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arts funding, class, classism, education, elitism, Feminism, gender, intersecting oppression, misogyny, music education, music funding, music hubs, music industry, Ofsted, oppression, patriarchy, race, racism, sexism, Teaching
Paul Gauguin’s The Cellist, reproduced under Creative Commons license.
Earlier this month Ofsted published its Music in Schools: What Hubs Must Do report which found that Music Education Hubs (instigated in 2012 to distribute music education funding previously given directly to local authority music services via the Arts Council) are failing to challenge schools to provide access to music across a wide enough demographic range or to provide proper progression routes for young musicians.
This report comes at a time when I find myself questioning my role in the lives of the young musicians I teach, the prevalent attitudes and elitism of the sectors of the music industry in which I work, and asking if I really am achieving what I hope to in terms of the impact my teaching has, whether I want to be part of oppressive sectors of the industry, and if I can make a difference in making them less oppressive.
In east London I teach a young cellist, we’ll call him “David”, through his primary school’s contract with the local music service, which is also the lead organisation for the area Music Hub. I understand from concerned teachers at his school that David’s home life is chaotic: his older sister was recently excluded from school, and his behaviour in class is deteriorating. He shines at football and music but is disengaged in academic subjects. David’s cello lessons take place before the start of the school day, and it is not unusual for him to be half an hour early, arriving at school at 8am, asking about how to become really good at playing the instrument and watch videos of cellists on YouTube. That school and hanging round the music room is preferable to home early in the morning may be a symptom of home not being a good place to be for him, but he wouldn’t be coming so early if he didn’t see something valuable to him there. He has been asking recently about music colleges and which secondary schools have good music departments (he is currently in his final year of primary school), and applied to attend the music service’s Saturday Music Centre.
I feel it’s vitally important for David to attend the Saturday Music Centre if he is to have a chance of fulfilling his ambition of getting a place at a conservatoire, as access to a music degree course isn’t just about working hard: David needs high level ensemble playing to push his abilities, space at home to play an instrument, and people around him who encourage rather than discourage his music-making. The Saturday Music Centre would provide much of this. He has completed and returned the application form, set off with his mum to attend on the first week of term, got lost and didn’t make it, was given a map by his school’s Music Coordinator, and had a phone call from the head of the Centre to encourage him to attend. That was nine weeks ago, and he hasn’t made it there yet.
I started teaching at David’s school during the ‘wider opps’ era of free entitlement to instrumental tuition for every child at primary school. Most of this was delivered through whole class tuition. The funding and the obligation for provision has since disappeared but many schools have kept the free, compulsory for one or two years, whole class tuition model. David’s school is one of these, and takes the musical education of its students very seriously. He started off in whole class tuition, moved to a half class lesson, then was put forward by an engaged and concerned Music Coordinator for funding for an additional small group lesson.
I was a naïve undergraduate when the wider opps initiative was announced in the mid-2000s. In the final years of my degree I started working in the music industry and came into contact with musicians who had been recruited to teach on those very first wider opps programmes and gigged regularly with a musician who worked part-time as a researcher on the Sistema Scotland programme, documenting its impact on the families of the town of Raploch. Their enthusiasm for wider opps was infectious: they talked about how mass instrumental teaching would change lives, open up the doors of conservatoires to those from less-privileged backgrounds and demystify classical music for a whole generation. They spoke of the challenges of catering to a range of learning styles in one lesson, and the need for precise and careful use of language to get across the meaning, and I fantasised about what challenges I might face teaching a wider opps class and how I would overcome them.
Fast forward a year or so and I was skint, having just completed a Masters degree, and looking for work in London. I sent speculative applications to every music service in and around the city, applied for countless music teaching jobs, administration work, low-paid positions advertised as “early years music leader” that required marketing experience but no teaching experience and, upon closer inspection of the job description, seemed to be more about selling a product than delivering a high-quality, engaging musical experience; and unknowingly landed on my feet when the first organisation to offer me a job was a music service based in east London. They take wider opps and the legacy of Sheila Nelson’s Tower Hamlets Strings Project very seriously. They expect progression opportunities to match up with reality, strive to provide those opportunities, and make it known to their tutors that the “they’re just [name of impoverished east London borough] kids” attitude won’t cut it.
At present I’ve been teaching music in schools in two east London boroughs for several years, but it’s only over the last year that it has begun to dawn on me how disadvantaged some of my east London kids are, as I now have the middle class families at a Saturday music school I teach at in an affluent area of north London to compare them to. These families have the means and motivation to bring them to the Saturday school, support their music-making at home, pay for lessons and instrument hire, and take them to extra activities, such a recent performance of Britten’s opera for adult and child singers and instrumentalists Noyes Fludde they were involved in.
