Brexit poses major challenges for music performers and the public

Google the word “Brexit” and the world’s best-known search engine will give you its top selection from the 183 million webpages it has found.

Start refining the search and you will find that the phrase “Brexit and the arts” accounts for 1.42 per cent of those results, a higher proportion than “Brexit and tourism”, “Brexit and travel”, “Brexit and farming” and “Brexit and agriculture” but about the same as “Brexit and Italy”.

The general perception is that Brexit will be bad for the arts. No one can yet tell how bad, because no one knows in detail what Brexit will actually entail, but the political posturing continues on both sides of the Brexit divide.

It’s an appalling vista. On one side is a country whose political establishment, left and right, allowed it to vote in a referendum with little real forethought about or preparation for the consequences of Brexit. On the other there is a political union that introduced a common currency without taking all the necessary precautions and then, when that currency came under threat, steered a course governed by ideology rather than common sense.

Who would want to identify with either side?

Freedom of movement

Freedom of movement and access to the single market are going to be key stumbling blocks in the negotiations between Britain and the EU. For music and musicians in Ireland, you might think that this would be a nonissue. Individuals and groups in a post-Brexit world should surely be able to move as freely between Ireland and continental EU countries as they do now.

Not so. Just look at orchestras and ensembles. There is a significant number of British citizens working in the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra, the RTÉ Concert Orchestra and the Irish Chamber Orchestra. All of the members of the Vanbrugh String Quartet are British, as is the artistic director of the Crash Ensemble. In the worst of post-Brexit scenarios, British citizens based in Ireland could face the same scenarios and red tape as other non-EU citizens when travelling to work in France, Spain, Greece or Bulgaria.

It is sobering to remember how things used to be and how they still are for non-EU citizens wishing to work in the EU.

As a student I spent a summer on an Italian government scholarship studying chamber music at the Accademia Musicale Chigiana in Siena. Ireland was already a member of the EEC, but registering with the police was a time-consuming affair. It involved more than half a day in a long queue while a policeman, the world’s slowest one-finger typist, went patiently, letter by letter, through the names and addresses of foreign students, his head swivelling slowly between the filled-out form and the typewriter as he took an age to make people’s stay in Tuscany fully legal. I had no option but to follow the rules. The completed registration was required by the bank for me to collect the scholarship money.

A few years ago, when I interviewed Macedonian pianist Simon Trpceski, a non-EU citizen, he was still dealing with dreary form-filling for work permits to allow him to perform in Ireland and other EU countries. This meant that, on a country-by-country basis, he had to deliver or send his passport to embassies in order to secure documentation essential for his career. At the time of our interview, which took place in London, it was touch and go whether he would get the necessary papers in time for his concert in Dublin.

For years after Ireland joined the EU, the government levied a punitive excise duty on LPs and later CDs. This meant that anyone buying records from abroad in those pre-internet days faced hefty charges before the postman would hand over a packet, just as generous Christmas presents from the US continue to suffer the same fate year after year. Journalists were obliged to obtain an official exemption from the duty so that recordings sent from abroad for review would not occasion an upfront payment to An Post.

Dubious benefits

If you are pro-Brexit, of course, the prospect of a kind of protectionism that will make British musicians and composers, and British artists in general, easier to employ than non-nationals might well be appealing. The changes would cut both ways, with equal and opposite “benefits” in other countries, where British artists would no longer find it so easy to work.

The biggest losers, of course, would be the general public. The EU’s freedom of movement and labour created myriad openings that had not existed before. It’s hard to predict what the outcome of even the partial reversal of that freedom between Britain and the rest of the EU might be. However, the reported rise in racist incidents in Britain after the Brexit vote was not widely foreseen. It is as ill an omen for the arts as it is for society in general.

mdervan@irishtimes.com