integration of visual and literary art increased the impact of the festival on the audience and community?

Sarah:

Given my background – I used to be a media researcher and planner - when we started the festival back in 2014 I thought I should do a little bit of research about the area before we launched this great mission. We knew there wasn't much art going on, but the figures at the time showed that 12% of people in our Romney Marsh heartland would only consider going to an art event, if it was an occasion, if it was on their doorstep, and if it didn't cost much. That taught us what our parameters were: it had to be low cost, it had to be broad in its appeal, and we’ve stuck to that.

By 2019 66% of our audience was from the local community. The visiting third come from all over the country. We raised something like £40,000 for local income back in 2019 through pub sales and festivalgoers staying in B&Bs.

The events are intentionally very different so you might get LMP performing classical music, which some people could see as a bit scary, but then you can go across to an exhibition in the leisure centre so we’re constantly breaking down these barriers of art or classical music being ‘not for me’. The festival is involving art in the community in ways that is eye catching and but not scary

Some people ask: ‘Why is it multi-arts when your background is music?’ We went down that route for various reasons: when we started doing the festival back in 2014, there was a real dovetailing of people going into the open-air theatre, seeing that we're doing concerts and then coming to a concert, or the other way around. So the different arts drew audiences for each other.

Ed:

I think the integration has been much more successful than one could have hoped. We did a project in 2019, where we had land sculptor Jon Foreman come down every day to the beach at Dymchurch and do these huge (100 metres across) sand sculptures (pictured below). All the dog walkers and the people who are interested in art saw them every day, but the amount of people who were just concert-goers that were going down to see them was unbelievable. You'd turn up at a venue that evening, and they’d all be talking about the sand drawing.

We also put quite a lot of our exhibitions in less obvious buildings that are much more accessible. We've done a collaboration with the local leisure centre where we're putting art in throughout the whole year, reusing and revisiting previous exhibitions as a retrospective. That crossover is really significant, and I think it’s one of the successes of the festival.

Beach art by land sculptor Jon Foreman

Do you feel that diversifying the festival with the addition of other disciplines can help overcome the perception that classical music may be elitist, and attract a wider audience to the event?

Ed:

Definitely. How many surveys have been done about classical music being elitist? I don't think it needs to be like that. I really don't. Music is very easy to dumb down - we shouldn't be doing that. Kids are really good at accepting anything of real quality - if you stick Onyx Brass​ into a primary school the quality of the players and the performance lights these kids up.

Our maximum price ticket is £20 - the exhibitions are free, schools activities are free and anyone under 18 can come to any festival event for free - so the festival is accessible to anyone who wants to dip their toes in the water. So I think that it's encouraging people to come and try it. So many people come into our events and go, ‘it's not really my thing, but I thought I'd give it a go and I never knew it could be like that.’

Sarah:

Our ‘bring your own’ events are another aspect that break down this barrier of elitism or inaccessibility. There's very little arts opportunity in the area, even though there are lots of artists, there’s nowhere for them to exhibit their work or build a following.

The artists from our Call for Artists are part of the festival on an equal footing with the performers that we have programmed. They are in all of our marketing and in our tickets brochures and I work to get interviews for the artists on radio or in the press so they're getting some profile from that as well. There are other festivals where you have to pay to be part of it or you're side-lined in a different venue. That's not how we do it - these artists are as much part of the festival as any other event. It's all part of what we're trying to do to embrace the whole marsh area and break down barriers and bring people in.

You talked a lot about the scale of the art offering you've got. What sort of challenges logistically has that additional aspect of the festival presented?

Ed:

Starting as a music organisation, you have to have the right people around you to judge the submissions. We had quite a long history with that from our annual Call for Music and we've kind of built a similar framework for our Call for Artists. We have three people on the panel who are visual artists and I as the artistic director, and John Frederick Hudson as the head of operations make up the five. Then we work to find something that we all want to do and that feels part of the festival.

Also, one of the trickier sides of including art in the festival is some artists are unbelievably relaxed about leaving their paintings in a building that is in effect unmanned, while others aren't. Some places are pretty remote and that is difficult. We've had to say, ‘this is the situation - we can't get someone to man the church every day.’

Sarah:

We have these great ideas and then have to tackle the actual practical delivery. In 2019 we asked some of the schools if they wanted to come down to the beach and do art with Jon Foreman. All the schools loved the idea, but then we thought, how are the kids going to make these things? Jon does it completely by eye – all he uses is a rake and sometimes a piece of string. So, we had to go into the local hardware store and get about 15 rakes, 100 buckets and miles and miles of string.

Ed:

On the final day of the festival, we invited anyone from the community to bring a rake and come and do art on the beach. We must have had about 400 or 500 metres of sand drawings on the beach. Talk about breaking down elitism - bring your own rake!

JAM on the Marsh​ returns to Kent's Romney Marsh this year from 7 to 17 July, with a programme of music, poetry, theatre and exhibitions. You can find out more about the festival and purchase tickets here.