how can i go forward when i don't know which way i'm facing

7/29/2019 How Can I go forward when I don't know which way I'm facing

1/8

How can I go forward when I dont know which way Im facing?:

the condition of Popular Music Education.

1999 was a quite remarkable year for popular music education. In one year, we experienced the

inauguration of the New Deal for Musicians, the opening of the National Centre for Popular Music,

the launch of the first MBA in Music Industries and the introduction of a new BTec syllabus in

Popular Music. Before dealing with the objection that these are not as easily subsumed under the

designation of popular music education as their listing in a single sentence attempts to suggest, I

wish to make a prior point. All four initiatives affect public perception of how popular music exists as

a fact of cultural life - whether we regard them as facets of an educational process or not the

perception of the young people who join the New Deal scheme, the parents who pay the visitor

attraction fee, the students who pay the postgraduate course fee, and the students (and their parents)

who hope that two years in Further Education will increase their chances of employability, all expect

that the experience of the scheme, the visit or the institution will add to, and perhaps transform, their

understanding of a practice that brings them great pleasure - making or consuming popular music.

Further, 1999 was also a year of great significance in the process of root-and-branch upheaval in

precisely these areas of music production and consumption - for example, 1999 was witness to the

restructuring of Polygram, one of the five major record companies, following its take-over by

Seagrams. 1999 was also the year that the first MP3 player went on general sale and within the first

two weeks of this year, and century, we witnessed the first merger between a web company - an

unheard of entity ten years ago - and another of the worlds incorporated majors; the aftershock of

the AOL/Time Warner merger promise to be lengthy and profound.

Taken together, then, both popular music education and its field of study are in upheaval. On the

surface, this is exactly how it should be - new courses, programmes and even pedagogies evolve to

keep pace with new developments, initiatives and practices within the subject area, except that, where

popular music education is concerned, there is no complete fit between, or even coherence within, the

field and its educational shadow. What I mean by this, as uncontentiously as I can make it, is thatpopular music education is a victim of its own history. We should all be aware, and continue to be

mindful of, the resistance to popular music education from within the educational system. Where

Higher Education is concerned, Liverpool enjoys great privilege in our field - the city has both an

Institute of Popular Music (IPM) at Liverpool University and it has this institution, the Liverpool

Institute for Performing Arts (LIPA) - yet the IPM is barely a decade old while LIPA has been in

existence for only six years. In the rest of the country there are only a handful of dedicated popular

music courses in higher education - and what courses there are are very different in their emphases.

Further, this difference in emphasis is, arguably, not the product of a transparent and cohesive

division of labour amongst institutions, nor even the outcome of market forces which have


2/8

somehow blindly created centres of excellence defined in terms of complementary specialisms;

rather courses have emerged through the efforts of very small groups of interested academics,

sometimes single individuals within a wide range of different departments. All of these academics will

have argued for a popular music course in a sector that continues to be marred by an elitist, mass

culturalist disdain for popular music. Consequently, existing courses reflect the biases of their

initiators and tend to reflect popular music as a continuum - from composition, performance and

recording, through manufacture and distribution to the varied arenas of consumption. Inevitably,

courses will be inflected by the practices, perceptions and prejudices of the parent discipline for each

stop along the continuum. Thus we have musicologists initiating popular music courses at the music

end of the continuum, and sociologists and cultural studies theorists organising music-cultural or

music industry courses at thepopularend of the continuum.

All of these descriptive terms and sub-terms continuum stop end and so on are inaccurate and

misleading, but the representation of popular music in this one-dimensional manner serves the

pragmatic purpose of demonstrating that, while our field is in constant and volatile motion, the

resources we need to analyse and research that field are restricted and often disconnected from each

other. Consequently, when we come to debate and discuss key issues in popular music education (to

quote the publicity material for this particular conference) we need to be aware that there is no general

agreement about what popular music is and, therefore, about what a popular music course should

consist of and how it should be delivered.

