Safeguarding and youth voice in music education – event overview

The third meeting of our emerging network on safeguarding in classical music education was held on Friday 25^th November at The Purcell School (with very many thanks to deputy head James Harding for arranging this and to the Purcell School for providing the venue as well as refreshments and lunch). Having an organisation which is at the heart of training elite classical musicians in the UK – and indeed internationally – offering to host this event is an important symbolic gesture about the sector taking a lead on this issue. Not only that, but our meeting was held in the Liszt Room, with portraits of 19^th century pianist and composer Franz Liszt all over the walls as well as one of his original manuscripts on display.

Abuse in music education: event overview September 2015

In September 2015, Lucy Delap (University of Cambridge), Ian Pace (City University) and I organised a half-day event for academic researchers to present their work to classical music education institution leaders on the theme of abuse in music education. We wanted to bring together researchers who were working on related areas, to start a conversation responding to the slew of high profile court cases around abuse in music education that had come to light since 2013 (see Ian Pace’s blog posts on recent and historic cases, as well as media discussions). We could not find any researchers working directly on abuse in music education – whether sexual, physical or emotional/psychological abuse.

Back to the songface

This post is about returning to teaching music after having written a critical PhD about it. I last taught music nearly ten years ago, while working as a freelance musician in Glasgow. I mainly taught piano students at Strathclyde university as well as taking the odd private student. My freelance work involved predominantly playing rather than teaching, but in the small amount of teaching I was doing I had an uncomfortable sense that despite corners of experimentation, I was mainly teaching the same way that I had been taught. As I’d had a ‘straight’ classical music education (other than Suzuki to start with) this meant canonic repertoire, lots of correction and technical detail, and working one-to-one rather than in groups. Meanwhile, in the playing I was doing as a musician I was having to use a much broader range of skills than my training had prepared me for – improvisation or playing around the score, transposition, interacting with a wide range of groups of people, and lots of emotional and musical support and flexibility for the musicians and singers I was accompanying. These skills hadn’t filtered into my teaching yet; and I was painfully aware that I had had absolutely no teacher training in music.

Now, having written 100,000 words on the ways in which class and gender inequalities have subtly (and not so subtly) made their way into classical music’s practices and pedagogies, I find myself at the coalface (songface?) again. I’ve agreed to take over my seven year old niece’s violin lessons. When I say violin lessons, I really mean music lessons – so far we are just using the violin as one of the possible ways at our disposal to make music (the others being a digital piano and singing). This came about because I was voicing my disapproval at both my nieces being put forward for grade one ABRSM exams. At age seven and eight, I think they have no business doing music exams. For the moment, I’ll leave the exams discussion for another post. But the upshot of my interference was that my sister asked if I’d be willing to take over my niece Isabel’s music lessons for a while. Thinking of the 100,000 word discussion I’ve just written, and my huge admiration for teachers like Jackie Schneider and Jason Kubilius who do this full time, I decided to say yes. It would give me a chance to have something special to do together with my niece, and also I had been meaning to learn to play fiddle properly for years (I’m mainly a cellist and pianist).

The challenges of diversifying the classical music profession

Ed Vaizey, the culture secretary, has just tried to give the classical music sector a wake-up call, in a speech to the Association of British Orchestras conference, saying that it needs to diversify itself. I haven’t found the full speech online yet, but the media reports quote him suggesting that established musicians should mentor those who are excluded due to issues of cost or culture, and singling out the work of the In Harmony project for praise.

I have written about In Harmony elsewhere; suffice to say here that a programme that spends millions to benefit only a few thousand children a year is problematic (I estimate around 3000 children in England take part in In Harmony, given that there are eight programmes with between 200 and 500 children each). I’d need to hear more about Vaizey’s ideas for mentoring to make a judgement on those, but this idea alone would be far from sufficient to overcome the barriers of cost or culture in gaining access to the sector.

Instead, I want to say something about how classical music’s particular history contributes to its lack of diversity. To be fair, as regards diversity, classical music has a lot in common with other creative industries – publishing, film, literature – which are all getting noticed for their whiteness and middle-class-ness at the moment. And I hesitate to confirm the exceptionalism of a sector and a tradition that already regards itself as different and special. But having said that, classical music’s particular history plays an important role in its lack of diversity today. The history has shaped the repertoire, the instruments played, the ideas of beauty, and the ways of playing together that have become normal in classical music. These historical ideas have sedimented to form the way the music is learnt and played and experienced now.