[Dixielandjazz] From today's London Times.

Fr M J (Mike) Logsdon mjl at ix.netcom.com
Fri Feb 25 12:14:39 PST 2005


>Down the tubas: music is dying in our schools
>Richard Morrison
>Serious music is under threat because it isn't taught, concertgoers
>are conservative and talented new composers ignored
>EXACTLY 100 years ago Sir Edward Elgar delivered his first lecture at
>the University of Birmingham, where he had been persuaded to become
>the professor of music. With the Enigma Variations and Pomp and
>Circumstance Marches being played everywhere, the 47-year-old
>composer was at the pinnacle of his fame and creative powers. So
>anything he said was bound to resonate.
>
>But few would have predicted the scathing attack he launched in that
>first lecture, called A Future for English Music. In language that
>was far from tactful, he deplored the vulgarity, mediocrity, chaos
>and insipidness of musical life in Edwardian England. These home
>truths probably needed saying, but they won him few friends in the
>complacent musical establishment.
>
>A century on, English music has no creative giant in Elgar's league
>to deliver such an authoritative report on the nation's musical
>health. A humble newspaper critic will have to suffice. Still, as Ken
>Tynan was prone to remark (in between beating his wife), a critic
>should be a person "who knows the way but can't drive the car". So
>this is an attempt at map reading. Where is serious musical life in
>Britain now? How did it get there? And in what direction is it
>heading? Well, one obvious answer is "into a very gloomy landscape".
>There is now an appalling canyon of incomprehension between the
>musical knowledge that classical musicians, critics and cognoscenti
>assume to be commonplace, and the real state of affairs. And this
>isn't a gulf between classes, or income brackets, or those with
>degrees and those without. It cuts right across those divisions.
>Indeed, this blank spot about music is often at its most noticeable
>among what you might call the cultured intelligentsia. "In our
>street," the American composer John Adams once told me (he lives, as
>you might imagine, in a painfully hip neighbourhood of Berkeley,
>California), "we have friends with lots in common. We discuss new
>books, films, popular culture, politics -- everything except serious
>music. That shuts everyone up. I don't think they even know what I
>do."
>
>I get exactly the same depressing sensation when I watch BBC2's Late
>Review. There they are, these articulate, confident intellectuals,
>discussing all the latest manifestions in literature, film, theatre,
>the visual arts. They take every art form in their stride. Everything
>except music. I once asked a BBC mandarin why opera and orchestral
>music is so blatantly ignored. "None of these cultural talking-heads
>feels qualified to talk about highbrow music," he said. "It scares
>them. It's a language they don't understand."
>
>If this were the 16th century, and serious musical life were
>bankrolled by dukes and cardinals answerable only to themselves, such
>a situation might be sustainable. But it isn't. For better or worse,
>nearly all serious music-making in Britain today depends on state
>subsidy. Which means politicians and their advisers must be convinced
>that music is a good thing to spend our taxes on. Now, it isn't true
>that you never meet a musical politician. Of the past 12 arts
>ministers I can think of at least two who actually went to concerts.
>But the general attitude of the political classes towards classical
>music was symbolised, perhaps unwittingly, by the Prime Minister when
>he turned 50 a couple of years ago. Now he had reached his sixth
>decade, he told a journalist, he felt he should "graduate to
>classical music". The implication was that symphonies were something
>you turned to, like cardigans and cocoa, when you were too geriatric
>to go out at night.
>
>The trouble is that indifference to serious music among those who
>wield political power can be devastatingly destructive especially in
>the field that lies at the root of our musical problems: education.
>
>I long ago passed the point of despair about the place of music in
>most state schools. Even to refer to it as having a "place" is to
>attribute tangible qualities to something that is often well nigh
>invisible. One problem has been the huge pressure brought to bear on
>primary teachers to raise standards in subjects which are said to
>"really matter" -- namely English, maths and science. I have no
>quarrel with that. But when a school's reputation depends on league
>tables that assess results only in English, maths and science, the
>pressure to marginalise "extras" such as music or art becomes
>irresistible. And now, with the current fashionable panic over obese
>children, more space is apparently to be found in timetables for
>sport -- pushing music even further down the list of priorities.
>
>The curriculum is one huge area of concern. Another is the wildly
>uneven level of provision for children to play instruments, sing in
>choirs, join bands and orchestras. Here you really are in the realm
>of postcode lottery. Some local education authorities nurture music
>brilliantly. Others don't seem to bother at all.
