Higher Education in Music in the Twenty-First Century

Björn Heile, Eva Moreda Rodriguez, Jane Stanley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317121954
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

In this book, the contributors reconsider the fundamentals of Music as a university discipline by engaging with the questions: What should university study of music consist of? Are there any aspects, repertoires, pieces, composers and musicians that we want all students to know about? Are there any skills that we expect them to be able to master? How can we guarantee the relevance, rigour and cohesiveness of our curriculum? What is specific to higher education in music and what does it mean now and for the future? The book addresses many of the challenges students and teachers face in current higher education; indeed, the majority of today's music students undoubtedly encounter a greater diversity of musical traditions and critical approaches to their study as well as a wider set of skills than their forebears. Welcome as these developments may be, they pose some risks too: more material cannot be added to the curriculum without either sacrificing depth for breadth or making much of it optional. The former provides students with a superficial and deceptive familiarity with a wide range of subject matter, but without the analytical skills and intellectual discipline required to truly master any of it. The latter easily results in a fragmentation of knowledge and skills, without a realistic opportunity for students to draw meaningful connections and arrive at a synthesis.

The authors, Music academics from the University of Glasgow, provide case studies from their own extensive experience, which are complemented by an Afterword from Nicholas Cook, 1684 Professor of Music at the University of Cambridge. Together, they examine what students can and should learn about and from music and what skills and knowledge music graduates could or should possess in order to operate successfully in professional and public life. Coupled with these considerations are reflections on music's social function and universities' role in public life, concluding with the conviction that a university education in music is more than a personal investment in one's future; it contributes to the public good.

1 Should there be a twenty-first century ‘Complete Kapellmeister’?

The skills, content and purposes of a university music degree

John Butt

University music education in the UK over the last century has enjoyed a peculiar history that is not directly shared by any other country. As becomes clear on closer examination, the tradition seemingly embodied within this history is in many respects of considerably shorter duration than many might believe, and it was only securely in place in the years following the Second World War. This fact also relies on a further characteristic of the British situation from c.1945–2000, namely the provision of free university education to those deemed suitable to benefit from it, as part of the welfare state, which was instituted directly in the wake of the Second World War (and towards which many interwar trends were pointing). Nevertheless, provision of fees and maintenance by Local Education Authorities was not completely established until the Education Act of 1962 (Education Act 1962).

In its most traditional form (that is, what would have been perceived as ‘traditional’ c.1975, and with most departments emulating what they saw as ‘Oxbridge’ norms), university music tuition reflected a ‘Kapellmeister’ style of education, training all undergraduates in progressively demanding skills of harmony, counterpoint and associated stylistic composition, together with challenging aural tests and keyboard skills. Music history was added to this, usually as an uncritical, factually based discipline aimed at teaching basic knowledge of the classical canon, and often borrowing unashamedly from the publications of the burgeoning ‘music appreciation’ industry in the US over the same period, notably the well-nigh ubiquitous source of pre-digested music history (Grout 1960/2014). Acoustics was sometimes included, as if to remind students of music’s traditional association with the physical sciences and also perhaps to prove that music was a ‘proper’ science. Notation and paleography often also played a role, usually involving study of Renaissance mensural practices and particularly of English music, which had been undergoing revival since the late nineteenth century. Later additions to this core were composition (whether stylistic, free or modernist), analysis (traditionally in the Tovey mould, but increasingly dominated by Schenker from the 1970s onwards) and historical performance practice. This latter was initially an extension of organology (occasioned by the wonderful instrument collections surviving in the ancient universities and associated museums), but in the 1950s and 1960s it was very much guided towards a rethinking of attitudes towards earlier repertories, particularly by the pioneering and entirely idiosyncratic work of Thurston Dart. Performance itself was often excluded (that was the job of the conservatories, or, in the case of Oxbridge, the richer constituent colleges, many of which offered prestigious organ and choral scholarships). Sometimes performance was grudgingly appended to the curriculum, perhaps as an option that was examined but not necessarily taught under the direct supervision of the faculty or department concerned.¹ With all these skills mastered in the course of a three- or four-year university degree (together with a secondary school syllabus that directly interlocked with the university curriculum), it was assumed that the graduate would be fit to practise the role of a generally competent musical organiser, director or teacher, able to undertake a whole range of expected (and indeed unexpected) leadership roles. Perhaps never before had Mattheson’s (1739/1981) ambitions for the education of the ‘Complete Kapellmeister’ been so fully realized on the level of a national curriculum.²