Take for example the new BTec syllabus for the National Diploma in Music, Popular Music or MusicTechnology. Introduced by Edexcel at a conference in Sheffield in November 1999, the Guidance

and Units document for teachers runs to 297 pages yet it contains not a single reference to a record

company and has no coverage at unit level of music business practices - and this in a syllabus that

aims to provide specialised studies directly relevant to the vocations and professions in which

students are working or intend to seek employment. Further Education is witnessing an enormous

expansion in popular music education (and in Media and Performing Arts provision generally), for

example, New College Nottingham - a super college merger of several large FE colleges - has 700

popular music students, and yet the course they will offer their students will only discuss popular

music as a business and as an industrial practice if, and only if, the teaching team recognises the need

to situate popular music production in the context of a market for popular musical products and then

only to the extent that they have access to research and teaching materials adequate to the task.

My own research into popular music production suggests that such materials are unlikely to be widely

available - for the simple, and also highly complex, reason that popular music education continues to

be hampered by the consequences of its own heritage inflected as this is by its piecemeal development

in the face of institutional and system-resistance. Consequently, what has developed in popular music

education is exactly the continuum concept deployed above when what is required is an holistic

understanding of popular music as, simultaneously, a social, a cultural, an industrial and an aesthetic

2


3/8

practice. This is a task of no small order - programmes need to have structures, teaching tends to be

linear and sequential because time is - but we need to resist the logic of sequentiality when it detaches

instruction in musical performance and midi and recording techniques from music business practices;

equally we must resist industry education which eliminates the experience of music creators from its

remit. Whether our goal is vocational or intellectual or aesthetic we must never separate the

popular from the music in our analysis and depiction of how popular music works because, if we

do, then our students are misled and disempowered

What do I mean? My own research into pop is driven by the combination of three statistics. None of

these statistics is precise - one is an extrapolation, the other two are music industry rules of thumb -

put together they make chilling reading, set apart they represent how fragmented our discipline is, and

how remote educators are from major practitioners across the widest range of popular musical

practices. Firstly, from the work of Ruth Finnegan, there is estimated to be one aspirant pop act for

every one thousand members of the population; secondly, various writers claim that only one percent

of aspirant pop acts signs a deal with a major record company; finally, Keith Negus quotes an industry

figure who argues that only one-in-eight act makes a profit for a major company and therefore for

itself. On this basis, only one-eighth of one percent of pop acts ever makes a profit.

Certainly, a pop act signing to a major label is not the be-all and end-all of popular music making and

there are music careers outside of chart acts - but there are not many, and popular music is what it says

it is, music that many people like and want to consume; in fact, pop music is only pop music once it

has been consumed in a mass way - any piece of music in and of itself can be written or performed ina popularstylebut that music can only be adjudged popular when it ispopular, when a large number

of non-musical, monetary transactions have confirmed that an unarguably large number of people

have signalled their pleasure in that music by consuming it in some way. In order that there is at least

a chance that this will happen a pop act must have some relationship with a major record company -

and the merger of AOL and Time-Warner suggests that the Web may not be a route by which this

equation can be re-written.

From my own research, I have identified a relationship between the commercial success or failure of

pop acts signed to major record labels and the nature of the (many) mediations they experience

between composing their work and having it offered for sale on the mass market. However, it is not

simply that mediation is a problem for pop composers and performers (it is also the conduit and

condition of popularity); rather, a lack of preparation for mediation can often result in commercial

failure - and the trauma that pop writers and performers will almost inevitably experience as a

consequence of commercial failure can be considerable indeed. On this basis, to teach popular music

students only in terms of their specialism (as performer, recording engineer or entrepreneur) is to

reproduce the conditions of the cultural carnage that is the industrial reality of the pop music industry.

Further, to allow the diffuse expansion of popular music education without a coherent, consistent and

transparent system of local, regional and national consultation on the nature and demands of that

3


4/8

education is almost criminally reckless. Take, for example, the launch of the New Deal for

Musicians (NDfM).