>
>Of course we can comfort ourselves with the vague ministerial promise
>-- first made by David Blunkett six years ago -- that on some
>unspecified, glorious day in the future, every child in Britain will
>have "access to tuition" on a musical instrument. Frankly, that
>remains -- if not an outright deception -- a dream and a distraction.
>In thousands of state primary schools there is not only no specialist
>music teacher but no teacher of any sort who can bash out a tune on
>the piano or the guitar, or who possesses the vocal confidence to
>lead classroom or assembly singing.
>
>The result? Kids go through their whole school lives without ever
>tasting the power of communal musicmaking. No wonder that, later in
>life, they find great communal musical endeavours -- such as
>orchestras, choirs, operas -- utterly alien.
>
>This is the stark reality -- this mass of young people entering
>adulthood with absolutely no acquaintance with musical history,
>techniques or notation -- that the professional music world must
>address if it is to survive. And many leading musical organisations
>have tried desperately hard to do just that. If there has been a
>classical music revolution in my time as a critic, it has not been in
>composition or performance, but in the attitude of performing
>organisations towards their audiences or, more to the point, their
>potential audiences. Spurred on by an almost Wagnerian sense of
>impending catastrophe, they make "the audience of tomorrow" the new
>Holy Grail.
>
>But let's not kid ourselves. All these "outreach" or "audience
>development" initiatives barely scratch the surface of the problem.
>In some ways they make things worse, because they allow politicians
>and arts bureaucrats to convey the complacent impression that the
>crisis is capable of being tackled in some inexpensive, magic-wand
>kind of way, without addressing the chronic absence of music and
>music teachers from so many schools.
>
>There is one other great problem confronting those who run our
>concert halls, orchestras and opera companies. It is the apparently
>unshakeable conservatism of their "greying" audiences. Put bluntly,
>the typical classical-music punter seems to hate the new, the
>unexpected, the unknown.
>
>Which is very odd. In every other branch of culture, the newest thing
>is regarded as the biggest crowd-puller. If you are a regular
>theatregoer, what most excites you is the latest Michael Frayn or Tom
>Stoppard. If you go to galleries, you rush to see Tracey Emin's new
>pile of personal detritus. Film buffs want to see the most up-to-date
>releases. Only in concert-halls are the words "world premiere"
>regarded as a liability, a pill that has to be sweetened by the
>promise of something so old and well-worn -- a Brahms symphony, say --
>that practically nobody in the hall has heard it less than a hundred
>times before.
>
>In a way you can understand this. For most of the late 20th century
>the very words "new music" evoked a bone-shakingly dissonant,
>intellectually opaque, well-nigh impenetrable experience that would
>be either unpleasant or turgid, and usually both.
>
>But that was then. Britain now has a new generation of serious
>composers with, I believe, a real determination to communicate a
>range of passions that would have been quite alien to the cerebral,
>system-obsessed composers of the previous generation. I am thinking
>of people such as Thomas Adès, James MacMillan, Judith Weir, Julian
>Anderson and the precociously young Luke Bedford. These talents
>should be regarded as tremendous assets to our cultural life; they
>are ten times more exciting than the average shock-jock artist in
>Charles Saatchi's gallery. So it saddens me that they receive a tiny
>fraction of the public attention lavished on "Britart" or "Britlit".
>That has to change.
>
>But not everything is gloom and doom in British musical life. True,
>orchestras and opera companies seem to lurch from financial crisis to
>crisis. Yet somehow they stagger on. In the year I was born, London
>had five professional symphony orchestras, two full-time opera
>companies and two or three chamber orchestras. Not a year has passed
>since then without someone issuing a dire prediction that at least
>two of them are teetering on the brink of bankruptcy. Yet, half a
>century on, London still has five symphony orchestras, two opera
>companies and two or three chamber orchestras. The British musician's
>capacity to survive the most adverse conditions must rival that of
>round-the-world yachtswomen and undercover paratroopers.
>
>What's more, our musical world is incomparably richer and broader
>than the one that Elgar assessed so bleakly in his 1905 lectures. Not
>only are eight centuries of Western art music now available to
>everyone with a CD player (the musical diet of Elgar's contemporaries
>was largely confined to music of the previous 150 years); but also,
>thanks to the world-music revolution of the past 20 years, so are the
>ear-popping sounds of countless cultures from around the globe.
