The Ivors Academy is to honour Ludovico Einaudi as a “pioneer”. He has reached millions with music that validates the aesthetic of reflection over the challenging act of it.
Announced today, Ludovico Einaudi is to receive a Fellowship of the Ivors Academy, the highest honour the organisation hands out. Einaudi receives his award at the new Ivors Composer Awards at Grosvenor House in London on 17 November. That the Ivors is headlining him as the ‘most streamed classical composer of all time’, points to where legitimacy if comfortably located: reach and, arguably, what the commonly held – acceptable – definition of contemporary classical currently is.
The Academy says Fellowship recognises “excellence and impact in the art and craft of music creation”. Impact is a fair test. But the award’s accompanying announcements leans more on reach – tens of millions of monthly listeners. Ivors Chief exec Lord Neri points to how Einaudi’s success “demonstrates the immense cultural value of composition and its power to connect people across generations and languages”. Chair Tom Gray goes further and makes the ‘pioneer’ claim, a word peppered on other biographies featured on the Ivors Academy Fellowship page. Gray calls Einaudi “a master of minimalism” who has created “a musical language entirely his own”. At the risk of mistakenly suggesting I don’t think Einaudi should get the award, surely Steve Reich had achieved that lofty status long before Einaudi.
Einaudi’s style of compositional gesture
Einaudi’s music succeeds in gaining mass appeal, as Michael Landmann-Karny’s Medium post succinctly put it last year, by blending high art with popular. Einaudi’s commercially savvy blending of minimalism and folk-infused melodies result in something that has an immediate appeal but keeps the listener within the relatively safe space of boundaried emotional expression. For some it is the emotional containment that makes the experience of listening to it comparatively hollow. Music for a generation who find the aesthetic of reflection compelling even if the actual act of reflection is something so difficult as to be avoided at all costs.
Einaudi says he grew up listening to a lot of British music and that its artists still inspire him, something hard to hear that scores which meets the mood of a certain generation and demographic. He has cultivated an audience that does not want to be challenged, and he serves it superbly. Solace has its place, and people undoubtedly find real comfort in this music, even if the product risks a kind of musical construction of emotional collusion. Yet, its style provides a way in for a great many – the relative simplicity of his scores make them easier to learn and offer a medium for emotional expression at the keyboard. Its impossible to not to imagine a slightly out of tune upright piano in a train station concourse whenever a track gets underway with Einaudi’s characteristc mournful melancholic opening.
Einaudi will be gracious and appreciative but he hardly needs the acolade: tens of millions of monthly listeners, sold-out arenas and a Royal Albert Hall reinforce this. What the accolade surfaces instead is how how we define the craft of composition. Here, its the distillation of multiple styles into a product that most find appealing, perhaps because it makes so few demands.
The Fellowship likely benefits the Academy more by providing a headline name for a first-of-its-kind ceremony, at a moment when it is asking far more of composers and guests to take part. A fellowship for the most streamed classical composer of all time is a good story gives that gives the Academy reach, just in the same way as a recording of his music by say the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra benefits the RPO.
The wider nominations
The Ivors Academy needs that story. The change in the event (written about earlier this year) sees a shift towards commercial and away from artistic output. Last year’s Classical Awards named about 28 composers across six concert categories. This year, there are 36 nominees across nine categories, but four of those are ‘new’: documentary, film, television and video games. The ‘concert-hall’ field is now five broader categories carrying 21 nominated works. Notwithstanding some of those nominated, many of the familiar names that appeared in last year’s awards are missing.
That may partly be the effect of a campaign mounted when the changes were announced. An open letter signed by more than a hundred composers protested a ten-fold rise in submission fees since 2020 and threatened a boycott. Fewer ‘concert-hall’ categories mean a more competitive field, and a more competitive field means less exposure for composers who are not writing commercially. Add guest tickets almost six times the price of last year’s (£350 against £62.40 at the top rate, £175 against £31.20 for members), and the result favours those with publisher backing and an existing profile.
Claire Jackson writing for BBC Music Magazine is a little more generous. “It might not be the most harmonically adventurous or technically complex, but Einaudi’s pianism heals, soothes, engages and encourages.” This might depend on your tolerance for tough love and/or your preference for soft cushions, fluffy toys, and pastel interiors. For me, challenge sees growth that comes from change.
