Having just scooped two Grammy Awards, we at Chandos are feeling rather pleased at the moment. What is striking about the current Grammy Awards is how much of a pop-music bias there is. When the Awards first started in 1958, six of the twenty-six awards went to classical music recordings. This time twelve Awards went to classical, but out of 110 categories. Each year the categories increase in number and the proportion of classical to pop decreases, the awards today being more like a stage-managed pop concert.

Which is all fine and dandy for the pop world, but it tends to push the classical awards into the cold. What’s worse, the press seems only interested in covering the pop awards and completely ignores the classical awards. It is just another example of the way high culture is marginalised in favour of popular culture – and it’s getting worse.

What is sad is that so much superb cultural activity is made available to be enjoyed by only a small minority of the population, the vast majority of people missing out on it. There is an assumption in certain areas of the media that the mass of the population is not interested in anything other than crass, easily digested pop culture, and that they are scared off by anything which requires a degree of concentration and curiosity to appreciate. But this is simply not true. One only has to look at the internet to see that interest in and discussions about ‘high’ art and culture thrive.

The arts are a basic and necessary ingredient in a civilised cultural world and it is for the benefit of all that we engage with the arts in every walk of life. Ideally they should be integrated in everyday life. Indeed, they used to be, especially in popular films: films regularly used classical music either as a basis of its soundtrack or a as a plot development. Think of Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much whose climax involves an assassination in the Royal Albert Hall, at the cymbal crash of Arthur Benjamin’s Storm Cloud Cantata.

Perhaps there is hope that, with incentives in the UK that every child will be offered the chance to learn a musical instrument, the next generation will not be so cut off from, or scared by, classical music. The internet has been surprisingly helpful in terms of introducing new generations of people to the arts, and allowing them to explore paths which would have been closed to them before. It is an example of art and technology operating beautifully hand in hand.

Paul Westcott
Chandos Records
Press Officer

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Please note that the views expressed are personal views, and not necessarily the views of Chandos Records.