The Long View | We’re all Nordic music fans now

Hooray, the Proms ‘proper’ are back: 6,000-strong audiences, international orchestras, two concerts a day – that sort of thing. Also back is the BBC’s continuing obsession with Nordic music and musicians, who course through yet another Proms season with a distinctly northern flavour.

The Finnish chief and principal guest conductors of the BBC Symphony Orchestra will open and close the season while the Finnish, Danish and Swedish conductors of the BBC Philharmonic, BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and BBC Singers will appear in between (that’s alongside plenty of other Nordic conductors). The hottest ‘new music’ tickets are for works by the Icelandic composers Hildur Guðnadóttir and Anna Thorvaldsdottir. The Oslo Philharmonic will appear, as will the Finnish Radio Symphony with the violinist the festival took to its heart a few years ago, Pekka Kuusisto. Nordic superstars Leif Ove Andsnes and Johan Dalene are also among the soloists and all that, as they say, is to name but a few.

I can well understand the corporation’s infatuation with Nordic music and musicians – most obviously because I share it. My new book The Northern Silence is an attempt to work out just how we got here: how orchestras in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Minneapolis, Ottawa, Toronto, Bogotá, Tokyo, Seoul, Paris, Montpellier, Lyon, Rome, Prague, Saarbrücken, Cologne, Detmold, Leipzig, London, Manchester, Birmingham, Bournemouth, Glasgow, Cardiff, Wellington and Auckland ended up with chief conductors drawn from a region with a collective population smaller than that of Texas.

It doesn’t take an anthropology PhD to work out how. Go to Finland or Scandinavia and you’ll see countries strewn with professional orchestras, opera companies and fit-for-purpose modern concert halls – a stark contrast to the entire south-west of England where I grew up, where there is no professional orchestra to be seen and only increasingly sporadic visits from opera companies based far, far away.

The story of the colossal success of Nordic music – the reason we seem to be in thrall to composers like Anna Thorvaldsdottir, Hans Abrahamsen, Anders Hillborg and Björk just as much as we cleave to Nordic conductors and soloists – is the story of the Nordic region’s distinctive attitude to arts and culture. It is the story of the principle of universal access to high-level education and performances of all kinds, whether or not an economic dividend can be wrought from it. It is the story of a principled media who report on those performances and broadcast them (including on television, every week of the year) and of a flat education system that means you don’t have to be rich to have the foundations of classical music laid during your time at school.

It’s only natural that small, homogenous countries will incubate distinctive and fertile music scenes – and it’s perfectly explicable that equally distinctive aesthetics will emerge (perhaps one reason we find avant-garde music from the region that bit more palatable).

It may be too late for Britain to wind back the clock to the post-war years and hardwire culture into the political and sociological fabric of the nation, as was done in the Nordic region decades ago. Besides, there are elements of our music life that work far better, not least the hunger that comes from its competitive, knife-edge fiscal arrangements and the artistic tension and unpredictability that engenders.

In the meantime, we might as well take whatever lessons we can from the Nordic countries. That means ensuring universal access to instrumental tuition. It means making sure young composers and conductors get the time with professional orchestras that they so badly need and currently lack in their formative years. It means keeping (should that be ‘putting’?) classical music on television and maintaining its presence in the pages of our newspapers. It means recognising that music and the music industry are different things; music is first and foremost a communal pursuit and a cross-generational bonding agent. It means trying to rid ourselves of this boringly persistent idea that classical music comes with class connotations, and aiding ourselves in that task by ceasing to treat it as a demonstration of sophistication or good taste.

Perhaps it also means slowing down and listening to the silence, which is always something the Proms, and its Royal Albert Hall home, have facilitated rather well.