SIMON FRITH

Why music matters

Inaugural lecture given at the University of Edinburgh,6 March 2007

I should begin this lecture by saying that I feel very privileged andeven more surprised to be addressing you this afternoon as the DonaldTovey Professor of Music, and it is perhaps appropriate to introducemy remarks by referring to an essay written by Paul Johnson in TheSpectator a couple of months ago under the heading: ‘The best thingever written about music in our language’. Johnson opens his essaywith these words:

If I had a teenage child with a passion for serious music I would nothesitate to give him or her Essays in Music Analysis by Donald FrancisTovey.1

The basis of these essays was the programme notes Tovey wrote for theconcerts he conducted with the Reid Orchestra, which he foundedwhen he became Reid Professor of Music at Edinburgh in 1914.Johnson calls Tovey’s Essays ‘his masterpiece, his monument and hisachievement, without parallel in the history of music in Britain’.Having begun by describing Tovey as one of ‘the three greatest writerson music in English’, Johnson concludes that he is the greatest, ‘becauseof his combination of originality, authority (based on his enormousknowledge) and nerve’.

In occupying the chair bearing his name, I suppose the only oneof these qualities I might possess is nerve. (And certainly, onthis occasion, nerves.) But, in fact, Donald Francis Tovey and Ido have two things in common. First, we both went to BalliolCollege, Oxford – though admittedly he had a music scholarshipwhile I read Philosophy, Politics and Economics. Second, we bothwrote musical entries for the Encyclopaedia Britannica, thoughadmittedly his entries were devoted to what Paul Johnson calls‘serious music’ while mine covered rock music, the novelty song andthe pop ballad.

I have no idea what Professor Tovey would think of someone like meoccupying a chair in his old department in his name – though in hisviews of the significance of recording, for example, he was much lessconservative than one might expect. But I have no doubt at all that PaulJohnson would be appalled. A little over forty-three years ago, on 28February 1964, Johnson wrote another essay on music, this time for theNew Statesman rather than Spectator, under the title ‘The Menace ofBeatlism’.

I remember reading this article when it first came out – I had leftschool but not yet started university and in retrospect I can see that ithad a significant influence on my academic career, if not quite for thereasons Johnson might have intended. It should be stressed thatJohnson’s article was not called ‘The Menace of the Beatles’. He had nointerest in the Beatles’ music; he assumed its worthlessness. Whatconcerned him was intellectuals taking such music seriously. ‘Ofcourse,’ he wrote,

our society has long been brainwashed in preparation for this apotheosisof inanity. For more than two decades now, more and more intellectualshave turned their backs on their trade and begun to worship at the shrineof ‘pop culture’. Nowadays, if you confess that you don’t know thedifference between Dizzy Gillespie and Fats Waller (and what is moredon’t care) you are liable to be accused of being a fascist.

To buttress their intellectual self-esteem, these treasonable clerks haveevolved an elaborate cultural mythology about jazz, which purports todistinguish between various periods, tendencies and schools. The subjecthas been smeared with a respectable veneer of academic scholarship, sothat you can now overhear grown men, who have been expensivelyeducated, engage in heated argument as to the respective techniques ofCharlie Parker and Duke Ellington. You can see writers of distinction,whose grey hairs testify to years spent in the cultural vine-yard, squattingon the bare boards of malodorous caverns, while through the haze ofsmoke, sweat and cheap cosmetics comes the monotonous braying ofsavage instruments.2

Johnson could only explain such ‘intellectual treachery’ by reference towhat he called the new ‘cult of youth’. And here, he suggested,intellectuals were wilfully misreading the Beatles’ significance. ‘Atsixteen,’ he writes,

I and my friends heard our first performance of Beethoven’s NinthSymphony. I can remember the excitement even today. We would nothave wasted 30 seconds of our precious time on The Beatles and their ilk.Are teenagers different today? Of course not. Those who flock round TheBeatles . . . are the least fortunate of their generation, the dull, the idle, thefailures: their existence in such large numbers is a fearful indictment of

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our educational system, which in ten years’ schooling can scarcely raisethem to literacy.

