RNZ Concert: cultural treasure or bland sound-track to our lives?
The Save RNZ Concert campaign is now a year old. Some people think the campaign has done its job and that the network is secure for the future. I believe the contrary; the job is by no means finished. I’ve set out below the current “state of the play”, what RNZ appears to be proposing and why its future “programming strategy” raises more concerns than reasons for optimism. I begin with my summary of our twelve-month campaign.
Margaret Guldborg and Elizabeth Kerr take the Save RNZ Concert petition to RNZ
Photo credit: Kevin Stent/Stuff
On Wednesday February 12, 2020, musician and teacher Margaret Guldborg and I climbed the steps of RNZ House on The Terrace in Wellington. We were carrying a large stack of papers, the print-out of an online petition addressed to RNZ’s Chief Executive Paul Thompson to “Save RNZ Concert”, signed by over 26,000 people in the previous six days. On February 5th RNZ had advised staff of its brutal “Music Strategy” proposal to make most of the RNZ Concert team redundant, shift the network to the AM frequency used by Parliament and redeploy Concert’s budget and network in the service of a proposed “youth” network.
No-one, not Kris Faafoi, Minister of Broadcasting who had been briefed more than once on the plan, not the Board, Chief Executive and management of RNZ, NZ on Air, the Ministry of Culture and Heritage, nor even those of us who listened to, worked with and valued RNZ Concert, fully anticipated the fast-moving storm of high-profile nationwide protest that followed the news of the proposed evisceration of our beloved Concert network.
Alongside our petition and a couple of others, a Save RNZ Facebook page quickly attracted 13,000 members and in the weeks following February 5 a landslide of news and opinion pieces piled up to a staggering 90 stories in print and broadcast media. Politicians, government agencies and RNZ itself were inundated with a tsunami of correspondence, much of it from Concert’s devoted audience who were astounded and horrified by the proposed destruction of a cultural treasure so important to their wellbeing. A trio of prominent lawyers, engaged by New Zealand’s professional orchestras, quickly delivered a written challenge to RNZ management pointing out the legal shortcomings in their plans.
It became clear that RNZ management, as well as underestimating RNZ Concert’s audience, had no idea of the network’s importance to the New Zealand arts sector. They seemed unaware of the network’s major role as champion of music organisations as well as broadcaster of their work, supporter of the careers of artists, inspiration for young musicians and significant multiplier of arts funding. New Zealand’s brightest and best musicians and composers - Dame Kiri te Kanawa, Michael Houstoun, Jonathan Lemalu, Wilma Smith, Clare Cowan, Gareth Farr and many others - spoke out publicly and eloquently about the important role Concert had played in their careers.
A protest concert for RNZ Concert at Parliament on Feb 24, 2020
Photo credit: Robert Kitchin/Stuff
The arts sector itself quickly mobilised to demonstrate its support for Concert, with protest performance events around the country, the largest at Parliament on February 24, attended by hundreds of musicians and radio audience members. Any stereotype of Concert’s support base as elderly, white and housebound was quickly dispelled by these protests, attended by classical music practitioners and fans of many ages and ethnicities.
Alongside the media attention and public events, the campaign took its message to the corridors of power, meeting with ministers and officials to brief them on the issues that RNZ’s proposal raised. Media commentators, notably Tom Frewen, writing for Scoop, pointed out that RNZ was paying scant attention to the legislative framework in which it operated and that it had no right to re-allocate Concert’s FM frequency. RNZ’s Chair Jim Mather and Chief Executive found themselves struggling to answer difficult questions from select committees, and their replies demonstrated their weak understanding of the value and substance of this significant part of their radio business.
Meanwhile, the furious initial protest had already had an impact – less than a week after the offending proposal became public, the Prime Minister, in her role as Minister for Arts, Culture and Heritage, announced that an alternative broadcast frequency would be made available for the proposed youth network. RNZ management, reeling from the onslaughts of the week, took the opportunity to withdraw its “Music Strategy” proposal and began talking about an alternative bright future for RNZ Concert. Redundancies were taken off the immediate agenda. Grant Robertson, in his role as Associate Minister for the Arts, spoke at the Parliament protest event, reassuring the large crowd that the only proposals government wished to consider were “those that built on the strengths of RNZ Concert”.
Some people thought the job was done and that Concert was safe. Those of us with longer memories understood that the abandoned “Music Strategy” had been merely an end-game in a longer intention to undermine and ultimately dispose of RNZ Concert. We had very little confidence that those who had failed to support Concert for years and who wanted to implement the destructive strategy could be entrusted with the task of looking after the network’s future. Meetings with government stakeholders, correspondence with RNZ and discussions in the arts sector have continued throughout the year of the campaign and the Save RNZ Concert Facebook page has kept its thousands of members informed of these discussions and any developments.
