Issues Facing Our Conservatoria as They Prepare Their Students for Careers in the 21st Century

By Dick Letts

The Sydney Conservatorium of Music has embarked on a major review of its courses. It invited Dick Letts to set the ball rolling with an address to Faculty members.

Our task is to consider the nature of the musical education that will prepare Sydney Conservatorium graduates to function professionally in the world they will live in, in the twenty first century.

The present program of the Sydney Conservatorium is generally consistent with its title: it is a program to conserve and carry forward the high art music of the European culture. Specifically, it is a program to prepare students for careers as performers of Western "classical" music, with some nods also in the direction of composition including electronic composition on the one hand, and jazz on the other. In effect, numerically the objective therefore is mainly to prepare students for careers as orchestral players or opera singers.

With this program, the Conservatorium falls easily within the traditional mainstream of such institutions. Their programs depend upon the belief that classical music has qualities that justify its placement at the top of the tree of our musical culture, and so deserves special support from governments. It is a belief that has been accepted by governments, even though most of the citizens in our democratic society, who support the classical music institutions with their taxes, actually don't care for the music. But that's OK, because surveys show that the citizenry, even though it doesn't listen to the orchestras etc., believes that governments should support them.

For the public, it's the orchestras and the opera companies that are the most visible vehicles for our classical music culture. They have the biggest audiences. For most listeners, they are the point of introduction to classical music. It is probably true that in Australia now, their audiences have never been larger, their standards higher, nor their subsidies more generous.

An institution such as the Con might then feel pretty confident that it is preparing its students for careers in a prosperous and vital living culture, and so is engaged in a valuable and credible enterprise. The reason we are here is to examine that proposition and to see whether it might still be true 10, 15, 20 years down the track when our present students are out there in mid-career. In doing so, I am not going to look at how the Con might teach classical and jazz music more effectively and efficiently. That's a discussion you will have anyway. I will cast rather a wider net.

I guess the management, in asking me to open this review, is giving me the bad guy role. I get to put the awkward questions. Before doing that, I want you to know that I'm really a good guy at heart. When I go to concerts, they are almost always orchestral, chamber music, jazz or opera performances. Personally, I hope that there is a handsome future for all this music, and there is a good chance that that is so. But my personal preferences - and yours - cannot dictate the responsible course for an institution like the Con. We cannot sail this ship blindfold into the night, and tip our students over the edge into some sort of career destitution. To be a bit melodramatic - how would you feel if in twenty years the orchestras were shut down and hundreds of graduates of this institution found that the only skills you had given them were now useless?

I begin with the following speculation: viz. that the orchestras, and/or the opera companies, are essential to the viability of the classical music world. It is they that attract the large audiences, they that provide the main sources of employment for classical musicians. It is they, therefore, that offer one of the main justifications for the very existence of this institution. Without them, there are only small scale performances of chamber music and such - a very esoteric enterprise in the view of the general public, and one which offers at best part time employment to a very few people. One could speculate that a classical music world on this small scale would simply not have the power to sustain itself at a professional level.

Now, orchestras and opera companies are the creation of previous centuries. In our era, they have a very fundamental economic problem. Our world becomes increasingly efficient by handing over the work to machines or slave electrons. Fewer and fewer people are employed to get larger and larger results. But you still need four people to play a string quartet, you still need 30 or more players to perform a symphony of the classical period, you still need 100 or so players to do justice to a Mahler symphony and even more people to perform many operatic works. The efficiencies of mechanisation and computerisation that save money for the rest of the world don't help music performing institutions that depend mostly on live bodies.

In the mid-80s, the Australian Opera produced figures to demonstrate that its inflationary costs rose considerably faster than the Consumer Price Index, although government subsidies generally were hooked to the CPI. That is a credible proposition because the CPI is based on costs of all those other increasingly efficient industries.

But on top of that, musicians' salaries slowly increase. For instance, ten years ago the rank and file salary for SSO players was a bit below the average Australian wage; now it is suddenly quite a bit above, and the top end of SSO salaries begins to look like a proper reward for the high skills and devotion - at least in the Australian context. The market for orchestral and opera performers is international. You want the best, you have to pay for it, whether it's to prevent an Australian artist emigrating or to bring in overseas players. So not only are orchestras labour intensive in an era when that is problematical: the unit labour costs are increasing. Their relative position in the economy worsens.

