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Music Education – Its Role in Our Music Ecosphere

Music Education – Its Role in Our Music Ecosphere

Professor Kim Walker

The urgent question today for all of us—posed originally by Lee Bollinger, President of Columbia University[1]—is which
institutions, outside of the usual free market, will assume responsibility for the health and vitality of a contemporary music
culture in Australia?

When I arrived in Australia two years ago I was struck by the incredible range of musical expertise in this country and the
very exciting mix of musical traditions and influences, including the music-making of Asia. This was far beyond the
mostly western tradition so familiar to me back in America and Europe. Why not use it?

My focus is on education in Australia, particularly tertiary education and the challenges facing us in Australia. At the
Sydney Conservatorium of Music we have three goals – recruit the best students, offer an outstanding program, assure
their future.

But we can’t do our job without a link into the profession and, at the other end, a healthy pool of talent from the school
years—a culture of music appreciation and teaching from Kindergarten to Year 12. There was much anticipation over the
Commonwealth’s coming report on primary and secondary music education, and the response by some 5000 individuals
and organisations indicates the urgency they feel.

I remain concerned, though, that a Federal initiative is also needed to address an holistic overview rather than each
separate area of funding, to understand music-making and appreciation from the toddler to the post-graduate, from the
enthusiast to the virtuoso. We have placed too large an emphasis on creating jobs in the profession without addressing
the ecosphere of interdependent relationships essential to our survival. If one segment is lost, the others will also wither.

At the Sydney Conservatorium, over 5000 people, aged 3 to 94, are every year studying or discovering music in this
building. But what truly excites me is that musicians from the Conservatorium are working regularly with those from the
best of this city’s ensembles—including the Sydney Symphony, the Australian Brandenburg Orchestra, the Australian
Opera and Ballet Orchestra, Musica Viva, the Australian Chamber Orchestra and Synergy.

This cross-pollination with Sydney’s ensembles—this opening of our stable doors to this city’s busy musical scene—was
a key focus of the concert season we launched in 2005. It is the largest concert season ever staged at the
Conservatorium. And while 2005 marked ninety years since the Conservatorium first opened its doors to the world of
music, it is in some ways just a beginning.

Who are the educators?

There is a still larger musical arena to survey. The often piecemeal funding of the different components in Australia’s
wide music culture is affecting the whole picture, including all of us at conservatoriums across the country charged with
creating musicians of excellence.

The worldwide trend of amalgamation of the conservatoriums and specialist music schools into the universities has
produced a number of benefits and challenges, which I’ll discuss later. Most immediate is the perception now that
somehow they are not part of a national strategy to focus on the development of music and virtuoso musicians.

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Australia is currently funding many programs in music education that are of short duration and not accredited. Music
presenters, not conservatoriums, are being democratically awarded money for short term music education and, while
some of these programs are outstanding, they are merely icing on the cake compared to the seven year task of
educating accomplished musicians. It is impossible to take a short three-month course, a summer school or one year
program and consider oneself a conductor, or a soloist, or prepared for a career.

The Sydney Symphony Orchestra, Musica Viva, Australian Chamber Orchestra, the Australian Youth Orchestra and the
Sydney Youth Orchestra all have “education programs”. These music presenters are all our colleagues, and they bring
vitality to the industry and society. As for education though, while these groups provide excellent opportunities for young
performers, and in some cases young professionals, the only comprehensive educational foundation is that available in
our established and accredited conservatoriums. Improvements have to be made, as I’ll suggest, in the education we
provide, but no other presenter comes close to the comprehensive educational role we play. Education it seems is
becoming an area, a tagline, by which music presenters can expand into other funding categories.

Conservatoriums used to be directly funded by the Commonwealth Government. Now within our universities, only 16 per
cent of annual expenditure comes directly from that source. It is almost as though we are now perceived not only as
state located but also state based, rather than as part of any national program of music development, and a means of
improving it. Given the resources, the history and the talents we have—and, yes, the benefits from being within
universities—conservatoriums should instead be part of a comprehensive national strategy.

I await the conclusions that will be drawn from the current Commonwealth review of the Australian National Academy of
Music and the Australian Youth Orchestra. It has been suggested that both these Commonwealth organisations will have
significant roles in the training of elite musicians. Conservatoriums historically have maintained this very same mission,
some for more than a century, but now struggle to find their remaining funding gap of 84 per cent to achieve it.
Meanwhile vital money for elite music development is being spread across other newer bodies, simply because they are
direct agencies of the Commonwealth Government.