When RNZ CE Paul Thompson wrote to stakeholders at the end of April telling them that “RNZ Concert had an assured future as an engaging, stimulating classical music service available on FM and digital platforms,” I took the opportunity in my reply to remind him that “within RNZ, those delivering the on-air product and services for Concert have lacked support for some years, a nadir being the multiple redundancies in 2016 which caused the loss of many expert staff and hampered the high-quality delivery of on-air radio 24/7 by the network. A great deal of valuable delivery was lost, much-appreciated feature programmes abandoned, on-air curation set aside in favour of more low-quality automated scheduling in some time-slots, outside recordings and broadcasts severely curtailed and in some cases Concert’s quality standards and arts sector partnerships regrettably reduced in the face of insufficient human resource.”
I also suggested there should be a dedicated RNZ Concert Strategy developed by knowledgeable people including the Concert staff team; restoration of staff morale; the appointment of a dedicated, knowledgeable and trusted manager of the team; and genuine consultation with external stakeholders including the arts sector and Concert’s loyal audience. I recommended both external facilitation of the process to restore trust and leadership of future planning by people with a positive view of the network.
Although I received no reply to my letter, a strategy development process for Concert did begin, led by consultants from PwC. RNZ Concert staff were involved in this process and some attempts were made to restore trust and repair the morale of the Concert team.
Meanwhile, the network continued to broadcast and proved a great solace and comfort to many during the period of lockdown and the other pandemic disruptions during 2020. The recording work of the Concert production team was invaluable as orchestras and other concert presenters replaced live concerts with live streams and other online content. And Concert’s audience grew substantially during the high profile of the campaign and the troubled days of 2020. Its cumulative weekly audience was 173,300 at the end of 2019. In the third quarter of 2020 that audience had climbed to 260,900, a staggering increase of over 50% in nine months.
Where are we now?
The “future strategy” work with PwC is now completed and a RNZ Concert “Programming Strategy” was presented to staff and to a limited number of external stakeholders in December last year. At the stakeholder meeting Paul Thompson made a presentation about future plans for RNZ Concert.
These offer grounds for optimism but also areas of on-going concern. The good news may be the proposal to increase the broadcast of New Zealand performance with an ambitious percentage goal by 2023. How the depleted Concert production team will deliver this, however, is yet to be clarified. Another positive step is the planned appointment of a station manager in February 2021 with recruitment scheduled to begin in December 2020. That manager is to be a “champion” for Concert, a role sorely needed within RNZ. The position has not been advertised to date and no job description is available.
Of more concern in the plan are intentions suggesting a “dumbing down” of content and further reduction of the already small rotate, described as a “tighter core playlist”. This will inevitably lead to more bland, repetitive programming. There are ambitious audience growth projections for RNZ Concert, based on “re-focusing its energy on a primary audience target of all 45–60-year-olds” and “prioritising …growing in-car and at-work listening”. The plan also proposes “a more efficient music scheduling system” and “making use of technology to provide a better experience for audiences and ease staff workload”. This undoubtedly translates to more automated segments in the on-air programme drawn from that proposed narrower rotate, which are extremely unlikely to “provide a better experience” nor to serve up the desired audience growth.
What’s missing in RNZ’s plan for Concert?
Throughout the campaign it has been clear that RNZ management has no understanding of nor interest in what classical music represents in our lives and in our culture. It is not a “soundtrack to our lives” or “classical wallpaper”, it is an art form of depth, beauty and architectural construction, with a long, significant and still-relevant history. It requires a lifelong commitment from its practitioners to develop the level of skill needed for its composition and performance. It is a dynamic and developing artistic entity in its own right, with fascinating contemporary changes always taking place. It is not merely a pleasant bland backing track to our “in-car” and “at work” lives. The superficial approach to classical music revealed in RNZ’s current planning is an ignorant travesty.
The greatest “strengths of Concert” referred to a year ago by Minister Robertson are the intelligent and knowledgeable people who make it happen behind the scenes and the engaging well-informed presenters who introduce the music with context to its on-air audience. Concert’s team and budget are far smaller than those of equivalent international models of public fine music networks that broadcast 24/7 but the “programming strategy” suggests no increase in resources.
What the new future plan does not propose is something this campaign has argued for many times – restoration of resources to RNZ Concert so that the severe losses of staff and budget in 2016 are undone and the experienced and committed staff team is increased in size and given an adequate budget to do its job. There is no mention of the production of well-designed programmes to attract and inform the desired new audience and no mention of restoring budgets so that, for instance, outside broadcasts can return to the levels achieved before the 2016 cuts (including restoration of South Island concert recording). There is also no mention of succession planning for the current staff team.
Finally there is nothing in the new strategy that suggests public broadcasting is not merely about increasing raw audience numbers. The Charter is mentioned but the apparent drivers and measures of the programming strategy are solely cumulative audience growth, with no commitment at all to quality and quality measures.
Until RNZ management includes in its future approach a commitment to quality fine music broadcasting in all its depth and variety and acknowledges that the current RNZ Concert staff team and budget-constrained operating environment are severely hampering the potential and development of this public broadcasting network, the Save RNZ Concert campaign has not finished its work.
You can read my earlier articles on this subject, RNZ Concert: An opinion piece (first published in NZ Listener) and Save RNZ Concert.