Marshall Marcus, CEO of the European Union Youth Orchestra, talks about the organisation’s role as a cultural ambassador for the EU.
The past two years have been a tumultuous time for the European Union Youth Orchestra (EUYO). 2016 saw the organisation denied funding by the EU, due in part to the structure of the Creative Europe programme, a blow which would have seen the orchestra shut down in a matter of months if not for an intervention by the European Commission. Furthermore, in 2017 the orchestra announced that after more than 40 years of being based in London, UK, it would move its offices to a new home in Ferrara, Italy, whilst expanding its work in Grafenegg in Austria. Alongside these moves, the EUYO has also announced a suite of new initiatives that will create and extend a number of partnerships across Europe, and beyond.
PEN spoke to Marshall Marcus, the CEO of the EUYO, to gather his thoughts on why now was the right time to move and what the change of location will mean for the orchestra, the organisation’s current work and upcoming efforts as a cultural ambassador outside of Europe, and how special funding conditions were made for the venerable EU institution.
After more than 40 years of being based in the UK, why has the European Union Youth Orchestra decided it will move to Italy next year?
For some time, we’ve been thinking about increasing the space that we occupy as an orchestra into Europe. When we perform, we go to all sorts of places, but our office has been in London since the orchestra was formed in 1976, and it’s been legally incorporated as a UK charity since that time. For some years now, the moves that we’re making in the next year were initiatives that were already in the minds of the governance of the orchestra. Of course, this was pushed by Brexit, because as an EU organisation it wouldn’t make much sense for our office to be situated outside the EU, so we began to hasten our plans when the referendum happened in June 2016.
So, we have a big move to Italy, but it’s also a move into Europe. As well as the Italian enterprise, we have greatly expanded our work with our main performance residency in Grafenegg, Austria, which is our summer home and main venue partner. We’re increasing our work with them, and they’ve just announced a big expansion of a major new initiative called Campus Grafenegg. We’ve become a partner in that new campus and resident orchestra, and our office will be in Grafenegg when we do our residencies there.
In addition, we’ve also announced an office address in Brussels, Belgium, and we’re going to be helping the Brussels Philharmonic Orchestra, along with a consortium of Belgian and Flemish organisations, to start a Flemish national youth orchestra. We’ll help them and, in return, we’ll establish a base in Brussels. So, although our legal seat and our offices are moving to Italy, it is all part of a broader move into Europe for the organisation.
Why did you choose Italy for the orchestra’s new home?
There are some historical reasons why we chose Italy. The first founding music director, the hugely influential and important musician Claudio Abbado, was Italian, and has some big connections to Ferrara, where our main new residency will be starting. There is tradition there, and I think Italy has always held classical music as a very important part of its culture.
Actually, it was an interesting decision-making process because once the Brexit vote happened, a number of places in different countries approached us, and we spent the following year investigating the possibilities of places we could move to. I must say, there were some quite interesting ideas on the table, and it seems to me quite a compliment to the orchestra that there was so much interest.
In the end, the move to Italy – as well as expanding the work with Grafenegg and the space in Brussels – came to be the most feasible and attractive solution, because it offered a wonderfully broad coalition of partners and support. We’ll be increasing our work with our national associate partner in Italy, which is the RAI, the state media broadcasting company. We’ve had a relationship with RAI for many years, and they were part of this offer to become a broadcast partner, which is going to be a very interesting next chapter in communication terms for the orchestra.
The third crucial element in the decision was support from Dario Franceschini and the Ministry of Culture in Italy, and so along with RAI and the city of Ferrarra, they developed a plan. It was fortunate for us because we also have a residency in the summer in Bolzano, which has been, and continues to be a really important relationship for us, so it gave us a really strong series of partners in all sorts of different political and cultural spaces, which made the whole proposal seem very attractive, and that’s why we opted for Italy.
Are there opportunities for you to expand your relationships with the other countries that reached out to you during that time?
I think so. First of all, Grafenegg remains our most important venue partner, including the Grafenegg Festival, the European music campus and now Campus Grafenegg, which are all huge areas that we’ll be developing in the next few years. But, in addition, there are a number of other places where we’ll also be developing work that came out of some of the conversations we had with those countries, although those are not yet at a stage where we’re ready to announce them. One or two of the places in particular proposed some extremely interesting projects, and in some cases it was a matter of making sure that we have the funding in place to make those feasible, but they may add up to an opportunity to recognise the fact that we’ve got young players from 28 countries in the orchestra, and we need to spread our work throughout the EU.
You have an upcoming project in China, and another in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. How important are these to the EUYO’s role as a cultural ambassador outside of Europe?
The China project is sponsored by the EU Delegation to China, and is called Experience Europe. For us, that’s the kind of outreach project outside of the EU that we find particularly interesting, because it’s not just about performing a series of concerts – it’s really about cultural diplomacy, and using music as a vehicle for diplomacy and soft power. It’s a three-year project for us, and we’ve just come back from the first part of the project in 2017 which involved 11 EUYO players working on chamber music with 11 players from the Shanghai Orchestra Academy.
