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You would expect me, as a musician, to be depressed by the periodic announcements of yet another British university closing its music department, Nottingham being the latest. The reasons cited are generally falling student demand and the need to make cost savings. Behind these reasons, true enough though they may be, lies a deeper assumption that music isn’t terribly important, a frill rather than an essential. Again, you would expect me to say (and I do say) that music is one of the most profound expressions of the human soul, a statement of what makes us human and civilised. We don’t know much about the lives of our cave-dwelling ancestors, but we do know that they played instruments, sang, danced, and created art of haunting beauty on the walls of their caves.
I was fortunate to have been born at a time when the arts (including dance and other physical activity) were considered to be central in a child’s development and were front and centre in British education – influenced by the ideas of continental pedagogues such as Friedrich Froebel and Rudolf Steiner. That went out of fashion. After decades of arts sidelining in our educational thinking, we finally have signs that the wheel may have turned full circle. The Campaign for the Arts has issued a report to which the government has last week responded positively. The philistine EBacc is being dropped, arts education is to be given a higher priority in schools, and (let’s hope) the number of students studying music for GCSE and A-level will climb back up after a steady decline.
That decline was inevitable: music is like swimming, you can’t discover whether you like it until you’ve tried it, and as long as so many state schools failed to provide any worthwhile music teaching, their pupils were always going to remain in ignorance of it unless they had musical families (I didn’t).
I am an optimist – a bruised one, admittedly – and I foresee a surge in demand for university places to study music. Hang in there, Nottingham. The tide will turn. Without proper provision for music across our universities, where will we find the music teachers, the scholars, the performers of the future?
JOHN RUTTER
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Thank you John. I went through the Music school system and Youth orchestras of Nottingham. That enabled a lifetime as a lover of music and as an employed musician and educator. I now try to support teachers in the delivery of the Primary music curriculum. It is so apparent the training of teachers is lacking in arts subjects. Is a primary degree really a primary degree with no real demands on understanding and competence with regard to the arts in general and music in particular? I studied a four year degree at Kingston (when I met and interviewed you). The musicians were always on parade for various events. Any institution of learning that doesn’t have music at its core is lacking and we really must break the cycle of teachers not being taught how to teach music. Hopefully the changes will bring us back to having music more centrally placed, understood and celebrated.
I studied science, have worked in lots of rural and environmental sectors. I have only ever been a consumer of music, someone enchanted and uifted by live, recorded and broadcast music. I think it is a huge tragedy for a university to lose its music course and not to be training and inspiringtge musicians of tge future.