The Impact of Art on Community
South London is a tough place to live. And Croydon demands from its residents – and its visitors of course, too – a heightened need to be streetwise. Savvy, in a word. First up, a potted history of the place: Croydon is first mentioned in the Domesday Book of 1086, is by the Middle Ages a market town, and with the advent of the railways during the 19thcentury already a commuter town. In the 20th century it expands into a large industrial area and sees during the 1950s a massive redevelopment that is as drastic as it is foolhardy. Swathes of medieaval buildings are torn down only to be replaced by high rise office blocks, shopping precincts and malls such as the Whitgift Centre. The heart of a thronging conurbation has been ripped out. The local population is left to get on with things on its own. The result by the early 21st century is the highest knife crime rate in London.
Come the year 2023, and Croydon is the London Borough of Culture. A grant to the tune of £1.35m is awarded to Croydon by the GLA (Greater London Authority), the office of the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan. The launch event – and a “flagship” project – is the “Oratorio of Hope”, a commission by Croydon Music and Arts for the borough’s resident orchestra, the London Mozart Players. The work is funded to £100,000 and comprises eight movements, each of which features particular Croydon-based artists such as Silvastone or performing groups like the theatre company Talawa who work with three “collaborative composers” – Fiona Brice, Jeff Moore, and Sarah Freestone – and, in turn, create “performable music”. Add in some local dance companies, song lyrics written by members of the Crisis Croydon choir, and a mass children’s chorus singing about hope for the future, along with films about the creation of the oratorio and life in Croydon, and the result is a heady mix no longer expressed just through classical music, but a multi-media celebration of Croydon and everything that makes Croydon, Croydon. For better or for worse.
So much for the theory. To understand what happens in practice it is necessary to know two things: First, that local boy made good, the British-American composer Tarik O’Regan, is entrusted by LMP not only to deliver a short overture to the Oratorio of Hope, but also to invent a cogent musical theme, an idée fixe as it were, that is to run like a thread through the warp and weft of the entire oratorio. The demiurgic trio that is Brice, Moore and Freestone is in turn called upon to lead workshops with Croydon arts groups, whose discrete contributions must be seen as a “series of team-written variations” on O’Regan’s theme, to quote Richard Morrison in his review in The Times following the premiere; secondly, that Shaniqua Benjamin, a poet, writer, creative workshop facilitator, and Croydon’s first Poet Laureate, who uses her passion to “make a difference and empower young people through creativity, conversation and writing” is also assigned a task by LMP, to pen a poem to be set to music and sung by a chorus.
The entire process is best described by one of the so-called collaborative composers, Fiona Brice. She relates how, working together with Subrang Arts (an Indian classical dance company based in Croydon) and Silvastone (a renowned UK based producer/singer whose songs are a creative hybrid of influences from his West African heritage) she allows music to be assembled that is based on the “fixed idea” by O’Regan and Shaniqua’s new text. Her role remains that of an arranger. She is given sheet music and feels that her first step is somehow to put across its contents to the dancers and musicians involved. Communication is by way of videos in which she plays through the theme at the piano and mp3 files, all destined for her collaborative groups. Under her auspices the second movement, seven minutes in duration, comes into being. During a workshop this musical kernel is developed. Now, Indian classical music is largely an improvised medium and the musicians of Subrang Arts must somehow feel free to flex in compositional terms their wings yet remain harnessed to a preordained musical form. The key to musical success in this case is to use a “raga”. So let me digress a tad . . .
Melodies in Indian music are classified by an ancient system known as “ragas”. These are collections of pitches, ones which resemble a scale or mode in Western music. But each raga is defined not only by the pitch steps themselves, but also by prescriptive rules for using them, e.g. how players are to ascend a scale or descend it during an improvisation. Moreover, the word “raga” in Sanskrit means colour, be it chromatic or emotional, and hence is also cognate with mood. Ragas in Indian classical music originate as part of ancient dance drama recitals in which a story is told, the main idea being that melodies stemming from each raga aid the emotions and act as vehicles for the actors on which they can project their emotions. Brice chooses a raga the steps of which correspond well to the musical motto provided by O’Regan, based as it is on a series of rising perfect fourth intervals.
At both a societal and musical level then, the “Oratorio of Hope” brings people together. A collaborative composer like Fiona Brice is seen as an enabler, one who inculcates a sense of respect and cooperation in participating artists and who engenders joint creativity. By exploring such diverse genres of music – hers is indeed a broad palette – she manages simultaneously to be experimental and combine cultural backgrounds into a synergistic fertile output. The relationships with figures such as Lata Desai (Producer Subrang Arts) and Saleel Tamba (tabla) e.g., are symbiotic. (Brice subsequently notates the workshop results and scores these for orchestra.) Desai describes Croydon as a “vibrant place to live and work”, opining that the big takeaway for the audience is a newfound enthusiasm for both Western and Indian classical music. For her part, Brice adds how this would simply “be a great thing”. More anon . . .
Welcome to New Utopias
Although traditional concert life has slowly started to resume, my own website www.graham-lack.com will continue to redirect to a blog that is called New Utopias and to which I would like to invite contributors.
The new site is intended as a rhetorical and philosophical discourse on how we have lived to date, and how we will need to live in the future.
There are no strict guidelines, other than to say that the normal rules of a civil world society apply. Contributions to graham.lack@t-online.de will be read before being posted, but no real need to moderate is expected. Comment function is not enabled; the blog is meant as food for thought.
Graham
