“We’re the easy option when it comes to making cuts”

A mu­si­cian in two dif­fer­ent places - play­ing dou­ble bass for the Ciu­tat de Gra­nollers cobla and a mem­ber of the Ha­vaneres Els Faroners de Calella - Josep Barri has had a dual ex­pe­ri­ence of the dev­as­tat­ing ef­fects that the Covid-19 pan­demic has had on the cul­ture sec­tor. “Only the mem­bers of the great or­ches­tras are pro­fes­sion­ally ded­i­cated to music, be­cause the rest of us com­bine work with per­for­mances dur­ing the week­end and the hol­i­days”, he ex­plains, be­fore adding that con­certs are a good source of side in­come and this year has been cat­a­strophic in that re­spect. In ad­di­tion, he lost his job just prior to going into con­fine­ment in March, so he had hoped to keep up his in­come with the sum­mer “gigs”. Ob­vi­ously, that was not to be. “We es­ti­mated we would do about eighty per­for­mances­last year, and we didn’t even reach twenty-five,” he says.

How­ever, Barri con­sid­ers him­self lucky enough in such a bleak sit­u­a­tion, be­cause he has been able to do a few per­for­mances, all small for­mat, at var­i­ous venues in Calella “when they were still open”, and the ha­vaneres group was also able to do a larger con­cert in Mataró and an­other in Calella dur­ing the town’s main fes­ti­val, one of the few that risked main­tain­ing the pop­u­lar cel­e­bra­tion dur­ing of the avalanche of can­cel­la­tions by most Cata­lan towns. “The town coun­cils did what they could, but there has not been a com­mon cri­te­rion, so each case was dif­fer­ent, sar­danes con­certs with­out danc­ing being al­lowed in Calella, danc­ing al­lowed in Sant Pol and Pineda com­pletely post­poned“, he re­calls.

For Barri, it is clear that this forced ces­sa­tion of cul­tural ac­tiv­ity - “the peo­ple of cul­ture are al­ways the first to get hit”- would mean the end for many mu­si­cal groups that had been con­fi­dent of a pro­duc­tive sea­son. “And we also have to take into ac­count the age of the mu­si­cians: for many, stop­ping like this means they will def­i­nitely give up the in­stru­ment.”

For this mu­si­cian, the zeal that the ad­min­is­tra­tions have shown in can­celling cul­tural ac­tiv­i­ties “is not jus­ti­fied in any way”. “Cul­ture is safe is not just a slo­gan, it’s true, be­cause any con­cert, play or per­for­mance that has been put on since the re­stric­tions came into place has scrupu­lously fol­lowed the dis­in­fec­tion mea­sures, ca­pac­ity con­trol and dis­tances re­quested. But it seems that this wasn’t enough and that, un­for­tu­nately, it would mean death for a large part of the sec­tor “, he says, in­sist­ing that” in any cri­sis, the first thing that is cut is the cul­ture bud­get; we are the ugly sis­ter, the easy rel­a­tive when they have to make cuts“.

Barri re­grets that, on so­cial media in par­tic­u­lar, “where peo­ple talk loudly”, there is en­cour­age­ment for the ster­ile and mis­lead­ing de­bate that jus­ti­fies re­duc­ing spend­ing on cul­ture to spend more money on other pri­or­i­ties. “And it shouldn’t be like that, be­cause cul­ture also has a so­cial aim, it’s food for the soul, and we just have to re­mem­ber that dur­ing the total lock­down, there were a lot of peo­ple who, day in day out, ded­i­cated them­selves to mak­ing music from their bal­conies to en­cour­age neigh­bours and make the lock­down less dif­fi­cult”, he re­calls.

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