BY LYLE CHAN
When Glenn Dickie arrived in Rotterdam, one of the first things he needed to do was buy a new sandwich toaster.
He’d been carrying one in his baggage, from Australia to London, Bremen and Toronto then back to Europe – but here it arrived broken, and he thinks it’s a result of over-zealous investigation by customs agents.
Sure, it’s an unusual item to travel with – but for Glenn, a sandwich toaster is a professional public relations tool.
Glenn is the indefatigable export music producer for Sounds Australia. When I met him in Rotterdam for Classical:NEXT, he’d been travelling for a month already, promoting Australian music at similar music gatherings worldwide. This is his fifth trip to Rotterdam; enough times that he has a favourite hairdresser here, and his familiarity with the city and conference makes him the perfect avuncular figure or even mother hen to corral the growing number of Australians coming to Classical:NEXT for the first time.
Back in 2015, the Australian Music Centre and Sounds Australia (a lean 4-person ‘music export office’ initiated by the Australia Council for the Arts and APRA AMCOS) strategically identified Classical:NEXT as a significant global event where new markets could be opened for Australian music. To their credit, these two organisations have since been encouraging and facilitating Aussie acts to go.
This year, about 30 Australians attended Classical:NEXT – the largest number in its eight-year history, and a large enough figure to pique the curiosity of the 1300 delegates who came from 45 countries, because Australians were prominent in all of the ‘streams’: there were three Australian acts amongst the 24 in the Showcase section, one amongst the 12 Project Pitches, two amongst the 12 Fellows, and three of the 38 Conference Sessions had at least one Australian speaker.
And – this is where the sandwich toaster comes in – AMC and Sounds Australia bought one of the 93 exhibition stands at the sprawling Expo, its position carefully selected by Glenn so that every delegate walks by daily when entering the massive De Doelen venue. At a morning reception on the first full day of the conference, Glenn made Vegemite and cheese toasties to entice passersby to stop for a chat. What brilliantly original diplomacy – non-Aussies regard Vegemite with both fascination and trepidation, making it a perfect conversation starter, and a distinct contrast to other stands that might host more conventional drinks receptions at the end of a day. (Though, credit is also due to the Scottish and Irish stands for outstandingly popular drinks receptions – made possible by exotically flavoured gins and Baileys).
Back to the various formal components of Classical:NEXT: what exactly are they?
Showcases are 30-minute slots for performers to give miniature concerts so that booking agents, festivals and other potential employers can sample the goods. This year, given the range of international buyers present, even relatively established groups like the Dublin Guitar Quartet considered it useful to give showcases.
Interestingly, the three Aussie acts each brought shows that they’d first performed successfully back home in 2017.
Sydney’s Ensemble Offspring made headlines in 2017 for devoting its entire concert season to music by women composers, and here showcased a shimmering program of Kate Moore and Andrea Keller.
Adelaide’s Zephyr Quartet presented its striking 2017 OzAsia Festival team-up with Hong Kong electronica musician GayBird Leung.
Brisbane composer Robert Davidson’s Stalin’s Piano, performed by Sonya Lifschitz, has already racked up an impressive one-dozen-or-so performances since premiering at the 2017 Canberra International Music Festival, and its export power was evident in that this international audience, though unfamiliar with Julia Gillard, still made its appreciation audible during the segment based on her anti-sexism Parliamentary speech.
Indeed, equality and diversity was a recurring theme at Classical:NEXT. Later, Fabienne Krause, Classical:NEXT’s general manager, mentioned the Michelle Obama segment in Stalin’s Piano during her closing ceremony address as she declared “the strongest presence of women so far” in this year’s conference attendance.
This theme of equality was most strongly felt in the conference sessions. The majority of the sessions were presentations on a topic with Q&As, but some were also mentoring and networking sessions. Over four days there were 38 sessions, held as concurrent streams making delegates have to choose what to attend.
