Their orchestra is not a sacred object but a tool for struggle – Paris’s musicians join the frontline

They were the last people standing – or rather playing – during last week’s student protests in France, as gas canisters landed in double-bass cases. L’Orchestre du Nouveau Monde, co-founded by young conductor Étienne Jarrier and his friends when they were still teenagers, aren’t a typical orchestra. With their manifesto of activism and social justice, the orchestra is not “a sacred object of beauty, but a tool for struggle”, through civil disobedience, outreach in schools, demonstrations and concerts, all to “present a different kind of classical music – one reconnected to reality”.

The new world Jarrier and his group dream of is “anti-racist, anti-capitalist, feminist, environmentalist and committed to de-growth”, and their way of working is deliberately provocative, not only to so many of the dominant directions of travel in the political world, but also to the institutions of classical music. They play scrappily passionate performances of La Marseillaise, of music from The Avengers, of Dvořák’s New World Symphony and protest songs but the ONM judge the quality of their performances not by playing the right notes in the right order, but by their consciousness-raising impact, whether they’re staging performances at Place de la République in Paris or at the foot of a glacier.

This is not an orchestra trying to find hermetically sealed concert halls to perform in perfect acoustics. It’s a group that wants to be out on the streets, outside television studios and the headquarters of corporations, institutions or industries they choose to protest against. They don’t want their audiences to listen in silence but to sing with them, move with them, shout with them.

All of this seems like a radical overturning of the way that orchestras usually function – and the ONM is arguably the most self-consciously radical orchestral assembly right now in how it fuses its political purpose to its musical ideals.

But it’s not the first. In its political idealism and aesthetic radicalism, the ONM is a contemporary cousin of two British orchestras founded in 1969 and 1970: the Scratch Orchestra and the Portsmouth Sinfonia. Composers Cornelius Cardew, Howard Skempton and Michael Parsons founded the Scratch Orchestra in 1969. Cardew’s The Great Learning, based on texts by Confucius, is the Scratch Orchestra’s magnum opus, its notation and performance realised the Scratch Orchestra’s goals: to make music as open as possible to participants of all abilities and backgrounds. Instead of classical music’s polished perfection, the Scratch Orchestra’s experimentalism was an aesthetic of radical inclusion – socially, musically and aesthetically. The Great Learning’s greatest learning of all was that music of this ambition and scale belongs to anyone who wants to play it. The Scratchers went on to be welcome by the very institutions they critiqued, playing the Proms in 1972; but Cardew’s increasingly devoted leftwing activism took his music down a different course and the orchestra disbanded in 1974.

For the Portsmouth Sinfonia, the self-styled “world’s worst orchestra”, the point was to try to play the classics – piano concertos, symphonies, orchestral hits – on instruments that the musicians, which included Gavin Bryars, Brian Eno and Michael Nyman, didn’t actually know how to play. The delirious, joyous and utterly deliberate cacophony that resulted remade everything from Beethoven’s symphonies to Handel and Hooked on Classics. (The Portsmouth Sinfonia’s attempt to disco-ify the classical repertoire parodied the Royal Philharmonic’s chart-topping kitschorama, and reached no 38 in the charts in 1981: Classical Muddly. Listen to it here, and enjoy.

And even if the anarchy of the Portsmouth Sinfonia is no more, plenty of UK groups today are leading even more serious missions to reorient the priorities of orchestras towards social and political engagement. Here’s just a few: the Multi-Story Orchestra in Peckham, which amplifies the voices of the pupils and students it works with in south London as performers, composers and administrators; inclusive ensembles led by disabled musicians such as the National Open Youth Orchestra, RNS Moves and the Paraorchestra are all examples where social activism meets orchestral possibility, making the sounds of social change; while Contemporary Music for All (CoMA) continues a message of radical inclusion for new music, creating a repertoire of hundreds of pieces for non-professionals to play.

Even so, the ONM’s commitment to direct political action makes them stand out in today’s musical world – but their manifesto has a clue to an even deeper history: they want classical music to be “reconnected to reality”. That’s the point: classical music only exists across the world today because of its often-problematic connections to conceptions of nationhood and political orthodoxy, from the courts of Vienna in Beethoven’s time to the concert halls of Shostakovich’s era in Soviet Russia. You can’t have the power of all that music without the complicated and compromised politics that produced it. The attempt to pretend that these connections don’t exist in the later decades of the 20th century and beyond is part of the problem with classical music’s often self-inflicted irrelevance, as if the art form were untethered to the world around it, existing only in glitzy concert halls and glossy programmes. The ONM’s performances and protests, and the police’s reaction to them, is a wake-up call to remind classical music where it comes from – and yes, to reconnect it to today’s realities.

With Celebrity Traitors – the latest series of the most successful TV franchise on the planet – drawing to a close this week, here’s the BBC’s Mark Savage analysing how the deliberate duplicities and misdirections of the show’s music are made, not least the “Braaams” of the composer Sam Watts’s opening titles. But is it just me or is there less of the Lacrimosa from Mozart’s Requiem, and less classical as a whole, in the soundtrack for the death marches and backstabbing this time round? I have a challenge to the music supervisors: next series, why not use only classical to soundtrack it all? There’s vast reserves of dark and doomy tunes and arias of treachery and treason to choose from after all – the Traitors Prom the summer before last was a mere drop in the ocean of classical melodramas. My choice for the opening titles? The opening of Wagner’s Walküre, which has enough storm, threat and malice in its opening minutes to dramatise any celebrity face-off. What would you suggest?

This week Tom has been listening to: I can’t get past The Portsmouth Sinfonia’s Classical Muddly, because who doesn’t need more joy and chaos in their lives? Also it’s not on the streamers, which only adds to the joy. If ever there was music made that the algorithms can’t touch, it’s this.