These increasing costs generally cannot be covered from box office, even with lowest common denominator programming. Continuing existence depends on maintaining or increasing subsidies.

Whether this subsidy is forthcoming depends upon whether governments continue to be convinced that this music has such a special status that the spending is justified - and that depends ultimately on the goodwill of the populace, most of which listens to non-classical music. Can we depend upon this continuing? Let me describe some of the changes that we can all see around us, which might tell us about the musical attitudes of the populace. First, I want to mention a couple of things that put these observations in a special perspective.

The Nobel physicist Murray Gell-Mann describes an aspect of biological evolution along these lines. A species can stay relatively unchanged for a long time and then undergo rapid change over a relatively brief period. There can be a drift of small changes which lead to an unstable situation. Once there, additional small changes can have a disproportionate effect, and even radically alter the species. This dramatic change might be called a gateway or breakthrough event. The new version of the species might have special qualities that were quite unpredictable from the preceding circumstances. Or it might become extinct.

In biological evolution, a change of this type occurs over millennia. But Gell-Mann points out that in an advanced organism such as the human being, we can see that learning is rather like evolution: inasmuch as both learning and evolution are a series of adaptive changes to a complex environment. Adaptation by learning, though, is much, much faster than adaptation by biological evolution.

Like evolution, our learning can proceed through a succession of small increments, and then suddenly there can be a break-through event or theory which alters radically our way of conceiving our environment. Some will know of Thomas Kuhn's theory of the paradigm shift in science. Science at any time conceives of our environment according to a particular set of concepts - a particular paradigm. Any phenomena which cannot be explained by a current paradigm sort of hang around untidily at the edge of scientific theory. As more and more of them accumulate the scientists become more and more uncomfortable - until someone comes up with a new paradigm which makes sense of both the previously explained and the unexplained phenomena. This breakthrough event Kuhn called a paradigm shift.

Gell-Mann says that culture evolves in a way analogous to biological evolution, albeit faster because it depends also on learning. I am offering a hypothesis here that our musical culture shows the signs of increasingly rapid incremental change of the sort that can lead to one, or a succession, of Gell-Mann's evolutionary gateway events, and that this could radically change the nature and circumstances of our music, what it is, how it is made, who listens and where.

Let's look at some evidence.

There is an increasing appetite for the visual. In the USA, many orchestras in smaller cities, lacking government subsidies, have collapsed financially and gone out of existence. Others are trying to stay alive by adding light shows and such to their programs. But paradoxically, opera has sell-out performances. Here, within the serious contemporary arts, there is more and more talk of the cross-disciplinary, or of multimedia. And of course, popular music has long resorted to elaborate visual presentations, whether through the video clip or the light show in the stadium. Are we going into a period when people are not satisfied to simply sit and listen? Can they then absorb the complexities of the classical tradition if their minds are half occupied with the visual decorations? Wherefore the concert music tradition?

There has already been what might amount to a paradigm shift in the nature of popular music that greatly distances it from classical music. When I was young, Frank Sinatra was king. Frank sang with the backing of the Nelson Riddell Orchestra - orchestra, note. If you grew up with Frank's music, and then heard a performance of Tchaikowsky orchestral music, with a reasonably open mind you could easily make the leap from one to the other. The instruments, the harmonies, the melodies were roughly of the same family.

To the present. Early last year, for reasons that may not bear public investigation, I found myself at the Cross in the squalid basement of the Beefsteak and Bourbon Restaurant. At one end of this room, through the noisome haze from a smoke machine, could be discerned the flashing lights and thrashing bodies of a small dance floor. The music was supplied by a disc jockey. The dancers were not from the local menagerie - they were just ordinary looking young people in their teens and 20s.

The music, on the other hand, was in some ways surprising - at least to a recycled old relic like me. It was totally electronically generated. As you would expect, it took no intellectual effort to understand the beat. But often the sounds traced no melody or harmony; the interest was totally in their colour or timbre and of course their rhythmic placement. So here you have a bunch of ordinary kids spending a pleasant night dancing to music with melody that is not much more than vestigial, and harmony that is often not much more than implicit. Tchaikowsky's music is from another galaxy.

