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.