Text of a public lecture delivered by John Kersey in the Cafe Philo series at the Institut Français, London, UK, June 2007.
“…a dense and brilliant talk. You managed to keep the audience suspended to your every word for more than an hour.”
Christian Michel, convenor of the Cafe Philo series
Deserting the muse; what happened to music education?
Abstract
Why can’t many of today’s music graduates play and write music? Why can they talk fluently about cultural theory yet not write a simple fugue? Why have university music departments lost confidence in historical and applied models of musicology? In this talk, Professor Kersey traces the development of British music education over the past 150 years with particular reference to higher education. He will explore the ways in which a socialist agenda has caused music education to lose touch with its roots in the applied art, and how political influence has played a large part in destroying the uniqueness of the elite musical education once offered by the major conservatoires.
Introduction
During the majority of the post-Enlightenment period up to at least the 1970s there has been a reasonable degree of consensus on the aims of postsecondary musical education in favour of equipping its graduates with the ability to perform and/or write music, or to teach others to do these things. This consensus has come about as a result of societies that have valued music that is written with cogency, formal command and structure, and that communicates the higher values of those societies – in which respect we might refer to such words as nobility, beauty and complexity, by which latter term I mean the capacity to reveal hidden levels of meaning upon greater exploration.
Good music lifts the spirits, challenges the mind and opens us to the riches of Western civilization. Even works which may be considered of lesser stature in that they express matters of no great emotional import have the capacity to accord enjoyment from their craft and charm of execution, in the same way that we may derive pleasure from an Agatha Christie novel despite being aware of its formulaic nature. In the best composers we discover a capacity to surprise and constantly renew their chosen forms. This renewal leads to organic development and also to experimentation, sometimes with dramatic and effective results.
Music education
Although an appreciation of music is probably innate to mankind, it would be a mistake to believe that Western art music will yield up its secrets without an appreciation of its context and techniques. Certainly we can appreciate music that is strongly rhythmic, or that relies on simple repetition for its effects – such as that which underlies most commercial television advertising – without much in the way of specialist knowledge. But when encountering a Bach fugue for the first time, many of the uninitiated will be put off by what appears impenetrable and difficult to follow. To traverse the unknown region, a roadmap is necessary.
The roadmap comes in the form of understanding both the circumstances in which that piece came to be written – the details of the composer’s biography and the way in which the work in question fits into his output and the genre in question – and the means by which the piece makes its effect. The first consideration belongs to the realms of history and musical appreciation. The second belongs to the realm of musical techniques.
If our aim is merely to appreciate music at the level of the amateur, so that we can enrich our lives as a result, we need to go down both of these routes on the roadmap. If our aim is either to write music that is worthy of comparison with that of the masters, or to perform it in some way that does it justice, we need to travel further and explore more widely. I also believe, without apology, that those who aim to teach need to travel just as far as those who compose or perform if they are to be able to convey the fullest sense of the art and science of music to their students.
The conservatoire system
In 1843, Felix Mendelssohn founded the Leipzig Conservatoire, the first specialist institution of postsecondary musical instruction in Germany. During the remainder of the nineteenth-century, other major capitals followed suit in establishing institutions where musicians might be trained to a high level. In England these included the Royal College, Royal Academy and Royal Northern College of Music, the Guildhall School and Trinity College of Music.
The conservatoire system supplemented a previous tradition of private study with an eminent teacher, although this remained a frequently-exercised option for musicians before, as an alternative to, and after conservatoire study, which I will return to later. The object of the conservatoire was to provide an environment in which the values of Western classical music could be explored and talent nurtured so as to provide the musical profession with a high standard of entrants.
At this point in time, the universities in the UK did not offer any form of instruction in music. Although they retained the power to confer degrees in music, and appointed a professor of music and outside experts to examine those degrees, for the best part of one hundred years the role of the university as far as music was concerned was to be the validator of external study, as well as providing music for internal functions such as chapel foundations. It was quite possible at the turn of the twentieth-century to take the Bachelor and Doctor of Music examinations of the University of Cambridge without ever having been a student in residence there, but instead having prepared for the examinations privately under a teacher or teachers of one’s own choice. Indeed, one of the main roles of the conservatoires by the beginning of the twentieth-century was to prepare students for these degrees.