But Tchaikowsky is already on another planet from mainstream rock music. There is little crossover of instrumentation or timbre, melody, harmonic structure, rhythmic structure, sound levels, mode of presentation. You incidentally also hear them on different radio stations and see them in different venues, with audiences of different styles and age groups. How could rock audiences make the leap to classical music?

Well, we used to hope that it would be through the school music programs. But there are big changes there too. The picture I have of music in the schools is very mixed. On the one hand, the provision in some schools has probably never been better - in the private schools especially, and also in the specialist state music or arts schools.

On the other hand, in ordinary schools there are forces hostile to classical music curricula. For a start, in many schools the kids themselves simply aren't interested and teachers find they can motivate them more with classes in popular music. The new national Key Competencies structure accommodates such a shift by saying, in effect, students should be able to recognise a major chord and we don't care what style of music it occurs in. I'm not saying this is a bad thing, but it does in effect eliminate classical music from many schools.

Another problem is the increasing complexity of knowledge and the competition between more and more disciplines, including, it might be noted, other art forms, for the same amount of classroom time. When this is combined with the shift of decision making from the central bureaucracy to the local headmaster or parents' group, the opportunities to excise music from the program multiply enormously. And we may not even know it's happening. I remember calling the Victorian Education Department as long as ten years ago and discovering that because curricular decisions and teacher hirings were managed locally in each school, they didn't even know how many classroom music teachers were working in Victoria - simply not a clue - let alone what was being taught. In short, it may be that any expectation that a classical music audience is being fostered through the schools is now in serious trouble.

One of the most obvious and important phenomena is the fracturing of music and music audiences into small taste groups. This has consequences for the status of classical music.

Some evidence. Popular music is constantly generating new styles - you've heard the name-tags: acid rock, heavy metal, thrash, funk, grunge, hip-hop, techno, world music etc. etc. - and presumably each of these has its own adherents and audiences. Australia has been very good at supplying the international mass music market with rock music. But in the last couple of years there has been considerable gloom in the Australian music industry because the hold of this one style group over the mass market is weakening, and profits are threatened

In contemporary classical composition the same thing has happened: the hegemony of modernism has cracked apart and composers feel much more free to work in styles that are personally satisfying to them: minimalist, maximalist, complexicist, post-modern, whatever that is, and so on.

This fracturing of the music audience fits into some larger cultural patterns. Post-war, the ruling paradigm for the Australian immigration program was assimilation: we all hoped that immigrants would quickly discard their own cultures and blend invisibly into the Australian ethos. This has been supplanted by multiculturalism: a valuing of cultural differences. We want immigrants to become part of a harmonious whole but at the same time retain those cultural differences that are not disruptive of the common good.

We might recall the days when it was believed that the greatest musical favour that could be done for poor people was to give them access to the noblest of all musics, classical music, just like the rich folks. This is a sort of correlate of an assimilationist philosophy. The correlate of a multicultural philosophy is that each musical style has its own value. In the more objective version, Indian classical music, for instance, is as fine in its way as is Western classical music. Another version goes much further. The value of the music is in the ear of the listener. You may say that Western classical music is the greatest, but that's only your opinion. If I don't hear it that way, then that's the end of it as far as I'm concerned. In the Herald, popular music is reviewed with the same seriousness as classical music.

So we have dozens of little taste groups, each convinced of the virtues of its own music, in a culture which says each to his or her own, value the differences. The classical music group can continue to assert its superiority, but who cares? - it's just another taste group like the world music buffs and the grunge rockers.

There are also consequences from the value we place on innovation. For example, the Head of the Composition Department at this institution says he finds difficulty these days in judging whether his students' work is good or bad. The predicament arises partly from the fact that we have long exhorted our composers to be original, innovative. Now the more successful you are in innovating, the more you leave behind a common language of style, in which judgements of value can be made. A discussion of the relative merits of a work by Mozart and a work by Haydn can be very finely nuanced because we have a shared understanding of the musical language or conventions. A discussion of the relative merits of works by Xenakis and Michael Smetanin would be much more difficult. This question of value poses an enormous problem in teaching. If, because one style is as good as another, or because music is written in an unconventional or private language, you can't distinguish somehow what is good from what is not, what is the purpose of teaching? and what indeed do you teach?

