Breaking: Wales cancels music degrees

Cardiff University announced today that it is cutting 400 jobs, closing the school of nursing and getting rid of numerous degree courses in the humanities.

Among the subjects to be axed is music.

The music department will be meeting at 6pm today to hear the worst.

Vice-chancellor Wendy Larner said: ‘The precarious financial position of many universities, particularly in the context of declining international student applications and increasing cost pressures, and the need to adapt to survive are well-documented. We know here at Cardiff University that it is no longer an option for us to continue as we are.’

Music was once part of the Welsh DNA.

Now, Cardiff’s concerthall is shuttered, its opera company is shrunk and its music education has gone.

Wales is in danger of losing its identity. It can claim the title of Das Land Ohne Musik*.

UPDATE: Professor Ian Pace, who did his PhD at Cardiff University, has issued this comment:

‘Cardiff was and is one of the finest music departments in the Uk, with enviable research and also very healthy recruitment. I did my PhD there, and am proud to have done so, and also once taught a little on the music course. The motivation for targeting this is unclear – it should be noted that it is one of the decreasingly few departments which still has a strong classical focus, and I do wonder if that might be part of it.

‘Music in higher education is clearly in crisis, as is HE in general. The financial situation is atrocious, and I do accept that some cuts have to happen. We have seen many in music HE fulminate against the type of teaching and research done at places like Cardiff, and an absolute lack of any coherent strategy for preserving the best of the sector from organisations such as the Royal Musical Association. As well as cuts at secondary level and so on, the musicological world has done a lot undermine itself, and I fear we will soon have a situation where there is little available outside of Oxbridge which is not simply vocational training at a lower level than offered at conservatoires.

‘Already in Scotland, I am told, it is commonly thought that a university music department is just a fall-back option if one doesn’t get into a conservatoire. The sector as a whole has done so little to promote the merits of musical study as an academic subject. Many once great departments are reduced to a pale shadow of their former selves. Scholarship is taking a back seat.

‘But right now I feel for so many distinguished academics I know at Cardiff who are facing such an uncertain future. They have done their best, but they inhabit an academic world in which the idea that what they do is elitist, colonial, white supremacist has taken hold and even informs many EDI departments and the like.’

* Almost. Bangor University still awards music degrees.