'Going Global' continued.. Is the intention more to provide an increasingly diverse bill of music to LMN's existing audiences, or to use the music to find new audiences as well? ‘It's a bit of both, says Derbyshire, ‘I think that there's a fantastic contribution that world musicians can make to the way that we understand our own multicultural society.' She adds, ‘But yes, we would like to develop the audiences as well and work with new communities around the country, that we maybe don't work with at the moment because we don't have an easy access route into that community.

Ideally what we'd like is for any musician to play in any community venue, so that you'd have western classical musicians performing for a group of people in a Somali refugee community, and you'd also have Somali musicians performing for elderly people in north-west London.
The broadening of LMN's remit away from more western, academic styles of music has already started to pay off. Musician Pavlos Carvahlo is overwhelmingly enthusiastic when asked to describe some of the experiences he and his group The Plastic Chairs (or Plastikes Karekles in Greek) have had whilst performing. Although Carvahlo also fits the more traditional picture of a LMN recruit, having studied cello at the Royal College of Music and previously working for LMN as part of a classical piano trio, it was playing Greek folk music with his friends for fun that encouraged him to give it a second go. Aside from the logistical advantages of playing Greek music – a bouzouki tends to be more portable and robust than a grand piano – it is, he admits, easier to engage an audience than with classical music.
‘It's almost a little bit unnatural: you try and explain this wonderful instrument and beautiful music and you do have to try a bit harder to make it really electric, and that can take a lot out of you.

Whilst with the Greek music, it's written for group occasions, and while no less profound than classical music, it's song and dance music, so from the very first chord you win people over. It's captivating, wherever you're from, whether you know the music or not. So it's much easier to be natural with this music, and you get exhausted because you end up dancing with children for an hour and a half!'
Carvahlo has seen the positive effects of LMN concerts on a variety of different audiences, from the children with serious disabilities whose joyful response surprised their carers, to the young people in a challenging behaviour unit who followed Plastic Chairs' set with an impromptu performance from their own band. When the group played Broadmoor prison, they were understandably apprehensive about their ability to reach out to men convicted of crimes including murder and rape.But the inmates had less reserve about joining in. ‘Within five minutes, we completely forgot who and why we were there and all our criticisms – “should we really be playing here?”
Because by the end, they had one professional drummer, who came and joined us, along with a guy who played really amazing classical guitar. We were just all playing and dancing together, and when it stopped, we got into the car and we were like, “hang on, do you realise who we've just been dancing and playing with?"
Along the way, the musicians gained valuable skills in being sensitive to their audience, says Carvahlo. ‘Sometimes when you're going in, especially with autistic children, they can't take really hard sounds, so we'd play much gentler music. It took a couple of concerts to get used to this – you'd start off with a programme and try to use it all, and gradually you'd get a much wider programme and a much greater sense of when you should use what. For more elderly people as well, we'd play unamplified. You just sort of feel your way.' According to Carvahlo, many young musicians do not consider outreach work as a long-term option. ‘I don't think people go in there thinking that it's a career move. They go in there thinking that it's something good to do where you can earn a bit of extra money and get a few nice opportunities, that it'll help you learn repertoire, and of course you're playing to lovely people and you feel you can do something to help. But however open-minded you are, however much you think you know about outreach work, nothing prepares you for Live Music Now!. Our approach and view of this kind of work completely changed.'
Maybe it's time that music educational establishments started asking themselves why ‘outreach' is more often another term for their adult education classes than an option to be chosen from the study syllabus. Although a few institutions are now offering qualifications in community music, instrumental education in the UK still seems geared towards turning out the concert soloists and orchestral players of tomorrow rather than satisfied and well-rounded community musicians.'
Says Carvahlo, ‘As a classical musician, you're brought up to perform on a concert platform and anything else is generally something you do along the way to help that. And having done LMN, you realise that this can be something that you do alongside performing in the Royal Festival Hall or whatever, or it can be something instead of, because it's all-consuming on all sorts of different levels, and it's so fulfilling in a way that playing on a performing platform isn't,' says Carvahlo, ‘It's very humbling, and it really changes your direction, or it adds different directions to the one-way path that you originally planned on going. It's another world of music that you never knew existed, with people who you might never meet in everyday life and you can learn so much from it.'
As well as the obvious gains in performance experience, Derbyshire notes that as musicians approach the end of their two years with LMN, they usually start cultivating useful contacts to help carry them over the transition to fully-fledged professionals. Well-known names who are LMN ‘graduates' include Andrew Marriner, principal clarinettist for London Symphony Orchestra; guitarist Morgan Szymanski and bassoonist Jeremy Ward, currently head of music at the Royal Welsh College of Music & Drama. Yet with the profoundly involving work that LMN offers, it's inevitable that some will think twice before throwing themselves back into a purely concert-based career. Whilst his time on the scheme is over, Pavlos Carvahlo still has links with LMN, mentoring musicians and helping to talent-spot potential new acts. But he also has other plans.
‘Now we've left, we're gathering funds to start our own company. We're trying to gather £10,000 to go on a ten-day tour and basically do extended workshops with schools and retirement homes, because we can't bear the thought of not doing any more of this kind of work,' he says. ‘I think it's been 50-60 per cent of our lives over the last three years.'
It's nice to imagine LMN's late founder himself approving of such aims, perhaps adding a few virtuoso violin arpeggios of endorsement to one of Plastic Chairs' lively performances. After all, as Carlos Chirinos notes, ‘Yehudi Menuhin himself could be considered a musician of diverse ethnic and national origin, and his jazz and Eastern recordings in the 1980s might even put him in the category of “Musicians who play culturally diverse music.”
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