The consequence of this system was that the conservatoires were largely independent from government interference and indeed, from wider university culture. This independence led to their development as notable centres of musical excellence which, in time, would go on to produce the majority of orchestral players for the top British orchestras as well as noted soloists and successful teachers. Because the curriculum of the conservatoires was deliberately specialist, it offered an unusual degree of freedom to the student, who if he or she chose, could also read widely at their own choice, take extension classes at other institutions, learn on the job by taking on voluntary or professional engagements, or even, as I did in the latter part of the twentieth-century, pursue parallel qualifications in other subjects for the sake of interest. The great virtuoso pianist Moriz Rosenthal, who was born in 1862, studied privately with Mikuli and Joseffy and with Liszt, but also in his twenties attended the University of Vienna and took a degree in philosophy purely from intellectual interest as well as an awareness that an artist should be a well-rounded person.
At the same time as the conservatoire system was developing, a second system of musical education was in operation that was aimed primarily at intending teachers and those performers who opted to study privately. This was the system of “taking one’s letters”, whereby external diplomas at various levels were available from a large variety of examining boards. Almost all of these boards operated wholly within the private sector, with some also offering tuition. More usually, the student would prepare for the examination privately and then, if successful, acquire what amounted to a license to teach or perform. Because these were grass roots organizations and because they were wholly in the private sector, with no government funding to prop them up, these institutions were compelled to charge prices that were affordable even to many who could not afford to go to university or conservatoire full-time, and drew their most substantial following from the working and lower-middle classes. Several of these independent examination boards survive today, including the Victoria College of Music, founded in 1890, and the National College of Music, founded in 1894. Following their lead, the conservatoires introduced their own parallel system of diploma awards, most of which were available to external candidates just as they were to those who had studied there full-time. Equally, many good performers and composers chose not to take qualifications at all, relying purely on their education, skill and contacts to make their way in the profession.
We can therefore see that, up to the 1940s, English musical education was focused on specialist institutions functioning largely independently, a thriving private sector and a university sector whose role was largely as a validator of independent study. This was the system that gave us the great figures of twentieth-century English music – among them Holst (who studied at the Royal College), Elgar (who studied privately), Vaughan Williams (who was at the Royal College and also read history at Cambridge), Bax (who studied at the private Hampstead Conservatoire and later at the Royal Academy) and many others. Notably, it also contributed to a high standard of music teaching and of musical literacy in the general public. Even as the growth of radio and television made concert-going less popular, the following for Western art music among all sectors of society remained strong, as witnessed by the continuation of the private music clubs (which were a leading employer of young artists), music appreciation societies and amateur choirs and orchestras.
In hindsight
We can now look back at this as something of a golden era in musical education. One of the main aspects that characterizes it as such is its confidence. Musicians and music educators were not generally beset by existential angst as to the justification for their art. There was a distinctively English approach to music-making, though regrettably this was much decried by critics of the time who preferred the allure of foreign names and flashier approaches. Although there was certainly public funding of the arts, there was also an extensive private sector that provided employment for many performers and teachers. Above all, music was localised and not centralised, and an understanding of the Western tonal tradition was accepted as an essential element of what it was to be educated and civilised.
I want in particular to point out one particularly significant aspect of the music education that has been discussed hitherto. This is that within it, in and of themselves, musical composition and performance are considered assessable disciplines within the academy. As will be seen, this position is not the outcome of a rejection of the essential subjectivity of these disciplines; rather it is a recognition that this subjectivity is in fact no more nor less than would be the case in the assessment of anything else within the arts and humanities. In 1910, it was possible to take the Doctor of Music degree at Edinburgh in musical performance and in that discipline alone (with no written component to the assessment); now the same feat is impossible at any institution.
In 1974, an official report of the Liberal Party said,
“Once the basic needs of food and shelter are met, the individual’s greatest satisfactions are to be found in love, trust and friendship, in beauty, art and music, and in learning…”
It is indeed difficult to imagine any political party of today, and certainly not the modern Liberal Democrats, coming out with such a statement. What has changed in the intervening years? In 1974, it would be easy for a reasonably educated member of the public to name half a dozen English classical composers or performers who were prominent internationally and whose artistic output was genuinely popular. These days, I would suggest it would be more difficult to achieve the same result, and where artists were indeed named, they would generally be from the “crossover” category. A decline has occurred, and I will now endeavour to trace its origins.