Such a plan results in wasteful duplication. It is reason again for a national overview of music development to empower
our Commonwealth and state institutions and define their different but complementary roles. In the education of music
professionals we should begin by differentiating between the long term specialist foundation courses and the add-on
programs which serve other purposes.

If we don’t do this, then I point you to what happened to the once flourishing classic recording industry as an example.
EMI, ANGEL, DG record companies all had a brand identity with opera, or concertos or orchestral work with star soloists
and orchestras. When the record companies found that they could all re-issue old releases on CDs, they immediately
began issuing cheap CDs and watched sales rise. Unfortunately the branding dissolved and they all produced each
other’s specialties. Orchestras also then lost exclusive and lucrative recording contracts as well as specialist reputations.
The disastrous result is history—the entire classic recording industry has collapsed and is being reinvented.

Research and Creative activity

Conservatoriums and what they offer—my idea of what a rigorous, accredited and comprehensive education is for elite
musicians—are also now, in their funding sources, stuck between a rock and hard place. In the vital area of research,
conservatoriums, I believe, benefit from being in the university setting. Under forward thinking university administrations
they have the potential to contribute to the wider music ecosphere, and benefit from the technology opportunities and
musicological disciplines which are enhanced by the university disciplines. Practitioners, for example, like Richard
Tognetti from the Australian Chamber Orchestra, realise the contribution that musicology can make to musical
excellence, with Tognetti introducing elements of text study into the rehearsal regime of his players. The position of
conservatoriums now within universities would, one hopes, have strengthened their access to research funding through
the Department of Education, Science and Training. But this is not the case.

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Our barrier to this financial support is the bias still in all DEST funding and Australia Research Council grants towards the
sciences, and to research which is text-based and credited only by publications. Creative projects, especially ones which
are cross-disciplinary, slip between the strictly defined panels which assess research projects. In September 2005 the
Commonwealth released a preferred model for a new Research Quality Framework but, although an improvement, this
framework inadequately addresses creative activity and the study and execution of performance. This contradicts the
recognition worldwide by major research universities and music conservatoriums that creative activity is a subset of
research. While there has been excellent attention in the preferred Australian model to the visual arts, it is important to
make explicit contributions to live concerts and other aurally perceived creative work.

Pure creative activity is not recognised in Australia as research for DEST calculation. In the US comparable work is
recognised and rewarded by universities as well as by the National Endowment for the Humanities. In the UK and the
US, creative activity qualifies for support, both through traditional research funding as qualitative research, and also
through arts funding organisations comparable with the Australia Council. In Australia creative projects are not eligible
on either front, not recognised by DEST, nor allowed funding from the Australia Council.

Here is our problem. The Sydney Conservatorium not only oversees many research projects, but this year we are
staging more than 200 concerts. We are in fact probably the largest concert presenter in Sydney. But now amalgamated
with the University of Sydney, the Conservatorium with its artistic contribution and development is unable to win support
from the country’s premier arts funding body. This offers us little help in the training and presentation of elite musicians.
Orchestra leaders may be worried by a 50 per cent structure gap in their funding, but tertiary music education—the part
of the ecosphere that supplies their musicians—is worried by a funding gap of 84 per cent. I don’t want to ignore the
needs of our orchestras, but the first and expanding crisis in our ecosphere will be felt here in the conservatoriums of
Australia.

So there is much more fund-raising to do if, at the Sydney Conservatorium for example, we are going to continue to offer
our elite students the unique opportunities of performance experience and research, to work regularly with, and in, full
orchestras, learn from and experience a variety of different music traditions and instruments.

The James Strong report, which looked into ways to ensure the sustainability of our orchestras, makes it clear that
musicians of the future will have to move to multiple roles rather than just exist in one silo. As in most of Australia’s
workforces, the days are gone when a musician will sign on to one orchestra for decades. Musicians today must be
multi-skilled: adept at performing with opera, symphony and chamber orchestras; they must teach and be able to perform
on a range of early and modern instruments; and they must know how to speak and relate their expertise to the wider
areas of the humanities and issues of the world. They need an in-depth and comprehensive education.

The Sydney Conservatorium and our peers in other states are the best placed specialist music training institutions to
provide this, but we too must revise our thinking and our programs to better answer the needs of today’s musicians.
Leaving aside the funding sources which, for now, are not available to conservatoriums, what is the path ahead for
conservatoriums now they are within the universities?

The Arts and the Academy

Nancy Cantor[2] points to a report by the American Assembly, which notes that the arts and higher education

…are two powerful, historically embedded, endlessly reinvented sectors in American life. They coincide in the society as
major arenas for education, experience and building knowledge. They coincide as major non-profit sectors in American
life; they coincide as builders and shapers of society’s values..

