Another reminder of the government’s ability to create bad – or at least confusing – news from what otherwise seemed like a good thing: at the end of last month, their announcement of tax relief for orchestras looked for all the world like a piece of genuinely welcome news for classical music and musicians in the country, bringing the orchestral and music-ensemble sector in line with the tax breaks that film, theatre, animation and video games already receive. So far, so good.
But as the Incorporated Society of Musicians have revealed, it’s the small print that counts. Or in fact, pretty big print: the government’s definition of what it is that constitutes an ensemble’s eligibility to qualify for the tax relief is, it turns out, weirdly prescriptive.
Here’s the clincher: “To qualify, the majority of performances for which relief is being claimed must be played by a musical ensemble consisting of 14 or more performers and must include players drawn from each of the following four sections: string instruments, woodwind instruments, brass instruments and percussion instruments.” That’s fine if you’re the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, but not so good if you’re a contemporary music ensemble, a brass band, a choir, a string orchestra or even some chamber orchestras. Larger orchestras themselves could fall foul of this rule: play too many programmes without a percussion section, too many works for strings alone, or indulge too often in, say, Stravinsky’s Symphonies of Wind Instruments and, ludicrously, even the Northern Sinfonia or the London Symphony Orchestra could find themselves on the wrong side of the tax-break fence.
It turns on whether the government wants to create a level playing field for ensemble music-making as a whole or restrict the benefits to a bureaucratically small-minded definition of an orchestra. The consultancy on the proposals is open until 5 March, so get your replies in soon – and let’s hope the government’s heart is in the right place in wanting to support music ensembles in general, and that they will change this unhelpful restriction on what it is that makes a Westminster-approved “orchestra”.