The NDfM was launched, in Liverpool, during October, 1999. It is too soon to judge the success of

the measure but early indications are not encouraging. The scheme is an adaptation of the existing

New Deal which, itself, is an imperfect measure - especially with regard to the terms of access to

further and higher education. The NDfM emerged from high profile New Labour overtures to a

sympathetic handful of music industry figures (notably Alan McGee, then head of Creation Records).

Relations between this group and the Labour government soon began to fray and the NDfM was the

governments attempt to mollify these high profile supporters. Since first being proposed, the scheme

has been severely, and unsympathetically, restructured - most radically in its reduction from a three-

year to a one-year scheme. Further, the DFEE, who initiated and run the scheme, is a government

department torn between almost irreconcilable priorities and pressures - it must be seen to be helping

to alleviate unemployment through initiating vocational training schemes but, equally, it is under

pressure to be seen to be retaining tight supervisory control over them.

The music industry remains obscure to all but those directly involved in its work, consequently, the

DFEE demonstrates neither an understanding of, nor the conceptual flexibility to cope with, the

lifestyles (and vocational requirements) of music creators. For example, there is no provision, not

even a subsidy, for recording time, and, equally, no allowance that fees earned from performance or

sales of work be allocated for rehearsal, recording or self-promotion (let alone living expenses). At the

same time, the DFEE is loath to trust that musicians are pursuing career development when they arenot under direct supervision, which is a source of continued tension between New Deal advisers (a

new descriptive term for what were job centre staff) and musicians on the scheme. Additionally, and

this is where the NDfM bears most closely on this discussion, the DFEE is forced to rely that the

structure and training provision it has established will satisfy ND clients, the music advisory group,

and the Government alike - yet if we accept that popular music education itself is still struggling for

focus then we need to at least consider that the NDfM initiative is unlikely to have resolved those

tensions at the stroke of pen. What is more worrying is that the training and advice infrastructure

created by the DFEE, which consists of a network of music industry consultants (MICS) and music

learning providers (MOLPS), can be argued, at the very least to have added a new tier (and with it

new practices) of mediation to popular music making which means that, if the large scale failure of

pop acts an be traced to a lack of preparation for mediation, more acts will be damaged by the NDfM

than will be assisted.

If we leave this speculation aside, what we, as popular music educators, are forced to recognise is that

there are now substantially more of us offering advice and guidance to young musicians and young

music entrepreneurs. The DfEE did initiate a period of consultation with educators and industry

figures before the NDfM was launched but participation was on a self-selected basis and the outcome

of discussion was a report written solely by the civil servants so commissioned. This, at the very least,

4


5/8

is an ad hoc basis for creating perhaps the single most important measure in popular music education

we have experienced, but beyond this, we need to make two more important recognitions: firstly, this

new cohort of educators will suffer the penalties of a lack of holism in popular music education

perhaps to an even more extreme degree than do teachers in further and higher education for the

reason that they have no syllabus to work from. Instead, the MOLPs apply a pack of Open Learning

materials generated for national use by just one Further Education college working substantially

alone while the MICs will be working almost wholly from instinct and untheorised experience.

Secondly, to whom or what was the DFEE to turn in the creation of a national support and training

scheme in popular music if not to a self-selecting group of individuals who had the time and interest

to take part in the (brief and inadequate) consultation process. Put plainly, there is very little co-

ordination amongst popular music educators in Britain or internationally. The only international

organisation that exists is the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM).

IASPM has many strengths but fails to involve either teachers from outside the university system or

music industry professionals and professional musicians. This is not entirely that organisations fault,

rather, the stratification of the education system in Britain tends to seal off schools from colleges and

both of these from universities. At the same time, successful pop acts and the music industry alike

remain only marginally interested in education and their indifference represents a further stumbling

block to the creation of an holistic approach to popular music education. This is made all the more

surprising and problematical by the increasing governmental recognition of the importance of the

music industry to the national economy (and by local government to regional economies).

