Music

Like the theater projects, the music cluster also strives to reconcile the periphery and the center, the elite and the common, the expert and the layman. This agenda is reflected in the projects that have a shared goal: to attract a non-traditional audiences and cross the dividing line between popular/alternative and classical music.

Average project titles: “Polyphony”, “Young@Opera”, “EuroNoize”, “KeyChange”, “MusXchange”. The central concepts here are: cultural exchange and transition, de-elitisation and de-nationalization of the music scene. Digital media is the central communication channel of the projects.

Do-it-Yourself music

D-i-Y music seeks to break down the barriers between professional musicians and lay audiences, and is therefore an excellent tool for the democratization and integration objectives of Creative Europe. The "EuroNoize" project reflects cleary this goal. It is a sort of remake of the Eurovision Song Contest, but EuroNoize has transformed the song contest's international profile into a supranational one. Usually, Eurovision uses a video montage of the landscapes and nationalities of the participating countries to promote the event's diverse cultural profile. EuroNoize’s video montages in contrast, depict national identities in a critical or satirical way.

"EuroNoize" also selected two artists for the song contest who subverted the male/female model of presenters by using non-conforming gender identity. They attempted to negotiate the relationship between the local and the pan-European and subvert national identity from the perspective of the subaltern[1]. The project is an example of the independent music scene being commodified by centralised funding. The politically correct redefinition of the sector's traditions, paradoxically erases its own non-conformist character.

Opera and orchestral music for fring audiences

If you want to preserve the monarchy, don't change the form of the opera," said the mathematician D'Alembert in 1752. It is as if Creative Europe recognised that breaking the elitist status of opera and other classical music genres and making them attractive to marginalised groups would have a wider social impact.

This principle resonates also in the project “Opera: Past, Present, Perfect”[2]: "For the opera genre to generate interest and support in the future, it must move away from elite narratives and goals and (re)develop a distinctive and meaningful engagement with audiences”.

 "Distinctive" and "meaningful", is in a given context a counter-elite artistic performance that is tailored to the specific needs of fringe audiences and that seeks to create meaning for them. It fills the notion of excellence with alternative content.

The MUSIC UP CLOSE NETWORK project is a good example of the de-elitizing agenda. It created a symphony orchestra for Syrian professional and academic musicians living in the EU to support them in maintaining their cultural identity. Here, music has become "a tool for knowledge and mutual understanding", thus implicitly enforcing the EU's diversity agenda. Another project, "OperaVision", promoted opera through a TikTok channel, which had more than 50 000 subscribers (2.1 million likes) during the pandemic, making opera accessible to young people at a time when this generation was most at risk of social distancing. The project thus met both Creative Europe's objectives of digital transformation of the cultural sector and the "democratisation" of elitist cultural areas[3].

While the above projects have engaged in a positive goal to reconciliate marginalised groups in society with high culture, they also contribute to the model of centrally controlled culture serving socio-engineering purposes. As such, they embody the insidious instrumentalisation of the cultural sphere for intransparent political ends.

Terminology and idioms:

• The question of national identity from the subaltern perspective
• Distinctive and meaningful engagement with audience
• Music as a means of knowledge and mutual understanding