Rethinking Contemporary Musicology: Panel at the Royal Musical Association 2019 – Part 1. Papers of Larson Powell and Eva Moreda Rodriguez

Posted: September 17, 2019 | Author: Ian Pace | Filed under: Academia, Culture, Film, Higher Education, History, Music - General, Musical Education, Musicology | Tags: alan davison, alex newton, anahid kassabian, balzan prize, bonnie c. wade, christian metz, christopher wiley, claudia gorbman, cultural studies, darla m. crispin, david bordwell, david neumeyer, decolonisation, deskilling, early recording technologies, eero tarasti, emilio audissino, encoding/decoding, eva moreda rodriguez, film music, frank lehman, frankfurt school, franklin cox, gender studies, general system theory, georgina born, giles hooper, global music history, harry braverman, hermeneutics, iconology, imaginary signifier, interdisciplinarity, irwin bazelon, james buhler, jean-jacques nattiez, Joan Arnau Pàmies, john williams, juan chattah, kofi agawu, kristin thompson, larson powell, leah broad, leonard ratner, ludwig von bertalanaffy, mark everist, mark hijleh, marketisation of higher education, michael spitzer, mu-xuan lin, music and fascism, music theory, musicology, new musicology, nicholas cook, nicole grimes, Noël Burch, norwegian academy of music, opera, paul harper-scott, peter manuel, peter tregear, philip v. bohlman, post-modernism, postcolonialism, poststructuralism, reinhard strohm, rethinking contemporary musicology, rethinking music, richard taruskin, robert hatten, roland barthes, royal musical association, scott murphy, semiotics, stuart hall, superstructure, theodor adorno, topic theory, university of glasgow, university of melbourne, university of missouri, william cheng, Wirkung | 4 Comments

At this year’s Royal Musical Association annual conference, at the University of Manchester/Royal Northern College of Music, I was very pleased to convene a panel on ‘Rethinking Contemporary Musicologies: Disciplinary Shifts and the Risks of Deskilling’ (12 September 2019). These featured the following speakers and papers:

Larson Powell (University of Missouri, Kansas City, USA): ‘Film-Music Studies between Disciplines’.

Eva Moreda Rodriguez (University of Glasgow): ‘Are We all Transnational Now? Global Approaches and Insularity in Music History’.

Darla M. Crispin (Norwegian Academy of Music, Oslo, Norway): ‘Artistic Research in Music: Brave New World – or Harbinger of Decline?’

Peter Tregear (University of Melbourne, Australia): ‘Telling Tales in (and out of) Music Schools’.

Below, I reproduce my Introduction to the panel in full, then give a detailed account of the first two papers (as some of these are drafts for chapters in the book, I prefer not to reproduce them verbatim). In the second part of this, I will do the same with the other two papers and also give some wider reflections of my own on the very well-attended and constructive event.

Ian Pace, Introduction

Twenty years ago, in 1999, Nicholas Cook and Mark Everist published the co-edited volume Rethinking Music. This followed in the wake of a series of publications now associated with the ‘New Musicology’ from the early 1990s, but the scale of this publication and its appearance from such a major publisher as Oxford University Press indicated how various tendencies had entered the musicological mainstream. Twenty years later, Peter Tregear and I are in the process of co-editing a new volume, Rethinking Contemporary Musicology: Perspectives on Interdisciplinarity, Skills and Deskilling, which will appear from Routledge in 2020. This brings together a range of leading scholars who all offer critical perspectives on both developments in English-speaking academia which were relatively new when Cook/Everist was published and the state of play in more long-established realms of research and teaching. Four of the contributors are here and will be giving papers, most of which relate to their chapters in the book.

I would emphasise that this book deals specifically with English-speaking academia. This is not because of any type of provinciality, let alone any assertion of centrality of Anglophone contributions to the disciplines. Rather, the editors simply feel that the issues at stake in the Anglosphere, while far from homogeneous, are somewhat distinct from those elsewhere, and as such warrant separate consideration.

Amongst the other chapters in the book – this is not an exhaustive list – are Paul Harper-Scott on musicology, the middlebrow and questions of demographics amongst academics, Christopher Wiley on popular music education and the question of specifically musical engagement, Mu-Xuan Lin on body politics and gendered orthodoxies relating to contemporary composition and the ‘New Discipline’, myself on the application of ethnomusicological approaches to the study of Western art music, then Michael Spitzer on the state of musical analysis, Alan Davison on that for music history, Nicole Grimes on neo-liberalism and the study of Western art music, and case studies relating to issues provoked by the work of Richard Taruskin, Nicholas Cook and Georgina Born, written by Frank Cox, me and Joan Arnau Pamiès respectively.

In general, the contributors can be said to share varying degrees of scepticism towards some aspects of such Anglophone musicology which can be said either to have become orthodoxies, or are sufficiently widespread as to be worthy of critical interrogation. In short, it is time to cast a critical eye on what the discipline has become. Key questions which recur in many essays have to do with the demands of interdisciplinarity, especially whether some allegedly interdisciplinary work entails more than a superficial injection of a handful of concepts or buzzwords from other disciplines (as has been argued by Giles Hooper, another contributor to the book) rather than more rigorous engagement, and the complementary issue of ‘deskilling’ of musicology.

The term ‘deskilling’ was coined by Marxist theorist Harry Braverman in his Labor and Monopoly Capital (New York: Monthly Review, 1974) to characterise the lowering of skill levels as part of a process of progressive estrangement and alienation of workers, relating to the division of labour, in the process increasing their dispensability. As musicology has supposedly become more diverse, many of us argue that various core skills and knowledge, not least relating to basic musicianship, notation, familiarity with history and repertoire, and especially theory and analysis, can no longer be assumed on the part of students, graduates, and indeed many academics themselves. This reduces the possibility of broader interactions between those working in different sub-disciplinary areas, and limits the ability of many to contribute to certain types of core curriculum.

What remains, at worst, is an atomised profession permeated by disputes and struggles for territory and power, in place of genuine quests for knowledge, however utopian such ideals might be. Such a situation is exacerbated and in some ways fuelled by neo-liberal reforms to higher education, pitting students as ‘consumers’, creating increased precarity for academics, and importing aspects of market culture as well as ever-growing strata of top-down management. Whilst many of the new musicological tendencies are advocated by those laying claim to ‘progressive’ political causes, at the same time they have often proved most amenable to the strictures of the commercialised university, not least through the post-modernist eschewal of conceptions of truth and knowledge with a degree of autonomy from their social function, in a capitalist society.*

Contributors to the book consider how his situation has come about, what are some of the ideological assumptions which underlie such a predicament, how this has been manifested in certain types of work, and what might be positive alternatives.

*This point may deserve more explanation than I gave in the introduction. My argument here is essentially that concepts of truth and scholarly autonomy and integrity serve as a brake on attempts to enlist academia in the service of the production of good capitalist functionaries. As such, post-modernists who jettison such things, or the likes of William Cheng and his acolytes (see the arguments of Peter Tregear below), facilitate such a process. It is no coincidence that many of these are strong advocates for heavily commercialised forms of music-making.

Larson Powell, ‘Film-Music Studies between Disciplines’.

Professor Powell began by identifying a growth in the field of film music studies in English since the publication of Claudia Gorbman’s Unheard Melodies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), but noted the difficulty in defining the field. He cited David Neumeyer, in the introduction to The Oxford Handbook of Film Music Studies, edited Neumeyer (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), on how film music studies are ‘a node between disciplines’ and how scholars ‘have begun to bypass the modes requiring highly specialized musical knowledge and jargon by moving toward sound studies’. Whilst accepting the need for broadening of established musicological methodologies in light of this specific technological context, Powell argued that when links to musicology are loosened, the result is often ‘imprecision and methodological inconsistency’. He cited James Buhler’s discernment (in ‘Ontological, Formal, and Critical Theories of Music and Sound’, in the Oxford Handbook) of three phases in film music theory: (i) the ontological, prior to World War Two; (ii) the methodological, linked to institutionalisation of the discipline, and incorporating structuralism, semiotics and psychoanalysis; and (iii) the ‘field theory’, a looser conglomerate of approaches. Buhler notes that when the term ‘critical theory’ is employed in film music studies, it no longer refers to the hybrid of Marxism and psychoanalysis which characterised the work of the Frankfurt School, but also areas such as poststructuralism, gender and sexuality studies, postcolonialism and race studies, narrative and cultural studies, and so on, without recognising the incompatibility of some of these. Furthermore, the forms of interpretation employed are usually limited to ‘semantic content or associations’, which are notoriously ambiguous.

Powell gave quite a severe critique of Anahid Kassabian’s book Hearing Film: Tracking Identifications in Contemporary Hollywood Film Music (New York and London: Routledge, 2000) (for another critique of a different piece of writing by Kassabian, see my contribution here), not least on account of her (mis-)characterisations of the work of Adorno, which he called ‘schoolbook examples of cultural studies misconceptions’. Kassabian claims that Adorno, Stravinsky and Irwin Bazelon ‘all seem to suggest that music is outside of social relations, pure in some fundamental, ontological way’, which Powell found absurd in light of Adorno’s work such as his Introduction to the Sociology of Music (New York: Seabury Press, 1976; translated by E.B. Ashton from Einleitung in der Musiksoziologie (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1962)). Furthermore, he noted that Kassabian’s ideas of ‘meaning’ were unconstrained by any technical musical engagement, nor by any sociological theory, and amounted to little more than speculation, held up in opposition to a straw-man notion of ‘absolute music’.

Kassabian claims that the relationship between musics and social orders is something that Western society has attempted to repress since the Enlightenment, and in a similar manner, ‘film music constitutes society while being constituted by it’. Powell characterised this as typical of ‘the amateur sociology of cultural studies’ which ‘sees society as an undifferentiated totality’, and uses the simple concept of ‘repression’ to encompass all of the various ‘subsystems of art, economics, morality, politics and law, a central component of theories of modernity’ (I would add that in Marxist terms these constitute key elements of the superstructure). She assumes that her readers share her own prejudices and assumptions, such as that high culture is repressive by its nature, while popular music is an emancipatory force; Powell then demonstrated how some of her claims of ‘our’ identifications with certain music amount to little more than brand recognition, and so ‘scholarship’ becomes little more than registering one’s favourite top 40 tune.

Powell then looked at Emilio Audissino’s Film/Music Analysis: A Film Studies Approach (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), which he finds considerably more edifying than the work of Kassabian, but not without methodological problems. Audissino takes more of a neo-formalist approach (this is a school of film studies heavily indebted to the work of Noël Burch, David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson from the early 1980s onwards), and is sceptical towards ‘culturalist analysis’ without ‘some basic grasp and knowledge of the musical art’, though is vague on what the latter might amount to. Audissino rejects a ‘separatist’ view of the visual and aural aspects of a film, presenting as an alternative a view of a film as ‘as an integrated system of elements (say, a soup)’, whereby an analysis should ‘break down the single substance to its single ingredients (tomatoes, salt, oil, etc.)’ Powell was quite amazed by the idea that an integrated system of music and image (like a Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk) might be seen as a ‘soup’, and in contrast presented the view from Ludwig von Bertalanaffy’s General System Theory (New York: Braziller, 1968):

A system can be defined as a set of elements standing in interrelations. Interrelation means that elements, p, stand in relations, R, so that the behavior of an element p in R is different from its behavior in another relation, R’.

In a film, a piece of music ‘behaves’ differently to how it would in another film, or a concert hall, argued Powell, but the concept of the system means that its identity is not wholly dissolved in the process, as the metaphor of the soup might imply.

Audissino cites an analysis by Frank Lehman of John Williams’ score to Raiders of the Lost Ark in which a cadence is coordinated with the discovery of the Ark, and is ‘exactly in synch with the sun rays’. But Powell subtly probed the use of the concept of ‘function’ for music in such a context, whereby it implies a teleological view by which a coupling of music and image is required to be ‘effective’ or ‘work’. In contrast to this, Powell suggested that function ought to be a comparison rather than a teleology, and pertinently observed that ‘If one only grasps film music in relation to the image, one cannot imagine what other kinds of music could have been used’. Williams’ music is able to be visually functional by ‘straining the boundaries of tonal functionality’, which Powell compared to the Rückung or harmonic shift identified by Adorno in Schubert or late Beethoven (as discussed in Michael Spitzer, Music as Philosophy: Beethoven’s Late Style (Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 2006)).

To Powell, Audissino employs a concept of ‘effectiveness’ which is wholly in the ear of the listener, and as such renders a particular acculturated response as something absolute, as does Kassabian when talking about responses to pop music heard on a car radio (which she thinks more ‘natural’ than those experienced in a concert hall). But Powell alluded to a standard practice in film studies of listening to a sequence with the sound turned off and then on, which demonstrates its distinctive role and codes. He maintained that perceived effect (or German Wirkung), while certainly an important consideration, should not be the only one, and called for greater understanding of the craft of writing film scores.

For an alternative approach to the audio-visual relation, Powell looked to semiotics, claiming that this had had relatively little impact upon cultural studies, and differentiating the ‘encoding/decoding’ model bequeathed by Stuart Hall, which Powell felt had more to do with communications theory (I am personally a little unsure about this claim about cultural studies and semiotics in light of the influence of Roland Barthes’ Mythologies (Paris, Editions du Seuil, 1957; translated Annette Lavers as Mythologies (London, Paladin, 1972)) on the former field, though this could be considered some of Barthes’ loosest and most journalistic work, in comparison to his almost exaggeratedly analytical approach to semiotics elsewhere). Drawing upon Christian Metz’s observation (in The Imaginary Signifier, trans. Celia Britton et al. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982)) that film language ‘possesses a grammar, up to a point, but no vocabulary’, Powell noted how neither Kassabian nor Audissino ‘clearly define the relation of sound to image‘, instead simply ‘leaping straight from music to larger narrative or cultural signification’. He related this problem back to Gorbman and her argument that ‘musical codes’ are always overridden by ‘cultural’ or ‘cinematic’ codes.

Musical semiotics, however, is a rich and pluralist tradition, often at best combined with rhetoric, hermeneutics or pragmatics, as detailed in Michael Spitzer’s Metaphor and Musical Thought (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2004) and Nicholas Cook’s A Guide to Musical Analysis (London: Dent, 1987). Powell drew various theses from this:

(i) it is very hard to pin down a ‘natural’ or unitary correlation between musical signifier and signified, as ‘Music does not simply ‘transmit’ a signal from sender to receiver’. To assume otherwise reflects the biases of communications studies, in departments of which film scholars are often employed.
(ii) this situation comes about because musical signification cannot exist without associated competencies, as argued by music semiotician Eero Tarasti in Signs of Music (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2002), and also by Kofi Agawu in the related field of topic theory (Playing with Signs: A Semiotic Interpretation of Classical Music (Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 1991).
(iii) musical signs cannot be analysed in isolation, as the minimal units of meanings are not simply sounds heard in isolation, but utterances. Scott Murphy (in ‘Transformational Theory and the Analysis of Film Music’, in the Oxford Handbook) has shown this for popular film music scores, using neo-Riemannian theory.
(iv) access to what Jean-Jacques Nattiez (in Music and Discourse: Toward a Semiology of Music, translated Carolyn Abbate (Princeton, NJ and London: Princeton University Press, 1990)) calls the ‘musical object’ is not provided by a naïve approach to listening, where the listener hears only what they want to hear. Kassabian and Audissino, in a similar fashion, hear only their own cultural and academic conventions.

Powell advocated recent dissertations by Juan Chattah (‘Semiotics, Pragmatics, and Metaphor in Film Music Analysis’ (Florida State University, 2006)) and Alex Newton (‘Semiotic of Music, Semiotics of Sound, and Film: Toward a Theory of Acousticons’ (University of Texas, 2015)). Newton’s ‘acousticon’ is a new semiotic audiovisual unit, investigated through a combination of musical and visual analysis, while he makes a link to the topic theories of Leonard Ratner, Agawu, and especially Robert Hatten and suggests that film music theory could learn from art-historical iconography and iconology. Powell argued that one might also draw further on Spitzer’s work on musical metaphor and associated scepticism about certain uses of semiotics (when they become ‘a kind of glorified motive-spotting’, like a similar criticism from Nicholas Cook), so as ‘not merely to produce another castle-in-the-sky of system-building that could risk its own problems’.

Eva Moreda Rodriguez, ‘Are We all Transnational Now? Global Approaches and Insularity in Music History’

Dr Moreda Rodriguez began by noting how for over 200 years many have been fascinated by the idea of a global history of music, and how in contemporary times this coincided with moves towards internationalisation in many Anglo-Saxon universities who wish to recruit more international students and also, ‘more recently, to develop broader, more diverse, “decolonized” curriculums’. In this context, she proceeded with a critical examination of three attempts at writing such a history: Mark Hijleh, Towards a Global Music History: Intercultural Convergence, Fusion, and Transformation in the Human Musical History (New York: Routledge, 2019); Philip V. Bohlman (ed.), The Cambridge History of World Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); and the project ‘Towards a Global Music History’ led by Reinhard Strohm (Oxford University) under the auspices of the Balzan Prize for Musicology.

Moreda Rodriguez also alluded to her own experiences as an ‘international’ academic working at a British university, whose work focuses on her own country of origin, Spain, which is considered somewhat marginal within Western art music. This, she said, had shaped her perceptions of the ‘global’, not least when having to put together grant applications justifying the relevance of her research beyond the community of musicologists working on music in the same time and place. As such, she felt it necessary at least implicitly to engage with the questions underlying these ‘global music history’ projects. Moreda Rodriguez’s principal projects to date have related to music under the Franco regime, which led her towards history and political science, and the national and international nature of fascism; and on the early history of recording technologies, about which she noted that there are many localised non-Anglophone studies, but the more ‘global’ narrative is dominated by US or other English-language sources and issues without acknowledging this.

Hijleh’s book justifies the sole-author narrative by framing itself as a textbook as would be used in a US context, where students take a greater range of foundational, comprehensive courses than in British universities. He also claims that it should be viewed as a gateway for the development of musicianship, in light of which Moreda Rodriguez argued that it should be viewed as a companion to Hijleh’s earlier Towards a Global Music Theory: Practical Concepts and Methods for the Analysis of Music across Human Cultures (London: Routledge, 2016). She also noted the extent of Hijelh’s interest in music theory, manifested in investigations of the relative role of melody and harmony in different times and places, or issues of tuning and temperament, as well as the development of ‘global regions’ of influence and prominence at various periods in history. While these two axes suggested very promising results, Moreda Rodriguez felt the book to be let down by omissions and overgeneralizations. For example, he treats the Americas as a whole in the period from 1500 to 1920, but after then ‘the Americas’ becomes exclusively the United States. Also, he neglects the crucial years in the formation of a European canon (also the period which saw increased colonisation) with no mention of Bach, Handel, Mozart, Schumann or Schubert, while Hijleh does bring up Jordi Savall and a range of Spanish Renaissance composers, on the grounds of the musical exchanges between Spain and its American colonies in the early modern era. Moreda Rodriguez argued that an equally plausible case could be made for the global reach of Bach, Mozart or Italian opera.

She also hesitantly evoked the concept of ‘music history minus Beethoven’ as recently imagined by Leah Broad, in order to argue for the difficult place where this book is situated, neither wholly a textbook nor a research monograph. It would be unlikely to be of service to first year undergraduates who have only a partial knowledge of some of the musical traditions (though it was not entirely clear why Moreda Rodriguez thought so, though she acknowledge a sensitive tutor could use it productively). Instead, she thought it might have a more polemical aim: specifically to test, in front of other academics, ‘the viability of a single-authored, predominantly narrative music history’. In this, she thought he succeeded to a significant degree.

