Another university shuts down musicology
NewsTaking its cue from Brandeis, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, is proposing to abolish musicology.
An appeal from Death Row:
Dear Colleagues, I write on behalf of musicology at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. Currently, the university has a proposal to remove Musicology as an area of research and teaching.
Musicology is integral to research and teaching at Victoria University of Wellington, both within the New Zealand School of Music and within the broader Humanities. The area is known for research in New Zealand music, women and music, historical performance practice, early modern and nineteenth-century music. As part of the Music Studies Programme, Musicology sits alongside Ethnomusicology, Theory and Analysis, and Jazz Studies.
The university’s current plan of widespread cost savings across the university would cut a third of music staff and eliminate musicology completely by disestablishing the roles of Professor of Musicology and Associate Professor of Musicology. This will result in the closing of teaching and research in Musicology in Wellington and would greatly diminish the future of music research and teaching in New Zealand.
On behalf of my colleagues, I am organizing a petition to Save Musicology at Victoria University of Wellington, to be submitted to the university, and I would like to invite those interested in supporting this to add their name to our petition by 3 September 2023, collated here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1LbBMVXXXqbtHtB8duePKkCID7HhSMg-9maL8CCQKeKw/edit?usp=sharing. We feel that international support for our musicology area would greatly help our case.
With our thanks for considering support for Musicology in New Zealand,
Brian
Dr. Brian Diettrich | Senior Lecturer in Ethnomusicology
The “musicology-massacre” in higher education continues! And this is just the beginning! In this ultra-conservative, anti-woke “culture”, the extremists will not be satisfied until all the creative arts (which “they” view as “ultra-liberal”) are completely obliterated from society!
After expressing deep consternation about their field’s systemic bigotry for some years now, musicologists should not be surprised that, to some, the best solution is to “end it,” rather than “mend it.” This is rather reminiscent of Alex Ross’s recent complaint that Lincoln Center appears to be abandoning classical music…https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/08/28/requiem-for-mostly-mozart
…when Ross himself has been a prominent voice calling out classical music’s racism ….https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/09/21/black-scholars-confront-white-supremacy-in-classical-music
Ross is an opportunist. He plays politics all the time, in a way that will bolster his own position within the industry, so that he can inflict uninteresting artists and musicologists on the institutions and the public. These people also know they will get nowhere without Ross, so they in turn amplify his voice. Ross cares about nothing else. If he happens to promote someone that does have substance, that is to make sure he does not appear like a complete joke. This James Levine apologist should have been ignored a long time ago.
Indeed. Ross’s journalism is worth reconsidering given what we now know.
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/james-levines-accomplishment-at-the-met
https://web.archive.org/web/20180331175707/https://radaronline.com/exclusives/2018/03/opera-maestro-james-levine-alleged-sexual-misconduct-ashok-shoky-pei/
Oh, he did much worse than that. He openly defended him against the “rumors” in print at the New Yorker, in a tone that can only be described as disdainfully condescending. He made it clear that anyone who thought the rumors might be credible was doing so out of “professional envy” and “sheer malice”. Even more tellingly, he also dismissed MET players’s warning that Levine could no longer give a clear beat (this was in 2004), because according to him “this kind of chatter inevitably catches up to any conductor who stays in one place for a long time”. I have zero doubt in my mind that Alex Ross enabled the untenable situation at the MET to last as long as it did and greatly contributed to its decline.
What do you “know”?
These people are clueless. They come out in public and denounce their own profession as systemically racist and then are shocked when their departments get cancelled. Maybe they should have studied a little more about Soviet history before cancelling themselves
Woke “culture” hates and fears any instance of freedom/research, therefore musicology “must” be racist,elitist, etc etc. Especially if your woke ideology lacks any evidence of critical rigour.
Wow, that one was out of left field.
I’m not sure that anti-wokism is as widespread and virulent in NZ as it is in the US. The same goes for cancel culture at both political extremes. It’s possible that the proposed musicology cancelation in Wellington is purely fiscal in origin — but misguided, just the same, in my opinion.
…that’s an extreme view. It is hard to believe that everyone who runs a university is ultra-conservative and anti-woke. In fact, most of them are probably middle-of-the-road, just trying to do a job. Where the problem likely lies is that there are only a small number of students wanting to study musicology and therefore it is hard to justify in a hard-nosed bean-counting way, nothing to do with liberal vs conservative. We are having the same issue with Taxation, where we have almost no students wanting to study it.
As a conservative, I definitely hate to see the backlash against fine arts due to the ridiculous anti-white and anti-male sentiment that has infested universities. But now that regular people are tired of the nonsense being propagated by wokesters in the post-truth era, I’m afraid the natural destruction of institutions that promote this malarkey is inevitable.
