Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about music education. This has something to do with my university, ANU, choosing to save money by integrating the school of music into a broader school combined with the art and design school and the centre for museum and heritage practice and making several staff redundant, but it’s also a question I’ve grappled with before. In this post I’m mainly referring to music education in Australia, but I imagine it’s similar in many similar countries around the world.

Music exists in weird place, educationally. It’s one of the few subjects where a different teacher teaches it in primary school, but it also is one of the only arts that seems to be mandated in the curriculum (you don’t go to a separate dance or visual art class with a unique teacher, even though you use those skills in the primary school classroom). Early music education is primarily practice-based: you learn an instrument (usually the recorder), and the class revolves around the application of these practical skills. Theory and history is not taught at all until later primary and early secondary, when music spins off into one of a number of separate electives (which may also include art as well as languages and even mathematics). Even at this point, though, these theoretical applications of music take a backseat to creative practice, even though the class moves from performance to composition (such as songwriting and guitar playing). At some point though, performance becomes less important in the classroom, instead being taught as an extra-curricular activity through a music tutor. In my experience, most schools are run this way: even state-funded primary schools have a dedicated instrumental teacher, and students are exempted from a class to go to their music performance lesson. Strangely, these external music lessons then become integral to the classroom experience, with grades being assigned based on performances that require knowledge of an instrument. You can’t learn music in high school without playing some kind of instrument, but this is taught outside the curriculum.

This is fundamentally the issue with the music department in the modern university. University degrees are tightly-regulated and managed by external groups, so performance has to be taught within the curriculum. But to do so, you need to follow the model that already exists from the school curriculum; one-on-one teaching. At university, what was previously externally taught needs to become internally taught, but this always comes at a great cost for the university as one-on-one teaching is highly expensive, and a model not replicated in any other discipline. Physics degrees are not taught in a one-on-one model, neither is history, literature, languages, mathematics, computer science, engineering, or visual art. But you can’t get a performance degree without having the courses inside the university, and so traditionally that means you do a course of 12 weeks tuition with a teacher in your instrument, get assessed at the end, and receive accreditation for that course.

However, it is not so simple to just move to the external model that was practiced in school, where the university runs the assessments and the student has external lessons. In this case, the student has to pay twice for the privilege of a music degree: first to do the university course, which is one of the more expensive options due to the Australian Government’s choice to make arts courses more expensive, and secondly to do the lessons. The cost of a course is mandated at a specific price, but in this case it just goes to the running of assessments, which is not fair on the student. If you say, “well, can’t we just give the money the student pays for the course to the teachers,” and you have exactly run into the modern issue: you can, but most of these teachers are not full-time or even part-time staff and casual loading adds 25% to their fees. Many of these staff are also only in it for teaching, not the other requirements of university, such as researching and publishing, teaching theory courses, or editing and committee work. This is not to hold this against them; but it represents the dichotomy at this issue: teachers want to teach, students want to learn, and the way the current system is set up makes this more expensive than it would be were the students to pay their teachers directly, which they cannot do because that will not lead to accreditation.

So I return to the issue with music education — what is it for? Beyond this issue, we have one very real question, which is “why does a performer need a Bachelor of Music?” Many great performers never had one. Many great composers never saw the value in it either. In Australia, I would argue, the top diplomas of the Australian Music Examinations Board (AMEB) represent are an as good as (if not better) judgement of an instrumentalist’s capabilities. Indeed, their top diplomas are even viewed as equivalent to an undergraduate degree in that instrument. Many great performers will achieve this and not complete a Bachelor’s degree and not need one for they are fully devoted to performance.

Music Education therefore, is about more than performance. It’s about also learning theory and history and (ethno)musicology, which are not needed in the AMEB system (there is a small component to the exams, and they have a separate syllabus for theory, but this is not required for the instrumental diplomas). It’s about becoming more general. This is, in my opinion, more useful for the modern musician, who is rarely going to be exclusively a performer. There are so few top performing positions, that instead having a range of skills is more useful. I myself started as a composer, and have now branched out into academic analysis as well as music technology and popular music studies. I could have ignored these and just focused on composition, and I would be a worse composer for it. The direction the ANU music curriculum is going (which was separate to to the Change Proposals) is along this road; with two streams: one that is more theory-based, and one that is more practice-based. The last thing that is needed, then, is a way to keep pure performance as an option that won’t bankrupt music schools. One answer to me seems to be more federal recognition of the AMEB diplomas, which could have a HECS-loan pathway which would bolster the AMEB’s reach in Australia, ease the load on universities, and still enable universities to teach the music their systems are best-suited too.

What other ideas and suggestions do you have? Comments on my proposal? Please leave them in the comments below. Without finding a way through this issue, I think tertiary music in Australia will only continue to struggle with these band-aid fixes.