In contrast with Hijleh, who acknowledges that power in music and power in the real world do not simply mirror one another, Moreda Rodriguez noted how ‘power dynamics and otherness’ are central to the essays in Bohlman’s edited volume, many of which studiously disregard aesthetic and qualitative matters and avoid any engagement with musical detail. As such, the whole history of Western opera (itself undoubtedly something which has had global ramifications, as Moreda Rodriguez pointed out) is simply reduced to a perfunctory mention of its colonial aspects. While the introduction disavows narrative, the chronological ordering of the book – from non-European music during the Antiquity and Medieval Times, through ‘The Enlightenment and world music’s historical turn’, to ‘Music histories of the folk and nation’ – does imply something of the type. Despite various attempts to define ‘world music’, few try to ascertain how this might differ from a global history of music; any such venture is viewed as an academic exercise rather than something which could impact upon the regular work of musicologists. Chapters written from a position of great expertise, such as those of Peter Manuel (‘Musical cultures of mechanical reproduction’) or Bonnie C. Wade (‘Indian music history in the context of global encounters’) are nonetheless both rushed and founded upon too many assumptions to work as introductory texts, but contain too little critical or innovative detail to qualify as research chapters.

Strohm’s project has so far resulted in one edited volume (Strohm (ed.), Studies on a Global History of Music: A Balzan Musicology Project (London: Routledge, 2018)), while two more are in preparation. In his acceptance speech, Strohm expressed his motivation to ‘learn new things on the musical relations between geographical regions and chronological eras’, focusing less on narrative than attempts to ‘explore, through assembled case studies, parameters and terminologies that are suitable to describe a history of many different voices’. As Moreda Rodriguez, noted, at that stage such parameters and terminologies were not yet defined, but the publication and workshops suggest overlaps with the approaches of both Hijleh and Bohlman. She urged, as further outputs are published, investigation of whether these ends have been achieved more efficiently than in existing collections which relate single issues or questions to diverse cultures and contexts, but do not necessarily explore global or transnational issues.

In conclusion, Moreda Rodriguez anticipated the appearance of further such attempts at writing global music history, but also that the search for some ultimate such history will prove elusive. Many of them might reveal less about music history than about ‘the shared assumptions, values and trends embedded in the musicological community at particular moments in time’ as with the contributors to Bohlman’s volume in their ‘attempt to understand world music history under the now-fashionable lens of power dynamics’. As such, such works may be ‘less interesting as product than they are as process’.

[To be continued in Part 2]

Response to Charlotte C. Gill article on music and notation – full list of signatories

Posted: March 30, 2017 | Author: Ian Pace | Filed under: Music - General, Musical Education | Tags: barbara eichner, brian ferneyhough, camden reeves, charlotte c gill, chi-chi nwanoku, david eastwood, david warburton, fiona cunningham, franklin cox, gillian moore, gordon munro, helen grime, howard goodall, ian pace, james galway, james macmillan, jim aitchison, Joan Arnau Pàmies, kevin korsyn, marc yeats, mark everist, marshall marcus, michael nyman, michelle james, music, musical notation, Norman Lebrecht, peter tregear, simon rattle, the guardian | 570 Comments

[Addendum: See my follow-up article to this, ‘The insidious class divide in music teaching’, The Conversation, 17 May 2017]

An article in The Guardian by Charlotte C. Gill (‘Music education is now only for the white and wealthy’, Monday 27 March 2017), has generated a good deal of attention amongst a wide range of international musicians, music educators, academics, and others. Below is the letter compiled for publication in The Guardian in response to Gill’s article, and a full list of over 700 signatories to date. The letter was compiled by Joan Arnau Pàmies, Kevin Korsyn, Franklin Cox, Barbara Eichner and myself, while Jim Aitchison, Marc Yeats, Camden Reeves and others have been extremely helpfully with its dissemination. It is published on the Guardian website here, and appeared in the print edition for Thursday 6 April 2017 (‘Risky romanticisation of musical illiteracy’, p. 32). Some replies are printed here.

Also recommended are the response to Gill’s article by Michelle James, and an earlier article on musical literacy by Peter Tregear. See also this excellent responses by Pamela Rose , this by Helen Sanderson, this by George Bevan, this by George A. Smith, this by Christian Morris, and this by Frances Wilson. Also the coverage on Slipped Disc, in Limelight magazine, and on Arts Professional, and an article from the Latin Mass Society (of which James MacMillan, a signatory below, is a patron), focusing in particular on Gill’s comparison of reading music to learning Latin. Another recent blog article considers the article in the context of changing expectations in UK secondary education, while composer and teacher Des Oliver has made an important podcast with Tigran Arakelyan about the article, and I have also made an extended podcast with Arakelyan, considering the article and wider issues of musical education, notation, literacy, privilege, and more.

For an utterly contrasting view to that of Gill, strongly advocating reading (and sight reading), composition, and musical history, being available to all schoolchildren by right, see this 1945 pamphlet by the Workers’ Music Association (hardly the voice of the wealthy), especially pages 5-6. Speaking personally, I think many of the recommendations in this pamphlet are as relevant now as they were 72 years ago. I have also blogged an inspiring defence of the teaching of Western classical music and literacy by Estelle R. Jorgensen, which I believe to be highly relevant to this debate.

I will happily add other names to the list: if you wish to be added, please post underneath with your name and how you would like to be described.

[Earlier addendum material on related subjects is included at the bottom of this post – this and the above constitute my own thoughts, not those of the signatories]

Charlotte C. Gill (‘Music education is now only for the white and wealthy’) argues that ‘to enable more children to learn [music], we must stop teaching in such an academic way.’ While rightly noting the increasing chasm between state and private education in terms of music provision, her conclusions about musical notation and theoretical skills amount to simple anti-intellectualism.

Gill dismisses the study of music ‘theory’ and argues patronisingly that musical notation is ‘a cryptic, tricky language (…) that can only be read by a small number of people’. This claim flies in the face of countless initiatives over two centuries making musical literacy available to those of many backgrounds. As with written language, musical notation enables effective and accurate communication, as well as critical access to huge amounts of knowledge. In many musical fields, those without it will be at a deep disadvantage and dependent upon others.

Gill’s comments about ‘limited repertoires of old, mostly classical music’ are unfounded and presented without evidence: composing, listening, singing, and playing are embedded in much musical education, which also widely encompasses jazz, popular, and non-Western traditions. Claiming that classical music comprises a limited repertory is inaccurate: composers have been adding to its repertory for centuries and continue to do so. We agree with Gill that aural and other skills are equally important as those in notation. However, through her romanticisation of illiteracy, Gill’s position could serve to make literate musical education even more exclusive through being marginalised in state schools yet further.

