Industry awards and natural justice


Much excitement elsewhere about two UK music industry award bashes this week. The Royal Philharmonic Society Awards are run 'in association with BBC Radio 3', while the Classical Brit Awards are 'supported by Classic FM radio and its sister publication Classic FM Magazine'. Both events allow the great and good of the music industry to indulge their passion for self-congratulation and rubber chicken while boosting radio audiences. One of the categories for the BBC supported RPS Awards is 'Creative Communication', which includes books.

That great composer, musicologist and BBC producer Robert Simpson, whose Ninth Symphony features on the CD seen above, wrote a very important book in 1980. The Proms & Natural Justice was highly critical of the BBC's music programming policies. It was an influential book that was admired by many, including long-time BBC employee Sir Adrian Boult, who provided the foreword. Let's imagine for a moment that Robert Simpson's book had been published in 2009. Would anyone like to speculate on its chances of being nominated for an RPS award?


Those Simpsons are cult classics.
My Hyperion CD of Robert Simpson's Ninth Symphony was bought at retail price. Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Report errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

Comments

Pliable said…
To help understand the various hidden agendas it is probably worth pointing out that the publisher of Classic FM magazine also publishes Gramophone.http://www.haymarket.com/sector/classical_music/default.aspx
Pliable said…
In view of what is going on in Parliament right now it is worth quoting these words from the BBC website -

The Freedom of Information Act does not apply to the BBC in the way it does to almost all public authorities in one significant respect. The Act recognises the different position of the BBC, as well as the other public service broadcasters covered by the Act (Channel 4, S4C and the Gaelic Media Service) by providing that it covers information "held for purposes other than those of journalism, art or literature". This means that the Act does not apply to material held for the purposes of creating the BBC's output (TV, radio, online etc), or material which supports and is closely associated with these creative activities.http://www.bbc.co.uk/foi/publication_scheme/excluded.shtml

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