What the Beatlists failed to realise, in Johnson’s words,

is that the core of the teenage group – the boys and girls who will be thereal leaders and creators of society tomorrow – never go near a popconcert. They are educating themselves. They are in the process ofinheriting the culture which, despite Beatlism or any other mass-produced mental opiate, will continue to shape our civilisation.3

Even when I was a teenager Johnson’s argument seemed boneheaded. Iwas someone who had (not atypically) queued all night to get Beatlestickets while revising for A levels, and I was listening at this time, withequal excitement, to Jerry Lee Lewis and Dave Brubeck, Gilbert andSullivan and Penderecki, Dusty Springfield and Mahler’s Song of theEarth. I certainly didn’t regard myself as the least fortunate of youths.And, on the other hand (and even putting aside Johnson’s classsnobbery), the account of ‘civilisation’ he offered seemed remarkablylimited, implying that the musical activities and pleasures of themajority of the world’s population had nothing to do with culture atall.

My response to Johnson, in short, was a conscious decision tobecome a treasonable intellectual, to treat popular music as seriousmusic. More particularly (and it took my undergraduate degree to helpme make this an academic decision), I decided that music was asuitable subject for sociology and, further, that there was no reason fora sociologist to accept a priori any difference between serious andpopular music at all.

I need to make clear what I am arguing here. It is obviously the casethat by the end of the nineteenth century one could describe, in broadterms, two different musical worlds in Britain, organised in differentinstitutions, understood according to different musical discourses.Various (not altogether satisfactory) labels can be applied to theseworlds – the high and the low, the serious and the popular, art musicand commercial music, and so forth. Such distinctions both shaped andwere further institutionalised by the new mass media of the twentiethcentury – recording, the radio, et cetera. But, from a sociological pointof view, these worlds were aspects of a single music culture, a musicculture that developed in response to the experience of social change inthe nineteenth century – industrialisation, urbanisation, globalisationand all the other consequences of the rise to dominance of liberal,market capitalism.

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My concern here, though, is not this history but its effect on how wenow think about music, and my point is that the separation of musicalpractices and experiences into the high and the low is not helpful whenwe seek to understand how music works in our lives – its role inhuman development, in people’s sense of personal and social identity –or when we try to explain the nature of musical pleasure and value –whether for performers or listeners. To start from a premise that onlymusic made in the Western classical tradition is worthwhile is to beg allthe questions that are interesting. How peculiar it would have seemed,for example, if my esteemed colleague (and current Reid Professor),Nigel Osborne, had named the IMHSD the Institute for Serious Music inHuman and Social Development. We must start from the assumptionthat music is music. From this perspective the high/low construct is, ifyou like, a cultural aberration, a way of thinking that may not even bethe most helpful way of approaching the problem it emerged toresolve: the problem of making music in the marketplace.

On the one hand, from the ‘high’ perspective, there is a tendency toassume that high music – music made in the Western classical tradition,with a particular concept of art as motivation – is autonomous, hasnothing to do with market forces, while low music, popular music, isdriven only by commercial calculation, and therefore isn’t really musicat all. Until really quite recently university departments of music thusexcluded many kinds of music from their curricula. The assumptionhere is clearly expressed by the pianist Susan Tomes in her collection ofreflections on the craft of performance, Beyond the Notes. We don’t needto consider pop music in a study of musical performance, she suggests(and her definition of pop music includes rock – her contrasting term isfolk). We don’t need to consider it because, in her words, ‘pop music iscynically designed to be short-lived, entirely commercial’.4

The problem of such an assertion, common enough in the classicalworld, is not simply that it misdescribes how pop works, but also thatit suggests a depressing lack of curiosity. The question that’s interestingabout rock performers is precisely how their performing craft hasdeveloped to take account of such commercial pressures – pressuresnot entirely unfamiliar in the classical world.

