Long Live New, Live Music

Some of you will be aware that my group, Guest House Opera, performed in the Europa Gallery, Sutton the other week – the final event in this year’s Imagine Festival of Arts.

My thanks go to all the performers involved – singers and players – for doing such a fantastic job after so little time together. Many of the performers were local people, proving the point I’ve often tried to make: Sutton’s got talent! Indeed south London and Surrey generally has got talent, all these musicians need is an opportunity to perform and an appreciative audience to listen to them.

Audiences have moved on over recent years. It was not so long ago that the eyes of the classic purists would roll at the thought of a John Lennon song rubbing shoulders with the ‘art songs’ of Gustav Mahler and Edward Elgar. And rock opera, too!? This would have been too much for a lover of ‘serious’ music to stomach, in the past. Now we are better able to ‘chill’ and just enjoy listening to good music, whatever the genre. Those present at our concert lapped it all up with equal relish. I think the sheer joy of hearing some live music in a culturally deprived part of the world was the overriding emotion.

The event suggested that the residents of the borough need more of the same. There are many other styles of music they would love to hear. The Europa Gallery, in Sutton Central Library is a great, centrally located space which could be used more frequently for music making, and I hope to be able to report in the not-too-distant future that this will be the case. There are other spaces, too, across Sutton, Cheam, Epsom and Banstead, which could host similarly ambitious live music events.

The demand for live music will never die – only tastes change and it is up to groups and programmers to cater for them. Long live new, live music!

Chris Wood is resident composer with Guest House Opera and editor of Epsom, Sutton and Cheam Time & Leisure.

Find out more about Guest House Opera (website under construction)