witts x 2
January 22, 2009
Last night Richard Witts* gave an entertaining lecture (part of the King’s College London Music Colloquia series) entitled ‘Can Things Only Get Better? – A Government’s Policy on Music’. When we finally got his powerpoint presentation up and running (Richard is Mac-native but we only had a PC to run (almost typed ‘ruin’ – Freudian slip) his show), we were treated to vintage clips of the New Labour victory party (whose D:Ream soundtrack gave the talk its title), as well as then-Heritage Secretary Virginia Bottomley being cornered on the issue of arts education. Richard’s talk covered the difference between policy and law, and sketched out a typology of the ways in which policy can influence musical actions. He’s a very entertaining speaker, and for me the value of his work is in its shrewd disentanglement of the threads of decision-making – he has a journalistic (in the best sense) instinct for finding the real story about money, power and personality, along with a historian’s eye for detail. Here, he revealed the elaborate pas-de-deux between government and the music industries, as committees and industry pressure groups were formed to make the relationship ever cosier.
There were interesting questions at the end; some felt that it was too easy only to criticise government policy without offering a constructive alternative. I thought that perhaps the horror/nostalgia of the video footage perhaps signalled a lazy contempt for the disappointments of the Blair government that wasn’t to be found in the detailed analysis that followed, and that there is real value in unpicking the knots of political and institutional power. Richard also spoke interestingly about Lord Mandelson’s role, when he was still an EU Commissioner, in the circumvention of the Gowers Review on Intellectual Property which opposed the extension of the copyright term on recordings.
I highly recommend Richard’s book on the Arts Council, Artist Unknown: An Alternative History of the Arts Council, and I also enjoyed his 2003 essay in Musical Times about the fashion in classical music for ‘extending the brand’ of dead composers.
*For the record, Richard is my estranged son*, so it’s always good to see him.
**no, not really.
