Dispatch — Published June 2026
Classical Music's New Clandestine Zoomer Network That Isn't Quite Based but Maybe is?
A Night With the Improvisation Gang
By Juniper Friedman-Ozaki · June 2026
I got told about this by a mate who went to the last one. Her review, verbatim: “it was a who’s who.” Which is the sort of thing you say about a party you enjoyed and can’t defend. She then sent me a link. I did not know then that this link would eventually lead me to a truly bizarre pseudocult, Eyes Wide Shut-style classical soiree, held around a 1970s conversation pit in a north London mansion.
The event was called Music Unwritten: The Hidden Tradition of Classical Improvisation. Presented by Vox Alba. Heath Street Baptist Church, Hampstead, a Saturday in March. Doors seven, music half seven, ninety minutes. Ten quid. Sold out.
Sold out at sixty-five people, mind. The previous one did 120. So “sold out” here is a number somebody chose in advance and then hit, which is a trick every promoter in London knows and only the good ones bother pulling off. Still. Threescore of us paying strangers in a Baptist church for a piano recital with a lecture bolted on. I have watched a friend beg twelve people to come to a thing she spent nine months making. I’m just saying.
The room
First shock, and it is a shock, the audience is young. Not young for classical. Young. Twenties, early thirties, a couple of people who looked like they’d come straight off a shift. I did the usual maths you do at these things, which is working out what percentage of the room is a friend, a flatmate or a mum. Normally it’s about ninety. Here it was maybe a third, and I only got that high by being uncharitable.
I asked around at the interval, which there wasn’t, so really I asked around afterwards. People had seen it advertised. Advertised! They had come to the last one and bought a ticket for this one, unprompted, like consumers. One girl told me she’d found them through a post and came on her own. On her own, to a classical concert, in Hampstead. Bestie, I have never done anything that brave in my life.
The actual music, which is the annoying part
Opens with Schubert. Written, fixed, the control group. Fine, lovely, whatever, we all know what a Schubert sounds like.
Then Gabriel Williams gets up and does forty minutes of what is, structurally, a lecture. The grammar of the thing. Counterpoint, harmony, how a phrase is built, why a period sounds like a question followed by an answer. He plays as he talks. He is extremely charismatic in the specific way that irritates me, almost not trying to be.
Then the parlour tricks. Somebody in the pews shouts out a tune. He builds a fugue on it, live, in front of everyone, and the fugue is not a mess. The pamphlet is very insistent that improvisation “sat not as a parlour trick or specialist skill, but as a crucial pillar in the life of the musician.” Sorry, it was a parlour trick. It was a fantastic parlour trick. The room went absolutely feral for it in the polite way that rooms like that go feral, which is a sort of collective exhale and one man saying “oh, come on.”
Audience gets to feed material into a new piece made on the night. Then a whole improvised sonata, classical style, exposition and the lot. Then Marc Plasmeijer, who is Gabriel’s student, does the Romantic bit.
The Marc bit is where I lost my footing a little. He’s an autodidact, apparently, came to improvising in his early twenties after growing up on Chopin and Liszt. Programme note says he thinks of the piano as “finite in its mechanism, infinite in its expressive reach,” which is exactly the sentence you’d expect and I rolled my eyes at it, and then he played and I stopped. It sounded like a recording of something from 1848 that had gone missing. Not a pastiche. Just a bloke making it up with his hands while a packed church of people watched, which is apparently what an entire century of European music sounded like on a Saturday and we all just… stopped doing it?
Then contemporary. Then a closing improvisation, entirely new, gone forever, no recording, tough luck if you were in the loo.
The pamphlet essay is annoyingly good, by the way. Its argument is that recording and arts funding and the concert hall between them turned the score into scripture, and that classical then split into “reactionary conservatism and the progressive avant-garde,” both of which worship the text, one as gospel and one as a technical manual for deconstruction. Both ossified. The listener becomes “a passive witness to a text.” The triangle of composer, performer and audience collapses into “a single vertical line of transmission from the dead to the living, with very little passed forward.”
I have been to a lot of new music concerts. That is the most accurate description of one I have ever read and I would rather it had come from anyone else.
Then the speech
Short one. Gabriel does the Vox Alba pitch. Repairing patronage, connecting audiences and composers and patrons, living concert culture not museum culture. It is, near enough word for word, the copy on the website. I checked on the bus home. Loved that for him honestly, at least the man’s on message.
Then the house
Here’s where it stops being a concert review.
We were all hurried up the road to the after party, a clandestine affair in a house that seemed to come right out of a David lynch film. A road in Hampstead where the houses have names and the cars have drivers. People sort of hurrying in the front door, not furtive exactly, but brisk. About fifty of us inside. The host’s staff had made a banquet. Staff! A banquet! I ate a small mountain of something with pomegranite on it while standing next to a Marxist.