Popular vs. classical
One substantial change, of course, is in the growth and nature of popular music. The sound of popular music at various points has not been so different from that of classical music. In the 1950s and before, popular singers performed to orchestral backing or to a jazz rhythm section. Early jazz also borrowed heavily from the classical soundworld and used classical forms, particularly variations and the improvisatory cadenza, as models.
Where jazz and the more sophisticated elements of popular music succeeded in absorbing the Western art heritage was in their adoption of spontaneity and individual freedom as interpretative models. These models were a key element of the Romantic aesthetic and led to a great flowering of individuality in performance and composition. In early classical recordings of pianists and violinists, for example, each performer can easily be distinguished by their own personal timbre and approach in a way that is impossible today.
Just as popular music – with the age of the teenager from the mid-1950s onwards – absorbed this creative energy, so classical music sought to divorce itself further from popular sensibility, indeed regarding popularity itself as a mark of disdain and corruption. The music of the Second Viennese School and of Darmstadt and its successors, which became the prevailing fashion in the post-war years, was defiantly inaccessible to the general public, and for all its complexity, seemed and seems to many devoid of any emotional connexion to those finer aspirations of mankind which I outlined earlier. It is notable that when the general public most often encounter music written in these styles it is as the soundtracks to films where horror and chaos are being depicted.
Parallel with these developments in composition, the interpretation of classical music was becoming progressively more conservative following the First World War, with the rise of the concept of a reductive aesthetic – a “correct way” of playing Beethoven, Bach etc. and the decline of individualism in interpretation. This concept was in itself an extended reaction against Romanticism, and its effect was to create a more establishmentarian profile for the classical music world. Individuals could and did still break through that world to express a personal response to music, but unsurprisingly many considered it stuffy and class-ridden, and many were marginalized as a result of its prejudices. These were, after all, the days when Liszt’s music was frowned upon because of his love affairs, and where music written to entertain or display technical skill was looked upon as second-rate. Where the divine spark of Romanticism had been essential to an understanding of the very purpose of music, now music was been written and promoted that denied that nature and sought to destroy it.
Composers such as Bax, Elgar and Walton had a very difficult time being heard on Radio 3 and its predecessor the Third Programme, since under the direction of Sir William Glock, this station had become a champion of the values of modernism and postmodernism. Glock, incidentally, as an accomplished pianist, did not play this music for his private pleasure, instead revealing himself as a Haydn aficionado.
Fortunately, the private sector continued to value the output of tonal composers and local musical events in England continued to focus upon tonal repertoire both classic and modern. Others understandably tended to regard jazz and popular music as preferable outlets of energy and emotion.
Adornoism
For this misconception about the nature of Western art music we have largely the Frankfurt school to thank, and in particular the legacy of Theodor Adorno. Adorno as a pupil of Berg believed that composers should relate to the past as a canon of taboos rather than a canon of models for emulation. His concept of art was also structured on that of Marxist Kulturkampf, in that he saw the duty of art to be “corrosively unacceptable” to the sensibilities of the middle class, and therefore to be a succession of shocking, difficult and obscure events.
This is not merely an idea that is wrong, it is one that is deeply patronising. At its root is the idea that the masses, given the choice, will discard Bach and Beethoven in favour of the fad of the day unless their political masters tell them what is good for them. This idea has no historical basis in fact. During the nineteenth-century, when music was largely kept within the private sector, composers of all kinds flourished and prospered, and even those who were not in the front rank produced music whose craft and appeal has put much written since in the shade. Above all, good music was as much a part of working-class life as for the rich. Almost everyone, but particularly women, learned to play an instrument or sang in choirs or amateur societies. It was this indigenous working-class musical culture that Adornoism was to attack most pervasively.
The Adornoist concept has the advantage of wrapping music up in an impenetrable web of self-meanings. It means that music structured on these lines is likely to be theoretically extremely complex, divorced from significant cultural reference, emotionally arid and exceptionally difficult both to play and to listen to. Of the thousands of works written during the post-war years in this style, not a single one has attained genuine public popularity. They speak only to an elite, and that elite is specifically ideologically driven. As far as many executant musicians are concerned, they are indeed tolerated but not loved. Indeed, many would say that one might just as well love industrial noise or the random clatter of tin cans as the work of Boulez or Stockhausen, for all the intellectual accomplishment of both. What is created is effectively non-music, non-art, because of its rejection of the musical values that I outlined at the beginning of this lecture. It preserves the colour, the instrumentation, the dynamic variety, but it ignores what David Hellewell has called “music’s unique language; the dialectic of notes.”