We are becoming familiar with the idea that Britains economic future lies with cultural industries -with music, film, television production, fashion, design, the theatre and advertising. I place music at

the head of this list quite deliberately. Thus far, the sheer scale and consistency of the British music

industry as an economic force easily outstrips the contributions of the other cultural industries to

Britains continuing prosperity; consequently, it is predicted that we will experience, or are in the

process of experiencing, in Angela McRobbies terms, the growth of cultural capitalism () a new

kind of cultural economy, comprising a vast network of freelance and self-employed creative

people. So prevalent is the notion that the old, moribund centres of primary and manufacturing

industries can be revived and re-vivified through the development of cultural industries that an entire

science (not to say an academic industry) has grown up around the notion in the past few years.

Oddly, perhaps, where popular music is concerned, the major record companies (all now divisions of

much larger corporations) have remained agnostic on the issue of the economic centrality of cultural

industries - which, in part, explains the energy of the New Labour overtures toward them. Put very

simply, the music industry has long prospered without the love of Government, without cultural

quarters and, it must be noted, without popular music education. Consequently, as a key issue facing

contemporary music educators we all need to ask ourselves whether a vocationally-informed popular

music education is either necessary or desirable, whatever the excitement about the cultural-industrial

future.

5


6/8

Before discussing this in any more detail, we need to note also how one attempt to combine a cultural

industries strategy with popular music education has had potentially disastrous consequences. The

National Centre for Popular Music (NCPM) opened in Sheffield in March, 1999. Built at a cost of 15

million, the Centre announced its first redundancies within seven weeks of opening. After five

months, the Centres Director and its Creative Director had both resigned. A new Director was

appointed from the first of September and he also resigned just after Christmas, 1999. The Centres

debt is 13 million and its future is now in serious doubt. Again, perhaps it seems inappropriate to

discuss a visitor attraction (as the centre is styled - at least in the terms of leisure economics) under

the rubric of popular music education - but if a visit to a visitor attraction that purports to be a

national centre in a specialised area of cultural production is not, at least, enlightening and

informative (and, therefore, educative) then what is it?

From the outset, the National Centre resisted the notion that it should be a museum, or house an

archive, but whatever the merits or otherwise of museums and archives, they are at least concepts that

the public is familiar with and also concepts that demand to be worked with imaginatively by the

creators of such entities. Perhaps, then, the NCPM has suffered most from a generalised lack of focus

about what popular music education should consist of, but its creators bear responsibility beyond this

general deficiency in our field. The NCPM was conceived almost entirely in the negative - its creators

were firm from the outset about what they did notwant the Centre to be but, equally, they were never

clear, even at its launch, about what they did want the Centre to be. What this confusion, and disaster,

and disgrace, means for us is that, after years of attempting to convince our institutions to take pop

music seriously the NCPM seems to have confirmed what our detractors have always suspected (andargued) that pop is trivial and does not bear scrutiny.

In my position as Course Leader of the first MBA in Music Industries (launched in September, 1999)

I feel insulated from the charge of pops triviality - I simply point confidently to the massive

earnings of the major record companies and bask in the glow of pops new status as one of the motors

of economic development, but I would be a fool to be seduced by either of these two conditions for

neither is as stable or as true as they might appear. For example, pop may earn Britain foreign

exchange, but most British pop acts are signed to companies owned by non-British corporations;

further, those corporations are no longer major record companies, they are merely divisions of much

greater conglomerates in which managing directors (and their musical predelictions and agenda) are

no longer as secure nor as influential as they once were. In immediate, practical terms this has meant a

switch to monthly accounting inside strictly enforced business plans. These new corporate regimes

have brought with them a concomitant emphasis on immediate chart success and huge sales from

smaller rosters of acts at the expense of longer term artists development (although this process was

never as benign as the term suggests). At base, pop acts signed to major companies are now less

secure than they ever were, while pop itself has to fight harder for its place in the taste and interests

that inform consumer spending. Equally, while small-scale entrepreneurialism (especially in the dance

6


7/8

sector) has helped support cultural industry strategies, that sector is marked as much by low pay and

economic insecurity as it is by innovation and dynamic hybridity.

