Just play music

It's Friday afternoon. The sky above the railway station is gradually fading from white through grey to black. It's been a busy week, full of meetings and discussions and decisions and brain strain. My piece on the ACE consultation drew some very personal comments - I don't mind people disliking my ideas, but take criticism of my prose style to heart! I've just finished a letter in support of some artists from the Eastern Cape in South Africa who've been refused visas to travel to take part in a major education programme in the Spring. A pint or a gin and tonic wouldn't go amiss, to be honest.


Days like this I will often go home and have a little noodle around on the guitar to decompress. I like to sing songs, but nothing relaxes me quite like just playing. (It's a non-aggressive way of getting the effect a game of fiveaside has on me.) There was a great article in The Guardian about amateur music making, by Charlotte Higgins, this week which really made me want to do this with some other people too. The people just sounded as if they were having so much fun and getting so much depth out of the experience. Play is, after all, a very serious thing.

Charlotte meets a number of orchestras and groups, and also communicates her own passion for playing. I'm no classical music buff, so my music making is in another sphere, which makes it hard to avoid the '40something-guitar-dad' cliches when even thinking about playing with other people. I don't mind inflicting those on my family through the walls, but would draw the line at strangers. (I think of my staff here like family, obviously, hence our inflicting the Management Team Ukulele Orchestra on them at one party.)


One person says something I really empathise with: learning a piece is "a life's project: even if I do learn [the notes] of the D minor Partita, that's just the beginning of ­interpreting and ­understanding that piece". He adds: "I'm struggling to express this, but there is something about ­playing that is wholly good for myself, ­uncomplicatedly good, in a moral sense. When you play music you are an agent, you are doing something rather than being a consumer or a subject. For me, it's part of being a human ­being."


The size and significance of the amateur sector is, I think, increasingly realised. The point the article makes is that quality is there too. It sometimes just goes with the love of music rather than the presence of payment. Charlotte Higgins has followed up with a blog asking for details of amateur groups - hopefully there'll be an upsurge in numbers of people using their instrumental skills.


Perhaps there is something in the air for 2010, about 'expressive lives'. The choir my wife and daughter sing in, which I've mentioned before, have started a 'sing for your supper' session at Arc in Stockton and had 80 people there last week - families of all ages and backgrounds making music together just for pleasure. I also had a lovely letter from a user of the Take It Away scheme recently, thanking us for making it possible for him to buy a banjo - 50 years since he gave up playing. The gentleman's aim was to be able to play it by his next (76th) birthday.


There, that's reminded me of the transformative power of the arts up enough to drive home now - do read the articles.

More thoughts on Expressive Lives

As I mentioned yesterday, I’ve been on holiday. The first part was a real ‘staycation’, enjoying the Stockton International Riverside Festival, which just happens to be my local festival. Paul Harman, with whom I am rarely known to disagree, honest, describes it very well on Arts Professional here. Listening in as two classic brick-outhouse, cropheaded, tattooed Teesside Blokes debated whether BalletBoyz Next Generation was as good as the dance thing they’d seen last year, whilst waiting for Avant Garde Dance to begin, really made my weekend. Well, that and seeing the rest of the family express themselves in performance – my wife and daughter running away to join No Fit State Circus (only for the weekend, mind, in line up in photo above)in the DVC Choir in Parklife, and my son and his mates in Cold Pistols getting an early slot in the Fringe Festival (amusing that's-my-giant-boy photo below).

Anyway, that and the rest of my holiday in Norfolk – my, that period as ACE Executive Board Rural Champion had a lasting impact! - made me want to add a further note to my thinking on Expressive Lives, which is that there is a certain metropolitanism to the tone, and to the notion that we are now awash with opportunity. Not every place is like Stockton-on-Tees, after all, where we get to live expressive lives. (By metropolitanism I don’t mean London-centricity, by the way, though that’s a common manifestation. For another strain of the syndrome, again probably not malignant, see recent discussion in the States over the new NEA Chair Rocco Landesman’s comments about theatre in smaller places – here or here.)