The effect of this movement on classical music has been disastrous. Because Adornoist music cannot exist without significant public subsidy and is explicitly Marxist in its aesthetic, the general tendency of governments to become more controlling with regard to the arts in the post-war period has had a field-day. Without the government supporting the Adornoists, they would fail in a blink of an eye when subjected to the popular market. Yet this support has achieved nothing in terms of producing a wider popularity outside the limited circle of initiates. People today listen to Elgar, Beethoven, Frank Sinatra and the Kaiser Chiefs for pleasure – all representing work which has clear form, emotional import and the power to rouse the spirits. They do not listen to Boulez, Carter and Lachenmann (unless they are really depressed). Yet it is the latter that receive the accolades of the musical establishment, while deserving figures such as the late George Lloyd are shamefully neglected.
As an Austrian in economic terms, I conceive most forms of government interventionism in the free market as undesirable. In terms of that influence in English musical culture, it has been all but fatal. A combination of centralising tendencies and Marxist ideology with a decline in support for composers who do not fit the Adornoist and government image of what they should be, has left several generations without access to new music in the classical tradition which has the prospect of speaking directly to them. I can assure you that this tradition has been there – in the music of such post-war figures as Howells, Hadley, Ferguson, Arnold, Lloyd and Stevenson – all of which have written vital and much underrated music – but even though all but the last are dead, their music remains largely sidelined by the mainstream today. And the concept of an official line on what composition should be – so very Soviet in its way – has led also to a situation where it is axiomatic that musicians be if not actively Marxist, then at least tolerant of that ideology. This gives us “luvvies for Labour”; it also means that those who doubt the left-wing consensus are afraid to speak out for fear of losing their livelihoods.
For a time the classical tradition was present within mainstream pop – reaching its zenith in the progressive rock years where popular music started to adopt classical form and aspirations, albeit with a strongly improvisatory element – but this was swept aside by the untutored, uncontrolled energy of punk, which to my mind remains much more interesting as a social phenomenon than it ever was musically. With the coming of MTV and the pop video, the image finally took over from the music as the key message, and with the exception of examples of good craftsmanship and occasional felicity, the serious musician will find limited interest in much mass market pop music of today.
What is significant, however, is that when the Adornoists want to prove that they, too, can be popular, they ape the techniques of popular music. The contemporary focus on the physical appearance of classical artists and on short, memorable pieces as the vehicle for their success belongs to the world of pop. What it is not is the popularisation of classical music. Rather, it is the presentation of classical music or something passing for such as pop music, with attendant assumptions of limited shelf-life and quick profits rather than long-term viability. Perhaps that lack of long-term viability points to the paucity of the concept; when these artists turn to pop, their models are bubblegum pop acts. This effect also makes itself felt in other ways; the Royal College of Music Magazine twelve years ago was a serious journal of record; now their alumni tabloid sheet consists merely of shallow PR and speaks of desperation for approbation by the outside world.
Education post-1945
We should now catch up with the effects of these developments on music education. Although some universities had started a limited teaching of music for degrees before the Second World War, it was the post-war period that saw the universities seek to mount a genuine challenge to the conservatoires and the private institutions. This period, of course, coincided not only with a general move towards the control of education by the state, but with the rise of Adornoist music which required the support of the state in order to maintain its stranglehold.
University music departments
Given that many university music departments had at best limited facilities for the performance of music, and did not attract the best teachers of performance or composition, they were largely forced to find other rationales for their existence. These rationales tended to centre upon the theory and history of music, with compositional techniques, keyboard harmony and a certain amount of free composition thrown in. Some institutions, notably York, made a concerted attempt to create performance-based degrees, but these were the exception.
In hindsight it is surprising that the obvious pattern adopted in the teaching of fine art was not applied to music. Just as the art school could be seen as equating to the conservatoire in concentrating on the applied aspects of the discipline, so the history of art department could be balanced by a department of musicology concentrating on the history and theory of the subject.
The failure to make this sensible distinction has led to two developments which are inherently highly undesirable. The first is the phenomenon of university graduates who have so-called degrees “in music” but cannot play or compose music to any significant level of competence, and the second is a denigration of the applied aspects of music as being not worthy or not assessable within the university purview – a view which you will recall is in direct opposition to that of the university at the turn of the twentieth-century. Being staffed generally with individuals whose competence has lain outside applied music, universities have not fully understood musical performance in particular as a discipline, and as a result have not embraced it and have regarded it as the sole preserve of the conservatoire sector.