I don’t want you to get the impression I assume all middle class children are without challenges (as I write this I am sitting in a classroom filled with the glaring absence of a young cellist who has just been whisked off by a parent to a football match, or chess tournament, or some other high-pressure expectation activity instead of coming to the cello lesson they pay for weekly and rarely attend. The challenge here is to make playing the cello make sense for him when he attends lessons sporadically, having left the instrument in the case gathering dust for a month), but I find I can usually see a way to sort out their challenges, whereas in east London, I’m often left thinking “that’s just the way it is and I can’t fix it”.
To bring this back to David: boys’ GCSE results are way behind girls’ and they’re less likely to go to university. Black children are at higher risk of school exclusion than other groups. I feel like David’s ambition to attend music college has failed before he’s even started.
A certain colleague has intimated to me that they have lower expectations of the children they teach in east London compared to the children they teach elsewhere and I could say to myself “well that’s nice that David would like to go to music college but it isn’t going to happen for him so there’s no point putting the effort in”. I really hope this is bullshit but the odds are so stacked against him.
Several years ago two other colleagues returned from a strings teachers’ conference fuming at being patronised by a private school Head of Strings who, upon hearing that they taught in east London, said “oh, I always think that what you do is like being an aid worker”. This particular comment may not have any direct effect on David and other east London young musicians, but if and when they enter the wider classical music world, they will find entitled, patronising arseholes like this guy, and his students who have learned entitled, patronising arsehole behaviour from his example.
Recently I played in a pit where all of the 16 musicians were white and two thirds were men. This is appalling in such a racially diverse city as London but perfectly normal. During the week’s work, I counted two incidents of casual racism and one rape joke. A few years ago I witnessed two male colleagues discussing the suitability of the various Musical Directors they knew for a job: one was dismissed as unsuitable because “her tits are so big she won’t be able to reach the piano”. In the three years I’ve been playing in London pits I have done just one single performance with a musician of colour. On every other show (and they’re in their hundreds) the pit has been 100% white.
Say David does “make it” despite all the odds and get place at a conservatoire. what happens when he starts gigging in his third or fourth year? When he encounters racist colleagues and over and over is the only person of colour on the job? When he is patronised and passed over for work by middle class entitled arseholes? Will he tough it out? Will he find enough work to earn a living from?
What about the young musicians with even fewer opportunities than David? Those with a difficult home life, plus an instrumental teacher who has low expectations and sees challenging behaviour as a burden they could do without, in a school with an uncaring Music Coordinator or no Music Coordinator at all?
Am I dangling a prize in front of David that he has no hope of ever winning? Am I only providing him with yet another opportunity to feel an inadequate failure? We called it ‘wider opportunities’ but if the opportunities are only new ways to fail should we be offering these opportunities at all? Is the teaching I do really doing more good than harm? Should I be doing it differently? Should I be doing it at all? Should I be taking jobs in pits where I’m the only woman* amongst a sea of white men? If, when a fixer books me for a show, I ask how many women and people of colour they’re booking, and whether they’ll support me if I call out oppressive behaviour amongst my colleagues, will they book me at all? Can I earn a living whilst doing what’s right?
Ofsted’s requirements for Music Hubs to challenge music education in schools don’t go far enough: in the sectors of the music industry one is likely to enter if one learns an orchestral instrument such as the cello, racism, sexism and classism are pervasive. Ofsted, Music Education Hubs, the Government, music charities, and those within the industry must challenge sectors such as classical orchestras and musical theatre to take steps to ensure their pits and concert platforms are less male-and-pale, set clear expectations for appropriate behaviour, and ensure their workplaces are safe spaces for challenging racism, sexism and classism when it occurs. All the progression opportunities we can throw at young musicians at school will amount to nothing if the wider culture of elitism doesn’t change fast.
*I actually identify as genderqueer rather than female, but have used the term “woman” here because I am mostly read as female and am writing about the barriers my students will face to working as musicians. Whilst trans* people, along with LGB people (with the possible exception of gay men, but I digress…), are marginalised in the sectors of the music industry I’m discussing, I feel transphobia, homophobia and bi-erasure are barriers that will only affect a small minority of my students, if at all, compared to issues of gender, class and race, and that writing about them in this piece would re-focus the discussion from their issues to mine. It would be the equivalent of a man shouting “MEN GET RAPED TOO! WHAY AREN’T YOU TALKING ABOUT THAT?” over a woman recounting her sexual assault. It’s just not appropriate.