So, the musical world has broken into a multiplicity of distinct or overlapping taste groups. Now each is separately catered for. Note that even in classical music this is the case. There are special performers and their special audiences for early music, choral music, contemporary classical music, electronic music and so on. The SSO has its various series catering to particular segments of the classical audience, from Mozart to the 20C. It no longer just throws all the styles in together.

The new technologies will serve this world very well, but they will entrench the segmentation. The tiniest interest group will be able to have its own radio or cable television programming, on a subscription basis. This is terrific in one way. Xenakis lovers can have the 24-hour Xenakis channel. And there is a rude honesty in it: any particular music will attract an audience or not, and we can know pretty exactly the size and nature of that audience. But what is the common culture we will share? Red-neck talk back radio?

You will be interested to know that a few years ago, the then head of ABC-FM radio told me that she thought that its classical music programming would eventually not be free to air, but would be available only by subscription. So people who haven't yet heard ABC FM classical music it won't be able to hear it, because they haven't subscribed, because they haven't yet heard it and so don't know that they like it. You wouldn't be able to stumble upon classical music on the radio. That's bad.

You might also be interested to know that the ABC in late 1994 was quietly circulating an advertisement internally for people interested in developing a pilot audio subscription service with five music channels - for opera, jazz, nostalgia, teen hits, and ambient music. Plans were already well advanced.

Finally, I will mention one other aspect of these changes in our musical world: a quite radical change of aesthetic approach. In most music, the standard classical repertoire above all, the composer, and subsequently the performer, is responsible for choosing and directly producing every most subtle characteristic of every sound. As audience members, we listen for and appreciate the way in which the artist controls these details. But there has been a trend over recent decades for artists to surrender this control. Jackson Pollock gave up control over the paint brush and its direct contact with the canvas, and in various ways threw paint at it. John Cage gave us chance music, or sat us down in the concert hall to listen to the sounds produced accidentally by other audience members, the chairs, the air-conditioning... One sound is as good, as beautiful and interesting, as another, he said. The serialist composers gave up most of their control by choosing a number system which then dictated every aspect of the notated musical score that eventually was translated into sound.

Now we can produce music by computer. This can be done in the conventional way in which the composer chooses and controls every note. A lot of film scores are created like this. But there is another way of working with computers which is much more, as it were, organic to their structure. The composer feeds in some mathematical rules. Then the computer takes over and produces an only slightly predictable stream of musical sounds. From this stream, the composer chooses sounds according to personal taste. David Worral from ACAT in Canberra works in this way. He sees it as a process that is consistent with our place in a world which increasingly floods us with information and sensations. We are always attending to some, filtering out others. Such a process, says Worrall, "tends to lessen the still powerful bourgeois link between art and ego: to encourage the surrender of the self to the half-seen, gliding beautiful things seen in a moment of reverie."

This aesthetic is not just off in a corner with the esoteric computer experimentalists. The DJ in the Bourbon and Beefsteak does much the same thing, except that he chooses from the streams of sound from existing discs that he had no part in making.

How would our classically trained instrumentalists cope in a world which gave itself over to this aesthetic?

Put all these changes together, note the increasing pace of change, and in one's bones one can feel that there is going to be some upending of the nature of our musical world, and possibly some gateway events and the emergence of something quite new and unexpected. Perhaps, indeed, this has already happened.

What will be the place of classical music in this new world? Who knows? But if its survival depends on a continuing political acceptance of the superior and special value of classical music to our culture, we have to accept that potentially classical music is at great risk.

Before considering the appropriate response of this institution, I would like to return to the present situation of classical music. It is a very curious situation. For about four decades after the war, classical music composition was pretty much under the control of the modernist aesthetic. The spirit of modernism was one of pushing forward the boundaries of musical content and structure in a brave attempt to establish a new musical paradigm for our times. The ethos borrowed heavily from that of science. Each work was an innovation, an experiment. The thing about scientific experiments is that they succeed or fail according to their internal logic and verifiability, not on the appreciation of an audience. The general musical audience tended to be regarded as a force hostile to the search for a contemporary musical truth. It might understand at some time in the future, but that really was not the composer's concern. Local composer Ian Shanahan has said that communication is a lower level consideration for the composer.

