Now these two young Croatian guys are touring vast American arenas as the support act for Elton John and have landed a recording contract with Sony. It’s about the viral YouTube clip by 2Cellos playing AC/DC’s Thunderstruck: Vivaldi metamorphoses into AC/DC in front of a suitably shocked and bewigged 18th-century audience and - most importantly - it’s had over 22m views. It’s about Laura Mvula writing songs on her laptop during her lunch break, forwarding them to people in the business, getting signed by RCA and having her own late-night Prom. It’s about the Pet Shop Boys at the Proms. It’s about classical composers working with digital games. Now everything is about creativity and imagination – it’s about classical musicians working cross–genre with spoken word or dance. And it is so much easier to experiment and push at boundaries because they have already been broken down. Today’s young musicians are told exactly the same thing and especially they are told that it has never been harder to make it as a classical musician.īut this isn’t true – it is so much easier to make it today! Forty years ago there were none of the amazing opportunities that digital technology affords young musicians. Forty years ago I was told that it had never been harder to make it in the music business. Since I recorded Variations everything has changed - yet nothing has changed. But more likely it was because I never left my classical roots behind because - much as I liked to experiment - I knew that my bedrock as a solo cellist would always be based on that five-hundred-year treasure trove called classical music. Perhaps because we had shown that pushing at boundaries need not be a bad thing. Perhaps because audiences were actually crying out for melody, rhythm and harmony. Variations (aka the South Bank Show theme) was unexpectedly successful. But I believed in the piece so I took the chance.Īnd it didn’t ruin my career. That was the time when melody, rhythm and harmony were taboo in contemporary classical music and I was warned by friends and colleagues alike that I would literally ruin my career by recording it. The trouble was that he decided it should be a piece for cello and rock band - and the classical music world was a lot stuffier then than it is now. This meant that he finally had to write me the cello piece he had been promising for years. To learn more about how and for what purposes Amazon uses personal information (such as Amazon Store order history), please visit our Privacy Notice.In 1977 I won a bet with my brother Andrew. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie Preferences, as described in the Cookie Notice. Click ‘Continue without accepting’ or ‘Customise Cookies’ to decline these cookies, make more detailed choices or learn more. Third parties use cookies for the purposes of displaying and measuring personalised advertisements, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. This includes using first- and third-party cookies which store or access standard device information such as a unique identifier. If you agree, we will also use cookies to complement your shopping experience across Amazon stores as described in our Cookie Notice. We also use these cookies to understand how customers use our services (for example, by measuring site visits) so we can make improvements. We use cookies and similar tools that are necessary to enable you to make purchases, to enhance your shopping experiences, and to provide our services, as detailed in our Cookie Notice.
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