2001 NACTMUS Conference
Byron Bay: June 30- July 2, 2001
Creating Musical Futures:
Challenges to Music Education in the 21st Century
Abstracts of papers
Byron Bay: June 30- July 2, 2001
Creating Musical Futures:
Challenges to Music Education in the 21st Century
When I first arrived in Australia at the end of May 1991 it took only a week to realise that I was in a culture that had certainly not shaken off the shackles of its colonial past. It was the Queen's birthday, a public holiday. In the UK no-one knew when the Queen's birthday was let alone celebrate it in any way..
I quickly came to realise that in music the story was similar. The model was by and large England. Unfortunately when turning to classical art music the UK is a pretty poor example, having had a 300 year gap from Purcell to Britten when no composers of real note existed. England was famous for its orchestras or to be more exact the sight-reading abilities of its orchestras.
1960s and the Beatles
In the 1960s, by a series of lucky accidents, England at last discovered its musical creativity with the Beatles and rock music. Being an English speaking country this music found fertile soil at home and was easily exportable to other English speaking nations (most notably USA) in a way the English classical composers had never been.
Until, this time music had been highbrow or lowbrow, then middlebrow. The 60s was the start of what John Seabrook called nobrow, in the book of the same name. This gave England the swinging 60s and a newfound confidence.
Not so in Australia. Australia was too far from the epicentre of the music business, its own perceived centre of culture. In an area where an idea can be two weeks too late, the physical time and distance was too great. Of course there were some successes, but nothing like the tidal wave that swept the UK.
the change
What changed the face of musical practice so radically? The answer is not simple, but is made up of an amalgam of :
technological change, both in the production of the music and in dissemination through the media (determining and determined by audience taste)
cultural changes such as technological change.
So it was a feedback loop. Unfortunately the academic world largely ignored this audience, concentrating more on maintaining so called standards. These standards did not respect and therefore respond to the audiences change of preference. This was left to the cultural theorists. The technology led to increasing connectivity which brings us to the double edged sword of globilisation.
globalisation
The potentially good news for Australian Music in a globalised economy is that we move towards a world where the centre is wherever the centre is. Any surface of a sphere is equidistant from its centre. All that matters is to have connectivity, speed and ideas. Now we have the chance to be a creative nation. But this demands a mix of determined planning, confidence, risk and creativity. Colonialism is firstly replaced by multiculturalism and finally a novo-culturalism demanding a shift of thinking to a culture that can cope with the demands of globalisation- a culture that creates its way out of the mire.
music as a discipline
Traditionally music institutionsrelationship to music-making has been similar to the relationship of the church to religion, a set of dos and don'ts, of rules and regulations that are all combined into what has aptly been called a discipline- the rules of harmony, obeying the wishes of the composer etc. Stiff, starched and lifeless in a fast moving world where peoples musical tastes are as fickle as a share portfolio in a nervous market. We may have problems with this, but we may also wish to survive - even to live.
multi-skilling
Does this mean a downskilling of musicians? If viewed through the traditional lens of melody, rhythm and harmony then the answer is yes. If viewed as a series of specific skills for a particular job then opportunities abound. It takes a particular skill and aesthetic to write and perform for the living room or the concert hall or the church or for film or tv or interactive media.
The idea of pure music, untainted by other arts, fashion or by commerce, is not only outmoded, it has connotations of a belief in some kind of authentic ultimate way of making music a construct born out of a particular era of a particular culture. So how do Music institutions cope with this multi-skilling world and what of the traditional values?
Firstly we have to acknowledge there are many ways to be a musician and there is no hierarchy of goodness in this. To make one final reference to the UK, it is significant that the UK's richest person in 2001 is Paul McCartney, a man whose inability to read music would bar him from most music institutions in this country.
multi-literacy
So we need to have a broader definition of what is musicianship and what is music literacy. Reading the dots is crucial if you are destined to copy others creations, but not so crucial if you are the creator. And we need to be creative. The jobbing musicians whose only skill is to faithfully play the notes may be admirable, but their status is diminishing, and they could be likened to the coffee workers in a developing country. Important but replaceable.