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The real wonder is that higher education and the arts have persisted, in parallel and in partnership, all these years, in so
many places, without articulating their relationship or taking full advantage of it.[3]

I would add that this is also true in Europe and Australia. What the Helen Nugent report and DEST have not emphasised
is that:

Without colleges and universities…artists would have fewer places to perform, fewer opportunities for employment, and
[greater challenges] to engage their audiences. If the academy did not support the arts, the activity of entire performance
forms—dance, theatre, music, and others—would…be available only to those in areas of the country with the wealth and
density to support them. Without their home in higher education, the performing arts [would be severely curtailed].[4]

Since the time of Pythagoras and later Charlemagne, music has been regarded as a basic element in higher education.
Before World War II the home for great musical training was exclusively in Europe. Over the past half century, the US
has supported music training from the most exclusive, the Curtis Institute of Music—where I went to school—to Julliard
and the large comprehensive research institutions such as Indiana University, where I taught for a decade.

Educational programming in all the arts, though particularly in music, was devoted primarily to a European ideal of
shaping young instrumentalists in the mould of the 19th century virtuoso, without experience in improvisation skills,
composition and conducting. On both sides of the Atlantic, Conservatory instrumental training was and remains directed
almost completely towards either the old solo ideal of individual artistry or orchestral preparation as primary goals, often
with serious musicianship and general education occupying a distant secondary role.

My own student experience at the Curtis Institute certainly did not indicate that music history, theory and the humanities
were regarded as particularly important ingredients in the training of a professional musician. We were offered excellent
ear training and solfege but, apart from a course called “the elements of music” with a brief overview of history, acoustics
and style, other aspects were neglected.

Things have changed radically now and most universities have embraced the idea that nurturing genius in the arts is
central to their mission. They seek a balance between technical skills, the education of intellectually creative thinkers
and giving future artists basic business strategies.

Challenges for Music Training and Universities

My first observation of music in higher education today is that those of us at the tertiary level must immediately influence
pre-tertiary training. We must extend our programs into the elementary and secondary schools of Australia influence a
dramatic change in the emphasis placed on arts education and connect with school and community programs.

Of all the professional schools in universities, only music and the other performing or visual arts expect from applicants
portfolio and/or audition demonstrations of potential for success in professional curricula. We don’t just require a high
UAI score!

Unlike law, medicine and business, a high level of pre-tertiary preparation in most of the arts disciplines is essential.
Indeed most of us began preparing for our artistic professions when we were between 4 and 14 years old. The removal
of music education programs from many schools has had a negative impact worldwide on the preparation of students
entering professional programs in the arts. If we are to expect the continuation of a high level of achievement in the arts
in higher education, it is essential that we reverse the trend. A school culture of musical appreciation and
accomplishment is also a vital part of the ecosphere in educating audiences and opinion-makers to appreciate the social
and cultural benefits both of the musicians we produce and the music itself.

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My second observation is that music trainers and universities must adjust to the totally different learning environment
brought about by technological advancements and artists who are now technologically sophisticated. Hearing and
analysing music has changed for better and worse, with students assisted now by sophisticated recordings while relying
less on their own internal listening, and consequently being less flexible rhythmically and in creative improvisation.

My third observation deals with changes in the delivery system of our education programs and processes. Teaching
methods used in most courses in higher education have changed dramatically in the last fifteen years. This is particularly
evident in cooperative learning, group projects and technology-aided instruction.

Traditional lecturing has declined and tertiary institutions worldwide are designing and administering distance-learning
courses in music. I am proud to say that the Sydney Conservatorium has been a leader in the provision of video-assisted
instruction to regional students beyond Sydney.

My fourth observation is related to the urgent need to provide and maintain the laboratory space available in
conservatoriums, offering the foundation training and experience with large ensembles and chamber music. Our fiscal
restraints make this almost impossible. Studying a secondary instrument should be mandatory, not excluded by the
current DEST fee schedule. Experience with piano or period instruments is vital in training musicians. The 19th century
model of virtuosic training in just one instrument is no longer applicable for either the elite performer or the working
musician of today. And, I repeat, the capability of the conservatoriums to implement this comprehensive educational
program and experience is what should distinguish them from other education package providers and presenters.

