Hayley: What would you say are some of the biggest misconceptions about classical music? Are there any that you previously fell for which you now spend your professional life trying to dispel?

Sebastian: It’s difficult. I think it’s seen as an elitist artform and I’d be lying if… It is prohibitively expensive. You have to learn an instrument and be immersed in that. It is a highfalutin artform that is traditionally and currently, I would say, perceived and positioned as not for the working class. I don’t think that’s what the artform is. I think the artform is… It’s just music, right? And I mean that not in a derogatory sense but in the most freeing and liberating sense. It’s incredibly beautiful. Hearing an orchestra play is beyond anything else, you know. It’s totally different to seeing a band and it’s an incredibly amazing and emotive artform. There are pieces that you’ll latch onto more [than others] and certain things that you’ll like and things that you won’t, and you’ll go through times where certain things you might not have liked you eventually end up liking. Like any genre, if you’re interested and have an open ear, you’ll find parts of it that you like. 

What’s the misconception of it… Unfortunately, I feel that there isn’t a misconception of it, if that makes sense? But I would say for the music itself, that it is incredibly beautiful and it is for everyone. Do you know what I mean? I don’t know if I should say that!

I think so. You’re saying that it’s perceived accurately—if not optimally—at the moment, but also that maybe you see it as part of your role to change that?

Totally. I totally see [it as] that. Something that I talk about a lot is how I think classical music is really interested in saying ‘This is for you, this is for everyone’, but what I’m really interested in and how I think you get a total revolution is actually by saying ‘This isn’t just for you, this isn’t just for the classical music fans’. I see a lot of organisations—and we do it as well, there’s definitely space for it—go out and play in interesting spaces, but I feel like it’s more interesting to have young, hip kids in Stoller Hall or The Bridgewater Hall. What I love the idea of doing is getting it to a point where someone who’s been going to classical music gigs all their life turns around and they’re like ‘Shit, I don’t recognise this’. But in a good way! In a way of being like ‘Oh god, maybe this isn’t just for me’. Then you’re tearing down all of the elitism—some of which I think is intrinsic in the artform and some of which is perception—but you’re taking it down from the inside.

When did you personally start to connect with, or appreciate the classical genre?

My parents don’t play instruments and they’re not fans of classical music. They’re very omnivorous when it comes to music, but I grew up with The Beatles, Neil Young, that sort of stuff. But I also remember at a young age—do you remember those monthly magazines that you could subscribe to? There was one called [The] Music Box and every month you’d get a cassette tape that would have a story on it set to a famous piece of classical music. So little Sebby, when he was, like, five, was getting lured in by the stories, then getting smacked round the face with beautiful classics like The Planets. Rhapsody in Blue I remember was on a story, and Bolero and Peer Gynt... All the classics, you know. That was my first memory of classical music, so to speak. It’s that idea of inviting someone in using something that they already like and [pairing it with] something that they might not expect. It’s a really great way to present things.

Did you study music at any point?

I studied Chemistry because I was good at it, but I always wanted to work in the arts. I really regret studying chemistry. But I really fought to end up in a job in the arts, and now here I am.

The relationship with the Camerata came about when I was working for NTS [as Station Manager]. Because it was a sister or a satellite station, that gig was only part-time, so I was working for Common & Co as well as events lead for a group of bars in Manchester, Common being one of them, as well as Port Street and Indy Man Beer Con. 

I booked the Camerata to play at Common a couple of times and [thought] ‘How cool is this? We’ve got this really adventurous orchestra that’s like ‘Yeah, fuck it, we’re going to play at your bar’!’ I kept in touch and said ‘If you ever have anything going, let me know’. I actually applied for a few jobs there and didn’t get them, but then they got in touch and I joined the marketing team. I didn’t have a marketing background.

I didn’t go to uni, but I have a total fascination with how big a role those who did feel it played in getting them to where they are now. Do you think a more overtly relevant degree would have been helpful in your career in any way? Sometimes, I feel like my lack of degree can be a bit of a barrier when applying for roles.

I think I regret doing Chemistry because deep down I’m interested in the arts. I’m an artist in the broadest sense of the word. I literally wonder what my life would be like if I did a fine art degree, or music or something like that. It might have been totally different. But… Are there barriers, was that your question?