I personally like some of this music, and have spent years of my life supporting it. But the general audience, seen as the enemy, has not warmed to the music, and has stayed with the music of the past. With the style and repertoire thereby fixed in the 18th and 19th centuries, there must be a means of retaining some freshness and novelty. This has been found in part by extending interest back into the early music repertoire and authentic performance styles, but above all, through a focus on the quality of performances. The result: in classical music, performing excellence is no longer simply an advantage: it is a survival issue.

The task of any institution whose role is the preparation of classical music performers is thus to ensure that they reach that high level of excellence that qualifies them for a place in the professional world. This requires tremendous focus, dedication and plain hard work on the part of all concerned. If a student commits the time and energy needed to build performance skills to this level and to gain some knowledge of the structure and history of the music, probably there isn't much left over.

Unfortunately, the future of that very world for which he or she is preparing cannot be guaranteed. And if it does survive, it may be as a very small part of a larger musical or multimedia world in which the general aesthetics are altogether of a different order. Is it fair, is it prudent, to prepare students so narrowly? Is it fair, is it prudent, to allow them to follow this course in ignorance of the risks, or the alternatives open to them? On the other hand, if they knew these things, would they be so discouraged as to drop out of classical music? Would we thereby be ensuring its demise because we lack the musicians to people the orchestras and performing groups? - hardly a situation we would want to precipitate. Finally, to be brutally frank and totally unpopular, are we willing to bury our heads in the sand so that our own positions are not threatened through these speculations?

This is a terrible dilemma. I believe it is unethical to continue to train classical performers on the basis that that world will continue forever. But it is also inappropriate to train them only to a level of excellence from which they cannot be successful.

The solution, it seems to me, is that a way must be found to train to the requisite level of excellence, but that options must also be shown, and some education given which will empower graduates to explore these options. For instance, they must have some basic understanding of the new technologies of musical production; they cannot be left only with technologies that are from another century - and that not even the last century. They should have some sense of the structure of the musical world: how it is organised, how it is segmented, its dynamics, how, basically, to deal with it. The Con could actually teach popular music styles, like the Queensland Con; but pop music is so ephemeral, and you don't escape the problem of rapid change. Students need, above all, to learn a resourcefulness in meeting the unfamiliar, because the one thing that we can predict about the musical world of the future is that it is quite unpredictable.

I'm at the end of my talk, although this matter of resourcefulness is the beginning of a much larger issue, and perhaps should be one focus for your later discussions. If you will allow me a little coda, I will pick it up briefly. Scientific work on theories of evolution has been revolutionised in recent years through the use of computers. Scientists have devised computer simulations of genetic adaptation to changes in the environment. While in the natural world, such changes may take thousands of years, in a computer simulation, they occur very rapidly, and so it is possible to observe the evolution of entire artificial ecologies on the computer screen.

There has been one discovery which could be very important to our situation here. This is that evolution proceeded most swiftly and effectively when the organisms in the computer-simulated environment were given the most freedom to find their own way to adapt to changes in the ecology. What's more, the solutions they found were often very surprising, and would not have been thought of by the scientists.

Let us draw, unfortunately too briefly, an analogy for our present situation. We were speaking of living in a time of rapid cultural evolution. Now consider the situation for our classical music students. On the one hand they have to learn a stable classical musical tradition, and it is our role to pass along this tradition to them. We do this conventionally, top-down from teacher to student. In this task, cultural evolution is not a major issue.

On the other hand, more broadly the students have to succeed in a rapidly evolving culture whose future cannot be known. The experience of the scientists of evolution suggests that in preparing the students for this task, a different style of learning is required: one in which perhaps the teacher sets up the problem but offers neither rules nor solutions, and the student discovers some very flexible thinking skills, an ability to comprehend the structure of a particular environment and the problems to be faced within it, and organises his or her own adaptation to it. It's probably fair to say that we ourselves were never offered this sort of learning environment, and so we would find it difficult to design it for our students. But perhaps, in addressing the present dilemma of conservatoria everywhere, this could be a most significant and original contribution of the faculty of the Sydney Conservatorium.

Dick Letts is the Chair of the Music Council of Australia