I know it is colonialist and anti-feminist of me, but I do wish people could return to using their ears and brains to listening to the music rather than focusing on every tangential fake oppressive delusion that is wound into great music from great composers.
We don’t need musicology, pedagogy and, for that matter, almost the entire social sciences. Those pompous subjects are no longer what they were not so long ago. They are parasites that drain the school system of resources and as a reward produce poison.
Musicians should focus on playing well and composers on composing good music; these are creative professions and contemporary theorists interfere with creativity with their identity ideology or what is fashionable at the moment. Today we mostly need engineers, mathematicians, chemists, teachers, doctors and other healthcare personnel. We need to spend all research resources in technology and life sciences.
Indeed, because no musician has *ever* done anything artistically fashionable, nor traded on their identity. Give me a break.
We need all of it: musicology, performance, composition, math, medicine, art, dance, engineering, education, theater, astronomy, psychology, history, languages. University should cultivate educated, thinking, feeling people, not some dismal world of specialization where the composers compose for no one because the doctors don’t care.
There’s a current plan of widespread cost savings at the university?
I have a suggestion to help. Eliminate your entire DEI department and anything else that gives preferences to people based on race.
It’s all about the Maori in New Zealand nowadays and not much about anything else.
Even for the Slipped Disc comments section, that’s an exceptionally offensive and ill-informed comment. These cuts across the university will disadvantage Māori students as much as anybody else.
Predictable drivel.
Some additional context to this – musicology is not being singled out, the cuts are actually quite wide:
VUW will discontinue Italian, German, Greek, Latin, design technology, secondary school teaching, and Geographical Information Systems. No more enrolments would be taken in tourism management, undergraduate geophysics, physical geography, and workplace health and safety. It would also stop enrolments in its graduate diplomas in early childhood and secondary teaching, and its Master of Teaching and Learning for both primary and secondary teaching. Theatre, Linguistics and Applied Linguistics, Museum and Heritage Studies, and Classical and Jazz performance would be integrated into other programmes (source = VUW statement and Radio NZ report).
Why is this being done ? Simple. It is facing a NZ$33 million deficit and can’t get any more central funding.
I sure hope other NZ universities are continuing education in geophysics — after all, NZ lies atop one of the most active tectonic zones on the planet! Perhaps Victoria U looked at the competitiveness of some of its departments and decided to cut funding in areas where they aren’t particularly strong to begin with. (Speculation on my part, hence the “perhaps”.)
The Linguistics and Applied Linguistics programmes are highly respected, and attract a lot of postgraduate researchers locally and from abroad, while the permanent staff have excellent professional and scholarly links around the world. Meanwhile, management is cutting education/teaching programmes at a time when nationally there is a shortage of teachers! Of course, there used to be a separate teachers’ training college, with its own campus but that merged with VUW in the early 2000s, and the University sold the campus for a large sum of money… The illogical nature of these cuts is that they’re aimed at academically successful programmes that have soldiered on, producing good students and good research while the university wastes resources in vanity projects.
These cuts are sad, but within a recession it cannot be expected that jobs which have the least far-reaching influence on a countries citizens should necessarily be guaranteed
Aghast
Well done
If music be the food of love play on.
It is useless to sing the praises of musicology and argue for its relevance: the powers-that-be will never listen to that kind of argument. The only language they understand is if big donors cut back on their donations. Then they might reconsider.
==research in New Zealand music==
Oh sure, a great loss !
That comment does nothing except show the vastness of your ignorance.
The New Zealand School of Music at Victoria University is considered to be the finest conservatory on the island nation. If they wish to continue with that reputation, musicology will stay. Otherwise, many of their students will end up going of island to other countries to study music. Perhaps it is not important to the administration and sometimes the loss of top students has to happen before they reconsider their malevolent actions.
Is there actually more than one “conservatory” in New Zealand? That Victoria University even counts as one is debatable.
This is a good question – will attempt to summarise from my experience / perspectives (apologies for personal biases – feel free to add or disagree ! )
–Otago (Dunedin) – leads in composition under Professor Anthony Ritchie and piano performance and accompaniment under Professor Terrence Dennis.
–Canterbury (Christchurch) – Professor Mark Menzies continues the strong history of violin studies here. Francis Yapp is highly regarded as a lecturer / commentator.
–VUW / NZ School of Music: I can’t comment on its musicology (didn’t study here) but with access to the NZSO, it is the leading performance conservatory – all of the section principals are “artist teachers”, I think. John Psathas (composer) and Peter Walls (choral conductor / music admin) are Emeritus Professors as well.
