About ACMA
Our Story
We have made it our mission at ACMA to build strategies and narratives with musicians and promoters, helping audiences to understand music’s language and appreciate its poetry.
Advocacy and Communication for Music and the Arts
We coach musicians, students and promoters to become better communicators when speaking about music so audiences can understand what lies within its depths.
Ultimate Goals
- To raise the profile of classical music and opera in the cultural life of the United Kingdom and beyond.
- For musicians and audiences to prioritise and to become comfortable with speaking about music in the context of live performance.
- To demystify the public’s perception of the art form.
- To Influence government to recognise the value of music in education at all levels and for the Department for Education to prioritise its incorporation into the state education system.
ACMA and PR
ACMA will complement and work with PR to develop promotional ideas
- By engaging a PR representative the individual or institution employing the PR company sets the agenda for the message.
- PR will pursue opportunities to appear in the media.
- ACMA researches and provides background information concerning repertoire, composers, historical contexts and cultural contexts.
- ACMA shapes the message, not simply for short term sales success but for wider benefits that we believe are necessary to change and lift the profile of music in the UK’s cultural offering.
Observations
Classical music and opera are being pushed to the fringes of the UK’s cultural offering. Funding by Arts Council England, coverage in the press, promotion and coverage of events in the media are all being chipped away by decision makers who regard music as an art form for the “elite”, a word that carries negative connotations for media platforms whose focus is on broad appeal.
The narrowing of priorities in education, broadcasting and mass-media has shaped the cultural appetite of most Britons. Taste is becoming increasingly populist, while the understanding of classical music is becoming niche.
When talking about the collections for which they are responsible, museum and gallery directors talk with authority and passion for the individual works. Most musicians and promoters tend to be more down-beat in the way they speak about music and when they do speak with enthusiasm, it’s seldom edifying.
Audience blind spots
With every year that passes it seems audiences understand less about classical music. The gulf between the expertise on the concert platform and the knowledge in the auditorium gets wider. The established formalities of the concert format - black dress or even tails for men and strict silence observed for the duration of the performance - renders the concert experience off-putting and the music unknowable for the uninitiated.
Opportunities for musicians to talk about themselves and their music in the media are becoming vanishingly rare. ACMA will optimise every opportunity for musicians to talk about their work, opening up the music for those who want to like classical music but who are discouraged by the labyrinth of unknowns. Understanding and explaining the unknowns is part of our purpose.
The gulf between stage and auditorium
Too often, performers fail to contextualise their music, considering it only in terms abstracted from the time in which it was written or is now performed; the precious, gloved and glassed approach to high art where we are told to admire it for its assumed universal greatness. We prefer the Getty Museum attitude to the art works in its collection in LA, where visitors are encouraged to get up close, touch, feel and relate directly and bodily to the works.
ACMA want to explore ways in which musicians can help listeners relate more directly and
with more confidence to their music. We want potential audiences to know that they are as welcome as anybody to own the music for themselves - in a way, music is the most open of open-source codes, in that everyone (EVERYONE) can and does interact with it on some level.
ACMA would like to work with professional and amateur individuals, ensembles, orchestras and opera companies to encourage performers and anyone who works within music to have the confidence to think deeply about what music is, what it can mean and how to communicate it, allowing non-musicians to hear it in a way they never believed possible.
We aim to normalise speaking intelligently and clearly about a work in performance.
Within a music educational establishment, we advocate that it become obligatory for students to introduce works when they perform.
About ACMA.org.uk
Personal Statement
My name is Toby Spence.
Having completed post graduate studies at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, I started my career as a professional tenor in 1995. Since then I have followed a path that has meandered through periods of ambition-fulfilling success and more challenging years following an operation for cancer that left me without a voice in 2012. For the duration I was unable to sing, I lost my sense of self. After a long period of recuperation and hard work, I regained my voice and resumed my career with appearances in leading roles at Covent Garden, Munich State Opera, Vienna State Opera, Paris Opera and The Met in New York and elsewhere. The work to regain my voice and my sense of purpose consolidated a conviction that my passion for music and performance will always define me.
Following that difficult time, I applied myself to understanding why music plays an important role in the lives of so many people across the world. I have written for The Guardian, The Times, delivered an address for the Council of British Phonographic Industries and elsewhere on subjects relating to better understanding and promoting classical music in the UK’s crowded cultural offering.
I was asked to join a panel assembled by New York University. The purpose of the panel was to explore the challenges facing classical music in modern times. The scope for the panel was ambitious and, in the event, encouraging managers of orchestras and opera companies to talk unguardedly about finances, union negotiations and shifts in audience tastes was not easy. If anything was learnt from the meetings over the two years we spent exploring the issues, it was that every challenge was specific to its community, at the root of which lay communication. There were no beneficial blanket policy shifts that could be applied to every institution. Every orchestra, opera company, venue, festival and individual had to find the specific tools for the engagement of different communities. It was all about communication and before that, preparing and thinking smarter about the message to be communicated.
I enjoy communicating about music. I try to
incorporate undervalued qualities, like personality and fallibility, that make us human and relatable when we speak about music. I relish the challenges of understanding the gap between my knowledge and that of individuals and groups of people with whom I talk. I often learn something by talking with people about music. While putting the concepts of music into words can be challenging, it can be educative and fascinating for all.
A Story
I was interviewed by Paul Gambaccini in 2009. He was interviewing people for a radio programme about the making of famous recordings in all genres. Colin Davis’s recording of Berlioz’s opera Les Troyens won many awards after it was released and has become a benchmark for the work since. In the interview, Paul asked me about the aria I sang which he perceived to have been a high point of the recording. I told him that the perception of my contribution is more to do with the placing of the simple song in the narrative than the way I sang it. My answer was not false modesty. I have observed that arias performed at the beginning of the last act of any opera garner audience favour for the performer. In my view, the observation is far more interesting for the understanding of how operas are structured than any personal benefit I could have gained from sustaining a myth. Since then, I have often seen Paul at my performances.
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