Claire Edwardes, Ensemble Offspring’s artistic director, was a very well-prepared chair of a conference session on gender equality amongst composers, with a panel that included the quietly impressive Paola Prestini, a composer who is also artistic director of the little-venue-that-could, National Sawdust in New York, that created the Hildegard Competition for female, trans and nonbinary composers.
The eloquent Australian conductor Natalie Murray Beale was on a panel about gender equality on the podium, and concluded that she really needed to place herself in charge of an organisation like an orchestra or festival in order to effect the kind of corrective changes she had in mind.
The Project Pitches were fascinating, as they included big guns like the Bang on a Can All-Stars selling new show Road Trip. Here, a Pitch is seven minutes of presentation followed by two minutes of Q&A to answer any queries from prospective buyers about the practicalities of putting on the show. Australian composer Damien Ricketson gave his pitch for Aeolian Playgrounds, an installation project turning large public spaces into giant tree-like wind instruments the whole family can play.
At the other end of the professional spectrum, the Classical:NEXT Fellows are emerging artists or arts administrators who are given mentorship and other assistance to clinch the big career opportunities at Classical:NEXT. The Fellowship program is run cooperatively with a partner institution in the participating country: for instance, the British Fellows are supported by PRS Foundation and Singaporean Fellows by their National Arts Council. The two Australians, supported by APRA AMCOS, were composer-pianist Belle Chen (who was also the first ever Australian to perform in a Showcase at Classical:NEXT, last year) and Sydney Symphony Orchestra’s new orchestra personnel manager Simonette Turner.
That’s it for the delegates who were part of the formal program – but as it turns out, they’re the minority; the vast majority of international attendees were there to do one thing: network. This was true of the Australians, and there were both buyers and sellers among them, such as the artist agent Reuben Zylberszpic (manager of guitarist Slava Grigoryan amongst others), Elaine Chia and Marshall McGuire of Sydney’s City Recital Hall and Melbourne Recital Centre respectively, the Naxos music label’s Australian manager and distributor Andrew McKeich, and Eugene Ughetti of Melbourne’s Speak Percussion. It pays off: I witnessed an exchange between Eugene and an American percussion ensemble that will likely result in a collaboration. Elaine and Marshall essentially sat down and never got up as queues of international artists and managers told them how much they wanted to play in Sydney and Melbourne. Even for the delegates there to perform or present, they said that the most useful moments were the ‘corridor consultations’, as you constantly find yourself next to an interesting person and potential collaborator in the four jam-packed floors of the massive De Doelen centre. There was even one intense “speed-dating” session for delegates from or interested in Australia and the Asia Pacific – two rows facing each other, loud conversations of four minutes each, and you’ll collect and give away a good 30 business cards by the end of it.
Lastly, mention should be made of the Innovation Awards given out at the Closing Ceremony, not least because CutCommon was shortlisted for one in 2017. The awards are decided by popular vote, and one of the three deserving winners this year was the South African program Umculo, started by Australian Shirley Apthorp to create social change in South Africa through music, and one of the composers is Cathy Milliken.
Classical:NEXT is structurally modelled on the great conferences that are the norm in other industries – medical, pharmaceutical, legal, agricultural and so on – and its existence as the only global conference in this field highlights something important. Our classical music community is excellent at fostering and teaching great performance and composition skills, but what about the business skills that are so clearly necessary to making a living as an artist or run an arts organisation successfully? Classical:NEXT is a reminder to a lot of artists to treat classical music like a business.
For now, it’s a lesson that’s in no danger of getting old.
Lyle Chan’s attendance at Classical:NEXT was supported in part by a grant from the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Sydney. He received media accreditation to attend Classical:NEXT through CutCommon.
Lyle’s views and opinions are his own.
READ NEXT: Myles Oakey offers an alternative critique of this year’s Classical:NEXT event.
Images supplied by Lyle Chan. Featured image and above: Classical:NEXT conference, captured by Eric van Nieuwland.
