Why we should all fear the nationalist CULTURE WAR
Artists signing a ‘declaration of independence’. An SNP minister’s chilling decree. And a movement ready to challenge artistic freedom. Now the greatest Scottish composer of his generation issues an ominous warning:
IT has been a goal of nationalist governments throughout history to control what artists have to say. Revolutionaries seize TV studios so they can dictate the news – but they also want power over the wider media, including the arts.
In Scotland, we pride ourselves on centuries of artistic expression, unfettered by officialdom, producing some of the best music, literature and poetry in the world. But it is in danger of becoming a hollow boast: in reality, we have a nationalist government that appears determined at every turn to undermine that cherished heritage.
Culture is now regarded as a tool to enforce the politics of the separatist administration in Edinburgh – which is working hard to achieve widespread, general compliance.
A few days ago, crime writer and SNP supporter Val McDermid castigated BBC journalist and fellow Scot Laura Kuenssberg online for being insufficiently respectful to First Minister Nicola Sturgeon.
She joins a long list of ‘creatives’ (the Scottish Government’s preferred word) who have queued up over the years to offer their backing for the political establishment.
Shortly before the recent SNP conference, in a move co-ordinated with political handlers, 50 prominent figures in Scottish arts and academia published a ‘declaration of independence’.
It set out ‘guiding principles’ for matters including a new state, a new constitution and the expulsion of nuclear weapons. So, a lot of pro-Government political stuff there – but curiously there was no mention of arts or culture.
At the Holyrood election in 2016, the SNP made a manifesto commitment to ‘commence work on a national culture strategy which will be based on the principles of access, equality and excellence’ – but it has yet to materialise.
Bolstering ‘meaningful access to culture and the arts for all’, so that ‘more people enjoy more forms of culture more regularly than at present’ was among the objectives.
And an all-too ubiquitous phrase in government documents also surfaced – another aim was to ‘encourage sustainable and inclusive growth’.
This is the bland and universal language of political managementspeak which one also finds throughout the charity or so-called ‘third sector’ in Scotland – a sector meticulously colonised by the ruling political class.
However, one looks in vain here for a definition of culture or art.
Culture Secretary Fiona Hyslop has decreed that Scottish artists must have a ‘common understanding of what the country wants’, generously conceding that ‘[artists] don’t have to be close to government’, although clearly she knows there is a significant majority of that tribe who are desperate to be just that.
It’s odd – people in the arts, who often pride themselves on being free thinkers and antiestablishment, have, in Scotland, become something else.
Gone is the thirst to speak truth to power – in its place there is only a meek and mild compliance; a pathetic desire to please those in control.
Lost is the notion that artists should never have the slightest obligation to have a ‘common understanding’ of what a country wants.
Art does not – or should not – bend the knee to governments or their backers: since when did artists give up shocking the establishment in favour of bending over for it?
What, one wonders, would the Culture Secretary make of Alexander Pope’s aspiration to ‘wake the soul by tender strokes of art/To raise the genius, and to mend the heart’?
Nothing about kowtowing to ‘the country’ there. What about those who want to write for readers, rather than for ‘the country’? What about composers who don’t care ‘what the country wants’?
Art and obligation are very dangerous bedfellows: perhaps our political masters and their cultural cheerleaders need to be reminded that ‘the country’ voted in 2014 against their plans for separation.
Ultimately, perhaps the best thing would be for government just to get out of our faces...
The impoverishment of arts is happening in an area that is managed by councils under the direction of central government – state education – and in our schools and colleges, there is manifest cause for alarm.
There is a continuing and escalating worry about cuts to music provision in Scottish schools, the disappearance of free music tuition, the raising of fees which edge out poorer children, and a dumbing down of the music curriculum.
THIS last point is of increasing concern as it becomes clear that Scottish state school students are not being raised to the standards required for Conservatory-level study.
And if that means, for example, that Scottish state school children will find it difficult to compete with others in gaining access to Scotland’s own conservatory, the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, then we have a national scandal looming.
Anyone involved in classical music knows that it is an art form that brings the generations together, and that there is indeed a profound connection between what we do as
ageing musicians and what the youngest in our society might achieve in their own music-making and cultural life journeys, as they begin. This is once again brought home to me in the work I do with school pupils in Ayrshire.
A lot of our energy goes into involving, and indeed encouraging, young musicians, some at primary school as well as secondary, to perform, invent, improvise and compose their own music, which is given a platform in the festival.
Last year we inaugurated a project at Doon Academy in Dalmellington, where my colleagues and I gave intense supervision and teaching, on a one-to-one basis to a group of nine teenagers – eight of them young women – to compose short movements for string quartet.
These works were subsequently performed by the Edinburgh Quartet as part of the festival, and recorded for the students.
The project involved an intense learning curve with regards to musical notation, the understanding of instruments, and the basic parameters of organising abstract musical ideas.
It was all connected to the Scottish Qualifications Authority curriculum, so that the school would be able to submit the compositions as part of the students’ work in their National exams.