On the other hand, from the ‘low’ perspective, there are equallyproblematic populist assumptions about high music, most obviously, ofcourse, the customary philistinism of the popular press, dismissing‘high’ music as difficult, elitist, inaccessible, pretentious, et cetera,familiar enough in Scotland from long years of the ‘problem’ of ScottishOpera. But what concerns me more is the equally problematicassumption that, by contrast, popular music making is ‘easy’, as if itsomehow doesn’t involve skill, hard work, discipline and, indeed,

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pretension. Just as high/low accounts of music are constructed inrelation to each other, so elitist/populist discourses simply reflect eachother’s limited accounts of why music matters: because it is popular;because it is unpopular. From my perspective, as a sociologist, theproblem of making music in the marketplace – which all kinds ofperformers face – is therefore better understood along other axes,according to different sorts of opposition, which run across high andlow music alike.

Take, for example, the perceived tension in music policy betweenaccess and excellence. In a speech to the Association of British Orchestrason 30 January 2006, the then Westminster culture minister, DavidLammy, acknowledged that

As a Culture Minister, there’s nothing that I – or any of my colleagues inGovernment – can do to create a musical genius. No-one can legislate toproduce a Mozart. But what we can do is try to create the conditions inwhich world class ensembles can thrive – and make sure enough peoplehave the means to access what they offer.

And I am under no illusions about which of these two things, the twinpillars of arts policy for as long as we can remember – excellence andaccess – should come first. Work of the highest quality must takeprecedence. Every time.5

The tension Lammy is describing here is between two differentapproaches to educational and cultural policy. Should the state investin the technical education of the talented few, subsidise ‘centres ofexcellence’? Or should it develop music education for the participationof the many, invest in community musical activities? Is the experienceof musical engagement more or less important than the quality of themusic or performance resulting?

But the terms here – and this is what makes music such aninteresting form of human activity – may not be quite the right ones.Music, that is to say, may be made by the few – a few with great skilland discipline – but to be enjoyed by the many, who engage with musicat quite profound levels, without themselves having, or evennecessarily understanding the meaning of, those skills and discipline.

To put this another way, musical excellence and access are notnecessarily contradictory. I’m not convinced, for example, that musiceducation is necessary for musical appreciation or that ‘musicappreciation’ is necessary for musical experience. It is a common tropein the autobiography of musicians that they heard a piece of music bychance – at a concert, on Radio 3, on someone’s record player – that somoved them that they then pursued a musical education. The sameexperience is common in popular music. The reason I was so knocked

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out by black American rock’n’roll in the 1950s – heard on RadioLuxemburg and AFN – was that it sounded so odd, so different, sodifficult even.

Access is about music being available – not about it being easy orfamiliar. What matters is that people hear the music and then accessaffordable instruments and teaching. How much this can be the resultof rational educational planning I don’t know.

Or take another common opposition, culture and commerce. In music,perhaps more than in any other cultural area (and in spite of thesignificance of market forces on musical tastes and practices), there is,in fact, a significant blurring and overlap between the amateur (themusic lover) and the professional (the music worker), between thosemusicians whose careers and livelihood depend on music making andthose for whom it is a leisure activity, a hobby, something done for itsown sake.

Sociologists like Robert Stebbins and Antoine Hennion have pointedout the paradoxes here – it is the amateurs who enjoy music more, whoare more committed to performance as performance, rather than as away of keeping the money coming in.6 But what interests me issomething different. While there is a clear difference between themusical amateur and professional in terms of career commitment, self-definition and, of course, playing skills, there is a less clear distinctionin what might be called the musical commitment involved.

