Here is a list of five things that I believe to be true:

1. Arts audiences are like addicts: we’re after a fix and we’re chasing a feeling. We may not know exactly what that feeling is, or quite how to get there, but that doesn’t stop us from searching. As artists, our job is to create that feeling for audiences.

2. At its best, art can provoke us, move us to tears or laughter, inspire us, change us. At its most benign, art is boring and irrelevant. At its worst, art can perpetuate systems of oppression, racism, and discrimination. All art is political. We’re playing with fire.

3. Other than a relatively small group of enthusiasts and professionals, audiences don’t really care that much about form. We’re animals. We want to feel something. Concert formats are less interesting than feeling like your heart might break in two.

4. The systems that govern the world of professional classical music are not fit for purpose. This is not controversial – for the most part, the ‘Crown Jewels’ of our sector are celebrated heritage institutions where real change is slow and difficult to achieve.
Player agreements, orchestral schedules, touring plans, and financial models were not designed for the world that we live in – a world of widespread digital content, streaming services, climate change, and rapidly declining funding. They must change. This will be difficult and painful.

5. Arts organisations that flourish over the next 20 years are likely to be target led rather than product led - that is, they will focus on what they want to achieve rather than what they need to present.

Five years ago, when I co-founded Manchester Collective, I had a very abstract understanding of these ideas. My training was as an orchestral cellist and as I rehearsed, performed, and toured, it wasn’t part of my job to think about audiences or contracts. I practised and got paid.

As the years rolled on however, two thoughts started to take hold in my mind. Firstly, the music that I was performing tended to be drawn from an incredibly narrow selection of repertoire. Secondly, the audience for that music was persistently white, educated, middle class, and middle-aged.

I met our future Music Director, Rakhi Singh – at the time, she was Assistant Leader at the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra – and found that she felt the same way. We started Manchester Collective in response to our mutual frustrations with the classical world. Two years later, I stopped playing the cello altogether, devoting myself fully to what I see as a necessary correction to the status quo. The world of professional classical music is not a diverse one. It’s not an inclusive one. But it can be.

One of my colleagues, the brilliant James Murphy at the Royal Philharmonic Society, talks about the difference between caretakers and curators of classical music. A caretaker preserves and cherishes existing work, guarding a legacy. A curator creates new meaning by arranging existing and new work in a particular way. We all have to ask ourselves whether we want to be caretakers or curators of our art form. Both are important, but if we only exist to preserve the past then it’s all too easy to find ourselves out of step with the present.

At Manchester Collective, we create radical human experiences inspired by the music that we love. We do not have a commitment to any particular canon of musical work, ensemble structure, or concert format. Our goal is usually to shape the subjective experience of each individual audience member in the most compelling way we can.

This means that our work often looks quite different to the kind of thing that you might expect a classical organisation to be producing. We spent the back end of 2020 creating a show called ‘Dark Days, Luminous Nights’. Inspired by a journey along a ruined waterway, the show is part-exhibition, part-installation: a tapestry of music, film, dance and photography. Music is at the heart of the show – it’s built around a work by Edmund Finnis, commissioned and recorded by the Collective – but it’s much more than a recording or a concert piece.

The number of people that might engage with our work in the future far outstrips the current ticket-buying audience for classical music in the UK. Opening up our art form is not just the right thing to do – it’s good business. We created 'Dark Days' in Manchester and Salford, and the show premieres at The White Hotel, an ex-MOT garage in the shadow of Strangeways Prison. Although the show will go on to tour internationally, in many ways we created it for the people of Salford. The first run of the show (40 hour-long slots across five days) sold out in less than a week.

One of the biggest challenges that we face is finding the right words to describe the value in what we produce. Music education in schools has been decimated over the last 20 years – we can no longer expect that our prospective audiences will understand or care about the work that we create. It’s our responsibility to make the case for this art-form with empathy and grace. Internally, our guiding principle for good copy is to ask: “How would you share something that you love with someone that you care about?”.

In order to help us achieve our mission, Manchester Collective are guided by five commitments. These commitments are not to the public – they’re for us, to keep us on track.

This is what we promise to do:

- We commit to create relevant, compelling new work inspired by the music that we love.

- We commit to serve a wide range of audiences who may not be familiar with the music that we perform.

- We commit to grow as a Collective; to take risks, learn, and experiment, and for that cumulative growth to inform and shape our work in the future.

- We commit to tell musical stories that take us and our audiences out of our comfort zones.

- We commit to train and empower a new, diverse generation of subversive artists and managers.

I’d like to hear what my friends and colleagues in the sector are committing to. We run orchestras, festivals, quartets, and opera companies. What are we trying to achieve? What is the new world that we want to create? The first step is deciding to change.

Adam Szabo is Chief Executive and Co-Founder of Manchester Collective. The group mark their fifth anniversary in 2021 and their first album, ‘The Centre is Everywhere’, is out now. You can listen to it in the Player below.