Association of Irish Composers Statement Feb 6th 2010
Issues Specific to AIC
On Monday last the Association of Irish Composers was informed in a letter from the Arts Council that the AIC would not be funded under ‘annual funding’ in 2010.
In 2009 the AIC received €19,000, a repeat of the previous year’s funding. In fact the Arts Council had steadily funded the AIC at a similar level (in real terms) since 1998. This assistance was given towards its work as the only union representing composers’ interests in Ireland, which it does on an all-Ireland level. AIC has, throughout that period, sourced additional funding elsewhere, primarily from its own members and IMRO (the Irish Music Rights Organisation), but also from Culture Ireland, the British Council, Pro Helvetia, and in benefit-in-kind arrangements with similar organisations in Finland, Switzerland, Romania, Portugal and South Africa, among others.
AIC’s primary purpose has been to look out for composers’ material interests in areas of copyright and contracts, and in lobbying organisations whose activities enter this area. As it is a member-based organisation it has also always involved itself in information dissemination and direct promotion of music, live and in recordings and broadcasts.
These activities have occurred on a national and international basis, although due to low funding levels, on a relatively modest scale. AIC is the Irish Section of both the International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM) and the European Composers’ Forum (ECF). ISCM promotes music through networking and its annual festival, which is held on a massive scale in a different country each year; while ECF is a lobbying entity which directs most of its attention towards the European Union political structures that affect artists.
AIC has existed since 1972, ISCM since 1922, and ECF since 2006.
Since 1998 AIC has promoted Irish composers in Romania, Moldova, Switzerland, France, South Africa, Flanders, Portugal, Britain and Finland, while promoting Irish composers at home alongside composers from all over the world. It has provided international and national opportunities for top-quality performers from Ireland and these partner countries, including Concorde, the Crash Ensemble, the Fidelio Trio, the Smith Quartet, Vox21, ConTempo quartet, Antipodes, Archaeus and others too numerous to mention. For composers, it has been involved in running composition competitions and workshops as well as concerts, sometimes up to 15 events in a given year.
All that activity, which seems like remarkable value for the Arts Council’s money, is now in jeopardy as AIC looks unlikely to be able to afford to carry on as it has done. Its roles in ISCM and ECF require it to be active in both promotion and lobbying at home, as conditions of membership. These organisations, which regard AIC as the portal to contemporary music in Ireland, have already sent messages of concern and support. Whether AIC can continue within them remains to be seen.
The Arts Council indicates that it takes the view (suddenly, in Feb 2010) that AIC’s role is rather similar to CMC’s which is already funded on a much larger scale. There are areas of activity in common, but the two are in fact complementary, with distinct areas of central concern and competency. To say there is need for only one is like saying all music can be played by an orchestra, so we don’t need any string quartets or jazz trios. The differences are clear to all those on the ground and are exemplified by the greater flexibility of the smaller entity and its greater willingness to speak out forcefully for composers.
There have been shortcomings in AIC’s activities in the period in question; more could have been done on all its fronts if it had had more staff etc, but all that was achieved was done with just one paid post: at about a quarter of the average industrial wage. Every collaborator has reported a very professional level of dealing, critics have been generous in praise of the artistic level of work, and all its financial accounts have been models of clarity and probity.
12 years of expertise and the build-up of a network reaching from Peru to China and Australia are all, it seems, to be sacrificed to the current mantra of ‘necessary savings’.
General Issues
The cut to AIC comes alongside cuts, some built up over three years, to all other providers in the contemporary music scene in Ireland, and in the related genres of jazz and classical music. These seem to be on a scale that will jeopardise the chances of performers and composers from producing much art at all. All will shelter in teaching and similar activities, waiting for the sun to come out again. But really, if this is how society views the artist; only good for the good times; then those artists must be asking why exactly are we teaching the next generation of musicians?
AIC notes savage cuts to Music for Galway, cumulative cuts to CMC, New Soundworlds and the Hugh Lane Concert Series as well as the cessation of RTE’s Living Music Festival, Music21 and Concorde, and there are many others. As AIC’s executive director was quoted in the Irish Times (Feb 6th): “Performers will suffer terribly from cuts to concert agencies and venues. Composers will find it next to impossible to get a piece played and their chance of being remunerated for composing – already weak – is hugely diminished.”
The Arts Council has been exemplary in terms of a liberal attitude to support to individual artists and small producers in the good years (1998 to 2007). In those years it has provided bursaries, commissions, project funding, publishing, recording and training opportunities, and also supported venues and concert agencies, all of which allow work to be made in a free atmosphere, without undue restrictions around style or artistic reception. This is in stark contrast to the attitude of Government support in other nearby countries such as the UK, which has moved in those years towards a functional and societal approach to arts funding: one that views artistic activity as useless unless it comes as a form of social engineering.
However our Arts Council’s shortcomings include a lack of foresight and consultation with its actual clients, and an inability, despite many words printed to the contrary in numerous Arts Plans, to change the vassal-like relationship of the artist (and the small-scale producer) to the Council itself. A problematic, dated and destructive relationship permeates arts support at council and local authority level and in non-state organisations involved in the arts. All arts producers find the way funding decisions are announced ex-cathedra to be ‘disrespectful’ because of their suddenness and the explosiveness of their consequences. That is to say that existing planning commitments are derailed, and as noted above, expertise and contacts that take years to cultivate may be lost to the arts overnight.
This is not to say that everything should remain as it is from year to year. Where organisations can be shown to have failed in some reasonably tangible way then by all means funding should cease. But where minor steering or advice could assist organisations to flourish the council should steer or advise. Instead it behaves like an eighteenth-century princeling disbursing his favours on a whim: pleased; carry on, displeased; dismissed.
It has been noted by artists’ representative bodies – AIC, VAI etc, that often the artist has the weakest contractual arrangement when it comes to employment terms, whether it is with theatre companies or galleries or the council itself: that is to say that administrators and all other functionaries generally have a term of contract that protects them from the whimsical treatment sketched above. Whereas the artist, desperate just to produce work and have it seen and heard, rushes in to arrangements that are small scale – often too small to merit a written contract, and he/she suffers accordingly. Amazingly, the small entities like Concorde exist in exactly the same context, which is why it is possible after 34 years of what could almost be called national service, for them to be terminated in a single perfunctory letter. Patronage – or patronising? it’s hardly the contemporary way to do business.
This year the Arts Council was itself cut in funds, by 5%. Because it had tried to keep things going smoothly by making small advances for 2010, it suffered a real reduction in its available fund of 11.68%. That was possibly a tactical mistake, we don't know. The Arts Council’s internal organisation aims to achieve a 30% saving for 2010, so we should all be aware that it will not just be its clients who feel the cutbacks.
The reduction of 5% was something of a ‘soft landing’ and it was achieved in no small part thanks to the National Campaign for the Arts, which was organised and co-ordinated by the same Arts Council clients who are now reeling from cuts from 22% to 100%. There are surely many questions hanging over all these figures, the main one being: ‘how has a cut of 5% been translated into such mayhem?’
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