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Every emotion, hormone and neuro-chemical that does whatever it does inside us, started doing it in our species long before we learnt to argue and disagree. What's this got to do with music? Everything, actually. What's music for? Where did it come from? It was woven into the fabric of our lives, long before speech. Writing speech down, and chopping it up into grammar, has only appeared in the last few milliseconds in the perspective of deep evolutionary time - western musical notation doesn't even show up on that scale. Also, in distant times we lived on our feet (we didn't have the expensive furniture that we now use to cripple ourselves) and, above all, much of that time would be spent running - running all day, effortlessly, like birds flying. Each of us would experience extremes of hunger and fear, days on end without anything to eat, days on end chasing the next meal, with no energy bars or bottled water - extremes of fatigue, with injury, illness, pain and death, constantly clutching at us. Complete darkness at night - frightening and immobilizing. When we finally got our hands on food, wouldn't we want to celebrate, give thanks, and relish the massive endorphin rush? The whole group joins in the dancing - singing, drumming, clapping, virtuoso solos on the goose bone flute, anything to join in - to be excluded from that group would literally kill you. The story of the day's hunt would be told and retold - illustrated with animal noises, poises and postures, charging and dodging, feigning and thrusting. One of our group, a son or a partner, might have been killed, or wounded and condemned to life as a dependent cripple. We would need to mourn - howling out pain and fear, while others yelled with relief at their escape. This is where music sprung to life. Think about it, all of this passion and exaltation - can it be fired up if we don't have the cause, if the need is not already bursting out of us - can it be faked? What's a feast for, if we haven't just escaped from death? This is 'meaning'. This is the inner story of so much art - whatever its outer manifestation. Where does all the cerebral stuff fit in with this deep emotional meaning? Our bodies still follow the paths of the ancient emotional landscape. Now, let's fast forward to our comfortable suburban bungalow....

I've often wondered why hundreds of thousands of folk will go to huge outdoor classical concerts, bearing basket loads of festive food, often to happily endure sitting long hours in rain and midges, relishing the camaraderie of interminable loo queues. These concerts usually end with 1812-type cataclysmic firework celebrations. Or why millions will go to pop, rock and folk festivals - camping out, rejoicing in the mud - craft stalls selling homemade food, homespun clothes, and prehistoric survival equipment.....? A Leonard Cohen or Bob Dylan concert will sell out in hours, at hundreds of pounds a ticket - without a penny being spent on publicity. Is it that we need a hero - that free spirit, that rebel, that great hunter - to stand up in front of us, telling out our story, uniting us in our shared journey and emotions? A massive tribal affirmation? One critic carped about us having presenters at Listen Here. That's the point - we need that focal figure. In April, sixty thousand people wanted to see the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela at the Festival Hall, 25 percent first time concert goers - were they looking for new subtleties of interpretation? Harmony or hormones? Clunk! That's my problem: We are playing the same music as these guys, and we're desperately looking for a bigger audience. For 'audience' read 'relevance'? Of course we can't just imitate the Bolivars - that would be stupidly shallow, if not impossible. They have a fantastic story to tell - which radiates from their performance. The West East Divan players have a fantastic story to tell - profoundly meaningful - the beating heart of what music is about. I don't have a fantastic story to tell - in this profession I'm the nearest thing to a boring old fart. But anyway, I am at the very least a member of the human race, and, like you, I'm wired into all that stuff I was just talking about.

We're proud of the range we covered at Listen Here. For me, that range fires me up and keeps me fresh. Improvisation is fast composition - composition is slow improvisation - who cares? It's the story that counts. Does it grip us, is it intelligible? Can the notes be random? Remember those kids' paintings that fooled the art critics? Remember the musically 'illiterate' Goldie conducting in 'Maestro'? Maybe he is more musically literate than us, because he's tuned into the essentials? He feels it, whatever 'it' is, and he's got a story to tell. How many great musicians, from any corner of the world, went to music college? Music education is such a recent invention. Is it helping? But, at this advanced stage in my career, I'm more than ever conscious of the competition we face. When I started we used to play 'studio concerts' - in an empty studio, and with retakes only allowed in the case of a genuine musical disaster. We've had to compete with CD saturation - forced to ratchet up our standard to keep up with the artificial standards of CDs. Now we compete with musical specialist groups - cherry picked players like the Bolivars and Divans, the John Wilson band (did you see the MGM Prom they did?), the EC Chamber Orchestra, early music specialists - to name but a few. I want to sound like them. Will we, can we, in our turn, in orchestras like the SSO, inspire that Bolivar spirit in the young kids of Big Noise in Stirling, and all the Venezuelan Sistema projects now springing up around the world? Will sixty thousand want to see them?

Margaret Hodge might, and I only say 'might', have struck an important note when she infamously criticised even the Proms for being exclusive. The Proms are wider reaching, more open, all embracing, and more successful than ever - don't dare say otherwise. The Prom audience is famously 'up for it' - whatever is on the menu. But maybe she had a point, a vein of truth in a lower stratum. Following on from my scribbling above, I'm suggesting that music has evolved out of a tribal rite, a celebration of 'us-ness'. Neuro chemicals triggered by music are associated with bonding, acceptance and forgiveness. Obviously there are other functions - celebration of skill, physical prowess, artistic and intellectual discovery, the scintillating effect of a huge group unanimously performing feats of stunning complexity, the physical resonance and visceral feel of orchestral sound.....whatever else grabs you.....but you can't disconnect from the tribal bit any more than you can give up being human. Your choice of music identifies you with your group, and your group gives you your sense of identity, and the strength that comes from that. Weighty words are uttered about the universality of music - yes, but are they the sort of clever words, like so many words, that sound good, but simply miss the deeper, inexpressible truth? A thought experiment: What would be different if the Divans did the Last Night of the Proms? What would it feel like if they played, or if they missed out, the Pomp and Circumstance stuff?