Does financial support for the arts carry the right to dictate content? In the capitalist world, state patronage has traditionally carried no preconditions. Yet it might be argued that just this untrammelled freedom has disrupted the contract between composer and listener. If there was ever such an agreement between the makers and consumers of music, there are signs that it may be reviving: sounds that are variously rhthymic, 'spiritual', amplified and so on have recently been challenging the traditional avant-garde. Is this an artistic reaction against modernism, or just a belated response on the part of composers to the loss oif their former mass audience?
Piers Hellawell is a composer, writer and photographer. He is Professor of Composition at Queen's University in Belfast and was the Gresham Professor of Music between 2000 and 2003. His work has been performed at the Henry Wood Promenade concerts and by the Vanbrugh quartet, Stockholm Chamber Brass and the BBC National Orchestra of Wales. He was awarded a Leverhulme fellowship in 2010.
All of Piers Hellawell's previous lectures may be accessed here.
