This week there has been some debate about how we select Â鶹ԼÅÄ Proms for television broadcast and especially the contemporary music we’re showing. Across Â鶹ԼÅÄ One, Two, Four and CBeebies we are covering 28 concerts this year – the single largest commitment to classical music on television in the UK. In doing so, we inevitably have to make choices about what we include – both in what concerts we select, and in what we show from them.Â
This year, we decided to create three distinctive evenings: on Thursdays Tom Service has been showing us Masterworks through the eyes of the musicians playing them, constructed as a chronological journey from Bach to Birtwistle. On Friday nights we’ve been devoting programmes to popular works for the broadest possible audience. On Sundays, Katie Derham has been showcasing the extraordinary eclecticism of this year’s Proms programme – from John Tavener’s final work to the Battle of the Bands.
Having made these choices, we need to make sense of them in how we construct our programmes. Sometimes that means that, when the choice comes of what to include to suit the complications of the time slots available in the schedule, we remove some pieces. In the past, these have been lost from TV – though of course they’re all there in their entirety on Radio 3.Â
This year, for the first time, we’ve been able to make these lost pieces available on Â鶹ԼÅÄ iPlayer (which is available through online TVs) and for a 30 day period rather than the full broadcast’s seven. Even having editorialised in this way, 70% of the music broadcast on TV this year is from the 20th and 21st Centuries, and we are broadcasting as many new works this year as last. So, contrary to some claims, we’re actually making more filmed Proms performances of contemporary music available to viewers than ever before.
There is certainly no policy against broadcasting contemporary music on Â鶹ԼÅÄ TV our commitment has increased from last year with 16 works (compared to 15) on television and a further 8 works on Â鶹ԼÅÄ iPlayer as part of a which is available for a longer 30 days.
Last year, we devoted every Sunday night to contemporary music as part of a year-long celebration partnership with the South Bank as part of their ‘Rest is Noise’ season (there was also an excellent TV series – The Sound and the Fury). This year we’ve included a wide range of new works – from Chen, Higgins, Widman, Prokofiev (Gabriel that is) and many more. We’ve had a feature on Judith Weir and Gavin Higgins on the popular Proms Extra show, and had such compositional luminaries as Sir Peter Maxwell Davies and Mark Anthony Turnage as guests on the sofa.
Every piece of contemporary music we’ve filmed has been made available in a special collection on Â鶹ԼÅÄ iPlayer, where they can be found easily and en masse. Tom Service has been doing an excellent job of providing context for those pieces for those who may find them less approachable. We’re also devoting an evening to the works of Harrison Birtwistle and Sir Peter Maxwell Davies and another evening to the music of John Tavener – even the Proms title music is by a modern composer (Jonathan Dove)!
The Â鶹ԼÅÄ is the most significant broadcaster commissioner of new works, and that commitment to contemporary music is as true on television as it is anywhere else in the organisation. We’re very proud of the job that the Proms team do in delivering exceptional concerts to our audiences on TV, and bringing classical music of all kinds to hundreds of thousands of viewers far beyond the Royal Albert Hall.
Oh, and don’t miss on Â鶹ԼÅÄ Four next Thursday, or Jorg Widmann’s new flute concerto next Sunday…
Greg Sanderson is Commissioning Editor, Arts and Music, who works closely with the Â鶹ԼÅÄ Music Proms production team to create Proms broadcasts on television.
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