Here is an article from today's Daily Telegraph:

   What will the music of the new millennium sound like?

   Simon Rattle, who has championed the music of this century, looks
   forward to the next with John Whitley OVER the past eight years,
   Britain's best-known conductor, Sir Simon Rattle, has been living in
   the past, working his way, decade by decade, through the music of
   our century in a series of concerts called Towards the Millennium.

   With a concert next Saturday at London's Festival Hall, he has finally
   reached the Eighties, and he can now begin to look towards the future,
   and think about what the shape of classical music is likely to be after
   the year 2000.

   "I have no doubt that there will be classical music concerts in the
   next century," he insists.  "It's much harder to predict exactly what
   form they will take because things are changing in the way we perform,
   and we must make them change even faster and more radically.

   "But I'm quite sure that we'll want to hear music live - not just on
   CDs or videos.  There are all kinds of areas where the live experience
   will be more important than ever.  In Japan, you know, the idea of
   the virtual girlfriend is very popular:  many relationships are
   suffering from the man having girlfriends that exist only in virtual
   reality.  And, just as I don't believe that the future lies in
   cyber-sex, I do think that there are certain things - such as human
   discourse, friendship and music - which are meant to be live."

   Relaxed and slightly jet-lagged after a trip to California, Rattle
   speaks with the directness and conviction that characterises his
   music-making.  Though, at only 44, his famous helmet of curly hair
   has turned grey, he has lost none of the passion that saw him drive
   his City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra up to international standard
   in 13 years, and refuse to compromise over his programmes of modern
   scores.

   Recordings, he argues, are an aid, not a substitute:  "The problem
   with the new technology is that musicians have used it for profit
   rather than for lifting the art.  Karajan was a great man, a great
   conductor, but he's got a lot to answer for.  His media empire built
   up the expectation that electronic reproduction would provide the
   best of all possible musical worlds.  But to be limited to recordings
   is like choosing snapshots of your children over the children themselves
   - the point is the real, live thing."

   Even so, Rattle acknowledges that modern live music is advancing
   cautiously by comparison with the ferment of the 1890s, when new
   music, painting and literature set the civilised world in a permanent
   uproar.  Only last year, several distinguished performers, led by
   Julian Lloyd Webber, described the shortage of new work as a crisis,
   and a huge cash fund called Masterprize was set up to entice previously
   unpublished composers into writing music that the public might actually
   want to listen to.

   "People are trying to pull together strands of this century, and we
   don't quite know where it's going.  This is a time of consolidation
   and a time of knowledge-sharing in every way," says Rattle.

   Even the one-time radicals of the period performance movement are
   now embraced by the mainstream.  "It is certainly necessary to have
   the extremists - to swing very far in one direction.  Thank goodness
   for people who will go way out on a limb and take risks to discover
   something very valuable."

   But these discoveries have been made at the expense of enthusiasm
   for new music from a public alienated by the defiantly hermetic scores
   of another set of extremists - Boulez, Stockhausen and those around
   the Darmstadt School in the Fifties.  "It was a time when people were
   trying to create a new language because they felt that the old one
   had let them down completely, that it had climaxed in tragedy.

   'Stockhausen and co were the most extraordinary idealists of all,"
   Rattle continues, "and I'm sure they felt that one could re-order
   the brain enough to accept 12 equal tones.  But it is not necessarily
   true that you can completely re-educate people's brains.  Still, they
   provided some extraordinarily inexhaustible music on the way."

   So he is clear that what we will hear in the concert hall at the
   start of the next century will be a reaction against such remote and
   wilfully difficult compositions:  "There's no doubt that music is
   becoming more accessible - it's aiming to include more.  It's more
   user-friendly, the surface is more beautiful.  There's also now such
   a wide range of references, of so many different types of music - so
   many influences are changing composers.

   "I loathe the term 'world music' - it must have been invented by
   people trying to pigeonhole CDs.  But there are so many different
   types available.  One does not have to wait, as in the 1890s, for
   the orchestra from Bali to come to Paris to be stunned by music from
   the East.

   "I think its influence often goes in the back door - the way that
   different types of music are put together, the way that, in Indian
   music, rhythms are added to each other.  That's been immensely
   important and that will become even more important as the world
   becomes a smaller and smaller place."

