Where have all the music students gone
NewsIn a chilling assessment of the state of tertiary music education, Ian Pace predicts further department closures after Oxford Brookes and fewer employment placements for the dwindling number of graduates.
Here’s a sample from his must-read essay in The Critic.
… The most recent figures available show 16 per cent of students doing plain “music” courses, 26 per cent music technology, 19 per cent musical theatre, 12 per cent popular/commercial music, 16 per cent performance (around 12 per cent at conservatoires, 4 per cent at other institutions excluding private providers). All except plain music degrees are directly vocational, supposedly leading to particular types of employment, and are therefore less focused upon the delivery of “transferable” skills which would serve graduates well in other fields of work. However, the relationship between these vocational degrees and demand in the music industry is far from established — it is unclear how much properly-paid work is available to the thousands of annual graduates in music production and musical theatre…
Perhaps most significantly, there has been a sharp decline in provision of music in secondary education during the 2010s, with a fall of over 38 per cent in the numbers of state schools and colleges offering A-Level Music between 2010 and 2018. This last factor has meant a dwindling number of pupils leave school with the necessary skills in notation, theory, repertoire required to undertake a plain Music degree. Universities could offer foundation years to compensate for this lack of skills, but these are costly to provide, and can have negative effects on the wider metrics by which institutions are held accountable by governments… Cutting a music programme can represent a significant saving for universities facing financial difficulties….
Read on here.
Sounds doomed. Other humanities subjects are not much better off. English is at risk everywhere — how not? These kids do not read books.
I was watching last night an old interview with Terence Stamp and Parkinson. Stamp, an East End chap who never got to university, was recounting the day his agent told him to show up for an audition for Billy Budd. He was about 20 at the time, and it was a very early opportunity. When told the role he would be trying for was Billy, he protested that he felt totally unsuitable to play this angelic young man.
I was impressed that, at that age, with no higher education, he was so informed about an American novella. Or perhaps his knowledge of the story and character came from the Britten opera. Whichever it was, I’d bet very few people of that age could make as accurate a comment as that upon this or just about any other book. I doubt one young person in 500 could tell you that it was a book, let alone that it was written by Melville. Or that Britten (who?) has written an opera based upon it. Or, indeed, that there was a movie…etc.
We’re doomed: Arts and education account for nothing in this world where college education has been reduced to training people how to make as much money as possible by working as little as possible and retire as early as possible. Karl Marx would have been proud – the dehumanization of society has finally been completed.
Marx was not about dehumanizing and would criticize the corprate crap that is pushed onto the masses and ignorant people like you. Marx would have supported the arts and humanities today.
Hmmm, Pace seems to have left Music Education out of his assessment of degrees. Students who graduate with a music education degree are essentially guaranteed full-time steady employment in teaching. Most music education degree programs in the United States can boast of a near 100% job-placement rate for their music ed graduates.
There are very few Music Education degrees at undergraduate level in the Uk. Used to be more common than they are today.
It’s not just Oxford Brookes.
What does it say about a country when it doesn’t even consider its own language and literature to be worth studying at a high level? And the same Tory philistines who have spent the last 45 years (including Tory-lite Blair) destroying everything that is truly valuable in life in the pursuit of short-term gains, have the nerve to paint themselves as patriots when it comes to the economic idiocy that is Brexit!
If we think our own language is worthless, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that art, music, theatre and all the other creative arts will soon go the same way.
Sadly the UK has become an idiot nation that has no alternative but to hit rock bottom before we realise what we have lost and attempt to rebuild.
This is ultimately strictly a supply and demand issue. Are there enough jobs for all the yearly graduates from all these music programs? I think we all know the answer to be no. And that’s one of the key differences between a field such as music — taking into account its various denominations — and something such as medicine or law (which are often comparable in terms of the effort and years invested). When you become a doctor or lawyer, you have a reasonable chance of finding employment as a doctor or lawyer, whereas this is far from being the case in music. It’s true for what the author calls “plain music,” and it’s probably even more true for “academic music,” given how scarce and precarious academic jobs are. I believe there is here also another factor at play, which would be students’ own awareness of their professional prospects. A couple of generations ago, one went into music (as a performer) without necessarily giving much thought to one’s actual chances of being able to make a living. One had enough natural ability and talent to embark on an educational course and assumed that such talent would eventually translate into professional opportunities, which it did, for the most part. That is no longer the case — there are plenty of very talented performers who cannot find work, or at the very least work that is in line with their standard of playing. I would imagine the situation to be worse in “academic music.” Students nowadays probably have a much more acute awareness of their actual prospects and perhaps act accordingly, as people nowadays have much higher expectations for their standard of living and are far from seduced by the romanticized idea of being a “starving artist.” As far as “transferable skills,” that is rather laughable — why go into something for years with the mere prospect of acquiring skills that might be transferable into another field? I am not advocating here for the general cultural decline in today’s world, but I believe these are important factors at play. As students increasingly turn away from music, institutions such as schools and universities will in turn suffer. Ultimately this is the reflection of a changing society and of a changing marketplace where only the very best may have a fighting chance to make it.