My fifth and a related observation addresses the need for the funders of research to recognise the role of the creative
process as much as they seek evidence of the creative product. There is an historical confusion here between virtuosity,
which is a simpler concept to grasp, and artistry. Virtuosity invokes the image of a performer one can see, hear and
respond to. It implies a degree of naturalness and ease with fluent technique, characteristics which have defined
virtuosity since the Renaissance. Artistry on the other hand, is more difficult to achieve, as it blends virtuosity, dramatic
impact and aesthetics into a seamless whole and produces an original product. Opera stars, for example, are known for
key roles they have sung worldwide in a truly unique way which sets them apart from other singers. The musical score
remains the same no matter who sings it. The process of musical genius, the way the music flows through the performer,
is the true artistic product—the artistry. The contribution of conservatoriums to the ecosphere is to nurture this musical
originality, but they must have the support to do it.

My sixth observation is that we are in a conservative climate regarding the recognition of the importance of the arts and
their funding. There have been attempts worldwide to dismantle public broadcasting and major funding for the arts, with
cost-cutting politicians (bureaucrats) regarding cultural programs as the first to be eliminated.

This is so in Australia and many other countries, but not all. Every candidate, for example, in the 1995 French election
agreed that a full 1% of France’s national budget should be set aside for culture.[5] This costs each taxpayer about $65
per year and is wholly uncontroversial. In Germany cultural subsidies cost each taxpayer $50 a year and in Berlin alone
the arts budget is over $1 billion. A powerful and united force must resist an environment of conservative attitudes and
conservative economic conditions in the arts in higher education.

My final observation emphasises the importance of cohesion and unity. If we are to accept the challenges of technology
and distance learning, promote pre-tertiary music education and the financial support of the arts, we must be unified. Our
own house must be in order and we must continually accept (though not necessarily always agree with) all the artistic
endeavours, accomplishments, philosophies and theories of our colleagues.

A national overarching vision is urgently needed so that we are all singing from the same song sheet (although with
different parts) in a unity of purpose to develop and enhance the entire culture through the Arts, and in particular our total
music culture.

Sydney Conservatorium

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The Sydney Conservatorium of Music is a place for artists and scholars—a magical and wonderful place. I am extremely
privileged to serve as the Dean. Since its inception, the Sydney Conservatorium has been reinventing the musical
experience. The first state-funded symphony orchestra in Australia opened at the Sydney Conservatorium, followed by
the first resident string quartet in Australia. The building has hosted Kreisler, Heifitz, Stravinsky, Melba and many other
legendary performers.

2005 was an historic year for both the University of Sydney and the Conservatorium, when we completed the
amalgamation of the university’s impressive Music Department into the Conservatorium. Now in the same building within
the same curriculum, excellence in musicology and music-making is combined, each deepening and enriching the other.
Work still needs to be done on the accreditation and academic recognition given to vocational practice, and to those
creative musicians pursuing excellence in musical practice. That is an important political and educational goal for all
involved.

Post-graduate students are now regular members of this Conservatorium. Many of these are now from overseas, drawn
by Australia’s distinctive music culture and our capacity at this institution to attract as teachers some of the world’s
greatest performers in their field. We have already admitted the first PhDs in Performance from the US—two Fulbright
Scholars—and hired in 2005 twelve new top performers/scholars or composers. Australian composers affiliated with the
University of Sydney and the Sydney Conservatorium of Music include significant Australians—artists like
Peter Sculthorpe (Living Legend), Ross Edwards, Michael Smetanin, Matthew Hindson—who are now gaining the world
recognition they deserve. This year students arrive from London, New York and the major music institutions in the US,
Germany and Asia.

Without advances like this, geared to build a healthy tertiary foundation and strong post-graduate programs, the cost of
bringing conductors, soloists and music to Australia will remain exorbitant, our musical culture will be eroded and the
musical brain-drain from this country will continue to deplete our reserves.

Education is now second only to tourism as the major export from the service sector of the Australian economy. This is
consistent with the level of accomplished overseas students now attending the Sydney Conservatorium and other peers,
but it is an extremely competitive market. As I was reminded on a recent trip to China, the success of the Sydney
Conservatorium in building this market is a significant pointer to our growing international reputation. Forty per cent of
the expressions of interest for our courses in 2006 were from overseas students and post-graduates. This is, potentially,
an even larger intake from overseas than that achieved by the Sydney Conservatorium before amalgamation.

To retain and grow this market sector, accredited music schools need the support of visionary politicians who can bring a
national overview to music education. The overseas market now adds an economic imperative to the need to remove the
funding anomalies which remain after two decades of structural change to conservatoriums and universities.