I think sometimes a barrier for me is not having been to uni, never mind not having studied a relevant degree.

I think that’s nonsense, first of all. I think my special power is that I come from outside the artform. 

A really good example of this is a videographer we work with, Jay. He’s amazing. His background is that he dropped out of uni and ended up making videos for the UK’s biggest drum and bass label. When I was searching for a freelancer, I put something out on my socials and this kid rocks up—he’s not a kid, he’s 28—and says one of my friends says you’re looking for a videographer. He had his shit so together and came from such an outsider perspective, that I was [instinctively] like ‘I want you. I want you because you’re different, I want you because the quality of your work is great and it’s not classical focused at all’. That’s the reason that our videos look the best, because no one else is recruiting someone whose mainstay is in the club, capturing high energy moments. He just gets that and instantly injects that into all of our video stuff. So I totally hear you on the barrier point, but you don’t want to work for any organisation who sees things in that traditional manner anyway. 

“I think my special power is that I come from outside the artform.” 

Because what could initially seem like a mismatch is actually where the magic comes from?

Totally. It’s really helpful to have experts as well, but yeah.

As for Camerata as a brand and what we’re all about, we’re really interested in making the artform as accessible for everyone. All our comms are bright and inviting, and we talk in a very personable manner, but also with authority and [a sense of] knowledge. It’s meant to be welcoming and demystifying. I mean, it’s beautiful music that everyone should go and listen to, so I want everyone to go and listen to it. And I want everyone to feel like it’s for them.

When you were younger, what was your ‘in’ to music? Is there a particular piece of music you remember really connecting with, or were you a part of any particular movements or subcultures?

When I was younger, I wasn’t massively into music, but then I started getting into chart garage and then UK garage more broadly. And then there was definitely a moment when I heard Smashing Pumpkins on MTV [for the first time]. I remember hearing Tonight, Tonight and seeing the video for it. I had the song stuck in my head, but this was before Spotify, so I couldn’t fucking remember [or find out its name]. Then I think about six months later, I found out what it was and one of my friends—this girl called Sally Cummings, I still remember her name—said that she had the CD. She lent it to me and I was like ‘Yep, this is it’ and then everything changed. I was just a total indie kid [from that point on].

I met some other really cool guys who were the year above us. They all had really long hair and everybody called them The Big Hair Gang. But they were really cool because they were really into rock and roll, so they were all about The Velvets and Beat poetry and New York rock and roll, and this was around the time that The Strokes were blowing up [too]. These guys were really die hard romantics, into Burroughs and all that sort of shit. It was great. It really ignited a thirst and appreciation of diversity and the slightly more esoteric [within me], as well as just how visceral and affecting all art can be. From that, [there was] uni and clubbing and DJing and NTS. I’ve got a really big record collection now and it is super esoteric and I’m really good friends with Tom who runs All Night Flight records, a really amazing record store… I just became plugged in, you know? I played in bands and I was booking bands and DJs… I just became super plugged in and that was it, I guess.

Was the live side of things a big part of that? I saw you were in a band, Young British Artists.

Yeah, of course. I used to go and see loads of bands, and I used to play a lot too. [Young British Artists] toured and we did 6 Music and at one point, I had grand designs of becoming… Oh, you know, I wouldn’t even want to reference a band. Playing the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury and all that stuff. We never quite did that, but we did get to play some festivals and tour.

When did the band start? Had you been in any bands before that?

Other than a band in high school, which I don’t think really counts… But maybe it does. I met most of my bandmates when I went to uni aside from our drummer Ben, who I’ve been friends with since I was 16. Uni was finishing and we were all like 'What shall we do?’. I was studying in Leeds but no one really felt really tied to Leeds, London was, at that point, just starting to get expensive… In comparison to now, it was probably really cheap, but even then you were like ‘I dunno, do I want to do that?’. It’s not like I had a set career path or anything. So, we [decided to] move to Manchester and my friend Ben, who was studying in Norwich, came up too and we all moved into a house together with a couple of other guys and the band started out of that really. We did it for about seven or eight years.

Do you feel like that experience changed your relationship to music at all?