This is then built on by a point made on Town Hall Matters by John Craig-Sharples, drawing attention to the role of local authority cultural services in supporting expressive lives. Although there are some passing references to local government in the publication, mainly in the context of funding, the role that culture can play right across a local authorities functions is underplayed. As John puts it, and as councils like Stockton at their best demonstrate, ‘Perhaps if we really grasp the potential of cultural services we would find that they may play as big a part in building the kind of communities to which we are committed, as some of the core services like social care’. This is about taking the arts out of their box and putting their influence to use throughout local provision, throughout the country.

I came across Town Hall Matters via Blogger’s Circle, which is an experiment in creating debate around blogs that fall broadly into the area of ‘public policy’. This is the first of my ‘Bloggers Circle’ inspired posts. If you’re interested in policy and politics have a look around.

How Soon is Now?

On Tuesday I was the keynote speaker at the national conference of ENYAN – the English National Youth Arts Network – at the Customs House in South Shields. This was a very suitable venue given the Customs House’s involvement in Creative Partnerships and now Find Your Talent. (The Customs House was the first RFO to run an ‘independent’ Creative Partnerships area, in North and South Tyneside – a model we had to work hard to convince people would work, but which is now more or less the model adopted across the country.)

I’d been set a topic which was possibly some kind of revenge for the kinds of questions young people get in exams, about policy and investment and the importance of ‘young leaders of the future’. I did address it but with a different emphasis. If I say I titled the presentation ‘How Soon Is Now’ that will give both my age and theme away.

Whilst there is a greater policy emphasis on young people and their leadership skills, and more investment there are three key themes I drew attention to. (You can read the policy stuff in ENYAN’s excellent publication Young Arts Leaders.)

Firstly that we need young leaders now, not in the future. (Apart from anything else, they’ll be older by then…) If diversity is a central element to a good leadership team (apply that as broadly as you want, organisation or sector-wide) and innovation vital, we need to develop a more multi-generational model of leadership. In my talk I skipped the research about the way in which Babyboomers, GenX and GenY and what I saw described as Gen@ interact, but it’s not uncomplicated bringing different generations together.

Secondly, ‘professionalisation’ is affecting how young people enter the workplace and their roles there, especially given how the workplace itself is changing. I did a straw poll in our office and the highest concentration of MAs, for instance, is probably at the more junior levels rather than the more senior levels. What happens when managers are less academically-qualified, but have more dirty-handed experience from the University of Life, running a theatre company from the back of a van or a poetry press with a long-arm stapler? We need to develop less hierarchical versions or visions of leadership.

Thirdly, the workplace demands this adaptation and diversification, but is arguably crowded with older folk working hard and productively. The management tiers are not emptying out to make room for talented young people. The leadership programmes are arguably struggling to cope with this, in bringing younger leaders through. The definition of young gets pushed up - sometimes as high as 40 as it was when I joined the British Council's UK -South East Europe Forum at the age of 39.9.

This means it is harder to be trusted and given the risky opportunity to run things, even small things, at a young age. I was 32 when appointed as Director of Cleveland Arts, my friend and predecessor Reuben Kench was just 27. One of my antecedents in this job – or perhaps ancestor is more the word, given he was actually running Northern Arts – Peter Stark was New Activities Co-ordinator in the Midlands for Arts Council Great Britain at 22 and Director of South Hill Park at 25, with 50 staff. Talking to both, we found it hard to think of recent examples of such trusting appointments of young people. There is less room in many senses perhaps.

The further question I was left with, after spending the morning at the conference, was might the recession create a bit of ‘clear space’ in which young leaders can carve out the chance to both fail and succeed - ie grow - in safe but not too safe circumstances?

Would the Pitman Painters classes happen today?

