Protecting its trainee musicians from the scourge of daytime television, the management of London’s Southbank Sinfonia organised a series of Zoom conferences during the initial Covid-19 lockdown. I was asked to lead one of them with the conductor André de Ridder. Under the title ‘How Others See Us’, the idea was to talk to the orchestra’s graduate musicians about how the rest of the world views classical music.
In a sense, we intended our talk as a reality check. If you’ve spent 15 years or more training to play an instrument at an elite level, chances are that you’ll have demonstrated immense personal focus while spending inordinate amounts of time with a lot of people from a similar background doing exactly the same thing. For most people outside that background, this world is as alien as the music it produces.