Alongside the rehearsals and the joint concerts, we also did some workshops explaining Europe to the Chinese, and explaining China to the Europeans. It’s really about helping the young people of China and the EU to increase their mutual understanding, which is quite a high-level project for the EU because it looks to the future of what the EU’s relationships with other areas of the globe are going to be. This has been a really stimulating beginning, and there was very interesting work being done there.
It’s absolutely fascinating work to do. There are two important columns of this orchestra’s work: one is to be a great orchestra and to help players to become great and employable musicians, but the other is to help in working with the great ideals of the EU, which are about working together. The China project was a great way to use our orchestral musical expertise and also look at cultural development.
Dubai, meanwhile, is our next big project outside of the EU and involves an education and performance residency next April in a Dubai opera. At the moment, we’re in conversations with various different young player groups in Dubai and across the UAE to make sure that we’re not just doing concerts, but we’re also advancing the mutual understanding that comes from young musicians working together.
To do that, we’ve developed a number of techniques and devices through our work with Creative Europe. For example, we’ve created a suite of audience engagement and innovative performance initiatives, which we can now roll out in different parts of the world. The Chinese are very interested to hear from us – when we return there next year for the second part of that project – about some of our innovative work on ways to engage with new audiences. We’ll implement some of those ideas that we’ve developed in Europe when we return to China, and we’ll also try them in Dubai in April.
In 2016 there were some concerns about the future of the orchestra after it was denied funding.
Do you feel the European Commission has done enough to resolve that situation?
The EU allocates its cultural funding through a device that operates on a seven-year plan. From 2007-2013, that device was called the Culture Programme, and the orchestra was in the Ambassadors’ strand of that. From 2014-2020, the funding device for culture and new media is now Creative Europe, and so for the orchestra to get funding from the EU it had to go through that funding programme. We applied to Creative Europe and received funding for a new project called Towards 2020, and we undertook the first phase from 2014-2015.
We applied for the second tranche of funding, but that application was turned down in April 2016. We didn’t appeal against that funding decision, because the argument that we have been making since 2015 is that, while we were very happy to apply to Creative Europe, we didn’t think that the way it was structured offered the right sort of funding for us. In essence, they stopped funding for organisations and instead offered funding for projects. We didn’t appeal the decision to turn down our funding, because I think that the people who judged the application were interpreting the rules in front of them as to how the funding should be allocated under the Creative Europe structure.
When they were drawing up Creative Europe, I wonder if they thought about what would happen to something like the EUYO, which is an EU organisation in its own right, rather than an organisation that applies for project funding as a partner. We’re the only performing organisation which works with young players from all 28 member states every year, and so I think that puts us in a particular space as far as being an EU organisation, and our argument was that as the EU’s youth orchestra we were justified in receiving EU funding even if we didn’t fit under Creative Europe. For example, we were established by a unanimous decree of the European Parliament in 1976, so we aren’t like any national or local organisation; we really are an EU organisation.
The commission agreed, because we announced that without our EU funding we’d have to close, and three weeks later EU President Jean-Claude Juncker announced that the orchestra would in fact be funded by the EU. What’s been happening now is that between 2016 and 2020, we’ve been receiving year-by-year funding from Creative Europe, but in a different form of application from the way other organisations apply. I think this will probably mean that after 2020, there will need to be a whole new way in which funding for organisations like the EUYO will be managed, but it’s difficult to think of other ways that the commission could have solved this, and I’m very impressed with the way that this has worked out so far.
What is your outlook as you begin to plan the EUYO’s future?
The mission of the orchestra is to act as a platform for some of the most talented players in the EU in order to form a great orchestra which is also a cultural ambassador for the European Union. For us, that’s important. Wherever we go, because of our name and the way we work, we’re seen as representing the European Union, and it’s very much our mission to show the highest ideals of the union. At the moment, that’s an important role to consider because Europe has some very significant challenges ahead, and it seems to me that culture and a cultural organisation like ours can be of help. When we play a concert and there are 120 players on stage, from 28 countries, playing with amazing passion, commitment and technique, audience members see it and understand what the EU is about. It’s a very tangible example of the European Union in action, and now is a good time for that.
Through our work with Creative Europe, we’ve also developed ways of working which are not just traditional concerts, but offer ways to engage with a new, broader set of audiences. I think that’s something that is extremely impressive about the whole Creative Europe programme. It’s not just funding to do cultural activities, there are criteria – some of which are about new entrepreneurial models, using digital techniques, and engaging with new audiences – and I think those are very important things for all cultural enterprises to be doing in Europe in this period in which we find ourselves.
Marshall Marcus
CEO
European Union Youth Orchestra
http://www.euyo.eu/
This article will appear in Pan European Networks: Government 24, which will be published in January, 2018.