   Indeed, Rattle's list of talents to watch for in the next century is
   determinedly global:  "There are all sorts of really tremendous things
   arriving from outside Europe and America.  Tan Dun has written some
   very interesting music and Unsuk Chin from Korea is full of wonderful
   potential.  Takemistsu was such a powerful figure in Japanese music
   that it may be only now that we start to hear of other Japanese
   composers."

   And Rattle has backed more local young lions with commissions -
   Mark-Anthony Turnage, Magnus Lindberg, Thomas Ades:  "That's just
   three out of the hat.  Each of them is really forging their own
   language, using many elements of what has gone before, but absolutely
   and immediately recognisable as their own.

   "Turnage's Blood on the Floor is the most successful synthesis of
   improvised jazz and classical music there has yet been, and it's an
   immensely important step forward.  He uses many different types of
   music, spoken in his accent.

   "Then, in the big orchestra piece that Ades wrote for us [Asyla],
   there are references to Parsifal just as there are references to rave
   music in the third part - basically deconstructed techno.  There's
   no reason why those two should not sit alongside one another.  And
   it may be that, in 20 years, we'll wonder what we were so worried
   about; couldn't we have seen this generation of talented composers
   coming? Maybe they couldn't see it in the 1890s either."

   But even if there is a return to scores one can whistle along to,
   how will they be performed, and will a 70-year-old Rattle still don
   his tails to ascend a podium? "Certainly the new technologies are
   going to change a great deal.  If I was running Covent Garden, I
   would say that there is a day every fortnight when this house is
   entirely open to everybody on the Internet, when everyone can see
   what is happening.  This is where we would allow people electronically
   into the house, to learn how things happen, to answer the question
   'What do you do during the day?'

   "But what will remain is that concert-giving will have an element of
   ceremony about it.  It will remind people in a noisy age that there
   is a place where you need silence, and that places in the modern
   world where there are 10 seconds of silence are shockingly unusual.

   "That doesn't mean it has to be a 19th-century ceremony.  It's likely
   to be closer to Theatre de Complicite than to Sarah Bernhardt, with
   that sort of rough vitality.  You need to hear the rough edges - if
   you have a chauffeured-limo drive through Beethoven's symphonies or
   string quartets it means you have missed something."

   Above all, this ceremony will be performed by a new kind of musician
   and it is here that Rattle the peripatetic maestro, who commands
   huge fees from appearances with the Berlin Philharmonic and his EMI
   recordings, is transformed into Rattle the low-tech educationalist:
   "Both the audiences and the orchestras have to be rejuvenated - not
   necessarily by bringing in young people.

   "The approach will be quite different, and education will become
   as important as performance.  In future, musicians will not only be
   auditioned for an orchestral post on the basis of how well they play,
   but also how well they can communicate their love and knowledge of
   all types of music.

   "The links with the local community are going to become more and more
   important.  There are very few places in the world where to be a
   musician is like being a football star, where music is so important
   to people that they will come to it whatever.  We'll have to continually
   present ourselves to people so that they need us in their lives."

   In fact, Rattle foresees larger groups of musicians, and a lot less
   jet-setting:  "The idea of a community of musicians is probably going
   to be the way forward - where people are involved in a range of
   things, not only music but education, research, discussions.  So the
   body of performers may be larger rather than smaller - a company of
   people with many different skills who are based in a specific area,
   as we have tried to do in Birmingham."

   One casualty of this shift to community work will be the star system,
   with its inflated fees and drop-in performers, something that Rattle
   welcomes, despite being a part of it:  "I react very badly to this.
   It is something that can't go on, just as the recording industry as
   we know it can't go on.  Things are changing, and it won't necessarily
   all be bad."

   This makes it a particularly appropriate moment for Rattle himself
   to be looking for a new home.  Since he left the CBSO last August,
   he has had no shortage of rumoured offers - from Karajan's old band,
   the Berlin Philharmonic, to the Metropolitan Opera in New York.  Even
   Covent Garden have made a bid, though it's clear he remains unimpressed
   - "That is not something that I am eager to do."

   So, with both his career and the millennium on the cusp, Rattle's
   reflections suggest a different job description - one where a new
   breed of conductor is given the time, the money and the virtuoso
   performers to bring music back into the centre of their community's
   life.

   But, as he adds with a laugh, "We can't know what the next revolution
   is.  I cheerfully look forward to being considered grotesquely out
   of date."

Tony Duggan
Staffordshire,
United Kingdom.