Stephen Connolly looks at how the traditional
music form is breaking boundaries and seeking out new audiences, by defying stereotypes and bending genres
Classical music is often incorrectly assumed to be one-dimensional, but a wave of musicians are pushing the music beyond its traditional boundaries and into spaces you might not expect to hear it. Championing this development is Elizabeth Alker (presenter of
BBC Radio 3’s alt-classical show, Unclassified). She says: “There are plenty of people working to take classical music out of the concert hall and to new audiences in clubs and warehouse venues. Groups like the Manchester Collective or Nonclassical, they’re bold and ambitious and they’re extremely passionate about the music and giving audiences the opportunity to hear it. It’s pretty radical to stage a work like Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire in a marketplace in Hull!”
Radical as it may be, such events are part of a growing movement that’s creating environments for mixed audiences of musical purists and the culturally curious to encounter classical music in unexpected ways. For the composer Gabriel Prokofiev, from a renowned classical family and the disruptor-founder of the Nonclassical club night, the creation of open, relatable events is needed to break down the walls between DJs and dinner jackets. “It’s all part of the process of classical music catching up with contemporary lifestyles,” he says. “Classical music is stuck in a bubble and most of the people involved don’t necessarily realise they’re in a bubble – they just love the music, it works for them, but that’s a tradition and a way of presenting the music that doesn’t really fit with modern ways of living.”