Pressures on the conservatoires
Into this messy situation we must add the plight of the conservatoires, which by the 1990s, when I was most involved in that sector, were entirely beholden to government subsidy. This led directly to the pressures they were to face both academically and ideologically. These were pressures that could not be withstood largely because independence had by now been ceded to the state to the point where it could not be regained.
There was great pressure in that era for conservatoires to close or merge; as a result the London College of Music became the music department of Thames Valley University, the RAM was absorbed into the University of London with an affiliation with King’s College, and the RCM, having held out the longest, eventually accepted an affiliation with Royal Holloway. The long-standing external diplomas of the conservatoires such as the Guildhall and Trinity College were replaced as internal qualifications by degrees validated by the post-1964 universities, and the University of London withdrew its entire external degrees programme in music.
There was a palpable loss of confidence within the sector. No longer did the conservatoires believe that they could set the standard. Now the politicised arts establishment led, and they begged for its acceptance. Strikingly, one aspect that had already begun to make itself felt in the conservatoires was that those institutions only became interested in promoting students when they won external competitions or attracted external sponsorship. They were examining all the time, as a key function of their activity, but seemed to have no confidence in backing their internal judgements.
Governmental interference
This process was exacerbated with the coming of the New Labour government in 1997. Shortly afterwards, those responsible for music education were essentially told that they would be compelled to embrace the Government’s educational priorities. Those priorities were towards Leftist multiculturalism and political correctness, and to the replacement of education with vocational training in pursuit of a social engineering agenda. Institutions would no longer be permitted to be determinedly exclusive in their admissions policies; the focus on excellence was seen as “disenfranchising people”. Yet, of course, the public in the form of the free market could not be allowed to have what they wanted; government must tell them what it considered best for them.
Interestingly, this development presaged the cult of the amateur and the disparaging of expert status that has since become such a prevalent feature of the Internet. It owes its roots, of course, to the prevalence of postmodernism, itself an ideology owing much to Marx. Once the idea that there are central concepts of value or meaning that run through all good music can be thrown aside, or that critical rationalism is a basis for assessing the worth of a statement that lies outside of the realm of pure opinion, the ground is clear for all sorts of phony replacements. Minimalism takes over where progressive rock left off, offering a dazzling surface but no depth as an Adornoist attempt to subvert the inevitable return to tonality and the popularity of popular music, to which it offers a counterpart without soul. Adornoism re-models itself into what has been called “the new complexity” and produces various hybrids of composers steeped in the Boulez tradition but groping towards some kind of accessible interface with the public.
Above all, what is promoted is a closed, totalitarian system in contrast to the Popperian open society. It is a system where government funding creates an expensive elite based on ideology, not ability. That elite is dedicated to the promotion, by definition, of that which is not popular, and of that where complexity and obscurity of method are valued over any reasonable results. Those who point out that the emperor has no clothes find themselves out in the cold. The last major attempt at bringing this situation to public notice was in the short-lived Hecklers movement led by tonal composers Frederick Stocken and Keith Burstein in the mid-1990s. Both are now not involved in challenging the status quo through protest, and Stocken in particular seems keen to de-emphasise his past activities in order to bid for acceptance by the musical establishment. Presumably both have found this to be a price worth paying.
Effects on schools
To some extent the rot had set in earlier. The imposition of the national curriculum in schools led to the marginalisation of music, a situation that got worse with the New Labour emphasis on numeracy and literacy. Music in primary schools had generally been taught by non-specialists, but now those non-specialists were significantly less likely to have musical general knowledge or the ability to play an instrument to a reasonable standard. A further problem was the replacement of the O level by GCSE in 1988, again the outcome of Leftist pressure by the teaching unions and incompetence by the Conservatives.
Part of this cultural shift was towards concepts such as “diversity” and multiculturalism in general. In his excellent book, “Cultural Revolution, Culture War”, Sean Gabb reminds us that,
“In October 2003, the Association of British Orchestras organised a symposium on Cultural Diversity and the Classical Music Industry, and effectively required attendance from every classical music organisation in England larger than a string quartet. Among those addressing the symposium was Professor Lola Young, Head of Culture at the Greater London Authority. She said: “We must change the look of the classical music industry”. She was supported by Roger Wright, head of BBC Radio 3, who confessed that everyone at the BBC now underwent “diversity training”.”