As someone in charge of a high level music industry course, but as someone who also believes in the

empowerment of pop acts, I find myself constantly negotiating my students demands for information

and my own determination to cultivate their understanding of how popular music works holistically -

and always from the perspective of the pop acts experience of the musical-industrial practice they

seek to learn and prosecute. It is far, far too early to judge whether the course will work or not but in

designing and delivering it I face continually the dilemmas of popular music education sketched

previously. For example, in my involvement with IASPM, I have to convince some of my colleagues

that music industry education is empowering; equally I have to convince my colleagues in business

administration that the music industry is not corporatised in the way that all other global industries are

and that fees should remain low. In general, I feel I have to convince musicologists that the industry is

present in musical decision making and I have to convince the post-modernists amongst cultural

studies theorists that the ownership of capital is still a determining factor in social and cultural

relations. I have to convince myself that popular music education does contribute to our understanding

of how popular music works and that this can improve the performance, the understanding and the

enjoyment of students as well as make them more economically viable in the near-future. And finally

I have to convince my students that they are getting value for money.

I attempt all of this from the confines of a business course and therefore tend to be restricted in what I

can discuss (although I have enough music students to at least broach the possible inseparability ofmusical and commercial processes in composition, performance and recording). I feel that my design

of the course takes place within the problematic heritage and recent history of popular music

education and against the background of almost seismic changes within the production and

consumption of popular music products. I feel also that my delivery is inflected by an additional set of

impediments and restrictions which, of course, might be more usefully and constructively read as

opportunities. In no order of precedence (and judged only from the perspective of music industry

education) these are:

(1). The fact that the music industry has no history of systematic recruitment - this means that there

are no clear routes to employment within it and no agreed patterns of working knowledge or skill-sets

associated with specific occupations. This is compounded by the fact that there is limited evidence of

in-house training schemes which might be replicable in the classroom or lecture theatre.

(2). The power centres of the music industry are all London-based. This makes it especially difficult

to access for anyone outside the capital. Equally, there is a perhaps an excessive degree of secrecy

surrounding music industry practices (almost a freemasonry), driven in part, but not entirely

explicable, by the need to retain business confidentiality. There are generous individuals who give up

time to speak to students but this is a restricted pool. The more courses there are, the more thinly-

7


8/8

spread these individuals become. As we have noted, the music industry has yet to be convinced of the

value of popular music education, this, then, is one consequence of that lack of conviction.

(3). The ideologies of the music industry militate against educational practices - talent will always

out, genius cant be taught, paying dues persist as guiding ideas subscribed to by music industry

executives and also by those far-removed from the metropolitan centre but still locally powerful.

(4). Musicians themselves subscribe to ideologies that limit the relevance to them of popular music

education. There persists a kind of craft mentality amongst musicians that drives them inward into

honing their skills and ignoring the wider contexts of the deployment of those skills. How many here

have experience of musicians who take up places simply to have access to facilities and no more?

(5). Finally, we are faced with the continuing unproven nature of popular music education - and not

simply from the perspective of vocational courses. Is there really any such animal as a career in

popular music; certainly, some individuals have made a career of the business - but these are few,

whether executives, entrepreneurs or musicians. If we pursue vocational education in popular music,

how do we prepare our students for life after pop?

Perhaps the greatest issue facing popular music education is that we continue to lack a common

vocabulary for analysing it as a dynamic whole, and, consequently we continue to struggle to develop

theories that might inform teaching, training and analytical practices. In the absence of wider co-

operation amongst popular music educators, students and practitioners, national and localinterventions in the life of popular music will continue to be uncoordinated, haphazard and even

damaging. Perhaps what unites us as popular music educators is that we are all fans of popular music,

if we begin by establishing why we want to teach popular music and then identify how we teach it, we

might begin to learn from each other in ways that can achieve not a monolith or a tyranny but at least

a working agreement about where we are headed, why we are going there and how we might arrive.

8

how can i go forward when i don't know which way i'm facing

Documents