One Oxford college receives £6m music gift, another shuts down
NewsMessage from Queen’s College Oxford:
The Queen’s College is delighted to mark the start of 2024 with the announcement of a £6.3 million gift to endow permanently its Fellowship in Music and to create a future Director of Choral Music post.
The College celebrates this inspiring gift at a time when music education and the performing arts are particularly under threat. The Covid-19 pandemic accelerated a decline that was already in motion; funding has been cut at every level: from school pupils learning about music for the first time, to entire music departments at higher education institutions.
Professor Owen Rees now becomes the first Waverley Fellow in Music at Queen’s and, upon his retirement, the College will split the academic teaching of music and the directorship of the choir into two distinct roles and appoint the first Waverley Director of Choral Music.
The announcement came on the day that Brookes University Oxford shut down its music department with the enforced redundancy of nine tenured academics.
Once again, Oxford Brookes is NOT a college of Oxford University. And it’s Oxford Brookes University, not Brookes University Oxford.
If there’s anything to show from this comparison, it’s that music education at British universities is thriving, provided it’s for wealthy institutions backed by private philanthropy. Institutions which don’t cater to the upper classes can close, the state just doesn’t care.
Oxford University does not “cater to the upper classes”, any more than any other UK university. Entrance is on academic merit and the fees payable by UK students are the same as anywhere else. (In fact I’ve heard it remarked that the undergraduates at Brookes are often noticeably posher than at the older University).
Yes, and no. Depends which part of Oxford, but overall, there is by and large a fairly rigid class system among universities, between the ‘old’ ones (with Oxbridge at the pinnacle), the pre-67s, and the post-1992s. The fact that individual students move between them doesn’t negate that.
By the way, per Wikipedia, Queen’s College, Oxford has an endowment of 291 million £ (over 8 billion £ for Oxford University as a whole); Oxford Brookes has an endowment of 2.5 million £.
There is some difference.
This article is indeed confusing. Oxford Brooks is nowhere near the quality and wealth of music tradition of the Oxford University. Not only on the performance side but also on the academic side. If I had a stash of money I would also feel that investing in the OU is a wiser investment. Especially that the OU supports lots and lots of musical activities. Also the amateur ones. BTW, I remember that 30 years ago there was a lot of talking about building a proper concert hall for the university orchestras. Has anything been done towards that direction? Or is it still just Sheldonian and the Town Hall?
A 500-seat concert hall is part of the Schwarzman Centre, due to open in 2025.
https://www.schwarzmancentre.ox.ac.uk/About (Scroll down to “Community spaces and cultural programming”)
That’s true, but many in Oxford feel that the new hall in the Schwartzman Centre is something of a missed opportunity. What the town lacks is a large hall capable of accommodating a full-sized symphony orchestra and an audience of around 1000, and the new plans won’t provide that.