Music Focus Workshop: Arts Festivals Summit 2025
Classical music festivals are adapting to a rapidly changing cultural landscape. At EFA's Arts Festivals Summit in Edinburgh, a dedicated workshop explored the pressures facing classical music today - from funding and logistics to shifting audience expectations. Participants shared innovative solutions, from rethinking formats and venues to broadening repertoire and deepening audience engagement. The session highlighted that flexibility, creativity, and advocacy are key to keeping classical music vibrant and relevant.
The founding members of EFA saw it as a way to bring together the classical music festivals of Europe: part of the reconstruction of civilisation after the horror of two World Wars in less than thirty years. Many decades on EFA has grown and expanded to include festivals in all artistic genres, from film to literature, theatre and dance. At the heart of the association, though, the classical music festivals are still hugely important. What has changed is the range of formats and venues in which they take place. Nowadays the music does not always happen in concert halls and castles. Festivals can take over environmental parks, village greens, river banks and seaside beaches. The range of music has changed too, from an emphasis on the European music from 1750 onwards to festivals that mix the music of our own time with that of all kinds from the last thousand years.
Despite that breadth and ingenuity, classical music feels under pressure – not from audiences, which show strong signs of having recovered from the difficult pandemic years and may well be turning out in greater numbers and social classifications than ever – but from antipathetic media and, sadly, powerful voices in politics, as well as those in other genres keen to soak up any money that is taken away. There is pressure to take a populist route and prove social relevance by including entertainers from pop, rock and 'easy listening' in programmes. There is also a tendency for funders to demand a focus on age groups and demographics that traditionally have not been classical music's majority customers but who are important to politicians and commercial sponsors.
At a workshop session at the Arts Festivals Summit Edinburgh, led by Music Biennale Zagreb and Schleswig-Holstein Musik Festival, the challenges were explored, formats discussed and advocacy arguments put forward.
Some of the challenges faced are shared by other genres but are amplified for classical music because of the numbers performing and the costs of transporting people and instruments: travel costs, trading barriers (for example 'cobotage' for taking instruments across borders), visas and work permits. Classical music is by its nature global and its protagonists are not limited to particular states, though they are hindered by borders.
On the audience side the challenges are less about paperwork than changes in expectations. The last 25 years have seen a shift in the way people behave – more emphasis on visual than audio experience, shorter attention spans, a reluctance to leave the home, especially after the COVID period, and a lack of familiarity with the codes of classical concerts (sit still, don't take photos or look at mobile phones, don't applaud between movements of complete works, don't talk, sneeze, snore or cough). The pressures on people's disposable incomes mean that tickets feel expensive to audiences at a time when production costs have risen sharply. There is also a tendency to expect festivals to reflect the national or social identity of sections of the community when classical music, while recognising and often celebrating those particularities, stresses its embrace of everybody.
The last 25 years have seen a shift in the way people behave.
The ways to deal with these difficulties are through flexibility of format and programming, the workshop determined. There are advantages in selling the festival experience with overall festival tickets (for a whole day or series) so that audiences come for a whole section of events rather than a single performance. For example, this allows Wonderfeel, outside Amsterdam, to have simultaneous and repeated short concerts on outdoor stages. Encouraging participation, not just listening, can help audiences break through perceived barriers, especially for young people and those not part of traditional audience sections. This is also helped by opening up classical to folk music from which, after all, much of it derives. Expanding the range of music beyond the 'canon' can pay dividends. As Joost Fonteyne, from the Klarafestival, said, “if you work closely with the musicians and don't treat classical music as a museum, you get a very different response”.
Encouraging participation, not just listening, can help audiences break through perceived barriers.
So many of the difficulties could be alleviated by good messaging, the workshop agreed. Here are some of the comments which were shared among the participants:
- Find formats that make sense in contemporary conditions – after all the stories that composers told are just as relevant today.
- Co-develop programmes with the audience so that listeners become your partners in selling the concerts. Use your festival members as ambassadors.
- See classical festivals as the research and development department for the commercial music industry.
- Re-invigorate the conversation between popular and art music which was much closer in the past.
- Collaborate with other art forms and build partnerships.
- Enable composers to hear their music so that they can understand what works for audiences. As a composer in the room remarked, “that was how great composers became great”.
- Celebrate the relationship between film/TV and classical music.
- Fit the format to your target audience – never let it be random.
- Remember that fundraising is all about personal meetings.
- Shift from a few sponsors paying (and demanding) a lot to many more 'members' paying less but participating more.
By Simon Mundy