One obvious observation: with the increased marketization of higher education from the 1980s onwards, together with the dramatic growth of student numbers (well beyond the previous expansion enshrined by the Robbins Report of 1961–3: Robbins 1963),³ the specialization demanded by the ‘Kapellmeister’ degree soon became unviable. If music was to survive as an academic subject it had to be adapted to a much broader range of interests. Moreover, the social liberalism that is often an unsung corollary of monetarist economic policy meant that there was increasing unease about the narrow focus on western classical music (and it may not be entirely coincidental that some of the UK departments that have closed since the ‘Thatcher revolution’ were among those that cleaved most closely to the classical tradition).⁴ Together with the new intellectual imperatives spurred by the American ‘new musicology’ of the 1980s and 1990s, the field of music suddenly became richer in its range of world and popular music, together with the methodologies by which these could be explored (Cook and Everist 1999). The ‘critical turn’, much heralded by Joseph Kerman (1985), went beyond the initial imperative to evaluate and discern social meaning in the classical repertory, towards a much more complex network of evaluation and hermeneutics within which ‘classical’ values were strictly relativized. Now, to many, the ‘Kapellmeister’ degree seemed absurdly abstract, on a par with, say, stylistic composition in Latin, and relevant only to a very small component of the overall ‘markets’ and ‘industries’ of music. Of course, there was something of a time lag between the changes in research direction and in the content of teaching, even in America, where ‘new musicology’ was most prevalent, but where the institutionalized approach to classical music appreciation has continued to endure. British musicology was a little slower to adapt to the new methodologies, although some distinctive voices soon emerged (as exemplified by Cook and Everist 1999). However, teaching content could still be very traditional in terms of stylistic techniques and adherence to the classical canon, even by the turn of the twenty-first century. But whatever the rates of change, virtually no department has remained unaffected by the broadening of musical study. Now the immediate question is whether what remains of the ‘Kapellmeister’ degree is worth preserving or even restoring, and whether, now that so many other – largely excellent – aspects of music have gained syllabus space (such as cultural or philosophical critiques, but also a much extended range of music and creative practices), anything worthwhile has been lost.

Any answer to this question will require some understanding of how and why the ‘Kapellmeister’ degree developed in the first place, particularly given that it does not go back as far as many traditionalists might like to believe. Music, it is true, had a very prestigious place in the medieval curriculum as an essential component of the ‘scientific’ quadrivium, which constituted the larger part of the seven liberal arts; the three ‘trivial’ subjects, which were the more practical arts such as rhetoric and dialectic, significantly did not include music. Thus the ‘ancient’ universities (i.e. the two in England, four in Scotland and the one Elizabethan foundation in Ireland, all dating from before 1600) would have promoted the study of the music theory in Boethius and Aristotle, since the proportions and relationships embodied in music were considered central to the understanding of the medieval cosmos together with the human body and its spiritual harmony. Some of this understanding persisted into the seventeenth century, supplemented with newer discoveries and theories concerning the science of sound (i.e. the emerging field of acoustics). But particularly interesting is what now seems like an unhelpful disconnect between the prestigious role of music as theory, linking the cosmos and the human in spiritual harmony (musica mundana and musica humana) and its more lowly position as a practical art (musica intrumentalis). Most of the ancient universities were closely associated with (or situated near) choral foundations, which were responsible for preserving and promoting both monophony and polyphony (famously so, in the case of St Andrews, given its role in the preservation of early polyphony), but this activity seems to have been an essentially different sphere from the academic, liberal arts, one.