An amateur musician must also practise, be disciplined, take onsomething difficult that needs work, take part in performance practicesin which self-expression is subordinated to collective ends. Amateurability, that is, depends on skills and aptitudes that must be learned,worked on, developed. As James Fenton noted in the Guardian last year,reflecting on his return as an adult to piano lessons, ‘I am learning toplay for my own pleasure’ is a misleading statement – that pleasureinvolves a high degree of self-discipline and a submission to authority,the authority of the tutor (person and book), the authority of a gradeexaminer.7 And much ‘amateur’ performance involves professionalstoo – to provide accompaniment, as soloists; just as in the popularmusic world being a professional musician describes a part of a careerthat begins and ends and is interspersed with living as a musicamateur.

When reading such dire warnings as Sir Peter Maxwell Davies’s thatour appreciation of serious music is at risk of being destroyed bytelevision and pop,8 or Sir John Eliot Gardiner’s that Britain’s musicculture is ‘getting worse’9 it is worth noting, then, the sheer amount ofmusic making that amateur musicians take part in daily. A 1991 UKsurvey, for example, suggested that as many people in Britain (2 per

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cent of the population) sang in choirs as were engaged in playing rockand pop music and I doubt if the figures have changed much sincethen. The Music Industries Association follow-up 2006 survey ofAttitudes to Music in the UK concluded that 21 per cent of the populationover 5 played a musical instrument and that 11.25 million householdsowned at least one. (The most musical population in the British Isles, itseems, with 28 per cent of the population able to play an instrument, isCentral Scotland.10) I’m not altogether convinced by such figures(drawn from a telephone survey of just 1,000 households in the UK) –the 1991 statistic for people over 5 years old playing a musicalinstrument was 5 per cent – but as the RSAMD 2003 audit of youthmusic in Scotland, What’s Going On, concluded, to look at what peopleactually do is to look at ‘an amazing range of activity’.11

And looking at the professional end too – at chamber groups andchoirs and contemporary and experimental ensembles, at jazz, folk,traditional and Gaelic music, at rock and pop in all their various forms– these do seem rather good times for Scottish music. I’ve certainlybeen to as many good concerts in Scotland in the last twelve months asat any time in my life. To talk, like Davies and Gardiner, of a crisis inmusical life seems odd.

It could certainly be argued that if music is just something we do, ashumans, as members of society, then music making will go onirrespective of market forces, educational decisions or music policies.That said, music making can be helped and hindered by such forcesand decisions and policies, and there are two issues I want to discusshere – one concerning Scottish music education, one concerningScottish music policy – that in my view reflect the continuing unhelpfuleffects of the high/low distinction I’ve been seeking to critique.

Music education

Most of my colleagues in university music departments in Scotlandwould agree, I think, that changes in the last few years in thecurriculum and standards of Music Highers and Advanced Highershave had a deleterious effect on students applying from Scottishschools to do music degrees. I could point to specific issues here – thedowngrading of instrumental performance grades needed to achieveHigher/Advanced Higher passes; the downgrading of aspects of musictheory – harmony and counterpoint, for example, the notational basesof Western classical (and popular) music; the lack of discipline requirednow for ‘invention’; the shifting use of the term ‘creative’ to meanpersonal work rather than to describe a displayed understanding ofcompositional processes.

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But the issue here is not simply that would-be music students nowleave school without the technical knowledge and aptitude thatuniversity teachers once took for granted. The issue, rather, is thatmusic has been changed from a difficult to an easy subject, in which theemphasis on access and self-expression and the incentives for pupils towork in and with forms that are entirely familiar, remove precisely thechallenge that is necessary for the emergence and development ofmusical talent. This is nothing to do with high music or elitism, butconcerns the way in which one learns the mental and physical skillsnecessary to express musical ideas fluently and interestingly in the firstplace. When the Herald reported the anxieties in the Scottish musicworld about the revamp of Highers and Advance Highers, the keyquotes came from jazz rather than classical performers, from TommySmith and Cathy Rae.12 The issue, to put it succinctly, is that the newcurriculum seems more concerned to give children the chance toexperience music than to learn it.