The GCSE examination, in contrast to the O level that preceded it, lays limited emphasis on the ability to play and write Western tonal music to a high standard. Instead it draws a false analogy between Western tonal music, popular music and music from other cultures, maintaining that all are equally worthy of study. In doing so, it illustrates a key postmodern dilemma. Individuals in the music establishment feel that they cannot any longer make the statement that the music of Beethoven, itself the outcome of Enlightenment thought, hundreds of years of artistic and spiritual experience, and of one of the most original and humane minds that ever lived, is of greater significance to Western students than a piece of commercial pop music or the repetitious communality of African drumming. They feel that they must pander to the perceived sensibilities of ethnic minority groups in order to satisfy themselves that they are sufficiently politically correct to please their masters and that their curriculum does not concentrate solely on dead white men.
Further to this, the emphasis on free composition without significant structural requirements means that music in many schools is now reduced to mindless pounding on percussion and synthesisers in the hope that this more-or-less random, untutored activity will produce something worthwhile. Within this atmosphere of the glorification of unstructured creativity governments have felt free to cut one of the last lifelines of the Western tonal tradition – subsidised instrumental tuition at school. Many local authorities discontinued their music services and, driven by opposition to elitism, ended their support of assisted places at the junior departments of the conservatoires. Meanwhile, the provision of private sector music-making, such as good church choirs and amateur orchestras, was also suffering from ideological shift as evangelical churches developed opposition to the concept of employing professional musicians and replaced well-written music with insipid pop, and amateur orchestras found the number of musicians coming from the school sector dwindling. The local music clubs and societies were centralized under a single national organization run by the arts establishment, which would then arrange for the artists and music it wished to promote to be hired by them, effectively putting the final nail in the coffin of private sector alternatives to the arts establishment in concert promotion. This further diminished the opportunity to hear classical music in live performance.
A further exemplification of this situation is in the increasing resources devoted by musical organizations to outreach work. This is effectively a piecemeal attempt to patch over the deficiencies in state music education provision. Where at one point schools would have had their own orchestras and choirs, and the local authorities would have supplemented this with borough-wide ensembles, now an occasional flying visit by a professional orchestra for workshops is taken as a substitute.
This dilution of musical education – effectively robbing the young of their heritage as Englishmen and women within the Enlightenment tradition – has been carried through to A level to a lesser extent. However, the greatest problem has been that universities are now compelled to accept not merely the A level and the Scottish Higher as a qualification to enter a degree course in music, but a variety of “vocational courses” such as A level “music technology” and BTEC which offer nothing in the way of a theoretical or historical basis for the study of music and no real test of practical ability as a composer, instrumentalist or singer.
I well remember my first appointment as a lecturer in music on a new degree course validated by a new university. Of the ten students in my class, only one had done A level music. All the rest had come the way of BTEC or access courses. Their knowledge of the theory of music was zero and their executant ability as musicians was largely limited to the cushioned confines of the recording studio with its copious electronic assistance. It became clear fairly quickly that some of those present were there because of the financial benefits that education offered as an alternative to the dole, and had no interest in what was being taught, one or two turning up to class under the influence of recreational pharmaceuticals of various kinds. My task was effectively to cram a theoretical basis for music as well as some basic aural training – material that used to occupy the curriculum from ages 14 to 18 – into their first year of undergraduate study. At the end of the year, the numbers having dwindled in the meantime, I was told that if the remaining students did not pass, the funding for the course would be withdrawn and I would consequently be out of a job, with the implication that I had better inflate their grades until they got through. In a moment of weakness, I agreed to pass them and then resigned, vowing never to teach in the state sector again.
Deserting the muse
At university level, the post-1997 era has been notable for two parallel influences that have come close to destroying significant musical education in this country. The first is the Research Assessment Exercise and its cognate processes, which have imposed a narrow definition of acceptability on music degree courses – of course, imposed by the universities, not the conservatoires. As a result of this, in order to meet government-imposed “quality criteria”, pure performance or composition cannot now be considered the sole criterion for the award of a degree except in very rare, almost never awarded cases of higher doctorates. The Royal College introduced a Doctor of Music programme in my last year there, and as part of it insisted that all submissions must have a written component. Effectively, it was acknowledging that it had no confidence in its ability to assess the very arts of performance and composition that it was set up to specialise in. Those degree courses where group and individual performance were a significant part of assessment also found themselves under threat; this was the case at Bristol where a bachelor’s degree with a strong performing basis found itself effectively replaced by one where the basis was in the more easily assessable musicology. Cardiff offers a PhD option in composition, but only if you also submit a dissertation. And at Cambridge, where the Doctor of Music in Composition remains on the statute books, potential applicants via the Faculty are told, quite contrary to the written regulations, that they need to undertake a PhD before they will be considered.
