Academy uproar: Weimar shuts down early music
NewsThe Council and Senate of the Weimar University of Music decided last night to close the Institute for Early Music. It’s not just Oxford and Cambridge that have devalued music studies.
Weimar is reallocating its priorities to pedagogy, teacher training and cultural management.
Goethe, Schiller, any thoughts?
Sadly this kind of thing is happening in music academies all over the place. Serious musicological studies giving way to less academically rigorous, more market-orientated courses with anomalous titles like “cultural management”. Whatever happened to the ideal of scholarship and learning for learning’s sake?
“Die Präsidentin der Liszt-Hochschule, Anne-Kathrin Lindig, setzt auf Fächer wie Pädagogik, die Lehramtsausbildung, das Kulturmanagement und sogenannte »kleine Fächer« wie Klavier, Akkordeon, Gitarre, Orgel oder Jazz.”
This means that, because of financial reasons, Early Music is sacrified to ‘small subjects’ like piano (!!! At the Franz Liszt Academy), Accordeon, Guitar, Organ or Jazz, and teaching and (important!) Culture Management. In other words: subjects which seem to be more directly related to the modern world.
“No depth please or Gründlichkeit.”
Had this happened in a small provincial place somewhere in the deep woods of the Pfalz or Bavaria, it would also be a very sad occurrance, bit this is in Weimar, the place where the great German ‘Klassik’ was born which led to the starry activities of Goethe and Schiller. It is like people who inherited costly antique and jewels from their family and exchange them for plastic nondescript modernity because they have no idea of the value of what had fallen into their lap by circumstance.
How about BACH, any thoughts?
What is ‘cultural management?’
it is the knowledge of how managing your career, how to get a music management, how to create a website, how to convince programmers, how to handle money and how to fill-out your diary with the travelling and the like, and how to handle your private life (family, relationships, kids, money).
This weeds-out genuine great talents who have no idea how to handle their life and have no talent whatsoever to even begin to understand a course in Cultural Management. And it filters-out the less great talents who want to compensate their musical inadequacies with lots of mental efforts to get as yet a place in an ensemble/orchestra, or get engagements.
It is part of the modern bureaucratiation of music life so that every aspect of it can be controlled, steered, made subordinate to values that are not musical or even cultural. When music life is run as a business, management control makes it so much more easy to keep personnel afloat.
A pity but no suprise. The Hochschule für Musik Franz Liszt has had internal problems for quite some time. There has also been recent talk of shutting down the opera department due to poor student outcomes, and the young artist program in partnership with four opera houses in Thüringen was allowed to wither on the vine due to a lack of will at the university to continue to administer it.
There were also allegations of sexual harassment leveled at a senior professor, which were (allegedly) swept under the carpet by the president.
The conducting department is still generally well-regarded and there are a number of excellent professors on staff. As at most conservatories, the problems seem to stem largely from administrative incompetence.
It might be new in Europe but it has been happening, from a very long time ago elsewhere.
How many students were in the early music program? That can also be a consideration.
Liszt, in his grave in Bayreuth, must be spinning.