I definitely realised that from a performer's perspective and a business perspective, it’s totally a different game. You have to question why you’re doing it a little bit. Obviously, we would have loved to have gotten really famous and become the next U2 or whatever—not that they were a reference point—but it’s nonsense. It’s really hard. And then it’s like, ‘Well why are you doing it?’ We just loved it, and still love it. 

I was also running parties and was DJing a lot [at the time] too. DJing is fun but it’s nowhere near as good as the rush of playing a gig, no matter how big or small. Everyone’s together and it’s fucking amazing. It’s that sort of ‘visceralness’ that I was talking about that I saw in The Velvets or my Big Hair Gang friends, wigging out at parties and waking me up listening to The Flaming Lips super early in the morning. There’s this immediacy music provides—that art provides in general—which nothing else does. It’s intoxicating.

“There’s this immediacy music provides—that art provides in general—which nothing else does. It’s intoxicating.”

How does that feeling manifest for you when you’re working on events as opposed to performing at them? Does that buzz come from a different place?

It’s definitely a different place. I’ve thought a lot about this and I’m an only child, so I think I’ve always liked sharing things. I wonder if I had to make friends, therefore I was [always] like ‘Oh look at this, let’s both [look at this]’. I feel like a well run event is a form of artistic curation though, right? I really liked being able to pull strings and bring things together to make something happen. I really enjoyed that. It doesn’t quite scratch the creative itch [in the same way] and I often think it’d be fun to start another band. I mean, I’ve got no time obviously as a family man and I’m 39, but I miss that. [But] I think if you make an event and it’s well programmed and well marketed and well thought out—all elements of it—I’d say that’s a piece of art. I guess it’s like DJing, right? Going and seeing Ricardo Villalobos or Donato Dozzy changed my life. It’s less performative, but it’s there.

You mentioned your time at NTS. Obviously, the station prides itself on broadcasting a wide range of genres and musicians, but on its surface, that job seems a world away from what you’re doing today! Do you think the two overlap more than one might think?

I think they do and I think it’s that curation element again. We were curating the station, asking ‘Who do we want on, what’s the interesting stuff?’. I remember I managed to get Calvin Johnston on who runs K Records, this indie hero who runs a really cool label. [At the time,] he was touring on his own, doing some small gigs. That was the great thing about NTS, they would pick these people who were in relative obscurity and say ‘No, this is fucking great music, we’re going play it and you should listen to it’ and I love that. That was so beautiful about NTS. It was always about, for me, trying to find those more esoteric things. We were also programming events, so I was running events at Tate Liverpool and Yorkshire Sculpture International Festival. 

I actually ended up doing something with [Manchester] composer and conductor, Jack Sheen. We did a John Cage piece in The Lowry and broadcast it on NTS. It was like an hour of people eating carrots, doing the ironing, smashing pianos and his conducting was him moving his hands in a circle for an hour, as it’s written in Cage’s score. Everyone was in separate rooms, reading sheet music, but it was this beautiful thing and it was great radio. In the early days, before Charlie Bones started his breakfast show—and he was always late—they’d just have a microphone outside and you’d just hear sounds of the dawn. Again, there was intimacy there and then he’d [show up and] ease you into the day, it was great. I have great memories of listening to NTS in the early days. 

So it’s that thing of curation and picking ideas, and then also with Camerata, I am in marketing, but I have done some bits of programming as well. [For example,] we did a show which was Music for 18 Musicians [by Steve Reich] and Space Afrika, which was one of my ideas. We did the music of Arthur Russell, which was another one of my ideas. The organisation is really open, so if I’ve got something I want to push, it’s great. 

Even just from the marketing side of things [though], it’s back to this idea of curating, asking ‘What is this organisation about and where are we going to take our reference points from?’. Obviously, we’re steeped in this beautiful history and we’re really proud of that, but also, we’re going to get this kid who makes drum and bass videos to come and film the orchestra, so you get that energy and that immediacy that you wouldn’t get if another [ensemble] presented it. 

And in terms of that curated element, how big or small a part of that is trying to reach new audiences?

Audiences is tricky. Because what Camerata does is so diverse, we do see our audience switch from show to show. The people who go to Mozart—[although] there is a little bit of crossover—don’t go to Hacienda Classical or don’t go to our Festive Happening show. We just did a piece of research in tandem with the University of Manchester where I said ‘Could we do some sort of analysis on our audience where we don’t look at demographics, but [instead, whatever else] unites them?’. What [participants] reflected back about the organisation is that they loved the fact that we were so diverse. They had this interest in everything that we were doing and they liked the diversity of curation. They said they felt like they were part of it, and they really loved that openness.

