This is the month when many young people are preparing to embark on new chapters in their education. Their choice of what to study next could define a large part of their lives. The question I’m increasingly asked by teenagers is a worrying one. What will be their prospects if they study music at university? And they aren’t just thinking about their employment prospects after graduation. They are also asking about the prospect of their chosen university still running a music faculty in the near future.
University music courses are disappearing
That sounds like a grim joke but it’s not. Earlier this summer I attended an excellent Monteverdi concert at York University directed by Robert Hollingworth, who has long been associated with music teaching there. He welcomed the audience to the music faculty and then quipped: ‘Yes, York still has one.’
That, I think, really was a joke – but one very close to the bone. For at least half a century York University has run one of the best music departments in the country. It has nurtured dozens of performers, composers and critics who are now household names, at least in my household. It would be inconceivable, one would think, for such a high-quality faculty to be closed.
Yet in the past few years we have seen many university music courses disappear from the scene, some from very fine institutions. The latest to announce it is going down that lamentable route is Nottingham, a Russell Group university (ie renowned for its high-quality research) that has contrived to run up an £85m deficit and is consequently cutting not just music but 41 other courses.
The lack of A-Level and GCSE music
I can’t speak about modern languages, philosophy, history or the other humanities subjects that seem to be the main victims of axe-wielding universities. But in the case of music I fear we are in a vicious downward spiral. If you don’t teach music to A-level or even GCSE-level in schools – as thousands of state secondaries now don’t – you won’t produce 18 year-olds equipped to study music at university. So, university music courses attract too few applicants to be deemed sustainable in these brutal economic times.
The consequence is that the UK has fewer and fewer music graduates, and even less who are prepared to go into teaching – what’s the incentive, when schools seem indifferent to music? So even schools that want music teachers find vacancies going unfilled.
The government has promised to remedy this by beefing up music in the curriculum. But that requires many more trained music teachers, and I see no evidence yet of ministers or civil servants applying the necessary joined-up thinking to reverse that downward spiral. Nor do I see any end to the contraction of higher education generally in the UK. The financial numbers simply don’t add up anymore, either for the universities themselves or for students facing £53,000 of debt (yes, that incredible figure is the average now) the moment they graduate.
Could music colleges expand their remit to include academic music?
I’m not saying that music will disappear entirely from universities. One would hope institutions that have always excelled in this field – for example, Oxford, Cambridge, Durham, Edinburgh, Manchester and York – would have too much pride in their traditions and excellent faculty staff to contemplate cuts, although nothing is certain in these dark economic times. The danger with them is that, to maintain their standards, they select for their courses even more applicants from the private school sector, where music is still well taught, than they do at present.
Maybe one way forward is for those higher education institutions that are totally devoted to music (our excellent conservatoires – the Royal Academy of Music, the Royal Northern, the Guildhall and the rest) to expand their remit so they train not only performers and composers (as is largely the case at the moment) but also far more ‘academic’ musicians who will then become teachers. In other words, they take on the work that universities used to do. Already, that is happening to some extent. The question is whether the conservatoires can expand sufficiently to provide the UK with all the teachers we need if we are to spark a true renaissance of music in state schools.
Some may argue that such a change would distort the proper function of our world-class conservatoires, which they see primarily as producing world-class performers. To which I would reply that existential crises demand radical solutions. And be in no doubt: music education in the state sector is on the brink of a catastrophe. It could disappear entirely in the next decade.
