Richard Morrison

Why I fear for tomorrow’s university music graduates

There should be a special phrase for this time of the year. ‘Early autumn’ doesn’t quite do it. At universities and colleges around the country, freshers’ weeks will soon be in full, intoxicating swing, initiating another batch of fresh-faced teens into the manifold joys and occasional woes of student life. Meanwhile, their older peers, the ones who graduated this summer, will have returned from their chill-out weeks in Thailand and be embarking on their first ‘proper’ jobs. Or, more likely, starting to realise that those jobs are scarcer than they thought.

It should be a season of high hopes, but I can’t remember a time when the intrinsic value of higher education has been under so much sceptical scrutiny. And that scepticism is multiplied many times for courses such as music which are theoretically ‘vocational’ but feed a profession beset with insecurities.

Let’s consider the perfect storm afflicting music education right now. Because of how the government’s lamentable Ebacc is structured, and because the Russell Group of elite universities don’t accept music as a valid ‘facilitating’ subject, there has been an alarming decline in entrants for music GCSE and A-level. That has coincided with cuts to local-authority budgets, forcing councils to abandon or reduce their commitment to instrumental tuition and youth ensembles.

Much has been written about the negative effects of all that on young people, many of whom won’t now get the chance to develop their musical talents, understanding and knowledge. That’s tragic. But let’s also consider the knockon effects for the music profession.

Fewer pupils taking music GCSE and A-level means fewer classroom music teachers, and thus fewer jobs for music graduates. Fewer youth bands and orchestras means less peripatetic work for instrumental and vocal tutors – peripatetic work that is the backbone of many a jobbing musician’s career.

Then there’s the effect on university applications. Many 18 year-olds and their families are already uneasy about putting themselves £27,000 in debt to get a degree. In areas such as music where graduate employment prospects seem to be shrinking by the month, that unease is intensified. It doesn’t help that contact time with tutors seems much skimpier on arts courses than for science degrees. My daughter, who studied history of art at a distinguished northern university, received just four hours a week of tuition and lectures in her final year.

But if more and more youngsters are put off studying music at college or university, those institutions will close their music departments. Several already have. Not only will that diminish the number of university teaching jobs for musicians, it will affect how music develops as an artform. In the past, universities were enlightened enough to support fine composers and musicologists by giving them teaching jobs that left plenty of time for them to write music or prepare new editions of older pieces. Few vice-chancellors would countenance that ‘luxury’ now.

Then there’s Brexit to consider, particularly if – as seems increasingly likely – we crash out of the EU in disorderly fashion. So many of Britain’s higher-education institutions, and particularly our music conservatoires, depend on income from foreign students. And you only have to attend an end-of-term production at one of those conservatoires to realise that students from other EU countries also make a huge artistic contribution.

In 1904 a German critic famously described Britain as a ‘land without music’. That was humiliating, but proved to be a wake-up call. Within 60 years British musical life went from rank amateur to world-class. It was the age of Elgar, Britten, Walton, Vaughan Williams, ★olst and Tippett. It saw the founding of the five London orchestras, Radio 3, the Royal Opera and ENO’S forerunner, and dozens of superb music festivals. And, for the first time in Britain, there was solid music education from infant school to university. But that was then. I’m horrified by how far my generation has whittled away the music education ethos established by farsighted Victorians and Edwardians.

I would never say to a teenager ‘don’t study music’. It is humanity’s greatest and most mysterious invention, and a lifetime is not enough to unlock a fraction of its marvels. But I have never been more pessimistic about the chances of music graduates finding work in the music business, nor about the indifference of politicians to this gathering cultural catastrophe.

Richard Morrison is chief music critic and a columnist of The Times

I’m horrified by how far my generation has whittled away our music education ethos