So, back to your question about attracting audiences… [With] the Space Afrika and Music for 18 Musicians show, fifty percent of the people turned up for the Steve Reich piece and fifty percent of the people turned up for Space Afrika, having never heard Music for 18 Musicians before. That was amazing, because I love both. I spoke to some of those people and they were like ‘Holy shit, that was amazing’, and actually a lot of the classical music people were into Space Afrika [too]. I mean there were naysayers in both camps… No actually, there were less naysayers in the Reich camp. There were some people who came for the Reich who were like ‘Nope, don’t get it’ and that’s fine. They still really appreciated the fact that we programmed it together. So for me, it’s about making sure that you’ve got these touchpoints and these invitations to interact with the organisation, but making sure that everything is presented in a way that [ensures] everyone knows that they’re welcome.

We will be doing really active targeting to reach younger audiences though. The marketing team has been really small for ages—it’s just been me—but we’ve recently expanded and got someone else in and now we’re starting to do lots of fun stuff which I just didn’t have the capacity to do before. We’ve got a poster campaign to attract under 30s coming soon. It’s a bit silly, but it presents everything in a fun way—’Centuries of clout’, ‘It’s like the club but different’—and is going to be all around the city [advertising] £10 tickets for under 30s.

So you’re almost poking fun at yourselves…

Yeah. It’s like, we’re aware of the conceptions of the artform, but what we’re saying is that it’s all bullshit.

And also, ‘We’re just like you’! Personally, I think that’s behind a lot of people’s reluctance to engage with classical music—that the people on stage seem so different to them. The impact of, say, a conductor speaking from the stage in a thick Northern accent or sticking their tongue out would be seismic. A really effective way of breaking that sheen.

This is the reason I love Camerata. Our Music Director, Gabor, does that. He’ll literally be about to start and then he goes ‘Ah yes, I've had this thought’ and turns round and talks to the audience and makes everyone laugh and shares this amazing, beautiful insight—then goes on and kills it with Mozart. It’s super high energy, again with that immediacy that I don’t know if you get from other organisations. Camerata is daring and relentlessly pioneering and willing to position itself in that way, which means that it works great for me. It goes back to your [question] about barriers.

There’s a delicate balance between appearing inviting and approachable to new audiences whilst not alienating those already engaged with you, something I think that the Camerata does a really good job of.  How impactful do you think language—and consumer comms more broadly—are in moving towards this aim?

100%. I don’t come from a communications background but I think I’m naturally a pretty good communicator. I’m also dyslexic, I found out last year, so words are like a fucking achilles heel for me. I’ve got great thoughts and ideas, but sentence structure and stuff like that can really kill me. My god, the amount of typos and absolute bullshit I’ve put on the internet is embarrassing and for a while, that used to get me down. But actually knowing that I've got [dyslexia] has really made me not sweat it and really focus instead on what I am strong with. 

The more my role’s developed, the more I’ve become really passionate about messaging and tone and presentation and it’s really focused my precision on this actually, to be very deliberate about our word choices. I mean, sometimes we’re deliberately not deliberate and it’s really casual. You’ll write something and you’ll be like ‘Yep, that’s great, it’s really funny, it’s got everything, it’s authoritative’, but sometimes you do have to tweak your language. It does matter. And it’s really hard. Writing is really hard. To actually say something well and succinctly is really fucking hard. But there’s beauty in that as well. I’m a visual person and I want the brand to be inviting in the way that we [visually] present ourselves, but also our tone of voice and how we communicate on the written page is really key as well. Even though that was an achilles heel—or still is, I guess—it’s also something I’m really proud of. We’ve just had a bit of research done by the university, and to have it reflected back to me that people actually love the tone and feel emotionally invested in the organisation, that’s a fucking dream! 

That must have been lovely praise to receive!

It’s a really great piece of flattery to get, it’s lovely. Especially for someone who doesn’t come from a comms background, who doesn’t really know what they’re doing in marketing and really is still learning. [To get that feedback that] ‘Actually, no, I've been doing it for five years, I do know what I’m doing’.