The new musicology
The musicology that is taught now bears little relationship to that of even ten years ago. Its chief difference is that, following upon the flight from applied music, it talks about everything except music itself.
Presaging New Labour by a couple of years came the movement entitled the “new musicology”, a jackdaw hybrid of gender and queer studies, cultural theory, post-structuralism, postcolonial studies and the theorising of Adorno and Walter Benjamin. When I arrived as a postgraduate at Cambridge, I found to my dismay that the music historians had either decamped elsewhere or resolved to keep a low profile while their faculty was effectively hijacked by those who stood to benefit from the bandwagon – invariably those who published the least and were the most aggressive in defending their turf. The new musicology was in its pomp, and criticism from outside was not to be tolerated. My objections that I had made it clear in my application to undertake research there that I was a music historian and not at all sympathetic to left-wing pseudo-disciplines such as “cultural studies” were answered in simple terms by “that’s what we do here” and the implication that if I disagreed with the totalitarian direction in which the faculty was being pushed I should leave. What was happening was that an ideology which had no defence in rationality was being protected from criticism by individuals who had much to lose from its failure. This was crude academic bullying and it was not something I intended to tolerate; accordingly I completed my doctorate elsewhere.
What is notable in the “new musicology” is how little of originality it contains. It is as if someone were to gather up the most leftist elements of university teaching and then unite them in a single Marxist behemoth. There is psychology, of course, and pointless theorising as to whether one can tell whether Schubert was gay or not from his use of the German sixth. There is cultural theory a-plenty, the return of extended prose written in numbered paragraphs, and the meaningless, self-referential cant of structuralism and post-structuralism. Indeed, Laurence Kramer says that in order to survive, musicology must embrace a network of “postmodernist strategies of understanding”. To appease the multiculturalists, ethnomusicology has now taken much of the space and funding formerly allocated to dead white males, meaning that the folk songs of obscure Third World tribes are now accorded the importance that the powers that be feel they deserve. Feminism of a particularly assertive kind has been allowed free rein, determining among other things that sonata form is sexist and misogynist. Because we are no longer talking about music as music, but instead music, in the words of Susan McClary, “as a medium that participates in social formation”, pop music is suddenly OK again – this is of course a point where Adorno’s objections to it are conveniently forgotten. And actual performance and composition can be reduced to the margins without guilt or hindsight.
The straw man
What the new musicologists have done is effectively set up a straw man in order to justify their ideological lurch. That straw man is the idea that music has no meaning and no political or social significance. As Charles Rosen points out, with the exception of nineteenth-century critic Hanslick, it is doubtful whether anyone has ever actually believed this. Rather, there has always been what we might refer to as a divine fusion in the performance of music between what is deemed to be the composer’s meaning and significance and that overlaid or recreated by the performer, and then a third overlay of meaning and significance by the listener. Not only are those perceptions likely to differ between individuals, they may well differ among the same individuals on different occasions, depending on emotional state. Even the eminent may legitimately see different and contradictory things in a musical work.
New musicology as authoritarian Adornoism
Earlier, I mentioned control as a key element of the changes in musical education with respect to government activity. It is equally prevalent in the new musicology. New musicologists usually seem to be telling us what to think and what to feel when we listen to music. By imposing meaning they present their opinion as dogma. By refusing to acknowledge the essential subjectivity that is at the heart of musical meaning they deny the individual the right to experience music in his or her own way and – heaven forbid – to use cultural references that are not chosen from the fashionable Left. The result is an edifice built on sand; once one does not accept the authority of the critic to dictate significance and meaning, much of what remains is merely ideological cant. Does the recapitulation of the first movement of Beethoven’s Ninth represent “the throttling murderous rage of a rapist incapable of attaining release”? Susan McClary published just that analysis, which to my mind is an excellent illustration of the way that this mode of discourse has a tendency to lapse into self-indulgent fantasy.