Alex Abercrombie, pianist and mathematician
Louise Ableman, freelance pianist and piano teacher
Richard Abram, editor
Juliet Abrahamson, erstwhile music teacher, and festival director
Peter Adriaansz, Composer, composition teacher, Royal Conservatory, The Hague
Jean-Louis Agobet, composer, professor of composition at Bordeaux Conservatory (France)
James Aikman, Composer in Residence, Indianapolis Chamber Orchestra
Jim Aitchison, composer and graphic score artist
Helen Alexander, freelance musician
Helen Alipaz, Piano teacher and former music tutor at Ruskin Mill College, Nailsworth
Timothy Allan, singer, academic
Ralph Allwood, music teacher
Claire Alsop, Musician
Dr Pedro Alvarez, composer, Adjunct Lecturer, Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts
Peter Amsel, author and composer (of notated music); former Musical Director of the Espace Musique Concert Society. Ottawa, Canada
Paul Andrews, Anglican priest with PhD in music, former music librarian and choral conductor
Samuel Andreyev, composer and teacher
Leonie Anderson, viola player and teacher
Tigran Arakelyan, youth orchestra conductor, Off the Podium podcast
Genevieve Arkle, PhD candidate in Music, University of Surrey
Newton Armstrong, Senior Lecturer in Composition, City, University of London
Christophe Astier, Clarinetist, Ensemble Orchestral de Toulouse, France
Jessica Aszodi, vocalist, doctoral candidate, Queensland Conservatorium of Music
Man Bun Au, Classical guitarist, Adjunct Lecturer, Hong Kong Baptist University
John Aulich, composer, freelance tutor in composition and theory, and recording artist.
Patrick Ayrton, conductor and harpsichordist, Professor at the Royal Conservatoire of The Hague
Emily Baines: State school educated performer, lecturer, musical director and DMus candidate (Guildhall School of Music & Drama)
Brendan Ball, trumpeter and educator
Joshua Ballance, Music student
Simon Ballard, Concert Pianist and Composer
Nicholas Bannan, Associate Professor of Music, University of Western Australia
Richard Bannan, singer, conductor and Head of Singing, King’s College School, Wimbledon
Stephen Barber, Retired music teacher
Alejandro Barceló, musicologist and music theorist
Daniel Barkley, composer and PhD candidate at Queen’s University, Belfast
Matthew Barley, cellist
Keith Barnard, composer
Lester Barnes, composer, producer, and former music teacher
Kristina Baron-Woods, Lecturer in Music Theatre, University of Western Ontario
Richard Barrett, composer, Institute of Sonology, The Hague
Bernardo Barros, composer, improviser, Ph.D. Candidate/Teaching Assistant at New York University
Pam Barrowman, clarinettist, singer, teacher
Stephen Barton, composer (Titanfall 1 & 2, Call of Duty)
Nicholas Bartulovic, freelance composer, student of Politics, Philosophy, and History, Ashland University
Jane Becktel B.Mus.(Hons) Dip. Ed., Choir director
Pierre-Michel Bédard, Organist, composer, teacher at Limoges Conservatory
Adam Bell, composer, doctoral student, Brunel University
Prof David J. Benson FRSE, author of Music: A Mathematical Offering (CUP 2006)
Margaret Bent CBE, FBA, Emeritus Fellow, All Souls College
Niels Berentsen, PhD (Royal Conservatoire of The Hague)
Peter van Bergen, director LOOS Foundation/Studio LOOS, The Hague
Rebecca Berkley, Lecturer in Music Education, University of Reading
Mark Berry, Senior Lecturer in Music, Royal Holloway, University of London
Dr Steven Berryman, Director of Music City of London School for Girls
Noel Bertram, Retired Head of Cumbria County Music Service
Dr Christopher Best, freelance composer, fiction writer and university lecturer
George Bevan, Director of Music, Monkton School
Dr. C.M. Biggs, performer; Director of Piano Studies, Cambrian College
Sue Bint, Music teacher, violinist
Sylvia Bisset, private piano teacher
James Black, MSt. in Musicology, University of Oxford
Deborah Blackmore BSc ACA scientist, chartered accountant and trustee of a children’s music education charity
Kate Blackstone, freelance musician, PhD researcher, University of Leeds
Darren Bloom, composer, Lead Tutor for Composition and Musicianship, Junior Trinity
Yvonne Bloor, Master of music, teacher and composer
Andrew Bottrill, pianist
Mark Bowden, freelance composer; Reader in Composition, Royal Holloway, University of London
Geraint Bowen, director of music at Hereford Cathedral
Andrew Bowie, jazz musician, Professor of Philosophy and German, Royal Holloway, University of London
Laura Bowler, composer, vocalist, Lecturer in Composition at Royal Northern College of Music and Guildhall School of Music and Drama
Karen Boyce, pianist/accompanist and music teacher. New Zealand
Martyn Brabbins, ENO Music Director, RCM Visiting Professor, Huddersfield Choral Society music director
Susan Bradley, freelance tuba, ophicleide, serpent, cimbasso player
David Braid, composer
Heather Bradshaw, violinist in the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra
Andrew Brewerton, Principal, Plymouth College of Art
Lewis Brito-Babapulle MA, MSt, FRCO. Head of Academic Music, Trinity School, Croydon
Per Broman, Professor of Music, Bowling Green State University
Anne Brown, primary school music teacher
Harvey Brown, secondary music teacher and musician
Janice Brown, piano teacher
Mariko Brown, teacher, pianist, and composer
Martha Watson Brown Oboist, Composer and teacher of Music Theory
Thomas Brown, composer
Robin Browning, conductor; Conducting Instructor, University of Southampton
Kevin Brunkhorst, Chair, Music Department, St Francis Xavier University, Antigonish, Nova Scotia, Canada
John Bryan, performer and Professor of Music, University of Huddersfield
Jason Thorpe Buchanan, composer, PhD Candidate, Eastman School of Music; Artistic Director, the [Switch~ Ensemble]
Lisete Da Silva Bull, professional musician, teacher, educator
James Bunch, Lecturer in composition-theory, KM College of Music and Technology, Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India
Sarah Burn, freelance music editor and typesetter; completing a PhD involving notation and critical editing
Steven Burnard Violist BBC Philharmonic , learnt to read music at state school aged 7
Martin Butler, composer, pianist, Professor, University of Sussex
Peter Byrom-Smith, composer
Thomas Caddick, Director of the Tobias Matthay Pianoforte School
Dr Edward Caine, Composer, pianist and researcher for Ex Cathedra
Sara Caine, singer & oboist, GP
Jacqui Cameron, Education Director, Opera North
William Cameron, musician
Rachel Campbell, Sydney Conservatorium of Music
Jay Capperauld, composer, saxophonist
Christian Carey, composer and Associate Professor of Music, Westminster Choir College
Gerry Carleston, B Mus, retired violinist and teacher
Stephen Carleston, organist & choir-trainer, music examiner and arranger
Tim Carleston, lay clerk, St George’s chapel, Windsor Castle
Gary Carpenter FRNCM, HonRAM, FRSA. Composer, composition professor Royal Academy of Music and Royal Northern College of Music, BASCA Director
Dr Paul Carr, composer
Philip Cashian, Head of Composition, Royal Academy of Music
Alan Cassar, composer and arranger
Peter Castine, composer, managing editor Computer Music Journal
Sam Cave, BA(Hons) PGdip (RCM), guitarist and composer, tutor in guitar at Brunel University
Roland Chadwick, Composer, Guitarist, Teacher
Oliver Chandler, Visiting Tutor in Historical Musicology, Royal Holloway, University of London
Alexandros Charkiolakis, musicologist, MIAM – Istanbul Technical University
James Chater, musicologist and composer
Eugenia Cheng, mathematician, educator and pianist
Anthony Cheung, composer, pianist, teacher (University of Chicago), co-artistic director of the Talea Ensemble
Pablo Santiago Chin, Adjunct Instructor, Music Theory and Composition, Saint Xavier University
Unsuk Chin, composer
Ray Chinn, violin teacher
Peter Cigleris, clarinetist, BMus (Hons), PGDip, Royal College of Music
Artur Cimirro, composer and pianist from Brazil
Keith W Clancy, artist/composer/computer musician, Melbourne, Australia
Colin Stuart Clarke, Classical music journalist
Raymond Clarke, pianist
Nicholas Clapton, singer and singing teacher
James Clarke, composer, Researcher, University of Leeds
Julian Clayton, conductor
Robert Coates FRCO(CHM), ARCM. Composer, organist and teacher, Harøy, Norway
Jacques Cohen, Conductor & Composer
Jonathan Cohen, former presenter, Music Time for BBC TV School’s programmes
Chris Collins, Head of Music, Bangor University
Rob Collis, singer and composer
Sarah Connolly, opera singer and teacher
Saskia Constantinou, Media Consultant and arts festival director
Dr. David Conway, music historian, Honorary Research Fellow, University College London
James Cook, University Teacher in Music, University of Sheffield
Rachel Cook BA MA, Pianist, orchestral musician and educator
Imogen Cooper, pianist
Brian Cope, composer, music educator and PhD candidate at the University of Edinburgh
Roger Coull, violinist leader of the Coull Quartet, and conductor
Tom Coult. Composer, Visiting Fellow in Creative Arts, Trinity College Cambridge
Emma Coulthard, flautist, author and head of Cardiff County and the Vale of Glamorgan Music Sevuce
Franklin Cox, Associate Professor of Theory, Cello, and Composition, Wright State University
Mairi Coyle. Participation & Outreach Manager, National Children’s Orchestras of GB
Stephen Coyle, composer and PhD candidate at Queen’s University, Belfast
Ruth Crouch, Assistant Leader at Scottish Chamber Orchestra & violin teacher at Royal Conservatoire of Scotland & St. Mary’s Music School
Francis Cummings, violinist and Director of Music at Sistema Scotland, Royal Conservatoire of Scotland
Simon Cummings, composer, writer, researcher, PhD candidate, Birmingham Conservatoire
Fiona Cunningham, CEO, Sistema England
Harriet Cunningham, music critic, writer and doctoral student at UTS, Australia
David Curran, freelance music educator, PhD Candidate, Royal Holloway, University of London
Caroline Curwen, PhD student Psychology of Music, Sheffield University
Dr. Mat Dalgleish, Senior Lecturer in Music Technology and Course Leader for MSc Audio Technology, University of Wolverhampton
Giovanni D’Aquila, composer, composition teacher
John Daszak, opera/concert singer
Steven Daverson, composer, Lecturer in Composition and Sonic Arts, Brunel University London
Colin Davey, Education Programmes Manager, Royal School of Church Music, teacher and conductor
Julian Davis, amateur pianist, Professor of Medicine, University of Manchester
Gavin Davies, freelance violinist
Edward Davies, Head of Music, St Mary Redcliffe and Temple School, Bristol
Jill Davies MusB, classical music artist manager and concert promoter, passionate amateur musician
Tansy Davies, composer
Rebecca Dawson, General Manager, Music at Oxford
Rebecca Day, Visiting Lecturer, Royal Holloway, University of London; Tutor in Music Theory and Analysis, University of Oxford
Caroline D’Cruz, B.Mus, ARCM, LRAM pianist and choral conductor
Nathan James Dearden, Performance Manager and Visiting Tutor in Music Composition, Royal Holloway University of London
Cornelis de Bondt. Composer, teacher Royal Conservatoire, Den Haag, NL
Lonnie Decker, Musician and Educator
João Pedro Delgado, viola, PhD researcher, Universidade de Évora, ESART-IPCB
Caroline Delume, Guitarist, teacher
Simon Desbruslais, trumpet soloist and Director of Performance, University of Hull
Dr. Luis Dias, founder and project director of Child’s Play India Foundation (www.childsplayindia.org), a music charity working to bring music education to India’s disadvantaged children
Josephine Dickinson, former music teacher, composer, and poet
Joan Dillon, Director of The Academy of Sacred Music/Voice Teacher
Alison Dite, pianist and teacher from Cardiff
Sarah Dodds, piano teacher, Associate Lecturer in music, The Open University
Emily Doolittle, composer, Athenaeum Research Fellow, Royal Conservatoire of Scotland
Sean Dowgray, percussionist, D.M.A: UC San Diego
John Duggan, composer, singer, teacher
Andrew Eales, pianist, writer and teacher
Leslie East, Chair, The Association of British Choral Directors; former CEO, ABRSM
Christiana Eastwood, Head of Music at The Granville School, Sevenoaks
Professor Sir David Eastwood, Vice Chancellor, University of Birmingham
Jason Eckardt, Professor, City University of New York
Dr Paul Max Edlin, composer, Director of Music Queen Mary University of London, Artistic Director Deal Festival of Music and the Arts
Katheryne Perri Edwards, music educator for 37 years
Malcolm V. Edwards, Professor Emeritus of Music, University of Calgary, Alberta, Canada
Barbara Eichner, Senior Lecturer in Music, Oxford Brookes University
Aaron Einbond, composer, Lecturer in Music, City, University of London
Dr Graham Elliott; Executive Director American Youth Philharmonic Orchestras; Washington DC, USA
Lynne Ellis, Chief Executive Officer, Berkshire Maestros and lead of the Berkshire Music Hub
Daniel Elphick, Teaching Fellow, Royal Holloway, University of London
Mark Elvin, Bass Guitarist, Double Bassist, Tubist, Composer/Arranger/Transcriber, Educator, Conductor
Nick Ereaut, jazz musician, singer-songwriter, music teacher
Nancy Evans, Director of Learning and Participation, Birmingham Contemporary Music Group
Tecwyn Evans, conductor
Nick Evans-Pughe, Performer and school instrumental teacher’ (PGDip in instrumental teaching in which l researched the learning by children of (western classical) notation.)
Mark Everist, Professor of Music, President of the Royal Musical Association (signing in a personal capacity)
Judith Exley. Flute teacher and composer. Wellington, New Zealand
Pauline Fairclough, University of Bristol
Daniel Fardon, PhD student in Composition and Teaching Associate at University of Birmingham
Miguel Farías. Composer, PHD(c) in Latin American Studies, associated Professor universidad academia de humanismo Cristiano , Chile
Tony Faulkner, Independent classical recording producer and engineer
Greta Fenney, therapist
Adam Fergler, composer, arranger, and conductor
Laetitia Federici, freelance pianist and peripatetic piano teacher
Anneke Feenstra, mother of a musician
Cal Fell BA Hons LRAM Freelance musician State Educated
Professor Brian Ferneyhough, Stanford University
Coia Ibàñez Ferrater, Director of Xilofon Elementary School of Music
Jeremy Filsell, Professor of Organ, Peabody Conservatory, Baltimore USA
Janet Fischer, Soprano, Teacher, Managing Director Fulham Opera
Jonathan Fischer, TV Composer, Songwriter
Chris Fisher-Lochhead, composer and violist
Dr Kevin Flanagan, Senior Lecturer in Music, Anglia Ruskin University
Dr Alexandra Fol, composer; conductor and organist at Missione Maria Ausiliatrice, Montréal, Canada
Miriam Forbes, Director of Music, Witham Hall School
Peter Foster. Music Teacher
Christopher Fox, composer, Professor of Music, Brunel University, editor of TEMPO
Cheryl Frances-Hoad, composer
Luke Fraser MMus, composer and Piano Teacher for Arts First
Brigid Frazer, Kodaly based Early Years Music Specialist
Judith Fromyhr, Senior Lecturer in Music, Australian Catholic University
Tor Frømyhr, Coordinator of Strings Australian National University
Hugh Fullarton, Organist and Master of the Choristers at Holy Trinity Anglican Cathedral, Wangaratta
Alvaro Gallegos, music scholar, journalist and record producer
Sir James and Lady Jeanne Galway, flautists
Tom Gamble, MMus Guitarist
Brian Garbet, composer, PhD candidate, University of Calgary, Canada
Ash Gardner, DJ, multi-instrumentalist, music educator, New York, NY
James Gardner, composer, University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand
Eloise Garland, Musician, Teacher, and Deaf Awareness Campaigner
Tim Garrard, Director of Music, Westminster School
Mark Gasser, pianist
Ben Gaunt, Senior Lecturer Leeds College of Music, Tutor Open College of the Arts
Andrew Georg, repetiteur, State Opera of South Australia, organist
Patricia Giannattasio, Professor of Music, Bergen College in New Jersey; PhD candidate at The Graduate Center
Sean K. Gilde, ‘cellist with Astaria String Quartet, Head of Strings Dragon School Oxford
Don Gillthorpe, Director of Music and Performing Arts, Ripley St. Thomas CE Academy
Hannah Gill, pianist, organist, choral conductor and music teacher
Karen Giudici (Turner) ex professional freelance clarinettist, current primary and secondary music teacher
Rob Godman, Composer, Reader in Music at the University of Hertfordshire
Nigel Goldberg, Artistic Director, Youth Music Centre
Miles Golding BMus, LTCL, LRSM, free-lance violinist, teacher of violin, viola, music theory
Richard Gonski, Conductor Torbay Symphony Orchestra
Howard Goodall CBE, Composer, Broadcaster, Music Historian
Liz Goodwin, teacher, founder/director Flutewise
Sumanth Gopinath, Associate Professor of Music Theory, University of Minnesota–Twin Cities
Adam Gorb, Head of School of Composition, Royal Northern College of Music
Stephen Goss, Professor, University of Surrey
Mark Gotham, Affiliated Lecturer, University of Cambridge
Dr. Barbara Graham, Retired Professor, Ball State University and amateur violist
Dr Michael Graham, postgraduate researcher, Royal Holloway; tutor, Rhondda Cynon Taff music service
Penny Grant, Singing Teacher and Soprano
Simon Gravett dip.TCL, Head of Music the Elmgreen School
Coady Green, The University of Melbourne, Melbourne Conservatorium of Music.
Robert Green, pianist, accompanist, jazz musician
Gavin Greenaway, composer, conductor, pianist
Helen Grime, composer, Senior Lecturer of composition at Royal Holloway University of London
Nicole Grimes, Assistant Professor of Musicology, University of California, Irvine
Jennifer Guppy, British national, resident in France. Class music teacher, at a Primary school and private piano and flute teacher
Christine Gwynn, conductor, pianist, coach, music workshop leader
Kerry L Hagan, Composer, Lecturer, University of Limerick
Stefan Hagen, Dilettant
Iain Hallam, singer and musical director of a cappella choruses
Marc-André Hamelin, pianist
Benedict Hames, viola player, Symphonie Orchester des bayerischen Rundfunk
Ross Hamilton, Peripatetic Percussion Teacher, Cornwall Music Service Trust
Helen Hampton, Director, Popchoir
Radka Hanakova, pianist
J. P. E. Harper-Scott, Professor of Music History and Theory, Royal Holloway University of London
Patrick Harrex, composer and Musical Director of Brighton & Hove Arts Orchestra
Dr. John Mark Harris, music educator and pianist
Sadie Harrison, secondary school peripatetic teacher of piano and music theory; composer and lecturer
Tom Harrold, composer, Honorary Associate Artist of the Royal Northern College of Music
Edward-Rhys Harry, conductor, composer
Béla Hartmann, pianist
Andrea Hartenfeller, organist, singer, teacher, Hesse/Germany
Per Hartmann, music publisher, Edition HH Ltd
David Harvey, D.Phil music, composer, guitarist, technologist, ex-CTO Sibelius, Tido
Waka Hasegawa, pianist, piano duettist and piano teacher
Katie Hassell, Senior Spacecraft Engineer, pianist and cellist
Arngeir Hauksson, Guitarist, Lutenist and music teacher
Jeremy Hawker B.mus, M.Teach, L.mus, professional guitarist and instrumental tutor at Townsville Grammar School
Steve Hawker, Inclusion Manager, Cornwall Music Service Trust
Sam Hayden, composer and academic, Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance
Morgan Hayes, Professor of Composition, Royal Academy of Music
Benjamin Hebbert, Director, Benjamin Hebbert Violins Limited
Piers Hellawell, composer and Professor of Composition, Queen’s University of Belfast, Northern Ireland
Andrew Henderson, singer, keyboard player, secondary school Director of Music, primary school governor, committee member, MMA – Music Teaching Professionals
Áine Heneghan, Assistant Professor of Music Theory, University of Michigan
James Heron, violinist and violist
Ken Hesketh, composer, Lecturer, Royal College of Music
Helen Heslop, piano student, concert promoter
Anne-Marie Hetherington, Music Director and Head of Creative Arts in a successful secondary school, singing teacher, conductor
Gavin Higgins, composer
Rolf Hind, pianist, composer and teacher (Guildhall School of Music and Trinity Laban)
Maggie Hinder, GRSM ARCM ARCO, freelance music teacher and chorister
Alistair Hinton, composer, curator, The Sorabji Archive
James Hockey, musician, teacher, conductor
Jason Hodgson BMus (composer, disabled, and now studying MMus)
Ros Hoffler ABRSM examiner
Alison Holford, cellist and lover of sight-reading
Klaas ten Holt, composer, writer, composition teacher at Prins Claus Conservatorium, Groningen, the Netherlands
Michael Hooper, Lecturer in Music, University of New South Wales, Australia
Julian Horton, Professor of Music, Durham University
Tim Horton, pianist
Janet Hoskyns, Professor Emerita, Birmingham City University
Stephen Hough, pianist
Yvonne Howard, Opera/ Concert Singer & Professor of Singing
Dr Jocelyn Howell
George Huber, singer and mathematician
Dr David Russell Hulme, Director of Music and Reader, Aberystwyth University, musicologist and conductor
Alexander Hunter, composer and performer, Australian National University
Derek Hurst, Associate Professor of Composition, Berklee College of Music and Boston Conservatory
David Hutchings, conductor
Anne Margaret Hyland, Lecturer in Music Analysis and Admissions tutor at the University of Manchester
Miika Hyytiäinen, composer, doctoral student, University of the Arts Helsinki
Michael Ibsen, Classical Guitarist Mmus, British Columbia Conservatory of Music
Grahame Gordon Innes, composer
Professor John Irving, Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance, London
Steven Isserlis, cellist
Dr Jenny Jackson, composer & private piano teacher
Stephen Jackson, conductor, choral director, composer and arranger
Julian Jacobson, musician
Alison James, Head of Music, Kelvin Hall School, professional musician, performance moderator
Lara James, tutor of saxophone, Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama, Senior Associate teacher, Bristol University
Willem Jansen, performer and teacher, The Netherlands
Joel Jarventausta, composer and conductor, masters student at the Royal College of Music
Kate Johnson, Promotion & Communications Director, Music Sales Limited
Stephen Johnson, writer, broadcaster & composer
Fergus Johnston, Composer
Allan Herbie Jones, composer, musician, teacher.
David Jones, Head of Accompaniment, Royal Northern College of Music; Deputy Head, Junior RNCM
Gordon Jones, singer, former member of The Hilliard Ensemble
Jeremy Peyton Jones, composer, Reader in music, Goldsmiths University of London
Julia Jones Teacher of Music, City of London School
Georgina Jordan, pianist and teacher
Susanna Jordan, tutti 1st violin, Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra
Frauke Jurgensen, musician, Lecturer, University of Aberdeen
Jari Kallio, music journalist
Matthew Kaner, Professor of Composition Guildhall School of Music and Drama
Rob Keeley, composer and pianist, King’s College
Susan Keeling, music graduate, arts administrator, amateur musician, parent
N W Kenyon, retired teacher
Dorothy Ker, Composer, Senior Lecturer, University of Sheffield
Dr Steve Kershaw, jazz musician, Oxford University Department for Continuing Education
Isla Keys MA (Hons) ATCL PGCE, music teacher, singing & piano teacher, committee member MMA-Music Teaching Professionals
Christopher Kimbell, Visiting Tutor in Historical Musicology, Royal Holloway, University of London; peripatetic teacher in music theory
Owen Kilfeather, composer and writer
Andrew King, Professor of English Literature – and avid reader of music
George King, Head and Senior Lecturer (retired), Department of Art History, Visual Arts and Musicology, University of South Africa
Helen Kingstone, Postdoctoral Researcher in History, Leeds Trinity University (and pianist and choral singer)
Professor Andrew Kirkman, Peyton and Barber Professor of Music, University of Birmingham
Patricia Kleinman, Musicóloga
Grahame Klippel, Guitarist, Kingston University
Ruth Knell, violinist, English National Ballet. Learnt to read music initially at the age of 6/7 in recorder lessons at an infant school on a council estate in the 60s
Annabel Knight, head of recorder, Birmingham Conservatoire
Kathryn Knight, CEO Tido Music and a director/founder of Sing Up
Matthew Lee Knowles, composer + piano teacher
Allan Kolsky, Orchestra Musician, Syracuse, NY
Kevin Korsyn, Professor of Music Theory, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Toni J. Krein, President of the Association of Swiss Professional Orchestras
Uday Krishnakumar, Composer
Prof. Dennis Kuhn, Head of the percussion and timpani dept, University of Music and Performing Arts Mannheim, Germany
Henny Kupferstein, piano teacher
Yannis Kyriakides, Composer, teacher Royal Conservatory, The Hague
Dr David Lancaster, Director of Music at York St John University
Vanessa Lann, composer, teacher
Jerry Lanning, conductor and arranger
Thomas Larcher, musician
David Lawrence, conductor
Andrew C Leach, organist, choirman in four cathedral occasional choirs
Elizabeth Eva Leach, Professor of Music, University of Oxford
Yekaterina Lebedeva, concert pianist, professor of piano Trinity Laban Conservatoire, visiting lecturer City, University of London
Norman Lebrecht, writer and broadcaster
Kelvin Lee, PhD Candidate in Musicology at Durham University, Conductor