–Waikato – standing out with the NZ Opera School which I think is endowed by the Dame Malvina Major Foundation. Professor Madeleine Pierard leads the school and other notables include Lara Hall (violin / viola) , Kristin Darragh (opera), Luca Manghi (flute), Anna Leese (opera) and Amalia Hall (violin). I think James Tennant still teaches cello there but I might be wrong about that.
–Auckland – used to be very good, now not so much (imho). The performance teachers are Auckland Philharmonia principals so that’s good. Piano remains strong with Stephen De Pledge, Sarah Watkins and Katherine Austin. Morag Atcheson and Te Oti Rakena lead the vocal school but cuts over years took out various other staff and programmes (shakes head).
New blog entry: Look, there’s a cloud in the sky!
A: Its the wokes! they are destroying culture and the world. AAAH!!
B: Its the alt right! they are destroying culture and the world. AAAAH!!
Rinse and repeat.
And these are the supposedly highly educated, enlightened, high IQ people who listened to Mozart from age 0 and look down upon the rest of society….
The charming sequestered world of academic music. Did they really think that shoe-horning identity politics and critical race theory into musicology was going to win them supporters and funding? It was borderline pointless in the first place.
When politicians’ main aim is to create poorly educated serfs to keep them in power and work in miserable, low paid jobs, you get this.
Hooray! Useless and self-indulgent ‘discipline’ serving no purpose even inside snooty academia. Let the redundant ethnomusicologists market their abilities in the real world and see how they go.
This is just the very beginning. Higher education in the US, at least, is going through the early stages of what will be seismic changes. All but the most well endowed public institutions are suffering budget cuts and strikes. It is the same for private institutions. We will see a wave of closures and mergers, as well as the cutting of music, arts, and humanities programs. Many institutions will go the route of Brandeis, seeking to create STEM programs they feel will lead to better paying jobs sooner, while reducing the humanities and arts. Fasten your seat belts. What Scott Galloway at NYU predicted is now starting to happen, it’s just taking a bit longer than he predicted and is compounded by activist labor unions, which he did not anticipate.
It’s the end of the age of enlightenment. Nothing to see here, move on.
All sorts of explanations are regularly offered for the decline of musicology, and this type of phenomenon, which resembles what happened at Monash University a couple of years ago. The point made above about academics denouncing musicology for a whole host of sins and complicity with many of the world’s evils, and then being surprised when university managers close down musicology courses, is not far off the mark, I believe. But there is a wider issue of what musicology is and is for, and what understanding (if any) there is of it outside of departments and institutions.
Musicologists, with a few notable exceptions, spend an awful lot of time conversing primarily with each other, not even necessarily with active musicians working outside universities. As a result, their discourse can become very insular, notwithstanding all the apparent engagement with colonialism, gender identity, and so on, and cut off from the concerns of wider communities of those interested in and caring about music – of whatever type, as popular music scholars may be even more remote from popular musicians and listeners than their classical equivalents.
In such a situation, how is a wider public, or even a community of university administrators, to understand what the value of musicology is, and why it should be supported? Or which 18-year olds are going to understand enough to be drawn to study it? One view I have heard, which I think is very valid, is that musicologists need to get out into schools more and talk with students about what their discipline entails. Some do this, for sure, but my own experience has been of huge resistance to this, by some claiming no-one in the world is more hard-worked than them.
Musicology stands to practical study of music rather as the study of literature does to creative writing. But the distinction between the former two has always been somewhat fluid, and has become increasingly more so in recent years, especially in the UK. I’ve come across numerous students who have little idea of the difference between university study and that at a conservatoire, pop school, production institute, etc. And the more that university departments try to become like the latter category, as many have (and often employed practitioners rather than scholars), the more precarious the situation of musicology becomes – for they end up boosting numbers by recruiting those interested in making music rather than studying about it, but who are unable to get into conservatoires, etc. Then some institutions choose to end the musicological side altogether. But I think it is very important to preserve and support this discipline, which has since at least the nineteenth century (and before that other forms of inquiry not yet formally constituted as musicology) has interacted productively with the activities of musicians, listeners and others, at least in some musical fields. We know far far more about composers’ work, activities, the performance cultures which existed when their work was new, performance practice, historical patterns of listening, the inner technical workings of much music, the relationship of particular music to generic norms, some of them now much less familiar than at the time, the constraints under which some musicians were forced to work, and much much more, due to the work of musicologists. Music would be much the poorer without a continuous and dynamic research and teaching culture of this type. And those who study it, most of whom will not go onto be professional musicians, will learn a myriad range of other skills which will serve them will in wider life and work.
If I may, I’d also like to give a link to an open access version of a recent article I wrote for Times Higher Education on this subject – https://openaccess.city.ac.uk/id/eprint/31206/ and a lecture from earlier this year which traces the history of music in higher education in the UK – https://openaccess.city.ac.uk/id/eprint/30326/