Tell me more about the Camerata’s recent collaboration with Cloudwater Brewery to mark the 24/25 season. I think it’s genius! It feels fun and playful, and does a great job of subtly grounding what can often feel like a ‘lofty’ genre.

It’s context again, isn’t it? Like I said, I used to work for Common & Co and we used to run a beer festival called Indy Man Beer Con. That can has been in the pipeline since before the pandemic. Paul who runs Cloudwater is so amazing, and supports so many great things across Manchester and I just knew he’d love it and he’d do it—and he did. It was me dragging my heels to make that happen. We actually got tapped up by Track Brewery to do one with them. They wanted to put on a concert with us, and I love Stefan and I love Track, but I was like ‘Hey, I can’t do it because I’ve already promised this to Cloudwater’ and I felt passionately that I’d got to keep to my word.

What I loved about it was, I wanted the beer to be about something bigger than us. That’s the reason it was called Support Your Local Orchestra. It’s a big message saying actually orchestras do loads of fucking great stuff that you don’t know about—orchestras are for everyone—and so instantly dispelling all of the bullshit that [surrounds] the artform. But then it’s intrinsically about us as well. From a competitive and selfish point of view, it’s like go support your local orchestra, but actually Camerata’s the dog’s bollocks because we just made a beer! It was really great. They distributed it nationally and I think it even went to Europe. Two hundred places up and down the UK had it and it had really great messaging on it, and it was a really great way to flex our brand in a very public way. It was just a really fun thing to do and people responded really well to it. It was cool.

On that same theme of grounding the music in things people might already know or have a connection to, how essential do you feel it is for the orchestra to perform at venues other than traditional concert halls? And by extension, to collaborate with artists who generally work within other genres?

Totally important. You can’t just say ‘This is for everyone, this is for everyone, this is for everyone… By the way, it’s [also] just some really weird shit that only I’m into’. You have to say, ‘Oh you like this? How interesting. Have you listened to this?’. You have to be on a journey [with people]. If you played young Seb Pauline Oliveros, you might have scared him. You have to say ‘Hey Seb, you’re into stories, here are some stories. Oh, by the way, I’m going to sneak in some Peer Gynt’. 

So kind of meeting people where they are?

Yeah, it’s meeting people where they are and inviting them in.

Tell me more about your Music Cafés. How does that fit in with what the Camerata do in a wider sense?

That’s key to the organisation and key to what we’re about. I think within the artform, there’s a lot of rhetoric around ‘We should just play classical music, by the way no one’s coming to our concerts, why do we have to do all this community nonsense’. There’s a lot of rhetoric around that, and sometimes from people pretty high up. It’s total bollocks. Music is this incredible vehicle that has the ability to really improve people’s lives. Transform people’s lives. We’re a sector leader in music and dementia now. It’s intrinsic to Camerata’s DNA. 

From a comms perspective, when I first came in, the organisation struggled with this fractured, split personality thing. But actually, we’ve spent a lot of time on our messaging and saying ‘No, you know what actually we’re really fucking proud of Hacienda, we’re really fucking proud of our Mozart and the fact that we do it with some of the best in the world. And our Music Cafés, we’re really fucking proud of that too. Not only that, but all of that shit together informs everything and makes us better than if we were to just focus on one thing or the other’.

“Music is this incredible vehicle that has the ability to really improve people’s lives. Transform people’s lives.”

I imagine that working on things like the Music Cafés is such an uplifting reminder of the power of music, and its role in creating and maintaining community. In what ways have you found community through music, both throughout your life more generally but also through your work? It’s not the done thing in this industry to call it ‘networking’, but the people you know and the people you collaborate with are such a huge part of both where you are and where you ultimately end up.

We do this really great programme called Camerata 360, [through which] we start training up the next generation of musicians in all aspects of our work and the impact it makes, because we [believe] that all of the work we do—be that working with AFRODEUTCHE, whatever—will make you a better musician, full stop. 

