The Spin Doctor Europadisc's Weekly Column

The closure of a music department at one of the UK’s less illustrious universities might seem to be of minor concern to the wider musical world. Yet the announcement last week of the immediate shutdown of the music course at Oxford Brookes University (the city’s former polytechnic) is deeply worrying. Some staff have been summarily dismissed, while others will be retained to ‘teach out’ the remaining cohorts of students. This case has made headlines because it highlights the wider predicament of academic music in Britain and in the world beyond. For some time now universities have been under pressure both to teach increasing numbers of students, and to offer ‘value for money’ (shorthand for vocational courses that will provide seamless entry into the jobs market).

Music, like other subjects in the humanities, is under pressure because it is widely deemed to be less focussed and potentially lucrative for students, with fewer immediate prospects in the jobs market: study for study’s sake, as it were. While music colleges and conservatoires focus on producing professional-standard performers, and the fast-emerging ‘music tech’ courses concentrate on such nuts-and-bolts matters as sound recording and production, traditional university music courses have typically been more wide-ranging, covering music history, theory and analysis in the ‘classical’ sphere, as well as options to study a broader selection of ‘musics’ such as jazz, film music, popular music and music from around the globe (‘world music’ or – to use its more traditional name – ethnomusicology).

In the past few decades, under pressure like all courses to attract more students, university music departments have embraced such approaches as critical thinking, urban geography, feminist and LGBT+ studies, and decolonisation. While none of these subjects should be out of bounds for any university department (as they bring today’s many of today’s concerns to bear on the main subject of study), the result has been a loss of focus on music as a discipline in and of itself. Comparisons with, say, university courses in medicine or engineering may seem wide of the mark. Yet any university music course that doesn’t introduce students to such technical areas as harmony and counterpoint, hocket, isorhythm, theory of orchestration and so on risks impoverishing their interaction with a far wider range of ‘musics’ than just the traditional classical ‘canon’.

Music, like other humanities subjects, has come under attack in recent years for being ‘woolly’, lacking in focus, and offering few job prospects after graduation. The pressure to attract higher numbers of students, as well as combatting accusations of perceived ‘elitism’ in the subject itself, have added to its woes. Yet any university subject that offers specialisation in a particular area could just as well be termed ‘elitist’, whether it’s life science (formerly biology), architecture or metallurgy. In the case of music, however, it was one of the key university subjects as long ago as the middle ages, when – together with arithmetic, geometry and astronomy – it formed one of the four components of the quadrivium, the upper division of medieval education. Together with the ‘foundational’ subjects of the trivium – grammar logic and rhetoric (all ‘transferable skills’ in today’s jargon) – it formed one of the seven liberal arts. This in itself is, naturally, no reason to preserve courses today which aren’t working at particular institutions. Yet the wider present-day attacks on the humanities risk undermining the very founding spirit of university education: dump the humanities and you’ve lost much of the very spirit of higher learning itself.

And what of music today? Only a handful or so of contemporary composers can make their living by composition alone. For many, teaching – whether at a music college or university – is the primary source of income and stability. Lose university music departments and we also lose an essential lifeline for music today, whatever boundaries it might cross, span and challenge. Even those few living composers who are (relatively) household names have relied on teaching at least in the past, and many continue to do so.

The attack on academic music study has gradually undermined the sure foundations of the 1970s and 80s, and while nothing is forever, the speed at which the sands have shifted – away from the certainties of the quasi-scientific studies of sources, historic documents and scores, and towards an ever more questioning relativism and revisionism – has left the subject in a shaky and vulnerable position. The erosion of standards – amid the increasing clamour of fee-paying students and parents for higher marks – has impacted on teaching to an alarming extent, and those institutions which have bowed to prevailing, fast-changing winds may in many ways be more vulnerable than those with a more traditional approach. And the exodus of the academic ‘characters’ of old, who exuded above all a love for their subject, to be replaced by compliant, institutionalised yes-men and women (a change reflected in wider society, as for example in the political sphere) has further weakened the discipline. How can a subject be truly healthy if its teachers can’t express a passion for it? In reality, nowhere in the humanities, and particularly in the resource-intensive world of music education, is safe right now. And that should concern us all.