How to make music work
Julian Lloyd Webber talks to Pippa Cuckson about why musical education is facing a crisis
JULIAN Lloyd WEBBER is the musician the media goes to for a trenchant quote. it obviously helps that his name is instantly recognisable, but he has always kept himself well informed, which arms him to speak truth to power.
Lately, he’s been denouncing the decision last month to ban secular concerts in St Sepulchrewithout-newgate in London EC1, which is the national musicians’ church, the dumbing down of music grade exams and yet more demoralising GCSE returns. Figures from the incorporated Society of Musicians (IMS) show a 7.7% reduction in music as an exam option since 2016, which is attri- butable to its exclusion from the rigid content of the English Baccalaureate (Ebacc).
This week, however, Prof Lloyd Webber, 66, can apply rather than simply vocalise his passionately held ideas about education with the opening of the newly built Birmingham Conservatoire, where he’s been principal since 2015 following the end of his career as a cello virtuouso due to a condition that afflicts his bowing arm.
Founded in 1886, the ‘Con’, which has Sir Simon Rattle as president, is the only one of Britain’s nine music colleges that is also a university faculty. The old premises were compulsorily purchased from Birmingham City University for the Paradise Circus regeneration. The lavish replacement—the first new conservatoire for 20 years—has five performance halls, including a 500seater capable of accommodating a symphony orchestra and some 100 practice rooms.
However, will future homegrown undergraduates be as prodigious as the present intake? Prof Lloyd Webber cautions that it’s already ‘very easy’ to fill college places the world over with talented instrumentalists from China, Korea and Japan, where western classical music is part of everyday life, in stark contrast to its evaporation from British classrooms.
He often quotes the PWC projection that 30% of existing jobs could be ‘lost to robots’ by the early 2030s. However, the music industry, by its nature serviced by living beings, contributes £3.5 billion to the UK economy and he points out that there are too many contradictions stifling creativity in the people we should be preparing for those roles.
‘Just as Britain is leaving the EU, why press on with a baccalaureate system originating from Napoleonic France?’ he asks. ‘And when standards of achievement in every field are ever rising, why make exams easier?’
He was shocked that the Associated Board of the Royal Schools
‘Just as we leave the EU, why press on with a system from Napoleonic France?’
of Music is switching its pivotal Grade 5 theory paper to multiple choice and that, in the practical grades, works his contemporaries prepared for Grade 8 when they were teenagers have been replaced by items from old Grade 7 syllabi. ‘A Grade 8 distinction may no longer be good enough to get you into an English music college,’ he cautions. ‘That was never the case 50 years ago—you had to play quite tough pieces.’
As for schools, the 2011 Henley Review’s 36 recommendations became the National Plan for Music Education. Prof Lloyd Webber said then that learning an instrument is everyone’s ‘birthright’ and the then Education Secretary Michael Gove seemed to agree, announcing that music is not the ‘preserve of those children whose families can afford to pay’. However, he simultaneously launched the Ebacc, meaning that State sector funding for delivery of the National Plan all but disappeared.
Not surprisingly, Prof Lloyd Webber is an inveterate letter writer on behalf of the IMS’S Bacc to the Future lobby, which wants the core syllabus to be rethought. In July, the Government diluted its Ebacc target, from 90% of pupils taking it by 2020 down to 75%. This was no altruistic decision—it was triggered by the shortage of language teachers.
‘There will certainly be a teachers’ crisis as far as music is concerned,’ predicts Prof Lloyd Webber. ‘Everyone needs security. If you’re told one day there might be music on the timetable and the following day there might not, you can’t plan.’
The Ebacc was notably absent from the last Queen’s Speech. ‘This goes against the public mood, that culture is important. There was a huge cheer when, at a rally in North Wales before the election, Jeremy Corbyn said every child should learn an instrument. That remark might once have expected a smattering of applause.’
Prof Lloyd Webber says that ‘endless surveys’ have proved what everyone who plays an instrument instinctively knows: that music benefits other academic subjects by developing pupils’ discipline, memory, handto-eye coordination and creative thinking, as well as promoting confidence through playing in ensembles.
Gordon Brown ring-fenced £332 million for music in schools, ‘but major cuts to music have always happened under the Conservatives, although they won’t acknowledge it,’ Prof Lloyd Webber points out. ‘It all goes back to Margaret Thatcher and local-authority capping. The first thing affected was what was referred to as “peripheral activities”. Sadly, nothing’s changed. It’s easy to destroy a really good system and so very difficult to bring it back.’
At least there’s a palpable spirit of ‘animato’ at the Birmingham Con. ‘The building was designed long before I arrived, but its vision will be very much down to me. Because we’re now on campus, we’re merging with the acting school, which opens up possibilities not available anywhere else. And as the music profession gets ever more fluid and flexible, being able to work with students across many genres is a fantastic opportunity.’
He observes: ‘The university could have taken a very different decision and shut the whole thing down, because a conservatoire education is expensive —they don’t get the grants other institutions do. Birmingham is flying in the face of what’s been going on and, I believe, will rightly be rewarded.’