‘Music can be everything’: Aurora Orchestra’s Jane Mitchell on the narratives around classical music

The Aurora Orchestra, who are playing at Oxford’s Schwarzman Centre on the 19^th June, are best known for performing their orchestral repertoire from memory. For anyone who’s familiar with classical concerts, this is a huge departure from the norm – orchestral players usually sit demurely in their seats, eyes flitting between their scores and the conductor. It is especially remarkable considering the difficulty of their repertoire, which consists of pieces such as Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring and Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5. But, as Jane Mitchell, their principal flautist and artistic director, tells me, performing by heart actually affords a kind of security: “ninety people with that much knowledge in their heads is actually safer than ninety pieces of paper that might fall off the music stand.” 

Learning the pieces by heart allows for a more instinctual, bodily knowledge of the music, “an intensity and an energy and this kind of ownership that the players feel… we know where the piece is coming from and where it’s going.” As an audience member once remarked, it is as if “there are no bar lines.” Their immersive performance style, where players can move around the stage, allows for relationships between players to be forged that might not have formed in a traditional orchestra setting: “one of the only jobs where you literally sit in the same chair for twenty years next to one person.” 

Another way that Aurora departs from the norms of orchestral performance is in their collaborations with actors, using the medium of ‘Orchestral Theatre’ to tell stories about composers. Jane writes the scripts for these performances. She is conscious of the fact that Aurora are, in a way, “paying homage to the canon, and it’s all of those men who’ve been made statues of”. Music history is often constructed as a narrative following the lives and works of a series of ‘great men’. Nevertheless, Aurora has “a real desire to tell their stories in a new way which brings in other voices”, not being afraid to “look at sides of [the composers] that are a bit ridiculous.” Jane suggests that their presentation in fact brings the audience “closer to the composer” by emphasising the more human elements of them, like the grumpy and irrational side of Beethoven.

These ways in which the Aurora Orchestra tries to present classical music differently are part of their more general ethos: that classical music is for everyone. As Jane describes, the orchestra has come up against many practical barriers in doing this: most obviously, it can be really hard to draw in audiences when many people see classical music as being cordoned off for a cultural elite. Jane has also made huge efforts to introduce classical music into educational settings, which can also be made difficult by material barriers at every level – Jane tells me how even when Aurora has offered free tickets to a school, many can’t pay for the bus to get to the concert.

So why is it so important for music to have a role in education? As Jane says, music “can be everything” – it “can be about words, and writing, and counting,” and on a more fundamental level, it is about “understanding what being human is”. This is becoming increasingly more important amid “well-founded fears about effects of screen time” on young children. As such, Aurora play interactive concerts that are specifically aimed at introducing children to classical music, such as Mahler and the Mountain Adventure, and Beethoven and the Dinosaurs. Jane has also developed a free programme called Aurora Classroom, aiming to break down further barriers by adapting the ideas explored in their concerts to a classroom setting. 

The Aurora Orchestra have made waves within classical music by presenting a familiar repertoire in a completely new way – more human, more mobile, more dramatic. They will be performing Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony by heart at 7pm on Friday the 19^th June at the Sohmen Concert Hall at the Schwarzman Centre for Humanities. Last tickets can be found on the Schwarzman Centre website, with discounts for students. The orchestra will also be doing a free pop-up performance in the Atrium of the Schwarzman at 4:45 pm on the same day, which is worth coming along to if you don’t fancy paying for a ticket (and useful to be aware of if you’re going to be there revising).