Nevertheless, music of a more practical nature eventually did make its way into the university, but not as part of the central BA syllabus (MA in Scotland), rather as an entirely separate degree. The first specific music degrees in the world belong to Renaissance Cambridge (BMus and DMus established in 1463/4) and Oxford was not far behind with equivalent qualifications. These awards could be gained through a compositional submission, which might involve many years of preparation. But residency and a structured course of study were not generally required. In short, composition was clearly becoming acceptable as an aspect of musical science, but it was only admitted as a supplement to the BA curriculum and not as a component or substitute. As Cudworth and Andrewes (no date, section 1) and Wollenberg (no date, section 5) outline, only in the nineteenth or early twentieth centuries did residency become essential to the acquisition of music degrees and only then were written examinations in specific compositional techniques instituted.

A closer relationship between theoretical and practical music was instigated with the appointment of the first professors of music (Oxford in 1626 and Cambridge in 1684), who were expected to retain a scientific interest in music but also provide leadership in composition and other practical aspects of music. For many years, these figures were associated with college or university organist roles, so one might assume that their work in composition probably accorded with the sort of music they performed in their respective chapels, right into the 1920s. Likewise, the next generations of cathedral and church organists usually came through the Oxbridge system, even though the centrality of religion to university life had slumped during the Enlightenment era.

All this demonstrates a peculiarity of British music: the more-or-less intact survival of the Anglican choral tradition through the ages of revolution and Enlightenment, industrialization and the birth of the modern state, and right into the twenty-first century. In no other European country was there such a continuous tradition and, given its association with the ancient universities, it is not surprising that the professoriate and recipients of the music degrees were so often associated with the church and its music (certainly in England and ‘Anglican’ Ireland, if not in Scotland, where the universities had become Presbyterian institutions, albeit with some regard for traditional church music). A further factor concerns the important role of the provincial cathedral and church organist in Britain, which grew in the nineteenth century when such figures effectively became the directors of music for entire regions (in the comparative absence of the professional orchestras and opera houses that were already spreading across the entirety of German and Italian lands, McCrea 1998, 288–90). Organists were not only conductors of provincial choral societies and orchestras, they also became a primary means by which the latest orchestral repertory was transmitted to audiences beyond the main centres, in the guise of organ transcriptions (very much facilitated by the increasingly orchestral specifications of the English romantic organ, Thistlethwaite 1990). In short, nineteenth-century British musical culture was dominated by broadly educated musicians who tended to have a first degree in a range of arts subjects and one of the coveted music degrees of Oxbridge (and Dublin, and later, Durham and Edinburgh).

If this short history suggests that some aspects of the ‘Kapellmeister’ tradition do indeed stretch back towards the institution of music degrees back in the seventeenth century, it needs to be stressed that full degree programmes in music (i.e. beyond the ‘second’ degrees that were generally taken without a full formal course of study) are of considerably later vintage. Indeed, full degrees in music were available only in Scotland before the Second World War. The first faculty of music was set up under the approval of Queen Victoria in Edinburgh in 1894, following several decades of intermittent music tuition from the Reid Professors of the Theory of Music (first appointed in 1839). The Reid Professor who successfully inaugurated the full degree in music was Frederick Niecks, a German-born Scot who was astonishingly visionary in his approach. Although he was clearly influenced by the newly inaugurated discipline of musicology in Germany, Tovey noted in 1920 that Niecks’s scheme still had no parallel in Europe. His rich syllabus (of which students were to take ‘not less than eighty Lectures’) was designed to educate students in the ‘how and why of things’, and it ranged from performance, through advanced harmony and counterpoint, form and orchestration, to study of analysis, history and acoustics; moreover, students had to pass examinations in languages, rhetoric and literature (Farmer 1947, 395).⁵ This BMus degree essentially became the model for later music degree programmes throughout the UK, with Glasgow first following suit in 1930–1.⁶ Most surprising is perhaps the fact that the ancient English universities were rather later in developing faculties of music, together with the associated single-honours undergraduate degrees: Oxford’s dates from 1944 (Wollenberg no date, section 5) and Cambridge’s from 1947–8 (Cudworth and Andrewes no date, section 1). Most other prestigious degrees in music date from later still, with that of a ‘plateglass’ university such as York dating from 1964 (Griffiths and Paynter no date), around the same time as that of King’s College London (despite the latter having had a professor of music for several decades, Breen 2015, 3).