This is not just a Scottish issue. The UK-wide National Associationfor Music in Higher Education has expressed similar concerns aboutwhat is happening to A levels. In the Association’s words,

The sheer breadth of choices within the A level syllabus means that thoseof us in higher education can no longer depend on students having aknowledge of concepts previously regarded as core (Bach choraleharmonisation, for example). Nor can we assume much familiarity withessay writing on musical topics.13

For NAMHE the problem lies partly with ‘the low levels of musicalskills that some teachers, particularly those in primary education,have’, and one effect of this situation is that the sort of musicalinstruction that universities presume – in terms of both instrumentalteaching and music theory – increasingly happens only outside thestate school system – in private tuition, in fee-paying schools. YouthMusic’s survey of The Musical Engagement of Young People Aged 7–19 inthe UK, published in May last year, indicates the effects of this in classterms: 33 per cent of the AB respondents played a musical instrument,only 17 per cent of the DE sample.14

In both England and Scotland governments have responded to whatis clearly a problem in the extent and quality of music educationavailable to children. In England the Music Standards Fund wasestablished in 1999; in Scotland the Youth Music Initiative waslaunched in 2003, on the back of a pledge that ‘by 2006 allschoolchildren should have had access to one year’s free music tuitionby the time they reach P6’. In both cases central government made

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funds available to local authorities to develop their own musicprogrammes, and the reports on how the money was spent – theDES Survey of Local Authority Music Services 2005 and the SAC Report onLocal Authority Attainment over 3 years’ Youth Music Initiative, 2007 –make interesting reading. Both reveal the continuing disparity betweendifferent local authorities’ attitudes to music; both suggest that thefunds are giving schools some encouragement to restore music to theplace in the primary curriculum that was once – before the curriculumshake-up and resource cuts of the 1980s – taken for granted. And bothreveal that, for most children in most (but not all) authorities, to pursueinstrumental tuition means paying for out-of-school lessons.15

No one can doubt, reading the SAC report on the Youth MusicInitiative, that there are many imaginative music education projects inScotland. But no one can doubt either that there’s a slightly dispiritingattitude here as to why music education matters. Unlike David Lammy,for example, Patricia Ferguson (then Scotland’s minister of culture)clearly put access at the centre of Scottish music policy. To quote:

I am delighted that local authorities have embraced the Youth MusicInitiative with such enthusiasm, helping to achieve targets across all 32areas. Musical activities boost children’s confidence and raise a child’sawareness and appreciation of different styles and forms of music. Itcan also help raise attainment levels and equips them with transferableskills for their future studies and employment.16

Something similar can be seen in the Westminster government’s MusicManifesto, established in 2004. In the second Manifesto report,published last year, the central recommendation is

Putting group singing at the heart of all primary school musical activity. . . Supporting the primary school campaign will be a wider initiative,backed by the music industry and the media, to create a singing nation,promoting the benefits of singing in terms of health, education andcommunity.17

As someone who wrote his PhD on the history of working-classeducation, I can only say: we’ve been here before – in the nineteenth-century promotion of the sol-fa system in working-class elementaryschools, in Cecil Sharp’s early twentieth-century advocacy of folksinging in the curriculum,

Music matters, says the Scottish Arts Council rightly, but too often itseems to matter as an aspect of social or health policy, as a means ofsocial inclusion or to develop social skills. The qualities that are needed

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to make music well need equal emphasis. I’ll come back to this point but,first, I want to say a few words about music policy.

Music policy

My starting point here is the reconfiguration of cultural policy ascultural industries policy and I’ll focus on a question that has been arecurring policy issue since I came to Scotland in 1987: what shouldpolicy makers and politicians do to ensure that Scotland has aflourishing music sector? Read any academic study of music scenesand cities written over the last couple of decades and it’s clear that avital music culture calls forth a successful music industry rather thanvice versa.18 Music lawyers, PR companies and managers make moneybecause their clients make effective music. Musicians don’t make goodmusic because they’ve got good lawyers, PR companies or managers(though much cultural industry policy seems to take the latter view).

