🌿⚡🌈 🐙
Proposition for a 21st-century orchestra – to a new ecology
1. Orchestral composition is BROKEN. The same composers are being commissioned to write in the same old idioms. Change is needed;
2. Composers who've never written for the orchestra, including improvisers and electronic producers, are NOT to be feared. Commissioning them will be our priority;
3. Artists are NOT to be feared. The orchestra is a socio-economic OBJECT and ARTEFACT as much as a music-making machine, and its potential as a medium for conceptual interrogation is untapped. We will commission orchestral works from artists;
4. It shouldn’t need to be said but gender equality is an AESTHETIC IMPERATIVE. Many of the most original musical developments of the last century have come from the likes of Pauline Oliveros, Eliane Radigue, Alice Coltrane, Galina Ustvolskaya, Meredith Monk. To ignore female composers, then, is not just an injustice but also an aesthetic DISASTER;
5. Diversity of ethnicity is an AESTHETIC IMPERATIVE on the same grounds;
6. Publishing houses are a CARTEL, who have held back music's progress in this country for years. Our priority will be commissioning those who haven't been published;🌿⚡🌈 🐙
7. Anniversaries are for LAZY programmers;
8. Talk of 'acoustics' is a TYRANNY and a SHAM, used to entrench conservative forms;
9. Architecture is our FRIEND, space an aesthetically LIBERATING force;
10. Art, film, dance and performance are NOT there to be used by orchestras, to prop them up. We engage with other art forms as EQUALS. Entanglement and tentacularity will be our guiding principle, the octopus our teacher;
11. Talk is an ART. It must NOT be used to patronisingly explain a work that is about to happen;
12a. RESPECT audiences. Realise that they are normal, curious human beings, who, like you and me, do not enjoy being spoon-fed or talked down to;
12b. Audiences are not there to be improved. LCMF Orchestra will not make you a better person, nor does it aim to.