The ‘Kapellmeister’ education served particular ends, not least those of the lecturers who were appointed between the 1940s and the 1960s, all of whom tended to be well-rounded practitioners of some kind, often connected with the church (predominantly Anglican) and/or regional music culture. To them, ‘academic’ meant the study and practice of stylistic compositional techniques, done wherever possible without a keyboard, to cultivate the ‘inner ear’. This was to provide a solid and essential musicianship, which would sustain musical culture in a way that practitioners from conservatories could not necessarily offer. The students were being prepared for the sorts of jobs that helped perpetuate the very tradition to which they belonged: church and cathedral music, the organist as a regional focus of classical music, broadcasting and concert promotion and, perhaps most significantly, school teaching. Although many of the more ‘establishment’ figures in classical music culture came from independent schools (which were most likely to be able to afford the resources and time in the curriculum for learning harmony, counterpoint, keyboard skills and advanced performance), this was also the period when pupils from state schools were most intensively educated in classical music and – if particularly talented – could become fully qualified to proceed to a university or conservatory education in music. National exams (whether A Levels or Scottish Highers) tested the skills of a prospective Kapellmeister, and given that 48 per cent of graduates in the Humanities in 1963 went into teaching (Robbins 1963, 92, table 34), it is easy to see how the system sustained itself and indeed gave the impression that it had already lasted for many years. Graduates with this sort of training in music were also in a position to inform the public about classical music culture and fit in directly with the Reithian values of the BBC, the ‘Third Programme’ of which became the world leader in the broadcasting of classical music.

There is an irony to this situation that perhaps cannot be stressed too strongly: this burgeoning of classical music culture, championed by the universities and filtering into the rest of the educational culture came at the time of the greatest government investment and ownership in public services across the board. In other words, what might today often be considered a particularly privileged and ‘elitist’ culture was officially made available to any suitably qualified person during the era of the welfare state. Indeed, the championing of ‘high culture’ was a very common feature of much discourse on the socialist and democratic left. If populist art was not necessarily to be condemned (other than perhaps for its explicit commercialization), the aspiration to have access to – and participate in – cultures such as classical music was frequently expressed, as in for instance the Policy for Music in Post War Britain by the Workers’ Music Association (1945).

If many in the older generation (and many younger figures besides) see this period as a golden age from which we have deviated, it is perhaps worth noting Thomas Piketty’s (2014, 96–9, 126–9) observations about the general trends in western capitalism since 1700.⁷ Within this broader history it is clear that the period stretching from after the First World War to the 1970s is the exception rather than the rule in terms of the support for public services in the western world (and, one might also obviously add, this also applies to the Soviet bloc, which flourished during precisely the same period). The economy during this period was devastated by two world wars and the Great Depression, and the need for urgent and repeated rebuilding inspired a trend for considerable public spending. This was also the period in which capital in general had the lowest value, while growth in national economies was at its greatest. Without entering into greater economic detail, it seems clear that the ‘elite’ culture of classical music was most central to public education and culture precisely when the country as a whole was least wealthy and had the greatest debt (and this was also the time when the gap between rich and poor was at its narrowest point). Only when the situation has reverted to the capitalist ‘norm’ (in terms of the larger historical trends), does this culture seem ‘elitist’ and contrary to the ‘cost-effective’ imperatives of the ma...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures and examples
• List of contributors
• Introduction
• 1 Should there be a twenty-first century ‘Complete Kapellmeister’?: the skills, content and purposes of a university music degree
• 2 The learning community, a quodlibet
• 3 Integrative music history: rethinking music since 1900
• 4 The many voices of ‘art song’
• 5 The music industries: theory, practice and vocations – a polemical intervention
• 6 Writing about music in the 21st century
• 7 Assessing making and doing
• 8 The teaching of creative practice within higher music education: Guerrilla Learning Outcomes (GLOs) and the importance of negotiation
• 9 On teaching composition: why it can be taught and why that matters
• 10 A reflective dialogue on teaching composition
• Afterword
• Index