Classical Review: A web of support

Published on Thursday 11 December 2008 19:26

PETER Gregson was hardly a household name prior to emerging last month as a surprise recipient of a Spirit of Scotland Award. Even now, with the memory of the awards ceremony still fresh in the public mind, the 21-year-old Edinburgh-born cellist is still largely unknown.

The odds are that that will change. Gregson is something of a maverick, whose prime ambition is to challenge the conservatism of the status quo and explore radical new ways of presenting contemporary classical music to the widest possible audience. It won't happen overnight, but he is a persistent lad whose ability to think "out of the box" and beyond has all the hallmarks of evangelical self-belief.

Gregson is no cellist in the traditional sense. For a start, his favoured instrument is blue – an electronic cello, which he regularly uses in combination with state-of-the-art amplification. In a solo recital last April in Edinburgh's Greyfriars Kirk – a programme that included his quirky electro-acoustic realisation of Tallis's 40-part "surround-sound" motet Spem in Alium – he sat encircled by space-age Eclipse speakers, provided by the electronics company for that particular project.

Similar examples of his performance style are viewable on YouTube, including the Spem Fantasia, written by composer Thomas Hewitt Jones, one of many young composers with whom Gregson is pursuing fascinating new directions in electro-acoustic performance. Others include Philip Sheppard, Martin Suckling and Max Richter.

The place you're most likely to find Gregson is on the internet. As someone whose recent studies at London's Royal Academy of Music expanded to encompass an online collaborative transatlantic project with Boston's prestigious MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), he is completely in touch with the sharp edge of technology.

That collaboration brought him into contact with composer Tod Machover's visionary HyperInstrument research programme which, when I visited it eight years ago, centred on the interests of international cellist Yo Yo Ma and violinist Joshua Bell, who were helping Machover develop an electronic stringed instrument so sophisticated it could interact to remarkably subtle degrees with the player's physiology.

Much of these developments – in particular the refinement of the HyperBow – are what have fascinated Gregson and driven him towards a style of performance and an ethereally-captivating style of music that lends itself naturally to web-based exposure. He is now about to embark on a collaboration with Stanford University's SoundWIRE project, which will see him link up from his parents' Edinburgh home with musicians across the Atlantic, the result to be broadcast live via the internet.

Other imminent projects include a concert in Edinburgh's Ingleby Gallery, which sprang from Gregson's chance meeting with owner Richard Ingleby at the Spirit of Scotland dinner. "I was starting to plan concerts in diverse venues where there would be more freedom of presentation, and in which I could recontextualise the concert experience for a modern audience," he says. He was instantly attracted by the gallery's "fantastic shape and acoustic".

Part of that recontextualisation hinges on internet screening. "Look at Coldplay and how they have managed to do it just right. You simply have to treat music-making like a business and listen to what the audience will say," Gregson argues. "Take the current demand for classical music compared to the act of concert attendance which is at an-all time low. If you look at Blast FM or YouTube under pianist Martha Argerich, you'll notice that her Prokofiev performances attracted 50,000 views, and her Mozart concerto 30,000. If packaged correctly, classical music is still an interesting and exciting industry."

Not that Gregson would ever support the move away from live attendance at concerts. "But that's no longer the only way for artists to engage with audiences. Location is no longer an issue," he says, citing the fact that people from Canada watched his Greyfriars Kirk performance. "Why shouldn't I be able to watch a concert from New York's Carnegie Hall from my home in London?"

Central to his upcoming Word on the Wall project – which opens at the Ingleby Gallery before arriving in London at the former warehouse venue Village Underground – is Gregson's intention, in collaboration with digital agencies, to design an interface that will allow both live and online audiences to engage with what he is doing.

"I'm happy to do a concert 1850-wise, with some folk sitting in the expensive seats and others not, but I don't think that's what they want," he argues, with the intention of finding out. "People will tell you exactly what they think via the internet. The e-mails I've received since winning the Spirit of Scotland award have been fantastic, asking really interesting questions about what I've been doing."

It will be interesting to see what kind of long-term following Gregson attracts in his quest to broaden the net for audiences. The world of classical music has generally resisted change. But it's happened in the recording world, where downloading is fast becoming the norm. How soon before internet concert-going catches up?

If anyone knows the power of the internet, Gregson does. It has proved a winner for him on several occasions. His first web broadcast was in 2004, when he was asked to perform a daily dose of Bach before morning prayers during the Church of Scotland's Annual General Assembly.

And winning the Spirit of Scotland Award, he says, was "a triumph of the internet age", adding: "I put every effort into rallying online support and it paid off." At 21, Gregson has the world at his fingertips.

&#149 For more on Peter Gregson's future plans, visit www.petergregson.co.uk