Christian Leitmeir, Magdalen College, University of Oxford
Erik Levi, Visiting Professor in Music, Royal Holloway University of London
Sally Lewis, pianist and teacher
Rebecca Leyton-Smith, Cellist and Cello Teacher at Uppingham School
Mu-Xuan Lin, Composer, and Lecturer at California State University Long Beach
PerMagnus Lindborg, composer, Assistant Professor, School of Art, Design, and Media, Singapore
Dr Alexander Lingas, Reader in Music, City, University of London; Fellow, European Humanities Research Centre, University of Oxford; Music Director, Cappella Romana
Tomasz Lis, concert pianist, teacher
Maureen Lister, Euphonium player
Rodney Lister, faculty department of composition and theory, Boston University School of Music, faculty The New England Conservatory Preparatory School
Lore Lixenberg, Experimental voice artist, Mezzo, Composer
Daniel Lloyd, Musician and author of No Notes piano music (tablature) designed to help beginners make a start with learning how to read and to play piano music.
Rick Longden, Lecturer in Music, Musician etc
Dave Longman, drummer, percussionist, teacher and author of “Skins Drum Performance Method”
Nick Loveland, COO, Birmingham Town Hall and Symphony Hall
Sonia Lovett, television director of opera and classical music concerts
Shay Loya, Lecturer in Music, City, University of London
Neil Luck, composer, performer, music educator
Karl Lutchmayer, Senior Lecturer, Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance
Frances M Lynch, singer, director, composer, teacher
Graham Lynch, composer
Tracey Mair, freelance piano and vocal tutor
Joshua Banks Mailman, Instructor of Music Theory, University of Alabama
Charles MacDougall, founding member of VOCES8, currently Choral Specialist for The Voices Foundation
Nigel McBride, Composer, BMus (Hons), MSt. in Composition (Oxon.), DPhil in Music (Oxon.)
Rachel McCarthy, doctoral candidate and visiting tutor, Royal Holloway, University of London
Paul McCreesh, conductor, founder and artistic director, Gabrieli
Maggie McCoy, Choral Arts administrator and choral musician
Elizabeth Macdonald, violist and arts administratorGeraldine McElearney, GSM,singing and piano teacher
Simon McEnery, singer, musical director (Salisbury Chamber Chorus), Associate Lecturer at the University of Chichester
Neil McGowan, Production Staff, Stanislavsky-Muzykalny Opera/Ballet Theatre, Moscow
Andrew McGregor, Broadcaster, BBC Radio 3
Jennifer Mackerras, recorder player; Alexander Technique tutor at Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama
John McLeod, composer
Sir James MacMillan, composer, conductor
Peter McMullin, Printed Music Specialist, Blackwell’s Music Shop
Stuart McRae, Composer, Lecturer, Royal Conservatoire of Scotland
Jason Matthew Malli, composer, sound designer, performer, producer, educator, arts advocate
Martin Malmgren, pianist
Kevin Malone, Reader in Composition, University of Manchester
Julien Malaussena Composer
Jane Manning, singer
Marshall Marcus, CEO European Union Youth Orchestra, President Sistema Europe
Daniel Margolin QC, lawyer, amateur musician and parent
Kypros Markou, Professor of Music, Wayne State University, Detroit, MI (graduate from Royal College of Music, London and New England Conservatory, Boston)
Katherine Marriott, mezzo-soprano
Daniela Mars, Flutist
Les Marsden, Founding Music Director/Conductor: The Mariposa (CA) Symphony Orchestra, Composer, Lecturer, University of California and Instrumental Musician
Andy Marshall, Senior Lay Clerk, Bristol Cathedral
Chris Marshall, Head of Professional Development, Birmingham Conservatoire
Barnaby Martin, composer
Domingos de Mascarenhas (DPhil) musicologist
Sandy Matheson, Nordoff Robbins music therapist
Alison Mathews MMus BMus(hons)RCM ARCM, composer, private teacher, pianist
Colin Matthews, composer
David Matthews, composer
James Mayhew, artist and narrator
Gijs van der Meijden (The Netherlands). Microbiologist by profession, not a musician in any practical sense, but a deep lover thereof
Cecília Melo, Magistrate
Virgílio Melo, composer
Miguel Mera, head of Music, City, University of London
Chris Mercer, composer, Lecturer, Northwestern University
Nathan Mercieca, Teaching Associate, Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge University
Jonathan Midgley, lay clerk, Ely Cathedral
Max Midroit, pianist
Chloe Millar, violinist, freelance musician and teacher
Richard Miller, Composer, Arranger/Orchestrator, Royal Liverpool Philharmonic’s Christopher Brooks Composition Prizewinner, Director of Music, St Michael’s Church, Camden
Sasha Valeri Millwood, MA (Cantab.) MMus (GSMD), musician, musicologist, & doctoral researcher, University of Glasgow
David Milsom, Head of Performance, University of Huddersfield
Ruth Milsom, freelance teacher of piano and music theory, and accompanist
William Alberto Penafiel Miranda, Composer/Pianist at Queens College (Aaron Copland School of Music
Madeleine Mitchell, state-school educated violinist, professor, Royal College of Music
Cara Ellen Modisett, pianist, Episcopal music director and essayist
Kerry A. Moffit, Master Sergeant (Retired), United States Air Force Bands and Music Career Field, Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines Orchestra Musician (lead and jazz trumpet), Grammy winner, and professional musician for 40+ years.
Alison Moncrieff-Kelly, cellist, music educator, and examiner
Josephine Montgomery, violinist, early years string teacher
Ivan Moody, composer, CESEM – Universidade Nova, Lisbon
Adrian Moore, composer, Reader in Music, University of Sheffield
Gillian Moore, Director of Music, South Bank Centre
Eva Moreda Rodriguez, Lecturer in Music, University of Glasgow
Dittany Morgan, former Sub principal Viola BBC symphony and teacher of Violin/ Viola
Huw Morgan, freelance choral director and organist
Kate Morgan, Director of Music, Harrogate Ladies’ College
Katie Morgan, flautist, music writer, and flute and music theory teacher
Michael Morse, composer, educator
Tim Motion, Photographer and musician
Catherine Motuz, trombonist
Thomas Mowrey, former producer for Deutsche Grammophon and Decca
Theresa Muir, Ph.D. Musicology, conductor and singer
John Mulroy chorister at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden
Gordon Munro, Director of Music, Royal Conservatoire of Scotland
Tommy Murtagh, cellist and educator
Rachel Musgrove, director, daytime choirs for retirees
Rachel Neiger, Pianist and teacher
Lisa Nelsen, Flute player, artist for Yamaha International, Tutor for Junior Guildhall School and former Specialist Flute Tutor at Wells Cathedral School, UK
Thi Nguyen , GSMD, IoE (MA in Music Education), violinist and teacher
Mike Nichols, Bassist. ACM lecturer, ABRSM consultant. Regularly work in orchestras and non reading bands
George Nicholson, composer, Professor in Composition, University of Sheffield
Marten Noorduin, Postdoctoral research assistant, University of Oxford
Kirk Noreen, Founder/Director, Ensemble Sospeso, New York, Composer
Mariko North, pianist
Dr Patrick Nunn, Lecturer in composition, Royal Academy of Music, London
Chi-chi Nwanoku MBE, double bassist, Founder, Artistic Director Chineke!
Richard Nye, BA (Hons) FLCM PGCE, teacher and composer
Michael Nyman, composer
Lady Anita O’Brien, Violinist/ Music Teacher
Dolors Olivé Vernet, music teacher, Headmaster, Teresa Miquel i Pàmies Elementary School
Des Oliver, composer
Philip Olleson, Emeritus Professor of Historical Musicology, University of Nottingham, and Immediate Past President, The Royal Musical Association
Nicholas Olsen, composer
Clare Orrell, primary school headteacher and music graduate
Jill Osborn BMus, private piano teacher
Richard Osmond, Director of Music, Haberdashers’ Aske’s Boys’ School
Ursula O’Sullivan, music teacher and musician, CSN College of Further Education, Cork, Ireland
Rebecca Oswald, composer, pianist, former faculty at the University of Oregon School of Music
Luke Ottevanger, Director of Music, composer
Martijn Padding, head of composition department, Royal Conservatory, Den Haag
Ian Pace, pianist, Lecturer, Head of Performance, City, University of London
Professor Carrie Paechter, Head of .Educational Studies, Goldsmiths, University of London
Christopher Painter, composer, brass bandsman, lecturer, music publisher, trumpet player. Barry, South Wales
Joan Arnau Pàmies, composer, Aural Skills Instructor, Northwestern University
Dr Tom Pankhurst, Music Teacher and Author
Tom Parkinson, composer and sound designer, Royal Holloway, University of London
Ben Pateman, Flautist and retired music producer
Anthony Payne, composer
Jenny Pearson, freelance cellist, teacher at Severn Arts Worcester
Michael Pearson, professional violinist
Jane Peckham BMus, MA, School Governor, Double Bassist
Tim Pells, Head of Guitar and Lecturer, Colchester Institute and Centre for Young Musicians
Chris Pelly, Concerts Series Administrator, University of Leeds
Damian Penfold, conductor and primary school governor
Ian Penwarden-Allen, choral conductor and teacher of music
Selah Perez-Villar, pianist and music educator
Lola Perrin, piano teacher, composer
Dr. Jeffrey Peterson, Associate Professor of Vocal Coaching/ Opera Conductor
Baylor University, Waco, TX
Theodore R Peterson, Composer
Joe Pettitt BMus(hons), bassist, bandleader and teacher of jazz bass and electric guitar at Westminster School and Trinity School, Croydon
Stephen Pettitt, writer and critic
James Philips, Classical Guitarist and self taught music reader
John Pickard, composer and Head of Music, University of Bristol
David Pickett, Former Prof., Indiana University School of Music, conductor, musicologist, tonmeister
Oliver Pickup, composer
David Pickvance, film and TV composer, composer-in-residence to the BBC
Jenni Pinnock, composer and instrumental tutor
David Pinto, performer with the Jaye Consort and musicologist, contributing editor to two volumes of Musica Britannica
John Pitts, composer and music teacher
Stephen Plaice, librettist, Writer in Residence Guildhall School of Music and Drama
Tamasine Plowman MA
Lara Poe, composer and pianist, graduate student at RCM
Irini Urania Politi, artist, teacher, amateur musician
Rosie Pollock, BMus MA (learned notation aged 6/7)
Benjamin Pope, Conductor working with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and Orchestras
Francis Pott, Professor of Composition & Head of Research, London College of Music, University of West London
Caroline Potter, Reader in Music, Kingston University
Eleri Angharad Pound, freelance harpist and composer, amateur choir singer
Jonathan Powell, pianist
Mark Powell, Conducting Scholar / ALP Faculty, Eastman School of Music
Steph Power, composer, critic, writer on music
Gillian Poznansky, flute player and examiner
Scott Price, Director of Music, The Cardinal Vaughan Memorial School
Dr Nicholas Stefano Prozzillo
Toby Purser, conductor
Peter Puskás, promoter and artist manager
Irene Quirmbach, violin instructor at the Francis W. Parker School in Chicago, IL (USA), active freelance violinist
Giovanni Radivo, concertmaster, Orchestre national de Lyon (France)
Caroline Rae, Reader in Music and pianist, Cardiff University
Lorenda Ramou, pianist, musicologist
Sanna Raninen, Research Associate, University of Sheffield
Torsten Rasch, composer
Nadia Ratsimandresy, ondist and Professor of onde Martenot and ondéa, Conservatoire à Rayonnement Régional de Boulogne-Billancourt
Manvinder Rattan, CEO and Head of Conductor Training, Sing for Pleasure
Sir Simon Rattle, conductor, principal conductor, Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, conductor-elect, London Symphony Orchestra
Robert Rawson, Reader in Music, School of Music and Performing Arts, Canterbury Christ Church University
Steven Reale, Associate Professor of Music Theory, Youngstown State University, Youngstown, OH
Carla Rees, Music Programme Leader, Open College of the Arts
Camden Reeves, Professor and Head of Music, University of Manchester
John Reid, pianist and teacher
Chris Rice, Director, Altarus Records
Sally Richardson, Artist Manager; owner of Tashmina Artists
Christiaan Richter, composer
Dr Tim Ridley, Director of Music, Glenalmond Gollege
Judith Robinson, Creative Project Leader for Education, Sound and Music
Heather Roche, clarinettist, co-editor of TEMPO
Dr Marc Rochester, lecturer in music history and criticism, Yong Siew Toh Conservatory of Music, National University of Singapore
Paul Rodmell, Head of Music, University of Birmingham
Carlos Rodriguez, pianist, conductor and MBA from ChileJames Roe, President & Executive Director, Orchestra of St. Luke’s, New York City
Martin Roscoe, pianist, Professor, Guildhall School of Music and Drama
Pamela Rose, ABRSM Theory Examiner, Music Educator
Daniele Rosina, Director of Orchestral Studies University of Birmingham, Conducting Tutor, Birmingham Conservatoire
Luke Roskams, retired violinist
Tish Roskams, B.Mus retired music teacher
Toby Roundell, composer and educationist
Rebecca Rowe, composer and music educator
Cyrilla Rowsell, Kodály specialist, teacher at GSMD and for the British Kodály Academy, co-author of Jolly Music
Edward Rushton, composer and pianist
Julian Rushton, Emeritus Professor of Music, University of Leeds
Isabelle Ryder, private piano teacher
Leo Samama, composer, musicologist, educator and author (The Netherlands)
Abel Sanchez-Aguilera, pianist and biochemist, Madrid
Helen Sanderson, Winston Churchill Fellowship in guitar education, Artistic Director of National Youth Guitar Ensemble, CEO of Guitar Circus, guitar professor at RWCMD
Anthony Sandle, opera singer
James Savage-Hanford, freelance singer and Visiting Tutor in Theory & Analysis at Royal Holloway, University of London
Melinda Sawers, Director of Music, Wadhurst, Melbourne Grammar School (Australia)
Paul Scanling, Music Director, Marietta Symphony Orchestra
Brian Schembri, Artistic Director and Principal Conductor, Malta Philharmonic Orchestra
Jonathan Schranz, Choral Conductor, London
Thomas Schmidt, Professor of Music, University of Manchester
William James Schmidt, pianist & composer, MMusPerf (University of Melbourne), MA (MUK Vienna)
Christian Schruff, Journalist – Musikvermittler, Berlin
Annelies Scott ARAM, cello and music theory teacher
Fred Scott, founder, Soundpractice Music
Matthew Scott, Professor of Composition, University of Southampton; Head Of Music, National Theatre (retired)
Peter J D Scott, Teaching Fellow, University of Bristol
Robert Secret ARAM, conductor & viola player
Florian Scheding, University of Bristol
Jeffrey Siegfried, saxophonist, doctoral candidate, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Linda Shaver-Gleason, PhD Musicology, University of California, Santa Barbara
Susan Sheppard, teacher of cello at RNCM and Trinity Laban and teacher of Latin
Daniel Sherer, professor of architecture, Columbia University and lifelong pianist and music lover
Rachel Shirley, Music teacher; PhD researcher in Music Education, Lancaster University
Andre Shlimon, musician and teacher
Robert Sholl, University of West London and The Royal Academy of Music
Martin Shorthose, Cantor and Choir Director, Antiochian Orthodox Church in the UK. Ex Layclerk at Coventry and Liverpool Cathedrals
Alexander Sigman, composer, researcher and educator
Angela Elizabeth Slater, Composer
Jeremy Silver, conductor, pianist, vocal coach
Nigel Simeone, music teacher, English Martyrs’ Catholic School
Mark Simpson, BBC Philharmonic Composer in Association and former BBC Young Musician of the year 2006
Wendy Skeen, BMus(Hons), Guildhall School of Music & Drama; Freelance pianist and piano teacher
M I Skinner, M.St. (Mus)(Oxon), PG Dip MTPP, ALCM, Dip ABCD. Musician, teacher, conductor, and musicologist
Shirley Smart, jazz cellist, musicianship and improvisation teacher, City, University of London, and Royal College of Music Junior Department
Ben Smith, pianist and composer, postgraduate student, Guildhall School of Music and Drama
Charles J. Smith, Slee Chair of Music Theory, University at Buffalo
David J. Smith, Professor of Music, University of Aberdeen
George Smith, composer and freelance piano/voice teacher, University of Southampton graduate
Harriet Smith, music journalist
Steve Smith, guitarist, multi-instrumentalist
Tim Smith, Director of Music, St. Mary Harrow on the Hill/Arts Faculty Leader, Heathland School
John Snijders, pianist and Associate Professor of Music Performance, Durham University
Ernest So, concert pianist
Peter A. Soave, Concert Accordionist, Founder Peter Soave Music Academy, in Sauris Italy
Stephen Soderberg, Senior Specialist for Contemporary Music (retired), Music Division, Library of Congress
Zoë South, (state-educated) professional opera singer, singing teacher
Clare Southworth, Professor of Flute RAM
Shauna Spargo, amateur violinist, soprano in the local church choir (learned to read music at 6 when I had free violin lessons at a state primary school)
Jeroen Speak, freelance composer and teacher
Simon Speare, Head of Composition and Contemporary Music, Royal College of Music Junior Department
Mic Spencer, Associate Professor of Music, University of Leeds
Jane Spencer-Davis. Accountant specialising in musicians and violist
Mary Stagg, Primary Music specialist
Sarah Steinhardt, piano teacher, Greenwich Academy, CT USA
James Michael Stergiopoulos, retired electronics engineer
Adam Stern, conductor (Seattle Philharmonic, Sammamish Symphony), Seattle WA, USA
Clare Stevens, music journalist
Susanne Stanzeleit, violinist, tutor, Birmingham Conservatoire
Peter Stoller, songwriter, music writer, popular music archivist and historian at Leiber/Stoller Productions
Danny Stone, brass teacher, former classroom teacher (state sector U.K.)
Denise Stout, Choral Director
George Strickland, freelance oboist, postgrad at Royal Northern College of Music
Ashley Sutherland, music librarian, freelance clarinettist
Owain Sutton, private instrumental teacher
Professor Bill Sweeney, composer
Aleks Szram, Academic Lecturer and Piano Professorial Staff, Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance
Caitriona Talbot BA Mod, freelance music tutor, Sefton
Diego Jiménez Tamame, composer
Gábor Tarján, composer, percussionist, Musical Director Het Filiaal
Christopher Tarrant, Lecturer in Music, Anglia Ruskin University
Mark Tatlow, conductor, educator, researcher Department of Culture & Aesthetics, University of Stockholm
Michelle Taylor-Cohen, Violinist, educator & arranger
Alun Thomas, professional violinist /Alexander Technique Coordinator Trinty Laban
Marisa Thornton-Wood, professor of piano, Royal Academy of Music
Paul Timms, music teacher, pianist, violinist & conductor
Phillip Tolley, Choral Music Advocate, British Choirs on the Net
Mikel Toms, conductor
Daniel Tong, pianist. Founder, Wye Valley Chamber Music. Head of Piano in Chamber Music, Birmingham Conservatoire
Julian Tovey, singer and lecturer, Royal Conservatoire of Scotland
Simon Toyne, Executive Director of Music, David Ross Education Trust
Peter Tregear, Professor, Royal Holloway, University of London
John Traill, Director of Music, St. Anne’s College, Oxford University; Director, Oxford Conducting Institute
Natalie Tsaldarikis, pianist, teacher, PhD student, City, University of London
Kathleen Tynan, Head of Vocal Studies and Opera, Royal Irish Academy of Music, Dublin
Fredrik Ullén, pianist, professor of cognitive neuroscience
Luk Vaes, pianist, reseacher, teacher
Maura Valenti BM, The Juilliard School; MM, Yale School of Music; current MPhil student in musicology, University of Oxford
John Van der Slice, composer
Dr Edward Venn, Associate Professor of Music, University of Leeds
Massimiliano Viel, Composer and Professor at Conservatory of Milan, Italy
Simon Vincent, composer, performer, and former Visiting Lecturer at City University London, University of Bayreuth, University of Potsdam and University of Applied Sciences Potsdam
Matthew Vine, volunteer music teacher (Kampala, Uganda)
Andrea Vogle, Percussion Tutor RNCM, JRNCM, Chetham’s School of Music
Zerlina Vulliamy, prospective university music student and DfE Music Scholar RCMJD
Alison Wahl, soprano, singer-songwriter, and music teacher
Charlie Wakely, Physics teacher and amateur musician
Helen Wallace, Kings Place Music Foundation, Soundsense Music
Neil Wallace, Programme Director, Doelen Concert Hall, Rotterdam
Richard Wallace, violist Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, viola tutor Bangor University
David Warburton MP, Chair of the All Party Parliamentary Select Committee on Music Education
John Warburton BMus Hons Tonmeister, Associate Lecturer, University of Surrey Department of Music and Media
Dr Michael Ward, concert pianist, conductor and composer
Philippa Ward, pianist, teacher, Wellington, New Zealand
Jenny Warren, maths teacher and classical soprano who learned to sight read at state school
Celia Waterhouse, Piano Teacher, Music Educator, Lead Editor for British Kodaly Academy Songbook
Ashley Wass, pianist
Huw Watkins, composer and pianist
Hannah Watson, secondary school music teacher, violinist
Rachel Watson, cellist, cello teacher with experience of secondary school teaching
Trevor Watt, former music student, now lawyer
Dr Richard Wattenbarger, musicologist, Adjunct Instructor, Music Studies, Temple University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Sarah Watts, Associate in Music Performance at Sheffield University, bass clarinet tutor RNCM, Clarinet tutor at Nottingham University
David Way, violinist/violist/teacher
Philip Wayne, Headmaster, Royal Grammar School, High Wycombe, also Musician
James Webb, Director of Music, Hull Collegiate School
Gillian Webster , Opera Singer and teacher
James Weeks, composer, Associate Head of Composition, Guildhall School of Music & Drama
Marcus Weeks, composer and jazz and reggae trombonist
Richard Whalley, Senior Lecturer in Composition, University of Manchester
Mike Wheeler, music writer and adult education tutor, WEA
Simon Whiteley, BMus, Lay Clerk at St George’s Chapel, Windsor Castle, and founder member of The Queen’s Six, a cappella ensemble
Adam Whittaker, Post-doctoral researcher (Music and Music Education), Birmingham City University
Dr Anthony Whittaker, composer, piano teacher and examiner
Sally Whitwell, composer, pianist. BMus(Hons) ANU, Australia
Joanna Wicherek, pianist and teacher
Judith Wiemers, PhD student at Queen’s University Belfast
Charles Wiffen, Assistant Dean, College of Liberal Arts, Bath Spa University
Louise Wiggins, PhD student, University of Bristol; harpist; and peripatetic music teacher
Emma Wild, Freelance Violist
Christopher Wiley, National Teaching Fellow and Senior Lecturer in Music, University of Surrey
John Willan, former EMI producer and Managing Director London Philharmonic
Ceri Williams, music teacher
David Carlston Williams, Organist and Music Teacher
Victoria Williams AmusTCL BA music theory teacher
James Williamson. Composer, PhD candidate at the University of York
Chesterton K. Whiteman, adjunct professor of composition, Oral Roberts University
Dr Alexandra Wilson, Reader in Music, Oxford Brookes University
Andrew Wilson, Freelance musician, and Head Teacher, Teesside High School
Jay Wilkinson, flute and theory teacher
Katherine Williams, Lecturer in Music and Head of Performance, Plymouth University
Frances Wilson LTCL (AKA The Cross-Eyed Pianist); pianist, writer, and teacher
Jayne Lee Wilson, Music Lover & Reviewer, FoR3 Forum
Natalie Windsor, BaHons PgCert (Birmingham Conservatoire), Mezzo soprano, jazz singer and music teacher
Lorraine Womack-Banning, pianist, piano teacher, adjudicator
Jaye Wood, BA Hons, freelance classical piano and voice teacher
Toby Wood, Music recording engineer and producer
Liz Woodhouse, piano teacher
Ronald Woodley, Professor of Music, Birmingham Conservatoire, Birmingham City University
Catherine Woodman. Head of Keyboard Studies at Redmaids High School and examiner
Kenneth Woods, Artistic Director, English Symphony Orchestra
Christopher Woolmer, Organist, teacher, Director of Music, Oakwood School, Purley
David Wordsworth, conductor and agent
Dr Emily Worthington, freelance clarinettist/Lecturer, University of Huddersfield
Andrew Wright, School of Education, University of Buckingham
Elspeth Wyllie, Pianist, Teacher, member of the ISM
Catherine Wyn-Rogers, opera singer and teacher
Anna Wyse, B.Eng. M.Sc.(Eng), AIEMA
Joshua D. Xerri, Sub-Organist (St Alphege, Solihull), singer, composer
Amit Yahav, pianist, doctoral student, Royal College of Music
Paul Yarish, pianist, Registered Piano Technician, organ student
Marc Yeats, composer and visual artist
Nina C. Young, Assistant Professor of Music Composition & Multimedia Performance, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Toby Young, composer, Junior Research Fellow, University of Oxford
Jay Alan Yim, composer, Associate Professor of Music, Northwestern University
Alistair Zaldua, composer and conductor, visiting lecturer in Music, Canterbury Christ Church University
Mirjam Zegers, music consultant, teacher, amateur pianist
Nicolas Zekulin, Chief Executive & Artistic Director, National Youth Orchestras of Scotland
Patrick Zuk, Associate Professor in Music, Durham University
Julio Zúñiga, composer, graduate student, Harvard University
Rasmus Zwicki, composer