What, then, is needed to sustain a vital music culture? To answerschematically:

�Music resources: music lessons, teachers, affordable instruments

�Music spaces: rehearsal rooms, promoters and venues of varyingkinds, art schools, universities, conservatoires, record shops

� Time: being a student or unemployed

� People: mentors, models, other musicians to play with, networks,friendships – across generations, across musical genres and experi-ences

�Mobility: the movement in (and out) of new faces, new ideas, newsound

What is not so significant is a commercial, industrial infrastructure –record companies, consultants, management companies, media, etcetera. These follow – gravitate to – successful scenes; they don’t createthem.

What I want to stress here about this picture, though (as a matter ofsociological common sense), is that the cultural strength of a musicscene lies in the fluidity of the people involved, the musicians, and theflexibility of resources (venues, for example). The most successful suchscenes blur the distinctions between high and low – in terms of whowent through what kind of music education, who plays with whom,and so forth. And note also that the most significant policy decisions inthe making and unmaking of local music cultures are not music policydecisions at all, but involve things like licensing and planning (whichaffect the distribution of venues), housing and education (which

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determine the nature of student populations) and employment andunemployment regulations (which affect musicians’ use of time).

To replace cultural policy with cultural industries policy in themusic sector is, then, to move attention from the conditions for musicmaking to the conditions for music exploitation. On 27 February 2007,the then deputy first minister in Scotland, Nicol Stephen, announcedthat

Scotland’s music industry is to benefit from extra and better coordinatedsupport from the country’s enterprise network. A key element of this willbe a new d500,000 fund – the Scottish Music Future Fund – to support themusic stars of tomorrow. The new fund will be made available acrossScotland.

Further,

The industry asked us to support the proposed new Scottish MusicIndustry Association. Scottish Enterprise and Highlands and IslandsEnterprise will now contribute to the creation of the new association.[Matching, I should add, the commitment to the SMIA already made bythe Scottish Arts Council.] (Scottish Executive press release)

The most interesting discursive aspect of this announcement is NicolStephens’s references to the ‘Scottish contemporary music industry’.What is meant here by contemporary? Stephen undoubtedly takes theterm from the Cross Party Group on Contemporary Music – thelobbying body behind his announcement. The Cross Party Group, inthe words of the Scottish Executive press handout, ‘believes thatScotland has the potential to be a world leader in the creation andmarketing of contemporary music’.

Now ‘contemporary music’ has long been the label applied tocontemporary art music (for which the term ‘classical’ is clearlyinappropriate). Hence the Contemporary Music Network, or ECAT, theEdinburgh Contemporary Arts Trust, chaired by my colleague PeterNelson. From this perspective an example of the creation andmarketing of ‘contemporary music’ would not be Paolo Nutini andthe seventeen other acts subsidised by the Scottish Arts Council toattend the South By South West rock industry trade fair in Austin,Texas, but 7Hings, the avant-garde label supported by EdinburghUniversity and my department. For the Cross Party Group, by contrast,contemporary music is defined against traditional music (which has itsown Scottish lobbyists) but also against classical music (complaintsabout how much subsidy Scottish Opera and the RSNO receiveare commonplace at Group meetings) and so, by default, against

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contemporary work in what is seen by the group as the ‘high’ musicworld.

The shift from culture to cultural industry policy, in other words,seems to become a shift from supporting ‘high’ to supporting ‘low’music (the popular, the commercial) without a proper understandingthat in terms of the words like ‘creativity’ and ‘talent’ that are bandiedabout music cannot and should not be so divided up. It would be aninteresting piece of sociological research to trace how one network ofinfluence in Scottish music policy making (rooted in academic andclassical worlds) has been replaced by another (rooted in the world ofmusic industry bodies and consultants). One unduly narrow world,that is, by another.