It’s Adult Learners' Week here in the UK. Adult education is one of those things that makes me feel proud and sorrowful about being British – like good council houses, allotments and Greggs pasties. (Where else do you still find organisations called things like Workers Education Association?) The Ashington Group, subject of Lee Hall’s The Pitman Painters that I wrote about recently, began as a WEA class in the 1930s. And that tradition carries on today with many thousands of people enjoying the arts through adult education, and artists and arts organisations being heavily involved in both formal and informal adult learning. (Literature in the North East has always been particularly strong in this field, with writers and editors like Michael Standen, Gillian Allnut, Andy Croft and the late Bill Scammell amongst many others having played especially important roles.)

In recent years some of the tradition of adult education has come under attack by the forces of modernisation. Some of this has been for the good – there have been benefits from professionalisation of teaching – but other effects have narrowed the people who can benefit, and narrowed the activities. I did a lot of adult ed teaching earlier in my career, and got a huge amount from it. I also saw some great writers emerge who might not have taken the first steps if adult education had not been so welcoming. Increasingly, though, you could harshly characterise the approach as being that most people will need to pay, need to get accredited whether they like it or not and they’ll only be able to pay for things for which are deemed ‘useful’. (Unless we’re especially keen to get them off benefits.)

The government is currently consulting on proposals for ‘informal adult learning’ which seem to be something of a corrective to that trend. There do seem to be dangers within – not least the idea that a Google search and an online experience is as effective adult education as meeting other human beings in a room. (Call me old-fashioned… I know it’s AND not or.) If your practice or your work brings you into this sphere it’s worth looking at that and responses such as those from the WEA and NIACE and perhaps putting your two penn’orth in.

Do you feel Olympian?

The London 2012 Cultural Olympiad moved another hop, skip and a jump closer this week with the ‘opening for business’ to artists and arts organisations. You can read about the different ways to get involved here. Obviously there’s a considerable amount of lottery funding going into the Olympics and many people have made their views clear about that. Whatever the rights and wrongs, 2012 is a-coming and is now an opportunity to do some creative and fantastic things. I see no sense in the resentful scorn I’ve heard from some people. I think we could really do something to showcase the talent of young people, for instance, that might dislodge forever (ok, a generation…) this damaging myth that young people are, somehow, Trouble about which ‘something must be done’. I think it’s also a great chance for the arts in London to demonstrate the benefits to the whole of the UK of having a global cultural capital here.

At the IFACCA World Summit on Arts and Culture, organised by Arts Council in the North East in 2006 we had a session on cultural Olympiads, with two great speakers, Craig Hassall and Beatriz Garcia. Craig’s presentation emphasised the need to involve artists, which the team are striving to do. Beatriz’s website has lots of links of interest to those interested in the legacies of such events.

Do we need a new agenda for cultural learning?

Following swiftly on the government announcements about the cultural offer and the 'Find Your Talent' pilot scheme, are a couple of timely documents from Demos. I'd recommend anyone involved in education, learning, creativity, call it what you will, to read and consider responding. Culture and Learning: Towards a New Agenda, written by John Holden, is a consultation paper which puts forward an analysis of the current state of play and makes some recommendations for change. Basically he suggests that we need a new agenda for cultural learning, based on a shared definition of cultural learning, shared standards of excellence and methods of impact assessment, driven by clear leadership and strong networks and brokerage. There are a number of challenges to the way things currently are, especially problems of profile, scale and effectiveness and the positioning of cultural learning. (This manifests itself, amongst other ways, in the relatively low earnings of education staff, compared to say fundraising or marketing.) The report is accompanied by a 'context paper' which gives an 'historical' perspective - particularly since the 1990s. I set up the first Teesside Arts in Education Agency in 1997, with a princely £8000 from Northern Arts and the same from local authorities, and it is fascinating to see how things have changed since then, and to consider the power of a well-timed report and initiative from funders.

Are the arts prone to ‘producer capture’?