[ADDENDUM: Since first placing this letter online, I have been alerted to two relevant phenomena: the Department of Music at Harvard University have now removed a requirement to study theory, or Western art music history, from their core curriculum . Worse, Texan musicologist Kendra Leonard has created a ‘Privilege Walk’ for musicians, a way of publicly shaming those who, for example, were taught music theory (no. 12), care about notated music (no. 19), can read more than one clef (no. 36), or had advanced instruction in a foreign language (no. 39). It is not clear from Leonard’s biography if she teaches regularly at an institution, but certainly such ‘privilege walks’ exist elsewhere in the US; I will blog more about this on another occasion. In case anyone is unclear, as stated above this addendum does not form part of the letter to which signatories put their name and represents a personal view.]

Responses to Simon Zagorski-Thomas’s talk on ‘Dead White Composers’

Posted: April 27, 2016 | Author: Ian Pace | Filed under: Academia, Music - General, Musical Education, Musicology, New Music | Tags: allan moore, andré rieu, aphex twin, arts and humanities research council, autechre, blur, brexit, elvis costello, eric clapton, fredric jameson, genevieve arkle, ian wellens, il divo, jim aitchison, Joan Arnau Pàmies, joseph heath, julian faultless, justin bieber, keith tester, meshuggah, michael gove, mozart, nicole grimes, pamela rose, peter tregear, richard middleton, robert mcchesney, russell group, sam richards, schumann, simon cowell, simon zagorski-thomas, thomas frank, todd gitlin, tom parkinson, xtc | 7 Comments

On BBC Radio 4’s programme Four Thought, Wednesday April 20, 2016, 20:45, the musicologist Simon Zagorski Thomas, Professor at the University of West London gave a talk entitled ‘Dead White Composers’. At the time of posting this, the talk is still available to listen to online; I also reproduce a transcript at the bottom of this post, which can also be read here.

Zagorski-Thomas’s talk has generated a good deal of reaction, not least on social media, and I felt that some of the responses should be made public. With this in mind I am printing a range of texts of varying lengths from musicians, academics, students and others, beginning with text of my own, then others in alphabetical order of names. I am open to including further text; those wishing to contribute can either post in the comments section below, or e-mail me at ian@ianpace.com if they would like me to consider including something in the main text here. All responses are welcomed, though I request strongly that posters refrain from personalised attacks or abuse.

Ian Pace: Pianist, Musicologist, Head of Performance, City University London

Simon Zagorski-Thomas’s polemical talk raises questions – about the types of music studied, taught and researched in educational contexts – which deserve proper consideration and debate. These are not new in such contexts, as can be witnessed through tonnes of published verbiage on issues of relative valorisation of so-called ‘high’ and ‘low’ cultural traditions, both in music and other cultural fields. Yet so often these debates become simply territorial and lack nuance, instead relying upon false dichotomies, straw man characterisations, populist rhetoric, and easy appropriation of the language of identity politics in order to bolster a sense of moral self-righteousness, and I am afraid that this is no exception.

The focus of this talk is upon music education in the UK, and I will stick to that area, though hopefully the issues raised have a wider application. Zagorski-Thomas portrays a stark dichotomy within the UK music higher education sector, between ‘classical’ and ‘popular’ music, with Russell Group universities focusing on the former, post-1992 universities on the latter. As he puts it:

…broadly speaking, the higher status Russell Group universities do Mozart, and the lower status post-92 universities do Blur. Could it be that the prestige of some academic subjects over others could be determined by prejudice and snobbery, rather than by relevance, complexity, or academic rigour?

But this is a huge over-simplification which does little justice to the diversity of tertiary musical study. I count 53 departments offering various types of music or music-related degree (excluding the ten UK conservatoires, and a few others where the degrees are hosted within other types of departments), 19 of which are in the Russell Group, 21 of which are post-1992, and 13 of which belong in neither category (including my own, City University London). Even a cursory glance at the modules offered in a cross-section of these demonstrates a wide range of areas of study and research well beyond canonical classical music: for example film music, ethnomusicology, community music, study of musical institutions, music education, sound recording, music technology, sound art, music business, music therapy and so on.

The picture of Russell Group institutions presented by Zagorski-Thomas is very one-sided. Liverpool and Newcastle Universities both offer degrees in popular music, and almost all the others offer modules in popular music and jazz, sometimes as part of a compulsory core curriculum. Many of these are in areas of Popular Music Studies and History of Popular Music, but others on the likes of ‘Popular Music and Consumption in the Digital Age’ (Manchester), ‘Pop Production’ (York), ‘The Music Industry in the Digital Age’ (Cambridge) not to mention various modules on jazz, Broadway Musicals, non-western popular musics, and so on. Other modules, such as ‘Music in California’ or ‘The Sixties’ (both at Birmingham) or ‘Music in Context’ (Leeds) incorporate popular and other musics. Oxford even has ‘Global Hip Hop’ as a compulsory core first year module. Popular musics are also well-represented in my third category of universities above; one can do modules in ‘The Beach Boys and The Who’ (Open University), ‘The Beatles’ (Bangor), ‘Rock and Popular Musicology’ (Hull), or ‘Jazz and Pop Arranging’ (Brunel), to name just a few. At my own institution, I have up until this year taught a core first-year module entitled ‘Investigating Western Music 2: 1848-2001’, in which all types of popular music are deeply integrated into wider historical approaches: from music hall, the French café-concert, brass bands, minstrelsy, and vaudeville, through jazz, blues, gospel, cabaret, to 1950s rock ‘n’ roll, soul, funk, prog, art rock, punk, fusion, free improvisation, electronic dance music and more, as well as classical and avant-garde traditions. As electives we offer ‘Popular Music Studies’, ‘Popular Music Now’, ‘Global Popular Musics’ and ‘African-American Music: Gospel and Blues’, whilst other modules on music traditions of the Middle and Far East, or Sound, Art and Technoculture engage with a plurality of types of music including popular genres. Many students have also done third year dissertations in popular music subjects.

Zagorski-Thomas says:

Musicology should be about trying to discover why we like the things we do, and how music works. Too often, though, it’s based on the assumption that classical music is by definition of value, and that musicology’s job is simply to demonstrate why.

This picture just might have been true in the 1950s or before, but not now. Even then (and well before), there was always a critical tradition with respect to classical music, and often highly disparate views as to the value of differing composers or sub-sections of the repertoire. It is unlikely that many musicologists working on classical music would think it all to be of little value; otherwise why spend one’s life studying it? I certainly do not see my job either as a teacher or researcher as being about demonstrating the value of certain music, and am quite sure I am very far from alone in this respect. Rather it is about equipping students with the critical, analytical, historical, aesthetic and other tools to be able to arrive at their own intelligent and informed judgements about many things to do with music. What Zagorski-Thomas describes is more akin to an adult education ‘music appreciation’ class than much of the critical work which is done in universities of many levels.

I view ‘popular music’ as dating back roughly to the early-ish nineteenth century, and constituting a predominantly urban range of traditions associated with the growth of cities through industrialisation, though there are of course major exceptions. This would separate it somewhat from folk and other vernacular traditions, though strict and inclusive definitions can be difficult to pin down.

I certainly believe there is value in teaching and researching popular music of all types in education, but it is not unreasonable to consider what form and extent this might take in order to maintain high levels of scholarship and rigour, as well as considering the purpose it ultimately serves. Classical music is a highly skilled and literate tradition, as are some other musical traditions in the world, and music degrees at respected institutions still generally require a fair level of developed skills prior to entry; it is not a discipline one can simply start from scratch at degree level. Yet a lot of popular music scholarship I have read either concentrates on almost anything but the music – the lyrics, the fashion, the publicity, the record sleeves, the world of celebrity, the workings of the industry, and so on. These are all certainly valid areas of study, but when the sounding music ceases to play a part, I do not believe this should be considered the study of music, but rather would be better pursued under the auspices of sociology, anthropology, cultural studies, and so on. And even when the music does feature in written scholarship, often this is only at a very basic level, with descriptive prose which is closer to the sort of writing one might expect of intermediate students at secondary school. There are major exceptions, for sure – such as the analytical work of Richard Middleton or Allan Moore, for example – but these are increasingly out of fashion, though some younger scholars are taking on their mantle.

There are pressures on university music departments to recruit and maintain students despite falling levels of pupils studying music at GCSE and A-Level, and also to bolster numbers taking elective modules by being able to offer these to those studying other subjects. It does sometimes appear to me one way of doing this, not least in some post-1992 institutions, is by what I have elsewhere called ‘deskilling’ of the discipline, removing the requirement to be able to engage with sounding music in any detail, or have developed any sort of wider historical or global awareness of various musical traditions and their contexts. Unfortunately, there are less able students who see popular music modules as a ‘soft option’ for these reasons, and it is not difficult to see how they might get such an impression from some of the published literature. This is not to deny the value of other, different skills, distinct from those acquired in a more traditional musical education, but that returns to the issue of whether such study is better undertaken in other departments and degree courses in which those skills are more widely pursued in a rigorous fashion. I would be horrified to see music study, or indeed any other specialised and skilled discipline, relegated to a mere sub-section of cultural studies (or the increasingly ubiquitous title of ‘cultural industries’).

It is not too difficult to see how scholarship relating to classical music interacts with the wider worlds of composition, performance and listening (not to mention recording, publicity, and so on). Study of historical trajectories, social context, performance practice, analysis can in my view fruitfully feed back into all these activities, and conversely are at best informed by regular engagement with musical activity undertaken outside of the academy. Throughout the history of musicology (and other forms of scholarship on music which pre-date the formalisation of the discipline in the late nineteenth century), there have been many scholars who have combined practical activity – as composers, performers, and so on – with other forms of writing and research on music, and the teaching of music in schools and universities has followed this pattern. I believe all these fields would be the poorer without the others, and one of the strengths of music as a subject (as recognised by many employers) relates to the high range of different skills cultivated therein.

But can one necessarily say the same in the context of popular music, primarily a non-literate tradition, which has largely flourished outside of an academic context, and for which it is much harder to make a case for a regular interaction between academic writing and music-making? How many popular musicians or popular music fans ever read any of the not inconsiderable amount of scholarship produced on their fields; or, how much does this scholarship inform more accessible and popular forms of writing, as for example in journalism? Short-term impact is not the only measure of the value of research, for sure (notwithstanding the fact that current government research funding policies tend to force it to be), but if such scholarship has only a marginal impact of any type over an extended period, it is not unreasonable to ask some questions about its value, if it is to amount to anything more than a closed talking shop for academics.

As to this point of Zagorski-Thomas:

So what does it say about us, as contemporary culture, that we value the activities of a small group of Central European dead men more than we value the activities of our contemporary musicians?

For a start, the domination of a Central European repertoire only really applies to the 18^th and 19^th centuries; before then English, Franco-Flemish and especially Italian repertoires are more dominant, whereas in the 20^th and 21^st centuries the tradition of art music has come to encompass most nations in the developed world and numerous beyond. It is true that before recent times the opportunities for women composers have been very limited, and this is to be deplored; nonetheless scholars have nonetheless done important work in bringing to public attention previously forgotten or neglected women musicians (as far back as twelfth-century abbess, composer and much else Hildegard von Bingen, and even earlier figures such as Shakdukht or Kassia). Using ‘dead’ as an implied pejorative adjective is only tenable if one believes historical music is of purely secondary value, a point of view I wholly dispute. Furthermore, there are many types of ‘contemporary musicians’, and I do not believe their value should be gauged primarily in terms of the market utility of their work. On the contrary; a university should offer a place where a plurality of creative activity can be studied (and practised), with some degree of autonomy from the need to attain short-term commercial success.

But who is the ‘we’, or indeed the ‘contemporary culture’, of which Zagorski-Thomas speaks? Personally, I can rarely go into a bar without being barraged by Japanese gagaku music, cannot go shopping without a constant stream of Stockhausen, Barraqué, mid-period Xenakis, or just sometimes examples of both French and Rumanian musique spectrale, piped over the loudspeakers, whilst when I jump into a taxi cab in most countries, I can be sure that there will be no escape from music of the Italian trecento. This is not to mention the cars going past blaring out the darkest Bach cantatas, or the endlessly predictable torrents of Weimar modernism which the builders will always put on the radio. Or not, obviously; in all of these cases I can be sure to hear Anglo-American popular music from the last few decades, which should make one ask which musical forms are genuinely hegemonic in contemporary culture.

Now I like a lot of popular music myself, of all types, and have done so since very young, but I would find it a bleak world if this was all that was heard, produced or studied. And I would hope that in high-level education we can do more than simply teach students about music with which they are already well-familiar, but open their minds and ears to a much wider range of music and sounds from different times, places, social strata, and so on. Furthermore, that it is possible to study musical traditions in detail, rather than just styles to be surveyed in the manner of a tourist. Many of those studying non-Western musics, music technology and indeed popular music are allowed to concentrate primarily on their specialism; I do not see why classical musicians should not be granted the same privilege, though it is increasingly frequent that this is not the case, at all levels of education.

Many of these other musics do not have the obvious commercial utility of Anglo-American popular music, nor the same amounts of capital behind them, the same amount of saturation media coverage, and so on. This is the real ‘hierarchy’ and ‘inequality’, rather than that to which Zagorski-Thomas refers. I do not believe value to be synonymous with commercial success; arriving at alternative conceptions is far from easy, but to give up on the task is to surrender to the values of the free market, as various critics of popular cultural studies, including Fredric Jameson, Todd Gitlin, Robert McChesney, Keith Tester, Thomas Frank and Joseph Heath, have argued cogently. This would not, I venture, be a positive move forward, though other aspects of the educational situation are encouraging it. If we were to take Zagorski-Thomas’s outlook on board, I fear this would only accelerate the process.

Response from Simon Zagorski-Thomas:

Despite Ian’s survey of the two Russell Group universities’ popular music courses and ten others that serve up popular music modules (although you forgot to mention Edinburgh where the dreaded Frith lurks – the spoiler of all things Tovey) – indeed, I’m sure there are more – despite this, I believe that my general point, positioned at the foot of this blog although posted a couple of days before this, about the sociological focus of popular music studies and it acting as a reinforcement of the entrenched idea that there is no value in popular music, still stands. The implication is that serious academics wouldn’t study the music, only the social and economic mechanisms by which it is disseminated and ‘consumed’. For that reason I’m afraid Ian’s survey, something like which I conducted myself, seems entirely irrelevant to me. I’m going to skip the section on definitions as I’ll respond to that in relation to Jim Aitchison’s post which deals with the topic in greater detail.

I agree entirely that we should teach and research popular music and that “it is not unreasonable to consider what form and extent this might take in order to maintain high levels of scholarship and rigour”. I don’t recall saying the opposite. Ian suggests that studying popular music requires or at least currently entails a de-skilling of music education. I completely disagree that it requires it (it’s hard to tell from your argument if that’s a straw man I’m attacking) but I also take issue with the idea that current problems in popular music performance pedagogy are that simplistic. That they don’t require a semi-redundant (to popular music before anyone faints) set of music literacy skills is not a great problem for me. That the alternative skills that are important in popular music are still in the process of being developed does mean that there can be significant problems. There are also lots of people working away on those problems – although generally it’s unfunded research.

I’m afraid I found the next section to be somewhat muddled. You maintain that you would like there to be a musicology of popular music that studies the music (you mention Middleton and Moore who, contrary to what you say, have been followed and extended by many) but the section on de-skilling suggests that you don’t want students to study the performance or creation of it? Or that you want them to study it using the music literacy skills of the classical world? And you think there’s a danger that including the musical skills required for popular music would push courses to be studied in cultural studies departments? I don’t understand the thrust of this section at all – it seems very confused and contradictory to me. There’s no logical thread, just a series of related statements that are juxtapositioned to suggest causality. If this does extend to a rather tiresome response to a response to a response, perhaps you could explain what you mean.

I’ve been accused by Ian of creating false dichotomies and, as I say, there are simplifications and generalisations in my talk which I’m glad of the opportunity to expand on. One direct comparison that Ian makes, though, I have to take issue with on a categorical level rather than in terms of simplification or generalization. He states that there are within classical music departments “many scholars who have combined practical activity – as composers, performers, and so on – with other forms of writing and research on music” and that is compared to “How many popular musicians or popular music fans ever read any of the not inconsiderable amount of scholarship produced on their fields”. That’s highly disingenuous. There are also many popular music scholars in universities who are also active musicians – practically everyone in my department for a start. And if I were to pass a copy of Cook and Everist’s Rethinking Music around an average group of orchestral musicians their engagement with it would probably not extend beyond ripping out some pages to wedge under their music stand to stop it wobbling. The former is a blessing and the latter is a problem in both classical and popular musicology. That’s a false dichotomy Ian.

And how about those straw men? Ian says “Using ‘dead’ as an implied pejorative adjective is only tenable if one believes historical music is of only secondary value”. It’s not an implied pejorative adjective, it’s an explicit delimitation. I make the point several times that I don’t think we should stop studying classical music – that’s a patently ridiculous idea that provides the straw man for a large proportion of my negative commentators to tilt at. When I say “it shouldn’t only be ‘a’ but we should include ‘b’ as well”, I see no implication in that sentence that I believe ‘a’ is inferior and should be ditched so that ‘b’ can take over. This is exactly the same kind of idiocy that led to the idea that white men were threatened by the notion of sexual and racial inequality. When someone suggests that they want to remove inequality it is surely irrational to believe that they want to replace it with a similar inequality in their favour. I certainly don’t in this case.

The argument about the economic dominance of popular music may display Ian’s distaste for both the economic system and for the lowest common denominator music that it pushes to the fore, but that is completely irrelevant to my argument. If he asks if I’m in favour of the commodification of higher education – as that seemed to be where he was going with his argument – of course not. I quoted Michael Gove as saying he wanted children to study “the subjects the Russell group universities have said they value most” and I think that is just as distastefully commodifying as Ian’s point that standards are being lowered to get bums on seats. Is this as simple as Ian’s populist rhetoric makes out? No. Academics can’t decide which courses students should want any more than students should determine course content. I’m certainly not suggesting that change is being handled well at the moment but denying that change should happen is as equally idiotic as suggesting that market forces should drive it. That is where an interesting and informed debate should be taking place, rather than the near hysteria that’s greeted the idea that popular music should be accorded a more equal place in the university system.

Ian says “Yet so often these debates become simply territorial and lack nuance, instead relying upon false dichotomies, straw man characterisations, populist rhetoric, and easy appropriation of the language of identity politics in order to bolster a sense of moral self-righteousness, and I am afraid that this is no exception.” Right back at you Ian.

Ian Pace replies:

My list of popular music courses at Russell Group universities was not meant to be exhaustive. Since you mention Simon Frith, I will say that I think we have reached a low point when someone so abjectly unconcerned with matters sonic/musical, indeed contemptuous of them, is a Professor at a Music Department. In terms of ‘serious academics’, each can decide for themselves who is ‘serious’, but I am going on the basis of reading a lot of popular music studies. Certainly some do study the music, but on balance, the extent to which it receives detailed and intense attention is small compared to that in various other musical fields. This is not the only musicological sub-discipline for which this is often the case, but one of the worst in this respect.

I think Simon is being deeply disingenuous if he denies that popular music courses do not appeal in large measure to students with fewer developed musical skills than for other courses. In many broader departments, classical and ‘world’ music students are capable of also studying popular music, but the reverse is much less true. And it is well-known that while many scholars of other musics can also teach popular musics, again it is rare for the reverse to be true.