creativity, industry and education
Of course we have a music industry, but how much do we have a creative music industry? We should not dwell too much on the last word. Create and the industry will follow. You may need some business skills, but the ideas are the prime requirement. Our education structure has not been very supportive of creativity. At last the ARC has included Creative Arts in its funding. Jock McCready, an arts business manager, is adamant that we should not be valuing the arts so much as creativity.
gauging the market
So is creativity a free for all? I think not. It demands a set of skills, a knowledge of the buzz of the time, some nous and some luck. Be too similar to something else and youre dead. Be too different and you are ignored. We are dealing as in a market of symbols in what Justin O'Connor from the Manchester Institute of Popular Culture said is a very volatile and fast moving symbolic circuit. Not the classic environment of your average tertiary institution.
This is not however a world where classical music is doomed, nor popular music blessed. AsManuel Castells stated, Globalisation is highly selective. It proceeds by linking up all that, according to dominant interests, has value anywhere in the planet, and discarding anything which has no value or becomes devalued, in a variable geometry of creative destruction and destructive creation of value. In a globalised environment, cults can flourish, provided you are well networked to seek out the individuals from around the world. In a networked world however, you cannot assume to be the spokesperson of a dominant culture.
As Stuart Cunningham says in his article this week in the Australian Higher Education Supplement (27/6/01) The creative industries concept is a recognition that the future of the new economy lies in the move from IT to content from infrastructure to creative applications. In the same way that enterprises in general have had to become information technology-intensive, so they are becoming more 'creativity-intensive'.
Creative industries are an integral part of the new economy, not only a way to understand and manage it.
QUT is today launching its creative industries initiative. It will, across many disciplines and practices, attempt to respond to the needs of the tastes and fads of this new world. The faculty of arts will dissolve and make way for this new structure. It will attempt to be much more interdisciplinary in its focus than has been usually the case in Australian Tertiary Education and will concentrate on the arts and other cultural areas as wealth creators.
It will include:
In music we have launched a major initiative in instrument making, taking a broad view of what an instrument is. New Sounds and New Sources. The students will work in a hothouse project, much like a group of scientists trying to find a cure for cancer. This project culminates in a festival of Real Electronic and Virtual Instruments (REV#1) at the Brisbane Powerhouse. The end result will not be the instruments themselves, but music made on them. This initiative is intended to attract other instruments makers, artists and manufacturers. The skills needed are various. Musical of course, but there will be a need to understand acoustics, electronics, digital circuitry, metal work, woodwork, human movement - to name but a few. For more information see http://www.academy.qut.edu.au /music/rev
There is risk in this. Anything that relies on technology is constantly moving towards obsolescence. The recording industry of today is nothing like the industry of 10 years ago or 10 before that. And the next generation of musicians will need to be able to cope with these fast moving changes. They need to be creativewithin the market. They need to be connected and flexible. And therefore so do the staff of our music institutions.
Men in grey suits would have to be high on the list. Film composer Glen Muirhead points out these days that on a film project the music supervisor often earns more than the composer. The middleman is still in the ascendant. Have the grey men finally taken over? What will the musician's role be in the future? Do we overrate our status, assuming priest-like attributes when we are merely caterers of sound? Is our function to supply lengths of musical material in a raw or semi-cooked state to an entertainment industry, to be cut up, recontextualised and remixed into a saleable cake with other ingredients?
There is an ever greater hunger than ever to consume, but there is also a greater desire too to throw away. A creator has to be on the right side of this equation. We need to remain indispensable if we want to make a career of it. We need to understand this new world and respond to the demands it makes on us. As the head of ACUADS said to a NACTMUS meeting three years ago., there are no safe places. Every musician has to work towards connecting with performers and audiences in various modes and media by using ideas that have cultural relevance. This, put another way, means creating music that is relevant to our culture, be that with a home-grown product, or by value adding to a product from elsewhere. It is becoming a truly borderless world. Whether the music is Australian or not is of little practical consideration. All that matters is that we do not just copy. If we as teachers can shift our emphasis away from repertoire to creation, we are truly assisting in the education of future musicians to be professionals in the field, instead of MacDonalds workers.
Perhaps this is a model our national Academy of Music should consider.