Music education is a hard thing to get right

Photo: Chris Payne

Over the last three decades, the idea of music teaching as an essential part of a well-rounded school education has been systematically diminished. It’s a great shame. Music making, and singing especially, is incredibly valuable for children. We learn to sing the alphabet, we learn to work in groups through song, we bond with our parents as they sing to us. And yet, more than any developmental advantage this might offer children, music's real magic is to do with its inherent abstraction.

Music doesn’t tell a story. It’s not meaningful in and of itself – it’s just sound, organised in time. What music can do, in a way that no other art form can match, is create a space that we can fill with our imaginations. When we listen to music, we are complicit in the act of creation. We are the director of the movie playing inside our heads. For children especially, this is an empowering experience. When children sing, or play music, they are involved in the creation of something new.

Of course, this doesn’t just apply to kids. When it comes to the performance of classical music by professionals, creativity is the alpha and the omega. That divine spark – the ability to breathe new life into familiar material – is something that all great performers share. Creation is king. Recreation and representation mark the death of passion in performance.

A huge amount of musical training is about repetition – as the old joke tells us, there’s one sure-fire way to get to Carnegie Hall. However, all that technical practice is just half the battle. A solid technique is the envelope, not the enclosed letter. So why is it that our conservatoires are still overwhelmingly focussed on producing technical machines?

The great orchestral culture of the 20th century may be partly responsible. Over the last 40 or so years, competition for orchestral positions has increased to a point that it’s not unusual for there to be over 100 applicants for every job that comes up. The orchestral audition process (often conducted ‘blind’ – where the applicant performs anonymously from behind a screen) optimises for accuracy. The musicians who excel at audition don’t make mistakes. They play the dots on the page, in the right order, with a nice sound. Incidentally, they might also be great musicians, but it’s very hard to test for that at an audition. It’s no wonder that conservatoires put a huge emphasis on machine-like consistency and excellence – these are the skills that the primary employers of their graduates are looking for.

Except… is that even true? Are orchestras the primary employers of young musicians in 2021? As a colleague at a concert hall recently pointed out to me, when people talk about the sad decline of classical music, often what they’re actually talking about is the sad decline of the business model of the professional symphony orchestra. It was a shady comment, but a valid one. It’s not easy to see how these cultural giants, presenting multiple programmes a week and employing 80 full-time musicians alongside hosts of management staff, fit into 21st century cultural life in the UK. Certainly, the current financial models are problematic – if the amounts that orchestras pay their artists are anything to go by, many of these organisations are struggling. Salaries have been in steady decline for decades, outpaced by the inexorable march of inflation. In the capital, the cost of living is prohibitive for most musicians, and yet many of the London-based orchestras still don’t pay overnights or expenses to players travelling from out of town.

These problems are solvable, but the fact remains that for many young musicians, even if they were lucky enough to win an orchestral audition, the lifestyle and musical compromises that come with a full-time orchestral job might not be as attractive as they were a generation ago.

There are many alternatives – as a freelance player, it’s rich pickings. Aurora Orchestra, Scottish Ensemble, City of London Sinfonia, Manchester Camerata, 12 Ensemble, and of course, Manchester Collective are among the many groups that make extraordinary demands of their players. From memorised work to performances in community settings, from cross-genre collaborations to workshops and devised work, there is an entirely new – and arguably more attractive – kind of ‘classical’ career for young musicians to aspire to. A solid technique is still essential, but the most highly valued skills in this new world are flexibility, musicality, and the ability to collaborate.

As with any emerging field, these skills are quite different to the ones that have historically been prioritised in formal music education. Let’s hope that the conservatoires can catch up.

Adam Szabo is the co-founder and Chief Executive of Manchester Collective.