Simon does not think it is a problem if we have an increase in students without music literacy skills, which he calls ‘semi-redundant’ for popular music. This must be the only field of activity in which literacy is not valued. There are multiple possibilities for notation, but how many students come with experience of other things too? How much detailed study of actual music is possible without some developed musico-analytical skills, usually using some form of notation? Otherwise writing on popular music reverts to simple description, the ‘sort of writing one might expect of intermediate students at secondary school’. The fact that Middleton and Moore do indeed use notation (and relatively standard Western notation) is the precise reason why their work is treated with disdain by some (including Frith, in his comments on Middleton – I do think it is relevant to note that he is a collaborator of Zagorski-Thomas). If music literacy skills are not important, then students will not be able to engage with this body of work.

I did not think the next section was so confusing (nor have many others who have read it). There are several points here: one is a critique of the straw man argument that musicology is about demonstrating value; another is an attempt at a definition of popular music, at least one I use in teaching, though offer it there for critical discussion; the other point is that (as stated above), a lot of popular music does not engage with the music. I argue simply that when it gets away from sounds, it would be better studied in another department. But also that a deskilled musicology (requiring little in the way of prior skills for investigating specifically musical matters) is definitely a bad move, though it might help recruit or maintain students who would not manage music degree courses otherwise. When you take the music out of musicology, it does become little more than cultural studies, to be studied by those with no prior disciplinary expertise. What results is most often what the Marxist writer Ben Watson has called the ‘Popsicle Academy’ (on which subject I would recommend his article ‘Semen Froth So Useless’, in Watson, Adorno for Revolutionaries, edited Andy Wilson (London: Unkant, 2011), pp. 131-148), ‘pop sociology’s lightweight theoretical armature and its musical predilections’ (p. 136), most fond of ‘Playing off commerce versus academy’ (p. 140 n. 5), in the lack of any coherent theory of capital. I wonder if the money spent on a lot of this type of teaching and research might be better spent on supporting young working-class musicians in forming bands?

As far as works of the ‘New Musicology’ are concerned (and Cook/Everist certainly belongs within this category), I agree that this has little relevance for active musicians, but on the whole I think this has been a very regressive move in musicology anyhow. This is by no means representative of the breadth of musicology, and mostly constitutes a particular Anglo-American tendency. Simon might look at some of the other types of examples I suggest instead.

I would like to know more about examples of active popular musicians who are also in universities, and would like to see examples of what constitutes their research. But I was asking for concrete evidence of a wider symbiosis between the world of popular musicians and fans, and academics studying the field. I am not convinced this exists to any notable extent.

The argument about the economic dominance of popular music does indeed reflect my distaste for the Thatcherite/Reaganite economics which I believe underlie Simon’s positions. He may say ‘of course not’ to my charge of favouring the commodification of higher education, but I think that is the inevitable outcome of his ideas, which would give a new level of backing to music already in a deeply unequal position in wider society (deeply in its favour). To pretend that this is simply about pluralism is nonsense. There are problems with the whole conception of the Russell Group, for sure, but to say that to favour the subjects themselves favoured by a certain group of universities is ‘just as distastefully commodifying’ is to misunderstand the whole nature of the concept of commodification.

There is not ‘near hysteria’ greeting ‘the idea that popular music should be accorded a more equal place in the university system’; on the contrary, popular music content is increasing in many places. I note that Simon makes no comment about the fact that I have taught it extensively myself, and worked hard to integrate it into core music history modules. I do not want to see it crowd out everything else; Simon claims that is not what he wants, but he ignores the economic realities. I am surprised to see my own belief that universities should continue to offer a plurality of skilled options, not just keep students in their musical comfort zones, as ‘populist rhetoric’. How wide are the range of non-popular options available at the music department of the University of West London (where I did once upon a time use to teach piano, when it was the London College of Music and Media)?

I do think that the provision of education should not simply be driven by student demand – and, for example, departments specialising in continental philosophy, medieval literature, all types of languages (for example various African and South-East Asian ones), and so on, should be supported even when they do not recruit well. The same goes for all types of music. Simon’s totally false dichotomy between ‘classical’ and ‘pop’ suggests these each constitute something like 50% of the music one might study, and he does not mention any other types. Western classical music has a history of at least a millenium; Anglo-American pop (and let’s not kid ourselves that popular music courses are going to attract many students who can engage with popular music not in English) is one of numerous other Western musical styles and genres. I do not think it should receive a greater profile in universities simply because of its commodity status.

Nicole Grimes also replies:

As we risk entering a hall of mirrors where we are confronted with responses to responses to responses, I wish to add one more note. My dismay at SZT’s broadcast is compounded by his response to Ian Pace’s response. There is nothing in his latest contribution to dissuade me that “the finest aspect of SZT’s neat Orwellian trick is the fact that he denies having played the trick in the first place.” Let’s for a moment set aside the question of the subject matter of the disciplines involved and remind readers of strategy: in his broadcast, SZT’s promotion of his brand of popular music studies was premised upon a carefully crafted denigration of classical music studies. If his broadcast has been met with “near hysteria” (his use of emotive language is duly noted), then this is because of a palpable sense of outrage at the disingenuous manner in which he has framed the debate. That this is set against a backdrop of approval for David Cameron’s erstwhile “Big Society” is, at this stage, merely grist for the mill.

Jim Aitchison, composer:

In this talk, Simon Zagorski-Thomas attempted to make a case for increasing the funding given to HE research activity around popular music, in his view, righting what he sees as a fundamental injustice arising from what he describes as a ‘hierarchy of inequality’. As far as the general case itself goes, personally, I’m not sure what the answer is: the terrain is extraordinarily difficult and there are complex arguments on both sides, and there will be winners and losers in any battle. The figure quoted of there being only 5% funding given to popular music research projects by the AHRC in comparison to what he describes as those relating to ‘classical music’, points to a situation worthy of further investigation. Zagorski-Thomas comes across as down to earth and as a warm, intelligent and engaging speaker, however, in terms of the talk itself, there are some hugely problematic issues.

Listening to the talk closely, it is impossible not to be aware of how often the terms ‘classical’ music and ‘popular’ music are pitted against one another directly as the sole polarities. It is hard to understand what the speaker means by the former characterization in particular and why: is it naivety? Or is it a rhetorical minimizing/undermining device that deliberately provokes prejudice in listeners by alluding to implied resonances of privilege and elitism? Or is he really only referring to the art music of Western Europe during the 70 years or so in the second half of the C18th and the beginning of the C19th? This lack of definition leaves a very large hole in the argument. In addition, this narrowing of the currents within HE music provision to just two interlocutors – a few decades of late C18th and early C19th European art music vs. popular music – seems a very strange formulation. What has happened to all of the other musics studied at universities across the UK currently? What about all the other histories of music? What about experimental music, film music, game music, electroacoustic music, computer and studio-based composition, sound design, sound art, modern and contemporary art music, folk and world music?

Zagorski-Thomas goes on to ask why the status given to what he calls ‘classical music’ assumed by some parts of the HE music sector (he singles out Russell Group universities) is unquestioned, and then stretches this into a general point about a privileged position being given to ‘classical music’ across society at large by default, which I’m not sure how can be substantiated. I absolutely agree that all quasi-hereditary ‘hierarchies of inequality’ must be held up to scrutiny, and that in my view not to do so risks allowing these to stifle unsanctioned innovation, while also becoming stagnant themselves. However, if you are going to do this, thorough familiarity with your target is advisable. Zagorski-Thomas makes a bid to undermine the supposed preeminence of what he characterizes as ‘classical music’ with the following propositions:

Using the example of the absurd, discredited and hugely flawed ‘Mozart effect’ phenomenon to suggest that a similar force operates that has led to a significant number of cultural arbiters somehow blundering into a false belief in the superiority of ‘classical music’, because of an inherited cultural predisposition of unquestioned bias.

Suggesting that there is a widespread tendency to characterize an opposition between ‘classical music’ and popular music unfairly (e.g. he suggests instead of pitting Mahler against Bieber, it could be Rieu against Autechre).

That there is a tendency to privilege music that emphasizes ‘harmony and formal structure’ against music that emphasizes ‘rhythm and tone’.

That there is another tendency to privilege music that emphasizes ‘Logic and reason’ over music that emphasizes ‘expression and emotion’.

The fact that examples of popular music can be every bit as complex as ‘classical music’ is ignored.

That there is craft in popular music, but which is not valued in the same way as ‘classical music’ (‘Why isn’t Aphex Twin, with his carefully crafted synthesizer pieces considered more important than Schumann?’).

That popular music exhibits subtleties every bit as sophisticated as ‘classical music’.

‘We value the activities of a small group of Central European Dead men’.

There are many propositions here, some thought-provoking, but others underpinned by highly questionable assumptions and beliefs as untested as those he accuses proponents of ‘classical music’ to be entertaining. I will offer responses to most of the above, but in some ways it does seem a little pointless to do so, as every single proposition is put forward in support of what I have already described as a fundamentally flawed underlying position: that of what Zagorski-Thomas believes he means by ‘classical music’ (of which we are not informed in any detail), and exactly how he believes this phenomenon is manifested in society in general and in academia in particular.

The reference to the so-called ‘Mozart’ phenomenon is an example of taking one specific instance of unproven relevance (in the context if his argument), inferring general implications and causes and effects and then applying this in service of the larger contention. Not only are there other possible explanations that may account for his conclusions, but to suggest that this somehow proves an inbuilt false bias towards ‘classical music’ (again, this is so difficult, when we don’t really know what he means by this) across the whole academic and cultural community is very hard to substantiate. This bias may or may not exist, but the instance above is not proof of it.

The possibility of a widespread tendency to characterize an opposition between ‘classical music’ and popular music unfairly is, very broadly, possible, but again is a huge generalization and is more conjecture (he is attempting to legislate on behalf of a large constituency whose views he cannot possibly know). However, the example he gives of reversing polarities and pitting Andre Rieu against the Electronic music duo Autechre, is a thought-provoking one.

The supposed tendency to privilege music that emphasizes ‘harmony and formal structure’ against music that emphasizes ‘rhythm and tone’ is very curious. It is well known that in the Western European Art Music, harmony as a functional entity in the Common Practice sense was in decline by the beginning of the C20th, and that rhythm and timbre were to become increasingly significant as compositional vectors. So, by any measure, this is a strange charge to lay. And in any case, to propose that such parameters are separate is also most peculiar. I think that Stravinsky would be surprised to discover that structure played no part in his use of rhythm in the composition of the Rite, and Debussy similarly that structure was absent from his use of timbre.

Then we have the notion that there is a tendency to privilege music that emphasizes ‘Logic and reason’ over music that emphasizes ‘expression and emotion’. The idea there is any music comprised of pure ‘emotion’ and nothing else is something I have never encountered before, and, characterizing, by implication, whatever he means by ‘classical music’ as being based only upon ‘logic and reason’ is also something that I have never come across. That these kinds of conceptions are floating around is rather alarming.

That examples of popular music can be every bit as complex as ‘classical music’ is ignored, is a proposition that needs thorough exploration. What does he mean by ‘complex’? I wonder if, by complexity the speaker really means density. Again, definition of terms would be helpful here.

That there is craft in popular music, but which is not valued in the same way as ‘classical music’, is possible again, of course, but the question posed as to why Aphex Twin ‘with his carefully crafted synthesizer pieces’ isn’t ‘considered more important than Schumann?’ is a complicated question that would take time to answer. However, I would ask, why Aphex Twin needs to be considered in competition with Schumann, and, point out that Mr. James has had 25 years of extensive exposure to make the case for his music.

That popular music exhibits subtleties every bit as sophisticated as ‘classical music’ is once again, a big provocative statement that requires proper discussion, substantiation and detail. Unfortunately, stating that, ‘the harmonic progressions in Beethoven are not where there is going to be interest and nuance’ doesn’t provide confidence that there is a grasp of such subtlety in terms of one side of the comparison, which rather undermines the argument.

That ‘we value the activities of a small group of Central European Dead men’ is a regrettably crude device of minimization. We could also decry valuing the work of the dead white man who wrote a few plays 400 years ago in just one small market town in Northern Europe. Many of us do ‘value the activities of a small group of Central European Dead men’ because they were and are extraordinary and of singular value in terms of the whole of human history. For anyone to feel intimidated and be unable to acknowledge that seems to me to be somewhat of a tragedy, especially if this attitude prevents others from engaging with their work. To worry about the same happening to the world famous, consistently visible/audible, and extraordinarily wealthy stars of various kinds of popular music would seem a less pressing priority for now (though that is not to say that there are not many unjustly neglected practitioners).

The talk as a whole, proposes that popular music studies are unfairly relegated to a low position in the academic hierarchy due to a kind of institutionalized prejudice. It seems a great shame that he ignores all of the other kinds of music and sound studied at universities, and that his remedy for his dilemma is to try to drag down whatever music it is he sees as being unfairly privileged (though I am still unsure as to which music he is referring to), rather than focusing upon the positive qualities of the music he loves and believes in and building an argument based upon rigorous exposition of these qualities.

The other serious problem with this talk, in terms of its tenor, is that I, and no doubt many others, who try to keep an open mind and feel the great importance of putting up with the discomfort of the uncertainty around these issues in order to keep debate and intellectual and creative possibilities open, are being forced to adopt polarized simplistic positions in order to counter what is being put forward here.

I am sure that Simon Zagorski-Thomas is well-meaning and quite naturally wants the best for his subject, which is commendable, however, I do hope that he might think again about the substance of his arguments.

Simon Zagorski-Thomas replies:

Jim, you are quite right to castigate me about using the term “classical” in such a loose manner. From now on the term which I am going to use is “music that has developed out of the cultural and economic hegemony of the southern and central European systems of aristocratic and ecclesiastical patronage and which relies on a symbolic representation of those socio-economic forms of dictatorship in the form of the conducted symphony orchestra and the bourgeois, furniture-based status symbol of the piano as the primary media through which composers can achieve status (although only by creating a printed contract, known as the score, to which all performers must agree to be subservient)”. For the sake of brevity in a 12 minute radio discussion this can be abbreviated to MTHDOOTCAEHOTSACESOAAEPAWROASROTSEFODITFOTCSOATBFBSSOTPATPMTWCCAS(AOBCAPCKATSTWAPMATBS). Although that may be a flippant response in one sense, it does make important points I think: Is it such a “strange formulation”? You cannot get away from the fact that there are “resonances of privilege and elitism”. That is the journey through which this musical tradition has developed. You can point to all the interesting twists and turns that have happened along the way but the historical development of all these instruments, modes of performance and pedagogy, structural forms, the development of and certain subsequent usages of the equal-tempered tuning system, the traditions of passive and reverential listening and, perhaps most importantly, the stave based notation system – these are all regularly reduced to the short-hand phrase “classical”. Indeed, everyone who has criticized this reductionism has somehow magically managed to understand it enough to take issue with it.

You also accuse me of stretching my point about the HE sector “into a general point about a privileged position being given to ‘classical music’ across society at large by default”. I thought I said “that the state – and status – of music in our higher education system doesn’t reflect the state of music in 21st century Britain”. I did make several points that relate to the idea that “classical music” – MTHDOOTCAEHOTSACESOAAEPAWROASROTSEFODITFOTCSOATBFBSSOTPATPMTWCCAS(AOBCAPCKATSTWAPMATBS) – is sophisticated or intellectual and popular music isn’t. I think that (unfortunately) being considered sophisticated or intellectual doesn’t put you in a privileged position in society. Generally it’s money that does that – and, of course, popular music has been making more money than “classical music” for a long time. (I’ll come back to this after a not-so brief diversion).

I’m not sure if you understood the point I was trying to make about the Mozart Effect. Of course it’s absurd and discredited and I said so – although not quite as bluntly. I also said I was “not interested in the reliability of the science part here but in our reaction to it”. My point was that when it was Mozart, the media and a large number of middle class parents jumped to the improper and logically flawed conclusion that there was something in the music of Mozart that improved the mind. When it was Blur they looked for something elsewhere – familiarity rather than some innate quality. If I understand you rightly, you suggested I thought this proved something. Well that does bring us to the question of whether musicology can ever be said to have proved anything. I think that the vast majority of argument in the humanities and arts is not about proof but about providing an opinion that’s supported by evidence. This is a twelve minute opinion piece on the radio and not an academic article so I didn’t have room for more evidence. Do I think that I could find further evidence to support the claim that there is a widely held view in society that “classical music” is more high-brow than popular music. I think I could. To be honest, even if I’d had time, I don’t think I would have thought it necessary.

That does bring us on to the next section which has caused quite a lot of consternation and confusion – and that makes me think I may not have made my position clear here. I wasn’t trying to attribute any of the oppositional binaries (logic and reason over expression and emotion etc) as being characteristics of either style. I was trying to point out that applying criteria like this to distinguish between popular and classical music was a pointless exercise because both sets of music can provide examples that meet those criteria. In retrospect “complex” was a poor choice of words but what I meant was that, however you judge it, the widely held view that “classical music” is more high-brow than popular music is entirely dependent on the examples that you choose. My opinion (emphasis on my again) is that the music that will stand the test of time (in terms of being ‘important’ or ‘art’) from the second half of the twentieth century will include just as many people like Hendrix, Zappa, Coltrane, Prince, Public Enemy and Aphex Twin as Ades, Boulez, Birtwistle, Cage or Finnissy. That is a “big provocative statement” and I would have loved the opportunity to discuss that. Once again, please note well that the statement is not decrying the value of the ‘dead white men’. Why is it that I can’t question the dominance of this musical tradition without being accused of wanting to denigrate, destroy or remove it? As I responded to Ian above “When someone suggests that they want to remove inequality it is surely irrational to believe that they want to replace it with a similar inequality in their favour. I certainly don’t in this case.” Ian’s response is that “Simon’s totally false dichotomy between ‘classical’ and ‘pop’ suggests these each constitute something like 50% of the music one might study”. No. I have no idea what the percentages might be and I haven’t talked about ethnomusicology, jazz studies, music psychology, music informatics etc because they don’t impinge upon my sphere of interests very much (and I had to make a 12 minute program). I was stating that I think there’s an historical imbalance in the system as it stands. Lots of people have agreed with me and lots of people have disagreed with me – but also, lots of people have accused me of wanting to undermine and denigrate classical music or to replace it with popular music in HE. In your response you accuse me of wanting to “drag down whatever music it is that he sees as being unfairly privileged… rather than focusing upon the positive qualities of the music he loves”. It perhaps makes sense in light of Ian’s politics (I know nothing of yours Jim) that the solution to economic inequality is to “drag down” the rich – those are my politics as well in a crude form – because economics is a ‘zero-sum’ game. I don’t think that the aspiration to develop the research culture so that we understand popular music better and prize the valuable elements of it, requires us to “drag down” classical music.