The nine Dalmellington teenagers were all in the highest bracket in this section of their work.
We repeated the project this year in Auchinleck Academy, and we will continue year on year, in an area of multiple deprivation – it’s our cultural strategy.
Further afield, schools are subject to the SNP’s Curriculum for Excellence (CFE) – and it’s simply not working.
That’s the conclusion of education expert Professor Lindsay Paterson, of the University of Edinburgh, who suggests that the CFE is in need of urgent reform.
There is now mounting disquiet at its failures, highlighted in a four-year decline in students’ performance in the recent National exams results.
The curriculum has been the centre of widespread anxiety – and this reflects a sense that the once-admired Scottish education system is now mediocre, and possibly in freefall decline.
PROFESSOR Paterson concluded: ‘The inadequacy of Scottish educational data is itself a scandal. The present SNP Government withdrew Scotland from other international studies that would have told us more about what is being learnt.
‘The pre-2007 coalition of Labour and the Lib Dems abolished the Scottish School Leavers’ Survey, an internationally renowned source that had been running biennially since the 1960s. Now the Scottish Survey of Literacy and Numeracy is also being abolished. Scottish education is a data desert.’
Professor Paterson pinpoints what the problem might be – there is ‘no recognition in the curriculum of a canon of necessary ideas or practices – no acknowledgement of any kind of theoretical framework that might give coherence to each curricular subject’.
In music, and I’m sure in the other arts, we have certainly noticed this.
And it’s not just that the kids might not actually ever hear any Beethoven, or know who Stravinsky was, but that the standard of technical ability in performance has been steadily reduced. When I was preparing to apply to university and conservatoire in the late 1970s, I was expected to operate at Grade 8 level in my playing. Now it’s Grade 4.
Right across the board, in all subjects, international comparisons show that neglecting knowledge and skill sets is educationally disastrous. Yet this is what our cosy, complacent consensus is bringing about in Scotland.
Any successful, visionary cultural strategy in Scotland will require a link-up with our education system, and the recognition that the knowledge and skills necessary for music (as well as maths and history, which are being nurtured in our competitor nations from China and Japan to Germany and even England) have to be at the core of our educational culture.
It might take at least a generation to achieve that, but the knock-on effects in our artistic and cultural life will be palpable as a result.
So where will the Scottish Government’s imminent cultural strategy lead us? What’s the thinking behind it?
As far as music is concerned, some clues have emerged in a progovernment book that appeared last year – Understanding Scotland
Musically. For its editors, the 2014 independence referendum is the ‘seminal moment in Scottish culture’ – and they claim that ‘musical nationalism is today on the rise, and as much as some commentators wish to divorce music from nationalism, music continues to be crucial in the construction of national identity and belonging precisely because of its affective power’.
They say ‘there are numerous striking examples of Scottish cultural and civic nationalists building support for independence in and through traditional music… [including the] Scottish Government collocation of traditional fiddling and piping with nationalism in their political videos and in tourism marketing… in a striking example of cultural nationalists supporting a determinedly civic nationalist campaign by the Scottish National Party’.
OTHER musical styles are given short shrift because they can’t or won’t fulfil this particular agenda. Pop music is dismissed: ‘There is arguably a Scottish school of popular music and musicians, but like the art music tradition, their musical habitus is located in an Anglo-American world.’
And these Scots popster Quislings are named – ‘big bands such as Simple Minds, Hue and Cry and Texas are all hugely successful popular music bands that came directly out of Scotland’, yet were working in a ‘broader Anglo-American musical tradition’ that is ‘far less interested in nationalism than their folk and traditional counterparts’.
Some of the book reads like an extended love letter to the Culture Secretary (and a complicated, indepth funding application to SNP arts quango Creative Scotland).
The editors bemoan the fact that ‘fewer than a quarter of Scottish state schools provide bagpipe lessons’ and that there is a bias therein in favour of classical musical instruments.
They should be much more concerned about the dismantling of music education in its entirety in Scottish state schools.
As for ‘classical’ music? Well, the editors are quite clear – they write of the ‘mythologisation of dead, male, white composers in the art tradition’, and that ‘it is safe to say that the “pale and male” lineages of composers of classical music still hold great signification in the public square’.
For this, they blame ‘those Tory politicians who have repeatedly sought to reinstate and aggrandise “dead, white Germans”’ within the English GCSE and A-Level music syllabus.
They must have missed that my Confession of Isobel Gowdie is on the English A-Level music curriculum too – a piece about a Scottish witch by a living (albeit pale and male) Scottish composer.
So there we have it – it’s the Conservatives’ fault. And the Anglo-Americans. And maybe even the Germans too this time…
Might there be some kind of attempted power-grab going on here, not just for the right to define real Scottishness and Caledonian musical purity – but for the government funding and policy alignment that might go with it?
In the final analysis, Miss Hyslop’s call for ‘common understanding’ is, in fact, something of a charade.
What she means, of course, is understanding – and that of her party and its many acolytes in the artistic realm it seeks to control.