The Long View | When tough decisions loom, blind outrage is not enough

There was a story circulating the day I sat down to write this column. It concerned the planned felling of an ancient tree to make way for HS2, the high-speed railway line connecting London and Birmingham. It’s a sad tale that conceals a hard truth. Whichever way you cut it, almost every major infrastructure project the world over involves a degree of collateral damage. We wouldn’t have built a high-speed rail link to Paris and Brussels without making similar sacrifices.

Anyone standing up for the rights of that tree has to ask themselves whether the environmental dividend of cleaner and more efficient public transport – and this at the time of a climate crisis – is a price worth paying for the existence of a single, beautiful plant. I wouldn’t blame anybody for coming down on the tree’s side, if they’ve chewed over the facts.

It’s a tough proposition to face, but we’re going to find ourselves fighting similar battles in our own sector. And yet it’s overwhelmingly likely that we’ll side unanimously with those institutions finding themselves under threat. Is that healthy? Should we fight to preserve every last bit of the infrastructure that existed before the pandemic, even if it was born in a bygone age and has manifestly failed to adapt or connect? Is it disingenuous to campaign for the preservation of an organisation we haven’t ever engaged with and know little about?

The internet suggests we will, no matter what. It only takes one crowd-funding appeal or petition, posted on social media with an enraged ‘how dare they’ or ‘this can’t be allowed to happen’ message, for us to click, comment and share in furious agreement: yes, we must preserve this institution at all costs. We may have no inkling of its poor governance, fading artistic standards, inability to connect with the wider world around it or of the more zippy ensemble hungry to take its place. But that won’t stop us piling in with digital outrage to insist that it must not be allowed to close.

In 2014, I was asked to support publicly a campaign to stop the Danish Broadcasting Corporation ceasing funding for its chamber orchestra. With a heavy heart, I declined – unfamiliar with the financial details, unsure why a state broadcaster in a tiny country should be running two full-time orchestras in a metropolitan area that includes four others. The de-funding went ahead, but the Danish Chamber Orchestra is thriving like never before – autonomous, imaginative, privately funded and recording on the world’s biggest classical music label.

The arts need their great, beacon institutions. But they also need to evolve. The aftermath of the pandemic provides us with an opportunity to accelerate that process – to embrace change and new currents – or regress. Is the classical music map of Britain too heavily weighted towards London? Do start-up ensembles with a more precarious but nifty operating model deserve to be rewarded for years of hard graft, artistic imagination and audience development? Is it wrong that salaried performing jobs don’t exist for ‘early’ musicians, when their sector is doing an increasing proportion of the most interesting work?

No arts institution deserves unquestioning financial support from the public purse, especially not in an age when some families can’t afford to feed their children. It is right that public funding comes with strings attached, and as ordinary citizens with an internet connection and a vested interest, we must admit that we are often more involved emotionally than we are rationally.

Even informed arguments being highly subjective. But there are plenteous battles coming our way, and we’ll need to be sure that in each and every case, we as individuals are choosing the right ones – fighting for something we passionately believe in having armed ourselves with some degree of contextual knowledge. As a sector, we stand to look petulant and spoilt if we refuse to accept change in the wake of the biggest crisis in living memory. If we choose the right battles, there is everything to gain.