Going back to the question of privilege and money – of course it’s true that the economic dominance of popular music provides it with a ‘sonic dominance’ in everyday life. As Ian points out, it’s the popular music that sells the most that fills our pubs and restaurants and allows it to enjoy the privilege of ubiquity. But there are forms of cultural and symbolic, as well as financial, capital that can leverage power. Classical music is the form of art music that the state has decided to bestow its financial capital upon in the forms of arts funding. Of course it’s complicated by the fact that it has decided to be relatively populist in its programming but the contemporary art music that receives the crumbs that fall from that populist classical plate – such as Salonen’s ballet and Iain Bell’s new opera in the forthcoming Royal Opera House season – are not matched by commissions for experimental electronic dance music or other forms of ‘art’ music. The recent decision to use a small amount of Arts Council money to fund start-ups for bands in the field of popular music was highly criticised but also is closely contained within the notion of community music making. There’s no suggestion that this might lead to music of artistic worth, simply that we should also be encouraging ‘low level’ musical activity. It’s also telling that on one of the very few occasions when public money was spent on a project by a ‘popular’ musician – Damian Albarn’s Monkey: Journey To The West for the Manchester International Festival in 2007 – it was a piece for orchestra – because, of course, that’s what ‘proper’ art music is. I’m not proposing anything about the quality or worth of Salonen’s, Bell’s or Albarn’s work – that isn’t my point. My point is that the state support of art music overwhelmingly favours music that is “classical” – or MTHDOOTCA… etc etc. Please don’t extrapolate from this that I’m proposing the state support of “extraordinarily wealthy stars of various kinds of popular music” or that we should put Madonna on at the Opera House. I don’t even think that I’d want to propose that arts funding should be spent on experimental or unpopular popular music – although it would be nice to see it spent on some more culturally diverse musical traditions. I just want to point out that these state subsidies are a marker of cultural capital – that this tradition benefits from those markers of value in many different ways. And just as a reminder, this isn’t the issue that I was raising – I was talking about the status of popular music in HE.

Perhaps it would be good to conclude this with a summary of what I was trying to say: I do see the classical tradition as something based on a form of notation, ways of thinking about pitch, instrument and ensemble types, performance and listening conventions, and formal structures that our culture routinely differentiates from popular music. I see that tradition as having unfairly maintained a virtual monopoly on being considered art music and therefore being more ‘high brow’, more valuable and more worthy of academic study. I think there is some popular music (mostly unpopular instances it must be said) that is as worthy of study as the ‘best’ classical music. That requires a different set of intellectual tools and unfortunately the research required to develop them isn’t being funded because the HE funding system is dominated by the classical tradition. I also think that the practical skills of making popular music are as important as the practical skills of making classical music and research that helped to understand those skills better should be funded. I don’t want popular music to replace classical music. I don’t want popular music research to replace classical music research (or any other forms of music research). I don’t want to ‘drag down’ classical music. Some of my best friends are classical musicians… and as long as they do it in the privacy of their own homes and don’t rub my nose in it, I sincerely believe that they can perform a useful and positive role in society.

Jim Aitchison replies to this:

This is a spirited, enjoyable and engaging defence of the talk that *should* have happened, not the one that did. I don’t think I need to respond in detail again, as folks can read text of the original talk, my response, Simon’s response, and then draw their own conclusions. And so, it seems to me that one of the fundamental problems was that the talk itself was given far too small a space (by the BBC) to deal adequately with absolutely huge issues involved. With the benefit of hindsight, I don’t think the debate was served well on either side by the broadcast, and perhaps it wasn’t such a good idea to take part in as I don’t feel it really helped anyone, in my humble opinion. Far be it for me to judge, as goodness knows, I have created text for things in the past with too little space and time, and the results have sometimes been problematic. Though, of course, it could be argued that it has sparked a lively discussion, which I hope will be beneficial…

Genevieve Arkle, Post-Graduate Student in Music, King’s College, London:

‘Notes and Thoughts on ‘Dead White Composers’ and Simon Zagorski-Thomas’

Zagorski-Thomas belittles classical music stating that its sophistication comes merely from ‘complicated harmony and large formal structures.’ There are many classical works that use simple harmonies and structures but still maintain a strong emotional impact and provide light enjoyment for the listener. Furthermore, to claim publicly that ‘classical music is seen as intellectual’ only adds to the public’s belief that classical music is inaccessible or elitist; these sweeping generalisations that he makes about classical music are merely a projection of society’s stereotypical assumptions and it is precisely these views and opinions that are slowly killing the progression of classical music in our 21^st century musical society. Classical music, just as with popular music, does not require any ‘mysterious rites of initiation’ as Kramer puts it, however due to what I believe to be our increased lack of exposure to it in our modern society, those who take an active interest are seen to be elitist or snobby in contrast to those who enjoy the more accessible popular music. What popular music apparently lacks in terms of ‘intellect’, classical music is currently lacking in terms of mainstream ‘popularity.’ It does not make one better than the other.

To claim that musicology suffers from ‘institutional bias’ and ‘doesn’t reflect the musical society of 21^st century Britain’ is utterly absurd. Having attended two different universities in London for my undergraduate and my Master’s degree, I have seen the wide range of courses offered in both departments and the versatility and continual exposure to popular culture and the impact of music in popular society. Perhaps these topics do not get the critical acclaim they deserve and popular attention in the field because there is literally less to discuss and analyse than there is in the plethora of classical music spanning the last six centuries and more. Zagorski-Thomas says: ‘Too often though, it is based on the assumption that classical music is, by definition, a value, and musicology’s job is simply to demonstrate why.’ – Musicology’s job, in my personal opinion, is as a field of study that enables individuals to have the opportunity to reassess, reinterpret and retell a part of music history, and there is no reason I can see that popular music should not be treated similarly; the value or nature of the musical work itself, popular or classical, is in my eyes near-irrelevant. Musicology does not merely claim to fight for classical music’s value, it provides debate, interpretation, discussion and advances our knowledge of a genre of music that has been hugely influential in reflecting history, politics, philosophy, and more, and equally is the foundation on which our currently popular music came to be formed.

My question to Simon would be to find out how he hopes to see popular music approached in musical institutions in order for it to be treated with similar academic credentials to those found in classical music musicology? Can popular music be analysed, scrutinised and interpreted with the same variance of meanings and emotional impact? Can popular music today truly stand the test of time that classical music has demonstrated through past centuries? I do not doubt that popular music studies is essential to the progression of musicology as a genre, as we have advanced departments in classical musicology, ethnomusicology, jazz studies and so on, and popular music should certainly be incorporated, and currently is in numerous music departments all across the world. But to treat the genres as equally sophisticated seems unlikely, as each genre of music works under its own rules and its own unique character. I will take back my comments if I can see a popular music song analysed to the same extent as a five-hour Wagner opera that intimately reflects the ideologies and philosophies of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, or coins the progressive and innovative use of the leitmotiv. This is not to say that Wagner’s opera maintains greater value or greater significance in musical culture, or that it requires an intellectual mind or an elitist upbringing in order to comprehend or enjoy it; neither am I saying that Bieber’s music does not deserve to be analysed for its composition or for its no doubt huge impact on modern society and its listeners. But to say that they should be considered equal in their complexity and therefore in their analysis is inappropriate. Perhaps, much like ethnomusicology, popular music studies should be formed into its own separate entity, enabling it to be a unique genre that while still reflecting musicological values can gain it’s own critical acclaim without being associated with the ‘elitist’ and ‘intellectual’ classical music that is supposedly damaging it’s reputation.

Zagorski-Thomas makes a humorous comparison, stating:

Is classical music really more complex than popular music? Well, if I compare Mahler to Justin Bieber you might want to say ‘yes’. But is that a fair comparison? Mahler is a choice based on expert opinion and Bieber is a choice based on popularity and sales.

Here I could not disagree more. Mahler is not a choice based solely on expert opinion. In late 19^th and early 20^th century musical culture Mahler’s music thrived and was exceptionally popular and in demand in concert halls around the world. Still today, his works are performed regularly due to their popularity with the current and ‘popular’ classical music world, a world Zagorski-Thomas seems to casually berate as being out-dated and only for the likes of the intellectual or those wanting to appear to be intelligent. Heaven forbid one should enjoy classical music for any other reason. Just because the music does not fall into mainstream contemporary music culture, it does not mean that classical music is no longer popular today.

Julian Faultless: Horn player, brass teacher, and tutor in Arabic at Oxford University.

One of the most striking things I find in this whole debate and which is very rarely mentioned is that pop music is far, far better represented in universities in the UK than the literary or artistic equivalent. Should popular novels or pop song lyrics be studied much more in university English departments? Would most people in English lit departments not find the idea ludicrous? Would that be sheer snobbishness? Would literature students even want that? (Incidentally, I speak as someone with a serious admiration for the best pop music and I do think it should be studied).

What Z-T should acknowledge is that the overwhelming majority of pop is in 4/4 and uses an incredibly limited harmonic palette. Math rock is utterly unrepresentative.

Dr Nicole Grimes, Lecturer in Musicology, Keele University:

‘Simon Zagorski-Thomas and the Musicological Brexit’

In his broadcast “The Only Good Musician is a Dead Musician” on BBC Radio 4’s Four Thought (Wednesday 20 April), Simon Zagorski-Thomas (hereafter SZT) plays a neat Orwellian trick. He presents a false dichotomy between the cultural value of classical and popular music, diminishes the value of classical music studies, and then lays claim to a self-appointed moral triumph for his ideology of popular music studies. This is done by way of proving that there is an “institutional bias” in the British higher education system that “doesn’t reflect the state of music in 21^st century Britain.” SZT’s concern is that music scholarship in the university sector is “in danger of becoming out of touch and irrelevant” to “our experience of music now.”

“Is it about snobbery” he asks, before demonstrating that his false dichotomy relies on a series of flattened and oversimplified binary oppositions:

“Is classical music really more complex than popular music?”
“Is harmony and formal structure more important than rhythm and tone?”
Are “logic and reason” thought of “as more important than expression and emotion”?

Few academics working in university music departments will be able to relate to the bifurcation of knowledge that SZT presents. Nor will they understand their intellectual engagement with the sonic, cultural, emotional, expressive, and analytical parameters of music to breakdown neatly along the lines of SZT’s false oppositions. Most will agree that the rich and complex study of music in all its guises defies such parsing and resists such polemical misrepresentation. Many musicologists will therefore question the manner in which SZT frames his debate. Pointing to a perceived shortfall in the amount of research funding awarded to popular music studies, he bemoans the fact that “We live in a world where classical music is considered intellectual and popular music is not—just look at universities: broadly speaking, the higher status Russell Group universities do Mozart and the lower status Post-92 universities do Blur.” He asks:

Could it be that the prestige of some aspects of academic subjects over others might be determined by prejudice and snobbery, rather than by relevance, complexity, or academic rigour?

Taking issue with SZT’s false dichotomy and the manner in which he frames the debate, I challenged him on Twitter: “Must we oppose European composers to contemporary musicians? Must it be either/or?” His response: “If you listen to the program, I’m asking for both, not either/or.” The finest aspect of SZT’s neat Orwellian trick is that he denies having played the trick in the first place. And yet even a cursory listen to his broadcast tells us that, despite professing a love for “that amazing music,” his promotion of one academic discipline (popular music studies) is premised upon the denigration of another (classical music studies). His argument is based on a crude attempt to dislodge the cultural weight and intellectual significance of Western art music (his examples of which are The Mozart Effect and André Rieu), and to undermine those aspects of higher music education that require prior knowledge and skills (namely harmony and formal structure, logic and reason, in short, music analysis).

The broadcast betrays SZT’s extremely reductive understanding of the nature of musicology as a discipline, which, in his formulation, “should be about trying to discover why we like the things we do and how music works.” This impoverished characterization denies musicology’s historical, sociological, anthropological, aesthetic, philosophical, and international significance. This is directly bound up with what Ian Pace has cogently characterized as the de-skilling of musicology. Moreover, it speaks to a utilitarian understanding of the role of the university whose task is to reflect society, in this instance, a particular strand of British society in the 21^st century for whom dead European composers and their rich and varied traditions have become an irrelevance. Britain alone, embracing an anti-European prejudice. If this reflects “the plurality of the 21^st century” to which British universities should aspire, then this musicologist casts a firm vote to remain in Europe.

Joan Arnau Pàmies: Composer, D.M.A. candidate at Northwestern University:

At this point, it should be rather evident that commodified music has the hegemony across most societal infrastructures. There is an aesthetic absolutism, not necessarily in terms of style or genre, but rather as for what the social purpose of music may be (i.e., escapism via simple forms of entertainment). Furthermore, I think it is crucial to differentiate popular music from mass music and/or commodified music. Most so-called ‘popular’ music out there does not emerge from communities of citizens, but rather is treated as a product that demands some profitable outcome. And, even in the case that popular music does indeed emerge from outside the industry, it may be easily repurposed into a commodified form if some sort of financial gain may be gained out of it. I’d like to suggest that instead of calling this academic discipline ‘popular music studies’, it seems to me that ‘commodified music studies’ would be much more appropriate.

PS: Classical music is also commodifiable, as we know from the reiteration of similar programming in concert halls and orchestra seasons.

My biggest concern about popular music studies is that often the hegemony of the market ideology is barely questioned. In some cases it is even justified.

In my classes, I barely use the term popular music, even when I’m referring to music that is considered to be popular. That is because my understanding of ‘popular’ has not much to do with the allegiance to the present neoliberal ideology.

Dr Tom Parkinson, University of Kent, Centre for Higher Education:

This was a short piece for radio, and as such its remits were gentle provocation and accessibility rather than precision and detail, so I’m going to respond mainly to to the spirit of what Professor Zagorski Thomas says rather than the finer points. However, I would like to take small issue with the characterisation of the Russell Group as elitist, stuffy and unappreciative of popular music; my own doctoral research focussed on the institutional culture of popular music departments, and I reviewed a number of programmes across institutional types- it is my informed view that Newcastle and Liverpool Universities, both Russell Group, provide some of the best popular music education in the country, and indeed produce some of the best research. This, for me, highlights the problem with treating the Russell Group as a homogenous bloc- as do Michael Gove’s comments that ZT refers to in fact. It is too often ignored that the Russell Group is a mutual interest group and not a meritocratic ‘premier league’; it is therefore inaccurate (and in Gove’s case, entirely inappropriate) to use Russell Group as a shorthand for elite higher education (Sorry- bugbear exorcised).

Anyway- ZT’s reminiscences of school music education certainly chimed with mine. I was led to believe that I wasn’t a ‘real’ musician, despite writing and recording my own music in my teenage years, because I didn’t play an orchestral instrument. My own music education was, like ZT’s, mainly autodidactic, informal and experiential, until I returned to university to study (not popular) music in my late twenties. Having taught in schools earlier this decade, I’m heartened by the prominent place popular music now plays in children’s music education. This gives space and structure for young people to explore and find meaning in their (and each other’s) filial and affiliative cultures, where previously these aims were seen as less important than inculcating an uncritical reverence for European dead composers. An education that overwhelmingly privileges the Western art canon, can, in some settings and circumstances, seem like symbolic violence, not to mention a total waste of everyone’s time, unless we can find a persuasive argument for its universal value to all (the assumption of universalism is dangerous). The issue of relative quality or musical value in such circumstances seems moot, where equality seems to be at stake.

At the same time, however, I’m uneasy about the oppositional rhetoric that often characterises this debate. I’ve also witnessed the macabre sight of hundreds of brass instruments languishing in a dusty portacabin behind a school music block. Often it feels as if classical music has been driven out of secondary music education entirely, which is a terrible outcome- socially, educationally, and musically.

The ideal is surely to accommodate both (or all) kinds of music; the perennial challenge of course is striking an appropriate balance. The inevitable corollary of including something in the curriculum is that you leave something else out, and there is precious little time in the arts curriculum. In higher education however, there is an opportunity to establish a more holistic and inclusive culture that acknowledges value and intellectual complexity across musical forms, and shapes its curricula and pedagogies accordingly. There are moves in this direction- an institution in my study had abandoned their earlier discrete ‘Music’, ‘Popular Music’ and ‘Music Technology’ degrees in favour of a single ‘Music’ BMus. Thus the preposterous implicit notion of a legitimate ‘music’ was abolished, and students were free to pursue their interests within a non-hierarchical landscape. Crucially, they were also exposed to the cutting edge of all of music’s sub-fields, rather than siloed within a limited aesthetic and analytical paradigm. This, to me, is the most frustrating aspect of the classical/pop divide- that so often criticism is levelled at the other side without the courtesy or academic nous to become acquainted with its theoretical advances (or even foundations) first. This is evident in the most surprising places. Roger Scruton, for example, one of the world’s leading conservative intellectuals, has been taking aim at popular music for decades, without any serious engagement with the now vast research base in popular music studies, or the well-rehearsed defences of popular music as a legitimate object of scholarly focus. Instead, he trots out the same rhetorical takedowns time and time again (I’m usually a fan of Scruton’s, btw).

ZT refers to the common assumption that classical music is self-evidently sophisticated, where pop is self-evidently less so, and correctly identifies the confirmation bias that reinforces this assumption among scholars. In my view, this is also symptomatic of the same wilful conceptual illiteracy, particularly regarding popular music composition and production, but this works both ways. In my experience, pop music academics can be equally ideological, and resentful of the classical world to the point that they deny themselves the opportunity to even try and understand or (heaven forfend) enjoy it. The bifurcated research infrastructure compounds this problem, and sustains discrete research communities whose participants share departments and offices, but not ideas.

Sam Richards, improviser, composer, writer, Lecturer in Music, University of Plymouth, author of The English Folksinger, John Cage as…, The Engaged Musician and other works:

Curiously, I feel this is quite an old issue – the valuing of classical music over popular. For me the pendulum has swung the other way. Some classical music students where I work have complained that they are less catered for than rockers. They have argued that they’re obliged to do improvised, blues, rock things in practical sessions, but that rock musicians are not obliged to learn classical techniques – which apparently now includes notation.

Pamela Rose, piano teacher, music education writer, creator of www.learngrade5theory.com :

Simon Zagorski-Thomas is in the business of academic music education. I am a private piano teacher, music education writer and creator of www.learngrade5theory.com, a series of 18 videos dedicated to teaching theory at the piano. I am as passionate about teaching music as Simon is about music as an academic study – but there the similarity ends.

“As Simon says”, due to his “shockingly mediocre music education at school” he felt excluded by not being able to study what he terms “his subject” – music.

Instead he played in rock bands and worked as a sound engineer.

He repeatedly tells us he’s “doing very well” BUT , and it’s a big but, Simon is unhappy. He seems to feel hard done by his exclusion from the Russell Group and his perception that the Russell Group monopolises music research funding. However, instead of devoting his efforts to securing what I believe is a better music education for others he develops a complex series of arguments that in the end are intended to elevate ‘cult stud’ to the status of classical analysis. We already have professors of music who can’t read music and can’t play an instrument. What of their students and their students’ students? Will this not simply reinforce and perpetuate a social divide because it is educationally legitimised?

From my point of view and more to the point, he has not undergone the rigorous discipline of learning to read music and play a musical instrument to a high standard. He has not dedicated his life to the pursuit of what I consider to be musical beauty. It is not possible for him to understand the degree of mental, emotional and physical effort it takes to perform classical music.

I care passionately about music education.

At present in the UK, we award BMus degrees on popular music courses to the likes of Simon Cowell’s “One Direction” . Only a few popular music degree courses require Grade 5 Theory as a condition of admission. Apparently, this is not enough for Simon Zagorski-Thomas. He wants equal access to grant funding for post graduate research into the music they play. To me this is commercialism gone mad.

He wants to raise their ‘cult stud’ status on an academic playing field to which they can never belong…unless of course, they pay for it.

Music is sometimes a life saver, sometimes a life changer and always a life enhancer. For these reasons, I believe the teaching of music is a great responsibility. For me that responsibility is the creation of independent musicians. Independence comes from knowing and understanding and this cannot be achieved without learning notation.

It beggars belief that we can have professors of music who can neither read music nor play an instrument. In a recent conference I heard a Labour Minister boast he could not read a note of music but as he was in the Parliamentary Rock Band he saw no reason for it to be part of a musical curriculum – well that’s an end to it!

