Something to Report After All: Classical Music Futures Summit

Turns out the Music Council of Australia have been hard at work facilitating participants of the Classical Music Futures Summit contributing to the final reports from the breakout discussion groups, a Steering Committee has been assembled, and the first meeting of this committee has already taken place. Which is a whole lot more than my nothing to report blog from a few days ago. I had nothing to report because my email address hadn’t been included somewhere along the way, so the loop didn’t have me in it. The wonderful @JohnofOz (that’s his twitter name, if you meet him at a concert he’s John Garran) had asked me if this was #justanothertalkfest, but it seems it was certainly not that, but rather #justanotheradminbungle. Since the steering committee have met just a few days ago I imagine there will be communications forthcoming in the next few weeks, and hopefully some interesting moves to create a better future for ‘classical’ music. One

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Classical Music Futures Summit: a Month Later: Nothing to Report

It was July 12 that the Classical Music Futures Summit was held at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, with participants ranging from private music teachers through to composers to arts marketers to radio broadcasters to artistic administrators to university deans to … bloggers! Nearly everyone there was not simply one of these things, so there was a considerable sense of understanding across the sector, no real sense of divide between participants. Everyone seemed to be in agreement that “classical” music has a niche audience that is shrinking. Inside that niche there have been success stories, but this against a backdrop of perceived dumbing-down and increased pressure to find sources other than subsidies to keep budgets balanced. Everyone seemed to be in agreement that a cooperative approach to making a cultural shift (and to securing an improved future for classical music) was preferable to an ad hoc approach. I reported that at the conclusion of the day it had been decided

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Leaving ‘Laminating’ Behind: Step 1 – The Skill Set

I’ve said it before, we piano teachers teach the way we were taught. And we do it because deep in our musical bones and our pianistic DNA we truly believe we were taught well. But upon deciding that, while our teachers served us well, we can serve our students better, how do we turn around a lifetime of habits we now perceive to be downright dangerous? The downright dangerous teaching habits are what I’ve called The Lamination Technique, where students are asked to learn the notes first, the rhythm next, then put hands together, then articulation, then dynamics, and so on over a period of months until finally the phrases are all welded together into something called a ‘performance’. The first thing is to truly believe that there is a better way, even if you are not quite sure what it might be. Like they say, if you don’t want anything to change keep doing what you’ve always done! If

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Repertoire Rules (for students)

These rules are rules about students and repertoire, but really these are more rules for piano teachers… So for any students reading this post – this is the stuff your teacher should know! In the 11 month history of my blog I’ve discussed how  students having access to more books of music is going to have a positive impact on their musical literacy, and how learning a large number of pieces each year will have commensurate educational benefits. I’m not going to rehash either of these posts, but rather cut straight to: what are the rules we need to apply to students and their repertoire? First up: a rule of thumb. If your student learns less than 26 pieces per annum they will be bored. They may not tell you they are bored, but they are. If learning 6 pieces a year truly engages their curiosity they must be almost entirely disinterested in learning to play the piano. On the other

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Repertoire Rules (for teachers)

Yesterday I gave a one hour presentation at the BlitzBooks-organised Winter Piano School held in Sydney’s CBD with the title “An In-Depth Look at Repertoire Collections”. I went along with a suitcase full of books for an intensive show and tell session: collections for beginners, graded collections, period-collections (Baroque, for instance), geographical collections (Australian, for instance) and stylistic collections (tangos, for instance). 16 kilograms of print music material. My intention was to begin with a short spiel about the importance of repertoire, covering the need for teachers to invest their time and money in getting to know new pieces every year, as well as the need for students to work on a much greater number of pieces than traditionally has been the case (a topic I’ve covered in my blog previously). And then I was going to launch into the music in the suitcase… The “rationale for repertoire” part of my presentation was supposed to be about how music is

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More Classical Music Futures Summit Themes

Worried that I might forget some of the themes and issues emanating from the Classical Music Futures Summit, and with the likelihood I won’t get to flesh them all out in my blog before Christmas, here’s a little summary of the blogs I’d still like to write on this: Music Education Will Not Save Classical Music: explaining why this recurrent notion, that teaching classical music in the schools of the nation is the foundational means of saving the classical music industry, needs to be taken out the back of the shed and put down. It’s a Lame, Tame Game: in which I will exhort classical music presenters to lift their game, stop being so tame and give up being lame, and then go on to say the same thing to musicians and composers as well; productions without any production are tedious beyond belief, and it’s not sufficient to think that it’s all about the music. Collaborators Inc: an emerging theme

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Classical Music Futures Summit Discussion Groups

Part 3 of my blogs about the Classical Music Futures Summit held at the Sydney Conservatorium on July 12. There were eight discussion groups into which the participants were divided, each group with designated topic covering six main areas, which were: 1. Advancing the Repertoire 2. Advocacy and Research 3. Audience Building 4. Community and Regional 5. Education (subdivided into School & Community and Professional & Studio) 6. Media When I arrived at the front desk at the start of the summit we discovered that I had not been assigned a group, so I was left with the opportunity to self-assign. Those who know the bulk of the work that I do would have assumed that my natural home would have been with the Education (Professional & Studio) mob, seeing as I do much professional development with piano teachers and I certainly do know the challenges they face in a variety of places in Australia – I’ve been lucky enough

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Ban the word “Classical”

Part 2 of my report on the Classical Music Futures Summit. Greg Sandow, our keynote speaker, touched on this idea in his speech, and it resonated throughout the day from a number of participants: Ban the word ‘classical’ from advocacy, advertising and conversation when referring to what we are talking about. Whenever this point was made a murmur of support rippled through the crowd. The past 15 years has seen a rash of books published querying and exploring the value of “Classical Music”, with titles along the lines of Who Needs Classical Music (Julian Johnson, OUP, 2002) and Why Classical Music Still Matters (Lawrence Kramer, University of California Press, 2007) as well as Who Killed Classical Music (Norman Lebrecht, Birch Lane Press, 1997). Greg Sandow’s forthcoming book Rebirth carries the subtitle The Future of Classical Music, and Alex Ross (of The Rest is Noise fame) has spoken widely about the death of classical music. In short, there has been much writing

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