My symphonies are sperm

On paper Leif Segerstam's symphonies don't look promising. More than 300 in total, each lasting only around half an hour but needing only two pages of score, and some requiring no conductor. All underwritten by the philosophy that "My symphonies are sperm. There is strength in numbers. Some will survive to take evolution forward". (So my headline is a genuine pull quote, not Slipped Disc-style clickbait).

Anyone acquainted with his authoritative Sibelius and Rautavaara will know that with Segerstam unconventional does not mean unacceptable. There is a method in what many will view as his madness. In the deliberate absence of a conductor the musicians are cued by certain specified signals given by different instruments in turn. The aim is to release the players' latent creativity which is normally suppressed by the highly prescriptive Western classical tradition. 

Segerstam explained that "I wanted a performance to be a creative event, not a Prussian ploughing competition. Which is what bar lines remind me of". Because his symphonies have a defined but loose structure, the resulting rolls of orchestral thunder juxtaposed with mystical tranquility evoke rather than repel. Think Mahler on LSD rather than Cornelius Cardew on a good day.

However Lief Segerstam's symphonies are more than the notable work of a musical maverick. Because they raise the important question of whether classical music is looking in the right place for its elusive new audience. Segerstam's famous explanation that "Music is NOT that which sounds. Music is WHY that which sounds, sounds like it sounds - WHEN it sounds" explains the dichotomy between strictly notated Western classical music - 'that which sounds' - and the impermanent world of loose structures, dynamic structures and controlled improvisation that his symphonies share with non-classical genres.

In its search for a new demographic, classical music is going further and further down the rabbit hole of smooth classics pioneered by Classic FM and copied by the neutered BBC Radio 3. But classical's new younger target audience are not sleep walkers: they are conditioned by the visceral sound and free forms of rock, electronic dance music, and other non-classical genres. And 'free-pulsative' forms with visceral sound and loose structures - think EDM - are exactly what Lief Segerstam's symphonies deliver in bucket loads. 

Proponents of smooth classics are doing classical music a serious disservice. Because not only are they are serving up a badly diluted version of the broad, diverse, and challenging classical oeuvre. Even worse, 'innovations' such as BBC Radio 3 Unwind - "music to unwind your mind" - are fatally conditioning future audience expectations. Soon classical will be seen as no more than a slightly intellectual sub-set of New Age music. Soon classical will be the soundtrack for bad Netflix soaps and pretentious health spas across the globe. 

As Leif Segerstam told us, we need to move music evolution forward. Of course there is a place for Max Richter and yet another 'reimagined' Goldberg Variation. But in that evolution there must also be a place for Segerstam's remarkable and unclassifiable symphonies and the countless other comfort zone-challenging works that are being marginalised into extinction by the smooth classics movement.