The house is a 1970s survival, which in a certain postcode is rarer than Georgian. Sunken seating. A conversation pit. An actual conversation pit, being used, correctly, for conversation. Our host is an art collector, Greek, deeply charming, and appeared to take it as a personal wound if anyone in his home was standing there without a negroni. Paintings stacked against the walls in piles, leant up like flat-pack, so many that you stop noticing them, which I assume is the point of having that many.
One room had a piano and a queue for it. Amateurs, mostly. Chopin, some Ravel, a duet that fell apart twice and got a bigger cheer than anything that didn’t. An accountant played and he was good. A postgrad from the Royal College played and was, obviously, better, and looked mildly haunted about it.
Another room had a debate going that started at the Council of Trent and did not stop there. I came back forty minutes later and it was still running with two different people in it.
The cast, briefly
A boy from the Latin Mass Society doing coke in the bathroom under a stained glass window. (this is normal, I promise you this is totally normal, one of my girls dated one of them and apparently this is completely totally normal for these guys, and with your spirit) Everyone else was remarkably genteel I should mention.
Someone who wrote their PhD on Patrick Deneen and made sure, within ninety seconds, that I knew he’d gone off him. A drunk author who talks like a tap. A cancelled philosophy professor. A podcaster who wouldn’t tell me his real name or the name of the podcast, which is either extremely based or the world’s most efficient way of admitting nobody listens. A Catholic lifestyle blogger with a comment section I have read for sport. Someone in acquisitions. A lawyer. A visibly gay publisher of the dissident-house variety putting together an anthology of commissioned work from politically incorrect queer writers, who told me, flat as a pancake, no smile, “it’s going to piss so many people off.”
And then, over by the food, two blokes talking about the Big Five and whether anyone could put them in touch at a firm. Which is what tipped me over. About a third of that room were young professionals with no connection to the arts at all. They came for the music. They stayed for the negronis. Nobody there was networking their way into a career in classical music because there is no career in classical music and if there is they are not typically made in a place like this.
So what is it
I know what I’m supposed to file this as. There’s a version of this piece where I count the rosaries, clown on the aristolarp bit, note who’s Catholic and what that implies, cancelled by the end of the week. Not doing it. Partly because these guys don’t care, and most other people don’t either. Partly because I’m one of the cool ones that knows the cancelling instinct is deeply cringe now and requires you to be visibly sincere in public (UGGGHH), which is worse than being wrong. But mostly because I had a really good time and I’d have to lie. (but don’t tell them that)
However, I’m not stupid. There is obviously an operation here. It’s a scene with money behind it, private money, deliberately routed around the Arts Council and the academy, and I had the suspicion everybody in that house understood what they were part of without a single person saying it out loud. It reads as a rescue mission for classical music from people they consider gatekeepers, run by people far too cool to describe it that way, because describing it would make it a movement and a movement can be argued with. Keep it a vibe. Very clever. Very annoying.
The genuine tea is that the mission statement isn’t a bluff. They say they want composers, patrons and audiences in a room together making a living culture. That is materially what happened. Sixty-five strangers, half of them under thirty, listening to a fugue get built out of a tune one of them shouted, and then fifty of us round a piano in a stranger’s house at midnight taking turns. Every institution in this country has a strategy document promising something like that and none of them can actually do it.
I tracked Marc down by the food. Asked him what he does when he’s not doing this and he went a bit sheepish and said finance. Actual finance, spreadsheets, the whole bit. May be recording a project at the minute, he said, like it was a confession. I guess a genuinely serious pianist who happens to also have a job??? I asked him what he made of the rest of the guest list (a smorgasbord of freaks and normie/music nerds all blended in so you couldn’t tell the difference) gesturing vaguely at the whole conversation pit situation. He looked properly confused. Said he only really knew a handful of people there.
Gabriel gave me about ninety seconds of his evening, was perfectly pleasant, and clearly had somewhere better to be. I told him, mostly to see what would happen, that the whole lecture-then-play bit reminded me a bit of Jacob Collier. He laughed. Properly laughed, not a polite one. Didn’t answer though, just moved his eyes somewhere over my shoulder. A woman next to him, didn’t catch her name, jumped in unprompted to say she actually quite liked Jacob Collier, which got no reaction from Gabriel at all. Later I found out that was the wife. He tells me they may do a concert in a chapel on this other guy’s estate and I should come… like an estate… like a real estate in the country somewhere with a private chapel on it like we are in Barry-Lyndon or something. He politely dumps me and moves on. Which, fine. I’ve been dismissed by worse.
Oh yeah and by the way everyone there was White, like I think there were two East Asians and if you count our Greek host. Just saying.
I’ve been trying for a week to work out what I actually saw and I can’t get it to sit still. It isn’t a right-wing thing exactly. It isn’t a trad thing exactly. It a cohort of sensitive young men and women in two buildings in NW3 taking music more seriously than anyone I know takes anything, funded by a Greek man with too many paintings, in a garish conversation pit.
Is this what motion looks like in 2026? Genuinely asking. I’ll be at the next one.
by Juniper Friedman-Ozaki