‘This is ultimately strictly a supply and demand issue.’
Pretty much spot on as is the point of increased student awareness of their employment chances.
There is a tendency on these sites to hear people catastrophise about ‘cultural decline’ and ‘dumbing down’ of values that borders on fogeyism but in reality all we are seeing is a changing world with values that are simply different. Twas ever thus.
And don’t worry, young people know about plenty of stuff and in great detail, that the older members won’t have even heard of.
Obviously everyone was going to have to work after graduating, but when I was a student education was more about the “marketplace.” And employers were smart enough to recognise that educated people could apply the tools they had acquired — how to research, how to think, how to reason, argue, write, present ideas — as “transferable skills.”
But somewhere along the line the dumbed-down took over and are contemptuous of anything to do with education: expertise, intellectual ability, reasoning. And as a result any education beyond “marketable skills” is being reduced to hobbyism. IT IS NOT.
If there was more music education there would be more music students and bigger music audiences, which would mean more music groups producing more music which would mean more jobs in and around music.
The arts DO have economic roles: more visitors come to a place because it has arts offerings than because it has an ice cream factory. Concert halls may employ musicians and administrators, but they also employ cleaners and maintenance staff and support nearby restaurants and bars and hotels and taxi services and public transport links and clothing shops and even florists.
This is true of every discipline. What is being phased out is not music per se, it is any education beyond a skill training. But there are many places for such training — how have the universities been relegated to luxury items? Where the keeping alive of learning — an increasingly challenging task — is diminished to irrelevance? It is very dangerous, and can lead only to a primitive sort of survival mentality, which is ludicrous in a world that has come so far from that very state.
That opening sentence should read “education was about more than the marketplace.” May have been my mistake, or some glitch — screwy things are going on with this site (another few posts that were here yesterday have disappeared).
The other factor is the skyrocketing cost of higher education and housing. People can’t afford to go into hock for a lifetime and not have a way to feed and support themselves.
I attribute this decline in music offerings in schools to the generations of people who have endured poor-quality music curriculum in the past, and have now grown into decision-making roles. They can honestly say to themselves, “That music education wasn’t worth the time spent on it. Maybe our students’ time can be better applied.”
I’ve not heard anything about the role of generative AI in the classical music world. It seems to me that keyboard instruments in particular lend themselves to AI performance.
Indeed Steinway have already started down that path, although I’ve not heard anything to enable a judgement.
I’m a little too old-school to welcome such a development.
On transferable skills: how many do an English Literature degree expecting to be a writer. Or a literature degree in other languages? For that matter, maths, which was my first degree subject, would rarely lead to a direct job in the field unless one works in a university. Rather, the simple fact of having a degree in an established subject, from a good institution, will stand you in good stead in lots of fields of work, and employers recognise this – including with music degrees. This is what ‘transferable skills’ are about. BUT – where such degrees become increasingly narrowly focused on providing very specialised industry skills, the value of the degrees is diminished if one does not end up pursuing that vocation.
Do a good degree in a subject you love, and you’ll get work, so long as the degrees and the institution remain recognised and valued.
Later this week an article from me on ‘low-value degrees’ (and the history of the concept of ‘Mickey Mouse subjects’) will appear in Times Higher.
Probably paywalled. Pity — I would rather like to read that.
I so agree about the subject of a degree not mattering. As I have said above. I did it myself, taking a pair of English degrees straight into work for an MP — whose speciality, as it happened, was the Middle East.
If religion can wither and die then there’s nothing to stop culture – especially Judeo-Christian culture – enduring the same fate. So much of our western European legacy was dependent upon the Church and Christianity. If that latter falls out of fashion then the musical understanding of it will too.
In 50 years’ time what are people going to make of Bach’s sacred works, or Handel’s, or Mozart’s – or anybody’s.
Yes, they’ll be regarded as relics of the Christian past. I’m glad I lived during a period where it was still valued and understood.
Religion is not a requirement. In Wales, the chapel tradition is almost gone, but Welsh traditional music is going strong. And so are Welsh hymns!
Where have all the grammar students gone?
Doubtless there will now be a great shortage of musicologists.