I was chatting to this guy, James—this amazing composer who’s leaving the scheme—and he was [asking] ‘How do we get stuff going?’. I said ‘Look, you’ve just got to start doing shit’. You’ve got to get people who are on the same page and say ‘Listen, I want to do this thing. I think it’d be really fun, [but] we’re not going to make any money from it or if we do, we’ll split it fair. Are you down?’. You can instantly suss out what people’s motives are at that point, because they might be like ‘Oh no, I’m not selling myself too cheap’. But, I mean, let’s get real, you’re not fucking Yo-Yo Ma, do you know what I mean? You could be one day, but you’ve got this great opportunity at this stage of your life where you’ve got [a window in which] to play, and do these great, amazing things. 

That was the whole thing with [my club night,] Seb Making Sense. We were booking artists like Bill Kouligas to come and play at Common! We didn’t have loads of money, but it was for a friend and he knew us... You get plugged in and it’s like ‘Oh yeah, [those guys are] safe so we’ll do it’. I mean, [Bill’s platform] Pan were nowhere near as big as they are now, but he did it for a [modest fee] and a bunch of beers because he was at the same point in his career [as us]. He gets it and he’s building something, but he’s not doing it because he wants to build something, he’s doing it because he fucking loves his label. It’s that. It’s not the end goal, it’s the practice. It’s your purpose.

That’s a common thread that I’ve noticed from speaking to people for this series. So many of them have started some sort of creative project purely for the love of it—or simply to give it a go—with no guarantee of reward.

You have to, right? Or else I’m going to call you a phoney. I think you can see it, but I’m pretty savage like that and there’s times that I've probably been wrong.

Especially given that you spent part of your career performing on stage, do you ever find yourself feeling ‘far away’—both physically and/or metaphorically—from the actual music while working? How do you reconnect to your passion for the field if or when you find it waning?

There’s a lot of creativity in my job and I work for a really creative organisation, so that ticks all my boxes. 

But with regards to music, there was this amazing moment when I stopped working at NTS. A couple of months after I’d left, I put a record on and I started to think like ‘Let’s search for some music’ and I heard something and thought ‘Oh, this is sick, this is great’ and [I realised that] I was listening to it totally without that thing of ‘Shall we get them on NTS? I wonder if I can contact them, they’d make a good show’—this whole thought process that was attached to that work. I could just enjoy [music] again. Because actually—even though it is very creative and it’s for a creative organisation—there is now some separation between what I do for work and music as a whole.

How much do you feel your experiences have shaped your work and potentially vice versa?

My experiences beforehand definitely shaped my work at Camerata, because that’s my superpower—that I come at it from an outside perspective. 

What Camerata’s done for me is… Orchestral land is really fastidious and it’s a really precise artform, which has really exposed my achilles heel and [resulted in] me finding out that I’m dyslexic. I mean, I kind of knew in the back of my mind, but I wasn’t looking for a diagnosis or anything. My boss was so supportive. He was like ‘I think you should get tested’. It just made me aware and made me focus. It means I have to focus my spidey senses in that area, because it’s not something that comes naturally to me. 

I also think there was a shift from being unconsciously competent to consciously competent. Because, like I said, I am a natural communicator and I brought all these great skills from outside, but now I can actually [pinpoint that] the reasons why what we do is so great. For instance, because we’ve got Jay, our videographer, making our films.

You’ve explored so many different pockets of the music industry already, but are there any areas of marketing—or the industry more broadly—that you’d still like to explore?

Yeah. I’ve got something I’d love to do, but I’m not going to say it. I don’t think you should speak too much about your ideas, but I want to stay in the arts. And when I say there’s something I want to do, it’s with the Camerata. I’ve been there for five years and I don’t feel like I need to hurry and move on.

Maybe to rephrase the question then, do you think it’s important to stay open-minded when it comes to your career? To stay open to new opportunities and thoroughly explore wherever you are?

It’s bullshit. Don’t stay in your lane. I mean, do everything with kindness and don’t tread on anyone’s toes. But we’re a small organisation. It’s super collaborative and I love that. That's how you learn and grow, isn’t it? That’s how the magic happens.

You’ve got to stay interested and you’ve got to stay switched on. I guess that’s something else from the Seb Making Sense days—we were hungry to know what was up. I still am. It’s different, I’m not as plugged in... I mean, when I was running NTS, I was so plugged in. I knew everything that was going on in the city, I knew all the DJs, it was part of the job. I’m not necessarily plugged in in that way [these days], but I’m plugged in in a different way. And you’ve got to stay hungry and stay interested.