What are conservatoires?
Day 2: Reflective Conservatoire Conference 2018
The rapid and intense discourse of Geoffrey Crossick’s opening keynote began to challenge my optimism. Not much about music or drama, as one enquirer noted. Quite a lot about museums though, political battles, ideology and funding strategies.
Is that what conservatoires are? Musical Museums, reforming, reworking, remembering and referencing our pasts? But then a word slipped in during Geoffrey’s answer to the music question: ‘commercialism’. At that moment the elephant in the room raised its trunk and blew a pachydermal fanfare.
Out there on the street young and old listen avidly to commercial music as an aural food, grazing throughout the day and at all the significant times of their lives, on music made in the moment, at the moment, consumed and enjoyed. It informs, nourishes and structures their lives. Nearly all that make it are musical autodidacts and all is song but not as we conservators understand it, nor do we easily welcome in those that make it.
“Art is the lens through which we view the world”, said the new Director of the Tate Modern, Maria Balshaw, recently on television. But how do we listen to our world and is music in society our microphone? I sat in Nell Catchpole’s recorded Suffolk soundscape. The darkened silence enveloped us broken only by the occasional bird or breeze. It was welcome solace from the war of the words which is the inevitable outcome of a conference.
But I remain positive and hopeful since I had the privilege and pleasure today of following the music and health strand. Here was evidence of artists in sound working positively in society in many countries and in different societies to make a difference.
One music therapist was learning to play mbira and seeking ways of living down the history of colonialism she inevitably carried.
A violinist and cellist from the Netherlands improvised for us music of now, as their practice is in hospitals where they help reduce pain in stressed patients.
I watched and listened for the elephant out in the street and hoped that one day it will find a home. Maybe in our discourse? That would be a start.
This article was written by George Odam, who is blogging daily from the Reflective Conservatoire Conference 2018.
George Odam is a teacher, composer, writer, editor and lecturer. In a wide ranging career, he has held senior roles at Guildhall School Music and Drama and Bath Spa University. His compositions includes opera, choral and vocal, orchestral and chamber works.
The Reflective Conservatoire Conference: Artists as Citizens, takes place from 20–23 February at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama in London.
The international conference brings together leading performers, teachers and researchers from all over the world to address the key issues in Higher Education within music and drama, explored through a series of performances, practical workshops, keynote speeches, curated sessions, seminars and round-table discussions.
