The Long View | A music degree should never be a soft option

Another month, another death knell for a university music department. Only this time, it’s different. Cardiff University is a member of the Russell Group with a department that had good recruitment and a solid research base in classical music. This is the flagship university of a European capital. That it will no longer teach modern languages, ancient history, music and even nursing is a sign of the seismic realignment occurring in the higher education sector – or, put another way, a symptom of its destructive commercialisation.

So what’s gone wrong in Cardiff? I’m no expert – for that, you need to consult the likes of Professor Ian Pace, who has been collating detailed data on university and conservatory music provision for years. But given the healthy student numbers at Cardiff, it’s difficult not to assume that the university’s executives have subscribed to one of the fallacies pedalled by successive governments: that the study of the humanities is a soft option that will get you nowhere in adult life (ironic, given the number of high-flying politicians who studied history, philosophy and literature).

However much you might disagree with that position on principle and in practice, university music departments – though, ironically, not Cardiff’s – have exposed themselves to this criticism by increasingly pandering to the whims of their customers (sorry, students) who want to purchase their degree without the inconvenience of having to stretch their intellects, develop their skills, challenge their preconceptions or expose themselves to new aesthetics and disciplines.

There is a reason music has been taught for centuries at the world’s oldest universities, who last time I checked, weren’t offering courses in Shoe Studies. I consider myself of average intelligence for a graduate, but was challenged by the music degree I took at a run-of-the-mill Russell Group university. The range of disciplines demanded was unparalleled when compared with the courses my peers were taking. Consider the combination of acute skill and sweeping breadth implied by advanced instrumental performance, ensemble leadership, classroom harmony, musical analysis, imaginative composition, political and aesthetic history, criticism, practical orchestration, acoustics, music technologies and arts administration. After parenting and writing a book, inventing four-part harmony on manuscript paper in the silence of a classroom is the hardest thing I’ve done.

I remain unsure how much I actually learned from my music degree; I made some poor module decisions and spent more time sucking up the worldly truths that can only be taught by a city like Liverpool (and doing two music-related jobs on the side). But I know my degree pushed my mind and introduced me to big ideas I’m still drawing on now. I came out of it convinced that nothing of value comes easily and that, fundamentally, I didn’t know enough about anything. Is that such a bad way to enter adult life?

And it’s important to say this: as a nerdy teen obsessed with Wagner, I had no interest in popular music. So I made it my duty to take a semester of modules taught at Liverpool’s Institute of Popular Music for precisely that reason. This isn’t about pitting one genre of music against another and nor was popular music teaching and research at Liverpool. We were encouraged to explore links between opera and soul just as we were sent off to the piano, in pairs, to play and sing retrospectively notated songs from indigenous traditions we had never encountered (handy, isn’t it, how musical notation can open up worlds otherwise inaccessible?). 

Music is a language with multitudinous dialects and origins, a science hanging on varying forms of code and an art whose expression can be tangible or intangible. Its study hinges not on whether the student prefers Johann Sebastian Bach or Dolly Parton, but on an understanding of the musical properties of harmony, rhythm, timbre and technique harboured by both those musicians and all manner of less well-propagated ones. Only an understanding of music’s properties, functions and behaviours on a technical level can equip broader thinking, in sociological terms, about music’s tracing of the human condition through history. If you ignore 400 years of context – however disturbing its historical detail – you are hindered. If you can’t see that, it proves the point.

Open a virtual door on the debate surrounding the current state of music in universities, and you soon get to know where the divide lies. Some academics apparently care about those basic principles outlined above while others don’t. As for those who don’t, can we hold them culpable for the situation we’re in? For debasing the value of a degree in music? For fuelling the accusation that such a degree is a soft option by rendering it just that? For the resulting suspicion from potential music students that a degree in the subject won’t be worth much? I believe we can. If anything good comes from the current shakedown in the system, it must be a reaffirmation that the meaningful study of music to degree level is not a soft option. For all but the most gifted geniuses, it can’t be.