I have Matthew Taylor of the RSA and a recent blog to thank for a new phrase – ‘producer capture’. Not sure I’m going to be able to slip it into conversation very easily, but it is, I think, a useful concept: ‘the process whereby the goals of an organisation reflect the interests and prejudices of its employees (the producers) rather than those it is supposed to serve (the consumers, customers or citizens)’. (His posting is inspired by a dispute at the charity Shelter, and Ken Loach’s intervention in it.)

Minimising ‘producer capture’ has apparently driven much New Labour reform, especially in the public sector. Matthew Taylor relates it to the voluntary sector, but it might be a useful check for arts organisations – including, of course the Arts Council. Why are we doing what we do, and who for – and what shapes our work most? When we argue for funding – either to government in the Arts Council's case or to the Arts Council or local authorities for many organisations - are we really sure we’re doing it for those we serve rather than for our own protection? These are good questions for any cultural organisation to ask periodically.

In the arts sector itself - as opposed to the arts funding and development systems - the idea is of course complicated by the central importance of artists and other kinds of ‘producers’ – they are far, far more than ‘employees’. Their individual artistic vision drives things. My sense though is that organisations that avoid ‘producer capture’, no matter how strong and individual the artistic vision, have more impact than those that don’t. They are also – as I would argue our recent case to government in the Comprehensive Spending Review result shows – more likely to put forward persuasive cases to funders.

Are superficial experiences really so bad?

Another thought, inspired by the conjunction of McMaster, the cultural offer, and me spending a week away with my family, enjoying ourselves and relaxing without anything approaching a life-changing experience, arts or otherwise...

Noel Coward said it was ‘extraordinary how potent cheap music can be’. Brian McMaster (or his report at least) recommends that ‘cultural organisations stop exploiting the tendency of many audiences to accept a superficial experience and foster a relationship founded on innovative, exciting and challenging work’. He rightly says that ‘An excellent cultural experience goes to the root of living.’

But how much excellence of that sort can a person – especially an impressionable young person –bear? Is it not enough at times to be stimulated, inspired and challenged as well as entertained at a deep level? Is an hour wandering TATE modern not a ‘superficial’ experience for many, no matter how great the art? I don’t think it’s necessarily transformational, or certainly not immediately. Anyway, don't some superficial things sometimes sneak up on you and turn into life-changing experiences?

I want fulfilling arts experiences, and surprise. I want to laugh, dance, think, ponder. I don’t necessarily want my values reorganised every time I go to the theatre or read a book. I don’t think that makes me shallow. Tell me if I’m wrong.

Is the ‘cultural offer’ a good thing?

Simple answer, yes. Complicated answer, still yes. Yesterday the government announced a huge investment into ensuring young people have access to five hours of week of culture. There are a number of questions raised by this, not least how many hours of the week children are going to have left to shape for themselves after all that school and sports and culture.

But some of the reaction has reminded me how hard some people will work to find the empty bit of the glass. Philip Hensher in the Independent seems to thinks this is a plot by Gordon Brown to deny adults access to theatres. (They’re going to be full of pesky children, apparently.) John Humphreys gave Andy Burnham an unneccesarily hard time on the Today programme yesterday. I’m a bit puzzled, to be frank. (Not unusual.)

It seems fairly simple. For the sake of the arts, and the sake of our communities, we need to ensure every child has the chance to find out if the arts are what turns on the light bulb in their head. That multiplies the chances of new talent breaking through and giving us the diversity of input we need. This gives us the chance to build on several decades of work, most recently and significantly Creative Partnerships.

To make John Humphreys a bit less grumpy though, can I suggest one of the pilot schemes experiments with half an hour of compulsory listening to Radio 4, 3 or 7 according to taste? It is, after all, a ‘cultural offer’. (As Stephen Fry said, there are times Radio 4 is the best reason for living in Britain – though yesterday wasn’t one of them.)