But I want to conclude with a different question. What is the place ofa university music department in the ‘contemporary’ music situation?

My starting point here is that such departments should beunashamedly elitist, concerned with the best students, teachers,research, ideas, arguments, performances, compositions. But this isthe context for three specific tasks.

First, university music departments should be the setting forexperiment – for what in the sciences might be called blue sky thinking– whether such experimentation involves technology or technique, theexploration of new musical languages or forms, the understanding ofmusic as an aspect of cognition and motor skills, social relations orsound experiences.

The point here is that university music education is not – in thecontemporary sense of the word – vocational; it is not a preparation fora professional career. This has to be understood if only because thereare not enough professional music opportunities available annually toabsorb the number of music graduates. (It is hard to get UK figures onthis but a systematic survey of what happened to graduates of Germanmusic academies from 1998 to 2000 suggested that less than 9 per centgot employment as music professionals. I doubt that the situationwould be different in the UK.)19

But there’s a broader point here. By and large popular music hasbecome part of the curriculum of FE and HE institutions as a vocationalsubject (a Music Teacher survey in 2002 suggested that there were atleast 200 popular music courses in the UK and that the number was stillrising20). Popular music courses prepare people for music industrycareers (and in recent years the government-funded, music-industry-supported training agency Creative and Cultural Skills has movedincreasingly into the role of benchmarking and auditing popularmusic teaching21). The problem of such industry validated courses isthat they are invariably conservative and backward-looking, whether

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in terms of the technology training provided – ‘short term practicality’,in Philip Tagg’s words – or of the structure of the music industryimplied. As Tagg has written,

I don’t know how many students have followed relatively recent musicbusiness courses whose ‘practicalities’ were based on observing industrystructures from the phonogram era (c1900–c2000): fantastic if you wanteda job in the industry in the 1980s! It reminds me of all those classicalperformers who still produce as if we were all living in fin-de-siecleVienna.22

This is the context in which ‘elitism’ means exploring musicalpossibilities (on the basis of embedded musical skills and theoreticalknowledge, including Western tonal music theory) rather thansubordinating oneself to commercial or bureaucratic or indeedacademic practicality.

The second, related, task of a university music department is todevelop through practice the idea of creativity – a term much abused bybeing applied currently, it seems, to every aspect of government andcorporate policy. In the history of British popular music it is strikinghow much more significant art schools have been than music schools orvocational music courses. The point here is that for various reasons artschools have been, until very recently, the only British educationalinstitutions that take creativity seriously, seeking to understand it,nurture it, assess it, display it. Musical creativity may not be quite thesame thing as artistic creativity – it is necessarily a more collective andcollaborative process – but it is not a quite different thing either, andmusic degrees and conservatoire courses need to take issues ofcreativity as seriously as art schools do.

And this leads to the university music department’s final task: to bea site for the development of and reflection on music teaching ascentrally important to the ways in which music cultures work. The roleof the music teacher has always been central to the classical musictradition – a performer’s provenance is established by whom theystudied with; music teachers are central to the history of music theoryand analysis. As we have seen, much current music education policy isdriven by the need – and the problems – of getting music teaching andteachers back into the school system. (And one of the major problem ofthe present plethora of vocational music courses is the very variablestandards of teaching involved.) Teaching, in short, whether doneformally or informally matters to music making – it can’t simply beregarded as an adjunct to research – it is an aspect of what ‘research’ inmusic means. And this is as true for popular as for classical music – in

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this respect Tommy Smith’s case for a Jazz Academy in Scotland isincontrovertible.

The title of this lecture is ‘Why Music Matters’ and it might seem bynow that I have rather rambled off my subject, so let me finish bysaying where I think I’ve got to.