Creativity

I offer a final thought on creativity and its place within higher education in the universities. I note that in some ways
things have changed radically and universities in the US, along with Oxford in the UK and Spain’s numerous universities,
have embraced the idea that nurturing genius in the arts is central to their mission. So have some key companies such
as Apple (in a major collaboration with Berkeley University), IBM (in another with Indiana University) and Hewlett-Packard
(in numerous non-profit arts projects). They have endorsed the concept that a balance between technical skills and the
education of intellectually creative thinkers is giving the future business leadership more resilience and success.
Additionally there is also emphasis on educators and artists getting basic business backgrounds in order to leverage the
mutual advantages. Such sustainable, reciprocally-defined partnerships in the arts bring long overdue benefits for all
concerned.

Intense competition will develop over the next thirty years for people who use a knowledge base as well as critical

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thinking as their basic tools. The abilities to interpret, critique, analyse and create will become even more important in
our information-loaded, highly technological global society. The ability to think critically, not just to know, will be most
valuable. In the future, therefore, a premium will be placed on people and communities who know how to adapt to
change quickly, and where the citizens see their community as their best resource and invest in its leadership, education
and culture.

Universities, business and arts training organisations all have a mutual interest in supplying such leadership to allow
those goals to be implemented and met. Nancy Cantor comments:

As [the American composer and Professor of Composition at Princeton] Barbara White, points out in her essay, Save
You’re Money [sic], the value of the arts ‘cannot be reduced to bottom-line figures, to easily calculable causes and
effects’. There must be a willingness to be ‘purposefully purposeless, to imagine the unimaginable, to make use of
uselessness’. The arts, as she writes, ’encourage us to reserve a space for the unruly, the unpredictable, and the
unforeseen’.[6]

When there are visitors at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, whether they are audience members or musicians from
around Sydney, I like to remind them what the word public means. It “comes from the ancient Greek word for ’making a
city’, and this connotes more than just bringing people together functionally” [7]. Universities need to be informed by the
Greek’s concept and examine their own public, community and cultural role. As Nancy Cantor so aptly puts it:

We must have that same public function—and remain poised between the monastery and the marketplace, and work to
increase the vitality of the arts by working to connect the two.[8]

Professor Kim Walker

[1] Lee Bollinger, Speech to the Association of Arts Presenters on 13 January 2002, p. 1, included in “Creative Campus:
th
The Training, Sustaining and Presenting of the Performing Arts in American Higher Education”, 104 American
Assembly, 11-13 March 2004, convened at Arden House, Harriman, New York.
[2] Nancy Cantor, “Collaborations on the Creative ‘Campus’”, p. 1, speech at the Conference on Campus-Community Art
Connections and the Creative Economy in Upstate New York, Cornell University, 3 May 2005.
th
[3] 104 American Assembly on “The Creative Campus: The Training, Sustaining and Presenting of the Performing Arts
in American Higher Education”, convened at Arden House, Harriman, New York, 11-13 March 2004.
[4] Ibid., cited in Cantor, N., op. cit., pp. 1-2. The full quote in Cantor’s speech is, ‘“Without colleges and universities’,
and I quote from the report, ‘artists would have fewer places to perform, fewer opportunities for employment, and
greatly curtailed ways to engage their audiences. If the academy did not support the arts, the activity of entire
performance forms—dance, theatre, music, and others—would wither or would be available only to those in areas of
the country with the wealth and density to support them. Without their home in higher education, the performing arts
could not live.”’
[5] Robert Hughes, ‘Pulling the Fuse on Culture’, Le Monde, Paris, 21 September 1999.
[6] Barbara White, “Save You’re Money [sic], Spend Your Art: Cultivating Imaginative Space On Campus”, p. 3, included
in “Creative Campus: The Training, Sustaining and Presenting of the Performing Arts in American Higher Education”,
convened at Arden House, Harriman, New York, 11-13 March 2004, cited in Nancy Cantor, “Thoughts on Art, Truth and
Higher Education”, p. 7, included in “Creative Campus: The Training, Sustaining and Presenting of the Performing Arts in
American Higher Education”, convened at Arden House, Harriman, New York, 11-13 March 2004.
[7] Richard Sennett, “The ‘Civitas’ of Seeing”, The Mayors’ Institute: Excellence in City Design, (Washington DC.:
National Endowment for the Arts, 2002), cited in Cantor, N., “Collaborations on the Creative ‘Campus’”, p. 6. The full
quote in Cantor’s speech is: “Even the term ‘public’, as Sennett points out, comes from the ancient Greek word for
‘making a city’, and this connotes more than bringing people together functionally.”
[8] Nancy Cantor and Steven Schomberg, “Poised Between Two Worlds: The University as Monastery and Marketplace”,
EDUCAUSE Review, vol. 38, no. 2 (March/April 2003), pp. 12-21.

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