So what of musical education now? Presumably if it’s acceptable to the cult stud to have music academics and their students who cannot read music, how far are we from English Literature students who are not required to be literate?

There are things that are immutable. The physical and neurological benefits of reading and playing music are manifold and far outweigh any benefits derived from simply listening to music. This alone is sufficient justification for learning notation. I realise that this is often a privilege only available to children of well off middle class parents which widens the class divide.

The arguments expounded by Zagorski-Thomas, once filtered down to an already desperately deprived state sector music education, will widen the class divide between the ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’ and not, as he thinks, narrow it. The ultimate conclusion to the logic of his argument is that the teaching of classical music would be outlawed.

Learning to read music and play a musical instrument to a high standard requires rigorous discipline and dedication.

For ease, for popularity, and crucially lack of funding our state schools are teaching children something they normally teach themselves outside of school – how to be in a pop band. Is this music education?

To my mind all education gives us choices. We may not choose to become classical musicians but this choice should be ours and derived from the freedom that knowledge, understanding and education give. Education should not narrow our options but allow us choice – something Simon says he was not given.

Recently, I read on a blog by a senior and respected teacher “Over the last 100 years a great deal of research has been carried out that shows that a notation focused approach to early instrumental lessons has a detrimental effect on listening skills and musical development.” – there were no citations.

Jeroen Speak, composer:

Characterising all music that isn’t ‘popular, contemporary’ music as ‘a small group of central European dead men’, and to reduce the difference between ‘pop’ and ‘classical’ idioms as ‘harmony and formal structure’ vs ‘rhythm and tune’, is quite ridiculous, and a remarkably unacademic way to support his assertion that pop music deserves more academic ‘value’.

It can be assumed (given our exposure to popular culture), that someone studying classical-based music has made a conscious decision to do so, but also will have experience and an understanding of both, yet (and this seems to be the main problem here) this rarely applies to the reverse situation. So, it would seem far more educationally beneficial (if indeed the purpose of a university today is to supply ‘higher’ education) that classical music subjects should take precedence. Shouldn’t a higher education be balanced, rigorous and inclusive ?

Zagorski-Thomas’ assumption that music funding, and research funding tends to go to research which addresses only ‘classical’ -based research is patently not true, a glance through recent PRS funding results shows quite the reverse in fact. On top of this, the criterion for funding has increasingly moved towards elements like ‘impact’ ‘public participation’ and ‘cross disciplinary’ which plays quite comfortably into the hands of a rock concert ! I feel there is little reason to regard research of pop culture as any different to any other form of research, so long as the research is of high quality. But Zagorski-Thomas doesn’t make it clear whether he is talking about pure research or musical practice.

He is right about questioning the way pop culture is integrated into higher education however. A scan of the course content of UK universities shows that students doing popular music courses are rarely, or never, exposed to classical music practice, composition, analysis or history. That seems to show a distinct bias in the opposite direction to the one Zagorski-Thomas is implying, and a very un-academic one.

As far as pop music not being taken seriously enough..… Pop music grew out of pubs, garages, and teenage anxiety, and then, harnessed and marketed by cynical commercial interests, entered into every element of our lives from supermarkets to airports to message machines. It has bludgeoned all of us for the past 50 years to the point where we actually genuinely consider the immature bleatings of a love sick 17 year old as more important than some of the greatest philosophical, artistic, musical, and political minds of the last millennia. Popular music accounts for more media space than any other form of culture. So, I think its done quite well for itself without needing to ruin my chance, or my children’s chance of getting a thorough musical education.

Dr Peter Tregear, Department of Music, Royal Holloway College, University of London. Former Head of School of Music, Australian National University.

Zagorski-Thomas’s talk was more a case of missed opportunity than musical mission. His overarching thesis was not the need for an expansion of intellectual and aural horizons of our tertiary music curricula, rather for a redistribution of limited educational resources. But the state of affairs he depicts does not reflect the realities of tertiary music education market place today. Jobs for lecturers in popular music studies proliferate at the expense of not just the traditional areas of research interest (including, to be sure, the spectre of ‘dead white male European composers’ he invokes at the beginning of his talk) but also the traditional disciplinary skills of notation, theory, analysis, and criticism.

We lose, however, much more than just a Euro-centric hegemony in Zagorski-Thomas’ brave new educational world. We lose our capacity to understand the basics of the very history that led us here.

Mahler matters not so much because his music might indeed contain, as he suggests, a greater richness of harmony and formal structure, but because his musical structures and materials are also in dialogue with history; his music demands an historical self-awareness from the listener that cannot but produce a relationship with his music that is both more self-aware and, yes, self-critical. Music history matters in the same way history itself matters—to remind us that the world we experience was neither the same, nor needs to be the same, as it is now.

Zagorski-Thomas asks us, instead, simply to institute a “musicology more relevant to our experience of music now”. If so, who will decides what is ‘relevant’? Can we really be sure it will not overwhelmingly be the marketplace itself? One does not have to be of the left of politics to recognise the impoverishment of historical and political imagination that follows.

Thus the real opposition in music education we must resolve today is not between so-called classical and popular musics, but that between music which asks us, through sound, to think more deeply about ourselves and our world, and that which doesn’t. Instead, it seems, Zagorski-Thomas asks us simply to replace one limited sonic horizon, one set of snobberies, with another.

Dr Ian Wellens: Former Associate Lecturer in Music, Dartington College of Arts, Author, Music on the Frontline: Nicolas Nabokov’s Struggle Against Communism and Middlebrow Culture

1) Ironically the term ‘music’ is very often used to describe a small subset of the world’s music, but in just the opposite way to that which Simon Z-T suggests …

http://www.bbc.co.uk/…/music-awards-2015-the-line-up

For another example, try the Guardian website where ‘music’ means pop & rock.

2) It seems to me that – for musicians operating within that family of post-50s popular musics, there are a lot of constraints in place – most of which apply most of the time. Their effect, taken together, is to put a ceiling on what can be achieved: it becomes difficult to create impressive, substantial music.

They include: restriction (across entire genres) to song forms; brevity; harmonic simplicity; the ever-present backbeat on drum kit; reliance on huge amounts of verbatim repetition; restricted instrumentation; reliance on very clear 1,2,4 or 8 bar units; the absence of any development or transformation of ideas; restriction to a single point of focus in a texture (i.e no polyphony); the fixed (and hierarchical) roles of instruments within an ensemble.

3) What’s also a bit hard to swallow is this sense that popular music is the upstart, the marginalised outsider merely seeking fair shares. I’d have thought a fair-minded observer would see a musical culture where pop & rock are massively, overwhelmingly dominant. I’m not an academic or in education any more, but I’d have thought that popular music is highly present in HE, and probably enlarging its presence. The same thing has happened in school music. Already in 2010 (when I left HE) music applicants to our degree course often had a thin and rather tokenistic knowledge of non-pop music.

When you look at the whole picture, I feel the idea of this hugely pervasive music as somehow excluded just doesn’t wash. And as someone else said, isn’t one important role of education that it should promote, encourage and maintain a space for cultural practices which are outside the commercial mainstream?

Initial Response from Simon Zagorski-Thomas, April 27, 2016:

I’m going to provide some more personalized responses to the points made above – some of which I take on board and some of which I take issue with – and Ian has kindly agreed to post them after the various responses. It will take me a little while so they are coming in installments – the responses are nearly five times the length of the original talk. First of all, though, just a reminder of what Four Thought is. A “Series of thought-provoking talks in which the speakers air their thinking on the trends, ideas, interests and passions that affect culture and society” is what it says on the website and the sub-theme that guides the BBC’s choice of speakers is that they are looking for a personal journey. So – 2000 words of which a substantial part needs to be some of my personal story, doesn’t leave room for a fully nuanced argument so it’s great to be able to follow it up with some more detailed discussion.

I don’t suppose it makes much difference in retrospect but the title and the summary were chosen by the BBC and appeared on iPlayer without consultation. My original title was ‘The Only Good Musician Is A Dead Musician’. A couple of general points: Of course, the terms ‘classical’ and ‘popular’ are highly problematic and there’s been plenty of discussion in both fields about how useless and disruptive the terms are and yet they still maintain a general currency that was useful for this kind of talk. A good few people seem to think that I’m suggesting that ‘popular’ music should replace or dominate ‘classical’ music in universities and/or research funding. That is not what I said. Read it or listen to it again.

Another point that I didn’t have time to make and which is why I distinguished specifically between the sociology of popular music and the study of the music and musical practices of popular music, is that I believe that popular music studies in the form that dominates outside the post-92 sector i.e. the study of the social and economic systems involved in popular music’s distribution and ‘consumption’, mostly serves to reinforce the idea that I suggest still dominates music departments: that the music is not worthy of study. And I would also suggest that if you use tools of musical analysis that were designed to work on music as it is written on the page to try to analyse popular music (or jazz or electronic music for that matter) you will only succeed in concluding either that the tools aren’t up to the task or that the music isn’t. CMPCP and CHARM started the job of developing tools to analyse the sound of musical performance but they have remained mostly classical. Some of us have been working to follow up pioneers such as Middleton, Tagg and Moore to do this from within popular music.

Simon Zagorski-Thomas – Talk, ‘Dead White Composers’, BBC Radio 4, Four Thought, Wednesday April 20, 2016, 20:45.

Producer: Sheila Cook

Introducer: Good evening, and welcome to Four Thought. We’re in New Broadcasting House in London, with a reasonably sympathetic-looking audience, and our speaker, Simon Zagorski-Thomas. Simon is a composer, writer, and record producer, whose day job is Professor of Music at the University of West London. His latest book is The Musicology of Record Production. So what’s a Professor doing in a recording studio, you may well ask? Well, Simon says that’s a rather good question. Ladies and Gentlemen, Simon Zagorski-Thomas. [Applause]

Simon Zagorski-Thomas: There’s an old joke in the music industry that dying is a good career move, and what I want to talk about today is whether dead musicians get a better deal than live ones. When I was a boy in the 1970s, I always found it disappointing at school that teachers were more impressed that I could play the theme from Schubert’s Trout Quintet on my trumpet than the fact that I could play Eric Clapton’s ‘Leyla’ on my guitar. I grew up enjoying Beethoven and Debussy as much as I enjoyed XTC and Elvis Costello, but I knew after my shockingly mediocre music education at school and a cursory look at higher education music courses that music at university level ‘wasn’t for the likes of me’. So I went and did a degree in Economics with Artificial Intelligence instead, but I continued to play in rock bands, and after university, I happened to be in the right place at the right time, and found myself working in the 1980s MIDI revolution in music, producing dance music, programming drums for rock acts, and generally learning to be a sound engineer and a record producer. Like many people working in music, I worked on a lot of music which I thought to be quite facile and simple because it paid well. And I used that pay to subsidise the music that I loved. The music that inspired me was from popular music styles that I felt had the same type of sophistication and artistic merit of some of the classical music that I also loved. But I was conflicted about this – I had it deeply ingrained in my musical identity that sophistication and artistic merit came from complicated harmony and large formal structures. But I also loved the more chaotic complexity of improvised and experimental music. Worse still, the energy of punk, new wave, and then later of dance music, had persuaded me that the ability to create that sense of momentum and attitude through arrangement, performance, and record production, was an equally valid form of expression. Added to this, there was often a rampant tribalism and snobbery involved in people’s value judgements about music – including my own.

The 1980s and 90s was also a time when popular music started to gain a foothold in universities – although initially not in music departments. First there was the sociology of popular music – where academics studied the cultures and subcultures of popular music rather than the music itself. And then we get the development of music technology courses. In the 21^st century we’ve seen a big growth in courses about other practices in popular music – performance, song writing, live sound and management, for example. A study commissioned by the Higher Education Academy showed that over 85% of these popular music degrees were in the newer Post-92 universities. A look at the Arts and Humanities Research Council funding for music over the last 10 years reveals that less than five percent of the money went to studies of the music or musical practices of popular music. Of course there are two things that I don’t know here – it may be that the number of applications for popular music research is low, and it may be that they’re not as good. The only information I have got is anecdotal and personal. In the past five years I have submitted a range of bids for funding research. The successful ones have involved a project where classical music scholars joined us in a study of popular music performance and another one where we were looking at producing classical music with recording techniques taken from popular music. But all of the funding bids that dealt solely with popular music were turned down. I should point out that isn’t the only factor; the popular music bids were generally for more money, and therefore less likely to be successful. But I do think that there’s an institutional bias in the system which means that the state and status of music in our higher education system doesn’t reflect the state of music in 21^st century Britain. Indeed, the 2016 report by the Cultural Value Project has criticised recent research in this area for being based on a narrow definition of art and culture.

But is this about snobbery? Or is there a reason that classical music is considered more culturally valuable than popular music? You could buy a CD from www.mozarteffect.com that says you can, “Use it… for better focus and concentration” – and of course, the CD is all Mozart. The Mozart Effect, the idea that listening to Mozart makes you clever, was based on some very tentative and not very reliable science but was pounced on by the media and by parents looking for easy answers to the problem of improving their kids’ intelligence. And a few years later, a much larger study, supported by the BBC, found that Blur outperformed Mozart in the same type of experiment. [Laughter from audience]. It’s interesting that in the reaction to the original study, which compared the effect of silence, a recording of relaxation instructions, and a Mozart Sonata, the performance of some spatial imagination tasks, everyone pounced on the fact that it was Mozart (rather than just music). But when the later study found that Blur outperformed Mozart, the perception was not that Blur improved your performance, but that it must be a music that you are familiar with, or partial to, that helped. But I’m not interested in the reliability of the science part here, but in our reaction to it. It’s not just that the only good musician is a dead musician – but they’re also white, European, male, and they compose rather than perform, and they compose by writing it down as notation, and they write classical music, preferably for a symphony orchestra. We live in a world in which classical music is considered intellectual, and popular music is not. Just look at the universities: broadly speaking, the higher status Russell Group universities do Mozart, and the lower status post-92 universities do Blur. Could it be that the prestige of some academic subjects over others could be determined by prejudice and snobbery, rather than by relevance, complexity, or academic rigour?

Is classical music really more complex than popular music? Well, if I compare Mahler to Justin Bieber, you might well say ‘Yes’. [Vague laughter from audience] But is that a fair comparison? Mahler is a choice based on expert opinion, and Bieber is a choice based on popularity and sales. What if I flip those criteria? What if I compare André Rieu, the cheesy superstar of Viennese Waltz, or Il Divo, the operatic crossover boy band, with Meshuggah, the progressive metal band, or Autechre, the intelligent dance music duo? The comparison becomes more difficult – we don’t want to be comparing chalk and cheese, unless we know whether we’re asking which one tastes better.

And that means this is also about the criteria by which we judge complexity. Is harmony and formal structure more important than rhythm and tone? If so, then Meshuggah, with their so-called ‘math rock’, using multiple time signatures, would give a lot of classical composers a run for their money. Perhaps logical reason was thought of as a lot more important than expression and emotion. If so, why isn’t Aphex Twin, with its carefully crafted synthesizer pieces, considered more important than Schumann?

And a frequently cited criterion for judging classical music is about the management of expectations, sometimes talked about in terms of tension and release. But when we get down to the detail, the question of which musical parameters we have expectations about is crucial. If I listen to James Brown or Beethoven, the harmonic progressions aren’t going to be the place where I hear interest and nuance. If I listen to Joni Mitchell’s guitar writing, or Debussy’s piano writing, I can enjoy their interest in extraordinary sounds, but a good part of why they’re interesting and extraordinary flows from the fact that they’re different from other guitar and piano writing that we’re familiar with. Musicology should be about trying to discover why we like the things we do, and how music works. Too often, though, it’s based on the assumption that classical music is by definition of value, and that musicology’s job is simply to demonstrate why. This assumption, despite attempts to dislodge it, is still fundamental to the way that music education and arts funding for music are run.

In 2003, when I started working at a university, I was surprised at how I felt about it. I hadn’t realised how excluded I’d felt by not being able to study my subject – music – when I was a teenager. And now, as I gradually came to realise, although popular music was included in the university sector, it was still being excluded from the top table. There are glowing examples of academics who realise that using the general term music, when they’re talking about a small cultural subset of the world’s music, is highly damaging. It’s like using the term men when talking about humanity, or the term civilization when a particular form of Central and Western European culture. It’s the signs of hierarchy, of inequality.

I don’t want to sound like a grumpy academic, and of course, if I’m talking about a hierarchy of inequality, and identify myself and my subject as being at the bottom end of it, then it’s easy to dismiss that as sour grapes. But actually I’m doing all right individually. I’m publishing research, I’m getting little bits of funding, and as far as I’m concerned, I’m in the best department in the country for my subject specialism of recorded music and record production. What I’m worried about is the state of music scholarship in the university sector. It’s in danger of becoming out-of-touch, and irrelevant, and that danger is an inherent property of the current system.

Applying for research funding from a post-92 university reduces your chances for success. In addition, although research proposals are peer reviewed, the majority of music academics reflect the dominance of classical music traditions in university, and their ideas about what would be important topics of research are informed by that. I’m not suggesting that people are being deliberately prejudiced; in fact, in my experience the opposite is largely true. When the issue is brought up, academics are mostly broad-minded and reasonable. It’s just that this isn’t a system that’s designed to change, and the question of change is rarely on the agenda.

So what does it say about us, as contemporary culture, that we value the activities of a small group of Central European dead men more than we value the activities of our contemporary musicians? I’m certainly not suggesting that we should abandon the study of any of that amazing music. But I am suggesting that the lack of alternative narratives of quality is stifling music in universities and contributing to this lack of balance. There’s inertia in the system, that maintains the existing institutional bias. It also demonstrates how unquestioning we tend to be when it comes to seeking to understand why our culture is as it is, and what kinds of bias become embedded in our culture without us noticing. It also demonstrates how the line of least resistance or the well-trodden pathway can create rigidity in our research culture, and in society in general. It doesn’t help if policy makers reduce this argument to the lowest common denominator: that there are good subjects, and bad subjects, good universities, and bad universities, and that’s both how policy should be made, and how students should make choices. That simplifies a complex issue, that’s dumbing down. In 2011, Michael Gove said he wanted children to study ‘the subjects that Russell Group Universities have said they value most’.

Unfortunately, the Russell Group is living in a musical world that bears little resemblance to the plurality of the 21^st century. It seems to be up to the younger universities to take the lead in analysing musical forms that live outside of the world of the classical score and to create a musicology that is more relevant to our experience of music now. Thanks.

Addendum communicated by SZT to IP:

52% of AHRC grants for music in the past ten years have been for western art music, 15% for ethnomusicology, 15% was for sociological studies of popular music and less than 5% were for studying the music or musical practices of popular music. The rest were for things like music psychology, data mining etc. The reason I separate out the popular music sociology is something that, again, I didn’t have time to discuss in any detail: studying the sociology of popular music reinforces the idea that the music itself isn’t worth talking about – just the social and economic structures that are involved in its distribution and consumption. I counted them up from the source you linked to above a couple of weeks ago. Some might take issue with some of the detail of my categorisation – e.g. a quarter of the popular music practice money that I mention was for a study of pedagogy for adult non-musically trained singers and I’ve included electroacoustic composition in the western art music category.

Desiring Progress

The Blog of Ian Pace, pianist, musicologist, political animal. A place for thoughts, reflections, links, both trivial and not so trivial. Main website is at http://www.ianpace.com . Contact e-mail ian@ianpace.com.

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Responses to Simon Zagorski-Thomas’s talk on ‘Dead White Composers’

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