Underlying what I have been saying about music in universities isthe belief that the value of music does not lie in what it is good for.Music doesn’t matter because it has a positive effect on children’sbehaviour or a community’s health, because it improves exam resultsor makes people feel more patriotic or less depressed, or better able todeal with memory loss. If these were the reasons for music’s value thenit could, in principle, be replaced by pharmaceutical discoveries or newbehavioural modification techniques or indeed by a better distributionof income. Rather, it is because music matters that it has – or can have –these other effects. Music may be useful psychologically, socially,politically or whatever. But that’s not why people do it. Music mattersbecause it is pleasurable – to do and to experience – and because it is anecessary part of what we are as humans, as feeling, empathetic beings,interested in and engaged with other people. To study music is to studywhat it is to be human – biologically, cognitively, culturally; to playmusic is to experience what it is to be human – physically, mentally,socially, in an aesthetic, playful, sensual context. Music matters, inshort, because without it we wouldn’t know who we are and what weare capable of being.

Notes

1 P. Johnson, ‘And Another Thing’, Spectator, 13 January 2007.2 P. Johnson, ‘The Menace of Beatlism’ (1964), repr. in Mike Evans (ed.), The

Beatles Literary Anthology (London: Plexus, 2004), 127.3 Ibid., 129.4 S. Tomes, Beyond the Notes (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 2005), xx.5 D. Lammy, speech to the Association of British Orchestras Annual

Conference, 30 January 2006; http://www.davidlammy.co.uk/da/29578.6 R. A. Stebbins, Amateurs, Professionals and Serious Leisure (Montreal: McGill-

Queen’s University Press, 1992; A. Hennion et al., Figures de l’amateur(Paris: La Documentation francaise, 2000).

7 J. Fenton, ‘James Fenton Struggles with Piano Examinations’, Guardian

Review, 11 November 2006, 15.8 I. Bell, ‘Did TV Kill Classical Music?’, Sunday Herald (Seven Days), 1 May

2005, 8.9 N. Crowe, ‘Melody Maker’, Prospect Magazine, 2006, 124; http://www.

prospect-magazine.co.uk/printarticle.php?id=7538.

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10 Music Industries Association, Attitudes to Music in the UK – a Nexus Survey(London: MIA, 2006).

11 Scottish Arts Council, What’s Going On? A National Audit of Youth Music inScotland (Edinburgh: SAC, 2003).

12 J. Kemp, ‘Chorus of Anger at Music Higher’s Lower Standard’, Herald, 18October 2005.

13 National Association for Music in Higher Education, NAMHE Newsletter,1:2 (2006), 9.

14 Youth Music, Our Music: Musical Engagement of Young People Aged 7–19 inthe UK – an Omnibus Survey (London: Youth Music, 2006), 3.

15 S. Hilton, L. Rogers and A. Creech, Survey of Local Authority Music Services(London: Department of Education and Science, 2005); Scottish ArtsCouncil, Report on Local Authority Attainment over 3 years’ Youth MusicInitiative (Edinburgh: SAC, 2007).

16 Scottish Arts Council, Report on Local Authority Attainment over 3 years’Youth Music Initiative (Edinburgh: SAC, 2007).

17 Music Manifesto, Second Report (London: Youth Music, 2006); www.musicmanifesto.co.uk.

18 See, for example, S. Cohen, Beyond the Beatles: Decline, Renewal and the Cityin Popular Music Culture (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007); B. Shank, DissonantIdentities: The Rock’n’Roll Scene in Austin, Texas (Hanover NH: UniversityPress of New England, 1994).

19 A. Barber-Kersovan, posting to IASPM list discussion ‘What Do ClassicalMusicians Play for a Living?’, 4 August 2006.

20 R. Mason, ‘Hello, Pop Pickers’, Music Teacher, February 2002, 26–7.21 See R. Ashton, ‘Skills Set to Lead Agenda of Government-backed Study’,

Music Week, 4 February 2006, 8.22 P. Tagg, posting to IASPM list discussion ‘Pop Theory’, 13 January 2007.

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