The Australian National University last night backed Vice-Chancellor Ian Young’s determination to end instrument teaching at its music school. The move has been condemned by the state parliament, protested by students and criticised by the school’s international partners. The head of the school has fled the country. It was strongly argued that sacking the music teachers would denude Canberra of performing musicians, making it the world’s quietest national capital (if it is not that already).
However, there’s nothing so sheepish or deaf to reason as a cornered herd of academic administrators and the decision was duly reconfirmed last night. An eminent professor at the school told Slipped Disc: ’This place is finished as a music school for performance.’
Here’s a local ABC report.
It is not ‘the state parliament’ which has protested; in Canberra’s case there is no such thing. Canberra is part of the Australian Capital Territory, not part of any Australian state.
This is somewhat pedantic – yes we are a territory, not a state. But the ACT does have an elected legislative assembly which has the functions of both state and local governments elsewhere in Australia.
The ANU now says it is moving to a ‘university’ model rather than a ‘conservatorium’ model and cites Cambridge, Oxford and Harvard as parallels in terms of staff/student numbers. It notes that the School of Music has far fewer PhDs, and less research output, than the university average as part of its justification. What they haven’t done, of course, is draw comparisons with other institutions like Curtis, Julliard, RCM etc. The conflict between the two philosophies (which is one which has clearly existed within the School between the ‘performers’ and ‘others’) couldn’t be starker. A big question – what do readers think of it?
The two models attract different kinds of student. If you want to be a performer you surely seek a spot at RCM and not Oxford, or the Manhattan School and not Harvard. The ANU wants to be Harvard, but it does not have the Boston Symphony Orchestra on its doorstep to be able to draw on local tutors to teach part -time, or three centuries of endowments to fund these aims. ANU management seem to be brutally trying to address multiple dilemmas by dumping the conservatorium training model. Firstly they want to make an apparent budget deficit go away by casualising and outsourcing it’s music performance teaching – but by the Vice Chancellor’s own admission enrollments will fall at least over the next 3 years which means millions gone in redundancies and lost income. Secondly the ANU wants all staff to be ‘research active’ in the sense understood by the ‘quality assurance’ authorities, even if that means employing different music staff who can write funding proposals and articles for obscure journals that nobody reads. The schism between music performance and musicology in the proposed new structure is very clear. The community views appear irrelevant to the university.
This isn’t the first time the ANU has done something like this. It’s certainly not confined to the ANU as a strategy for temporarily improving finances at the expense of function.
Students are not being provided with the service that they have paid for. Now that class actions can be taken in Australia, I’d like to see existing students engage available legal/administrative channels (ACCC and Fairtrading ACT perhaps) to receive refunds.
I’d like to see the ACT government provide grants for prospective students to go to fully-fledged music schools outside Canberra.
I’d encourage any former students whose income does not improve henceforth to seek damages from ANU for loss of income from reduced repute.
I’m tired of corporate philosophy for education.
I’m tired of mega-institutes that marginalise constituent institutes. Just have specialised institutes, and allow them to co-operate and co-ordinate regularly without actually revoking sovereignty.
We need a separation of corporation and culture.
Some people always see the glass as half-empty.
I say this is a great opportunity to expand music studies to the entire student body of ANU. They can all practice and play Cage’s 4′33″.
Oi nio not Cages 4’33” – a serious waste of drinking time.
Good thinking. That should put an end to their discrimination against deaf students once and for all.
To say that the School of Music is finished as a music school for performance is a typical example of the scaremongering thats going around town. What a load of old bollocks!
I can’t believe the shoddy one-sided journalism thats coming out of this – if this is a typical example of journalism in Australia then heaven help us!
Its like the SoM is the centre of the universe in regards to music performance in Canberra and nobody will challenge this ridiculous statement.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, there is some wonderful music being made in lots of different communities all around Canberra, and all unconnected with the School of Music. The School of Music is NOT the centre of the universe around which performance spins.
Precisely, Ms Pacek. At first I too joined in the weeping, wailing, and rending the raiment over the SoM’s fate. Then I started re-reading some history, and I perceived from this that Australian music – in terms of both performers and, in particular, composers – had done at least as well before the SoM’s existence as it has done since.
But this uncomfortable fact doesn’t fit the collectivist narrative of tabloid journalism, a narrative for which the institution counts for everything and the individual musician counts for nothing. If this narrative (which I suppose is Frankfurt-School-Marxist in its origins, like most of today’s cognitive junk) were to be believed when it came to European music, Berlioz and Debussy and Franck and Fauré and Ravel and Roussel and Messiaen would never have existed without the Paris Conservatoire. Yeah, riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight.
Incidentally some of us are all in favour, on reflection, of the SoM’s much-vaunted one-to-one instruction being curbed. European music schools concentrate on group lessons, so pupils there can’t play the beloved Anglo-Saxon game of hiding behind stage-fright as an excuse for non-performance. Also, group lessons reduce the risk of another danger: the propensity of certain male academics, when confronted with nubile students, to behave like Viagra-crazed goats.
Rosie. No one has said that music performance in the ACT will end. They have said that the SoM will no longer be a music school in the usual sense of that term. That seems quite true.
My guess is that with fewer people studying music in Canberra – an inevitable result of the change, I think – there will be fewer performances.
My guess is also that the school will die. I doubt that there will be many wanting to study music in Canberra the way it will be taught.
The stupidity to allow this to happen is mind boggling. If the nobody can stop this that Australia has no future in any field of excellence. The lack of common sense combined with bureaucratic indolence by these highly overpaid decision makers and their apparent complete ignorance about what teaching music is about is a manifestation of their incompetence.
A country that allows these arrogant culture less paper shufflers rule the vital system of education by the purse string has only one possible future to look forward to: Intellectual underdevelopment and a cultural vacuum resulting in increased violence and social decline.
For the first time in 40 years I regret having made this country my home! I am ashamed of being part of an Australia that has so many talents who’s training is now being castrated by unqualified power brokers.
Could you imagine such cuts to be tolerated if it was a sports training institution?
Welcome to a country that is not a Banana Republic but will become a “Nation of Drongos”!