Classical music doesn’t disappear because audiences lose interest. It disappears because exposure is reduced. Burton nailed that view as efficiently as the programmes he made
Classical music TV legend Humphrey Burton’s death has been marked in customary fashion across broadcast, print and digital media. Burton’s legacy is considerable, his name a shortcut to a so-called golden age of classical music television. Kryptonite for those seeking to reinforce their credentials. But does some of it miss out on the detail? People go dewy eyed when they speak of him. Rightly so. The work he did – Omnibus, Young Musician et al – is the kind of stuff that people imagine rather than remember. When they do they inadvertently compare the present day and realise just how much changed, and just how much agency (and budget) Burton had in his day. Are we in danger of letting nostalgia distort judgment?
Burton seized the technological advancements of the day and used them to his advantage to celebrate and advocate that which was important to him. Television was the language he used to manifest his purpose. He unapologetically celebrated excellence and beauty at a point in time when mission statements dominated, and barriers went unexposed. We are invited to mourn the passing of a man who did good with the resources available at the time. But beware those who lionise him. They are quick to create stories that glorify the past. What’s more telling is the implied assumption that Burton possessed cultural authority then that today’s innovators do not.
The strategy today is necessarily different. Innovation of the kind Burton delivered then – education-heavy, deference, less pandering – wouldn’t cut through today. If you’re looking for an equivalent, it might be found at the Southbank Centre this week. Announced yesterday, the Southbank Centre will stage a highly contrived event with a specific demographic in mind: six orchestras performing looping 20-minute ‘sets’ in various spaces around the Southbank Centre, offering ticket-holders the opportunity to create their own experience, soundtracked by iconic scores. Twenty minutes is the key element in this proposition. This is the stretch demanded of would-be dabblers in early February. You’re not going to hear an entire Mahler symphony – that way insanity lies – but you’ll get a feel for things. Because that’s what a demographic whose window on the world is found on the mobile phone is inevitably stretched by.
In Private Eye this week, research cited from the American Psychological Association reports how Gen Z’s insatiable appetite for short-form content is seen to have a negative impact on attention spans. Thirty-second videos are the death knell for a 30-minute symphony. Yet, it’s TikTok that is subsidising at the Barbican, and presumably at the Southbank for the event billed to pull in a TikTok audience.
It is tempting to demonise the Southbank (and the Barbican) for such partnerships. That would miss the point. What they are doing is recognisably Burtonian: identifying barriers to engagement, working within limited resources, and designing formats that meet audiences where they are. The tools are different, the constraints considerably more brutal, and the compromises more visible – but the instinct is the same. This is present-day innovation responding to present-day conditions in much the same way Burton did.
This is of course not to overlook the triumphs of the man’s lifelong career, one that extended beyond his time at the BBC and London Weekend Television, beyond the decades most often mythologised. Thoroughly Good saw him in an Aldeburgh Festival Sunday morning recital in the coastal town’s gin refinery overlooking the sea. To be present with someone who has inspired so much of one’s own appreciation for the art form is something special. We didn’t speak. It’s better that way.
Much has been made about Burton’s contribution to classical music via the Young Musician competition. Here the danger of lionisation is high. At the same time, his view on its demise can and has been conveniently overlooked in the race by the BBC to pay tribute to its departed legacy.
Burton’s account in his autobiography outlines the inspiration for Young Musician being established: an act of self-determination in response to Leeds Piano Competition organiser Fanny Waterman failing to credit the BBC as broadcast partners for the internationally renowned piano competition. Suitably motivated, Burton pitched a British competition for under-19s, something then BBC One controller Bryan Cowgill got behind. Whilst Cowgill provided money and schedule time (no doubt a measure of Burton’s already secured credibility and influence), Burton later hosting the series didn’t mean he had discovered later winner Nicola Benedetti, as some news reports have boldly asserted today.
Burton also didn’t have much truck with how Young Musician got treated in later years.
In his 2021 autobiography, he wrote, “I had to leave the show in the 1990s when I moved to New York to write my biography of Leonard Bernstein. I was saddened by the way Young Musician was thereafter deprived of its massive audience. The rot set in when the show was relegated to BBC Two by Michael Grade (then Controller of BBC One) in the mid-1980s. Eventually it was transferred to BBC Four and nowadays in my view a great mistake … the downgrading of Young Musician is entirely due to the lack of care – one might even call it philistinism – of those now running BBC Television.”
Burton’s complaint was echoed by the very people who benefited from participating in the competition until the 1990s: if you reduce classical’s exposure, you relegate it. They, like him, understood what exposure had made possible. It must have been painful to witness, even more painful to record in his later years. No TV executive ever defends a reduction in exposure. There is simply no voice strong enough now to reverse it either.