The aim of all this is, of course, to offer a further justification for the Adornoist position on music as high art inaccessible to all but the elite. By connecting music with other disciplines, links are created that are harder to break and that make music harder to isolate within the academy. By borrowing highly obscure modes of language and reference from those disciplines, and effectively talking about everything except music, new musicologists make it more difficult to discuss their work in anything other than its own terms, unless (as I do) one stands wholly outside their viewpoint. They also fulfil Marxism’s inherent self-hatred by focussing on the effort expended in method and execution rather than the value or intelligibility of the results. And by ensuring that those disciplines chosen support the broadly Adornoist view – in other words that they support the concept of paternalistic, nanny-knows-best culture ruled by experts who tell the underclass what to like and what to think, they create a perfect ideological fit with academia’s Leftist zeitgeist and with the culture industry as defined by New Labour.
The effects of the new musicology
It is a testament to the qualities of musical educators that they managed to withstand such nonsense for as long as they did. But from the late 1990s the onslaught came at them with a vengeance. Around five years after I had left the RCM, I looked out of curiosity at its list of teaching staff posted on its website, thinking that the exceptionally low staff turnover that I had noted during my time there would have continued. By contrast, I found and confirmed through subsequent enquiry that most of those responsible for the teaching of musicology – a very competent faculty, by the way, representing a good deal of expertise in analysis, history and musical techniques – had either retired, been sacked or left. In their place were individuals who were overwhelmingly graduates of institutions that taught the new musicology and presumably advocates of the same from the indications of the course changes that had taken place. In the case of the RCM – and this is surely astonishing – none of these new members of staff had been through a competitive process of external appointment. They had simply been recommended and chosen from the inner circle of the establishment. A similar pattern of ideological appointments has been repeated at other music departments around the country.
What we are witnessing is effectively the continuation of the process that drove Western tonal music underground under the weight of post-war ideology. Traditional musicologists and music historians are no longer welcome in British academia unless they are willing to accept the new musicology. Indeed, Laurence Kramer has said,
“The theories that ground [postmodernist] strategies are radically anti-foundationalist, anti-essentialist, and anti-totalizing. They emphasize the constructedness, both linguistic and ideological, of all human identities and institutions. They insist on the relativity of all knowledge to the disciplines–not just the conceptual presuppositions but the material, discursive, and social practices–that produce and circulate knowledge. While often disagreeing with each other, poststructuralists, neopragmatists, feminists, psychoanalytic theorists, critical social theorists, multiculturalists and others have been changing the very framework within which disagreement can meaningfully occur.”
Once you can control disagreement, there’s not much else that isn’t within your power.
It will perhaps not come as a surprise that those who like myself regard this sort of thing as an irresponsible waste of public funds (and are not afraid to say so) have had to seek academic positions abroad (in my case in a privately-funded institution that is fully supportive of my views). Most have accepted that kow-towing to the musical establishment’s chosen fads and cults is the price they pay for having a job in the area at all, particularly given that the glut of post-1997 music graduates has resulted in greater competition in the areas of lesser competence such as arts administration.
Conclusions
Until around 1945, English musical education consisted of a hybrid of private tuition, private sector diplomas and the conservatoires, with universities performing a validating rather than teaching role and the government not involved in the process to any significant extent. This system produced composers and performers who achieved lasting and continuing recognition at both a popular and initiate level.
Today, English musical education consists of an emasculated conservatoire sector increasingly subordinate to the universities, a university sector subordinate to the government which in turn controls the arts establishment, and an arts establishment subordinate to Marxist ideology. This ideology is committed to the promotion of the obscure and the unpopular provided such are the outcome of complex intellectual methods and do not challenge the ideology itself. It recognises that the applied art of music is a threat to ideology because it relies primarily on individual, rather than collective interpretation. It remodels musicology as an insecure art reliant on dogma and resting on other disciplines for its validity. It has produced few composers and performers whose popular success is not the result of aping popular music.
I generally try to end occasions like this with some kind of constructive suggestions for improvement. In this case, the issue is probably not so difficult to deal with. Without state funding of universities and of the arts establishment, the new musicology will fall into the dust where it belongs. Perhaps then we can get back to understanding that music consists of performance and composition and the means by which these are achieved first and foremost, and as a support to these the historical and analytic contexts which enable us better to understand and benefit from their creative power.
Professor John Kersey 
