{"id":864,"date":"2010-01-14T11:29:49","date_gmt":"2010-01-14T11:29:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/2010\/01\/14\/don-t-kill-alex-prior\/"},"modified":"2010-01-14T11:29:49","modified_gmt":"2010-01-14T11:29:49","slug":"don-t-kill-alex-prior","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/2010\/01\/14\/don-t-kill-alex-prior\/","title":{"rendered":"Don’t Kill Alex Prior"},"content":{"rendered":"

[UPDATE, FRIDAY 15 JANUARY: Since writing the post below, I\u2019ve been in contact with Alex\u00a0Prior\u00a0who tells me that he was \u201ctotally misquoted\u201d\u00a0in the articles that caused the fuss!]<\/em><\/p>\n

I\u2019ve been watching with dismay the fuss created by the Daily Telegraph\u2019s piece yesterday on Alex Prior<\/a>, the 17-year-old conductor-composer. He\u2019s been given a post by the Seattle Symphony Orchestra<\/a> \u2013 a \u2018specially created six-month fellowship\u2019 in which he becomes assistant to the guest conductors. The follow-up interview yesterday quoted him<\/a>, and his mother, making some very sweeping and singularly unfortunate remarks about the bitterness of the attitude towards young talent in Britain. The piece has caused orchestral musicians, managers and just about everyone else to go into near meltdown with fury on Facebook and Twitter. <\/p>\n

It\u2019s all ridiculously exaggerated, of course, and frankly, nobody comes out of it very well. But I want to add a few words in his defence \u2013 because young musicians with this much talent do not grow on trees. Also, I\u2019m anxious that other ambitious youngsters will be put off by the bile that\u2019s being flung at him before he\u2019s even had a chance to grow up. <\/p>\n

Most of us were arrogant in our late teens. At that time I, too, probably regarded music as \u2018the search for beauty through suffering\u2019 \u2013 one just does<\/em> at 17 \u2013 but luckily this wasn\u2019t of national interest. And I\u2019ll never forget my first days in the music faculty, aged 18, where cocky lads fresh from public school paraded around the library saying \u201cProkofiev\u2019s rubbish!\u201d and amused themselves by photocopying certain bits of their own anatomy. That wasn\u2019t of national interest either, though I bet the Daily Mail<\/em> could have had some fun with it if they\u2019d known. <\/p>\n

The Telegraph<\/em> doesn\u2019t look good. Prior\u2019s fellowship in Seattle is exactly what any young conductor should be doing anywhere possible: a sort of apprenticeship that offers the chance to shadow and learn from seasoned professionals. Countless conductors regularly pay tribute to their days as assistants \u2013 Daniel Harding and Ed Gardner, for instance, have both praised to the skies this aspect of their training. But it\u2019s not <\/em>a significant conducting appointment in the slightest, and shouldn\u2019t have been reported as such.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But also the Prior family doesn\u2019t look good \u2013 if, that is, that they\u2019ve been accurately quoted\u2026 they should probably know by now that giving the impression of arrogance is a massive sin in this country (though they could probably get away with it in the US or Russia). If they encouraged the coverage, it wasn\u2019t a great idea. Alex is conducting at The Sage, Gateshead, next week<\/a> (as his PR has told me several times, with the kind offer of \u2018press accreditation\u2019 which I\u2019ve had to refuse since I will be trotting around Tenerife with Vladimir Jurowski & co just then) and they should be trying to build up good will, not ill will, in advance. Over-selling mild successes generally does create bad feeling, inevitably so, because this is a very, very competitive field and there are others in the picture too, often more highly awarded\u2026<\/p>\n

But actually the UK isn\u2019t perfect. The words dissing British orchestras are frankly nonsense \u2013 our orchestras spend huge amounts of effort, money and creativity on providing opportunities for young conductors, players and interns, many very successfully. But the fact remains that the standard of musical training in Britain is not always internationally competitive. This isn\u2019t the colleges\u2019 fault \u2013 it\u2019s a matter of national attitude. To become a good professional musician you have to<\/em> start very young, be very well taught and work very, very hard. None of this is encouraged here; there is no widespread \u2018system\u2019 for training the gifted young \u2013 yes, there are junior colleges, youth orchestras, Saturday music schools etc, but living near a good one is a lottery, and there are only four or five small, high-level specialist full-time music schools in the whole country of 60 million people. It\u2019s generally assumed here that childhood is desperately precious, that it\u2019s all about having fun, and that being gifted or prodigious will lead you to MISERY later on. Hmm. It\u2019s worth remembering that not <\/em>being gifted or prodigious doesn\u2019t actually guarantee that you will live happily ever after\u2026 <\/p>\n

So what is happening to Alex Prior is sadly typical of what happens to gifted youngsters in Britain, especially if their background involves cultures where attitudes towards talent and publicity are perceived as deeply unBritish (his mother is, of course, Russian). There\u2019s plenty of attention, but it is attention designed to destroy, not to encourage others by example. And of course reality TV is a sure-fire path to notoriety. There is such a thing as bad publicity, and this is it.<\/p>\n

HOWEVER. I have seven nephews, some of whom are a similar age to Alex. And if anyone did to any of them what the media and commentators are doing to him, I personally would go round and tear these people limb from limb. You are talking about a 17-year-old boy<\/em>, for God\u2019s sake! What anybody does at 17 is really not supposed to be all that interesting; what he\u2019ll do at 37, 47 and 57 is a great deal more significant. *IF* he has suitable mentors and the chance to grow up and learn the lessons he must \u2013 without being publicly lynched for it before he\u2019s even old enough to vote \u2013 he might just have what it takes to do something very interesting indeed. I only hope we will have the chance to find out.\u00a0 <\/p>\n

<\/i><\/a><\/i><\/a><\/i><\/a><\/i><\/a><\/i><\/a><\/p>\n

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No related posts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[UPDATE, FRIDAY 15 JANUARY: Since writing the post below, I’ve been in contact with Alex Prior who tells me that he was “totally misquoted” in the articles that caused the fuss!]I’ve been watching with dismay the fuss created by the Daily Telegraph’s piece yesterday on Alex Prior, the 17-year-old conductor-composer. He’s been given a post by the Seattle Symphony Orchestra – a ‘specially created six-month fellowship’ in which he becomes assistant to the guest conductors. The follow-up interview yesterday quoted him, and his mother, making some very sweeping and singularly unfortunate remarks about the bitterness of the attitude towards young talent in Britain. The piece has caused orchestral musicians, managers and just about everyone else to go into near meltdown with fury on Facebook and Twitter.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7173,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-864","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/864","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=864"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/864\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7173"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=864"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=864"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=864"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}