>
>And that has produced a wonderful, almost accidental by-product. As
>these myriad musics have intermingled, or "fused" as they say in jazz
>circles, they have inspired composers who might otherwise have been
>stuck in a narrow rut to explore completely new directions. As I
>listen to a band like Asian Dub Foundation, or the New York-based
>Chinese composer Tan Dun, or the weird and wonderful composing voices
>emerging from the Baltic states and Turkey, I hear not the jangling
>of many different traditions, east and west, but something entirely
>original that has been forged afresh. That, surely, is how
>composition will develop in the future.
>
>Of course, since Elgar's day there has been one other enormous
>musical revolution: the rise and rise, and now total dominance, of
>youth-driven popular culture. There is no point in pretending that,
>for many of those on the classical side of the great divide, the
>ubiquity of pop, rock, rap and its various hybrids has been anything
>other than unsettling. It is perceived by them not as an enrichment
>of our culture, but as a Goliath-sized threat to the traditional
>arts. And though I have no problem with the enormous expansion of
>musical styles in my lifetime, I too am alarmed by the extent to
>which the pop-driven record industry ruthlessly turns youngsters into
>passive consumers of music, only there to be exploited commercially,
>rather than active music-makers in their own lives.
>
>Yet if I have one big hope and ambition for musical life in the 21st
>century, it is that more and more people will dare to sample and
>learn to love all sorts of music, so that these artificial stylistic
>and generational barriers eventually fall away. And I believe this is
>starting to happen. The most exciting events I find myself reviewing
>these days cannot be labelled as straight concerts or operas, or
>Western or Eastern, or traditional or avant garde. They are
>imaginative and provocative hybrids; they defy the tired old
>categorisations. They draw eclectically on many cultures, highbrow
>and low, visual, theatrical, cinematic and musical.
>
>And I notice that the audience for such events increasingly defies
>categorisation. I sense that, bit by bit, the old defensiveness --
>about who we are, and what we like, and what is definitely "not for
>us", and what must be preserved at all costs -- is disappearing.
>
>England today is a far more complex, multifaceted, ambiguous and
>shifting society than the homogeneous, white, Christian nation to
>which Elgar belonged. Some see that as a threat. I see it as a
>tremendous opportunity for the revitalisation of our cultural life.
>But not if we continue to deprive millions of children of the chance
>to make music at the most formative time of their lives.
>
>This is an edited extract of the lecture given by Richard Morrison at
>the University of Birmingham this week to mark the centenary of
>Elgar's professorship
>
>THE GOOD NEWS
># In 1963, 180,000 people took graded music exams. In 2003 it was
>almost 500,000
># There are almost 2,000 youth orchestras in Britain; 267
>comprehensive schools have specialist performing arts status
># In 1999, £270 million was earmarked over five years to boost local
>authority spending on music education, via the establishment of the
>Music Standards Fund
># Britain has nine internationally recognised state-funded academies,
>five conservatoires for the under-18s and 44 dedicated choral schools
># 33,371 children under the age of 18 attended a musical education or
>outreach event in the 2003/2004 season
># The National Foundation for Youth Music was set up in 1999 with £30
>million lottery funding to provide music-making opportunities for
>young people aged up to 18 -- mostly through out of school hours
>activity
>
>THE BAD NEWS
># In 2002 an average of 1 per cent of pupils aged between 5 and 16
>attended orchestras or ensembles funded by their Local Education
>Authorities (LEA)
># In a national survey the same year 47 per cent of LEAs said that a
>lack of instruments, tutor books and general resources were a barrier
>to the delivery of musical instrument tuition for pupils aged 7-11
># The same survey revealed that just 10.3 per cent of pupils between
>7 and 11 are learning a musical instrument. Across all key stages,
>the figure is even lower, at 8 per cent
># In 2002 only 4 per cent of concertgoers were under the age of 24
># A 2003 survey revealed that only one in six musicians in youth
>orchestras could name three living classical composers. A survey last
>year revealed that 65 per cent of children under 14 could not name a
>single classical composer at all
>
>NEIL FISHER

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Fr M J "Mike" Logsdon
Special Assistant to the Presiding Archbishop
North American Old Roman Catholic Church (Utrecht Succession)
www.naorc.org





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