rm, well yes, that would be nice! But of course it isn't going to happen. HMG have committed to the increase in numbers, and I can't see any future government, of whatever stripe, reversing that policy.

As to enthusiasm, yes, of course - but how many departments currently have the resources or capacity to interview, as they did in the OLD DAYS?! Not many. So, you have to go on the personal statements in UCAS forms, plus reference etc. I've often found, as occasional admissions tutor, that a quick phone call can sort the wheat from the chaff quite quickly. Takes 5 mins, as opposed to the expense and hassle of a specially arranged interview.

By the way, I'm with Reiner on the efficacy of gap years. Those studnets who've done this seem consistently to have gained more than they've lost as a result.

Half of the time I find myself bemoaning situation as I can see it. 1 Students are getting worse, more spoiled. Young children are even worse. 2 young people confirm to fit in 3 mass propaganda, etc

But then they are so different, there is rebelion against consummerism, much interest about music.
It is just that one has to do in any situation one finds himself to help in some even small way.
Often I am encourage by what I see, because so many children still pick up study of music. If one considers that parents surely know there is not much money in it for future profession, it is amazing. There is interest in good (high) Art. So it is not so bad yet. There is realisation that one can do very little (limits of energy etc)

There are many tendencies, rebelion against intellectuals and academics perhaps. Here we have English literature department that doesnot teach literature at all, but publishing and editing business. There are applied departments like that. May be they will have pop song writing courses on music departments too. It is for sure will be popular as many want to make a quick buck.

I think we are unduly pessimistic at the moment. There were always big discrepencies between different Universities and institutions. I am idealising the music education system of my youth. In fact if I think back there was so many bad musicians, bad teachers, bad students that could play badly after graduating.
May be there will be two tire system or two kind of Universities: One for challenged students, and the other is for more gifted. We seems to be inclusive now.
I dont like what I hear about New Musicologosts breed, but one should not concentrate on them. The department depends on who is in charge because the chair with his agenda molds the department I think. So there are always different departments.
May be I am too tired today to argue my point of some optimism. I try tomorrow.

Eruanto, it doesn't sound as though you conform - you have some fascinating things to say about Conservatoires, and I for one would like to hear more.

My arguments are based on my perceptions of the students I come across in daily life, which may or may not be a representative cross-section of the community as a whole.

We all, students and staff alike, need to continually question our perceptions and argue our cases rather than retreat, unchanged, to our original positions.

So - don't give up!!!

There's popular music and there's popular music though, isn't there? Music of the people, by the people and for the people, so to speak. Commercial music (which is often what we mean when we say 'popular music') is often just the last of those three.

It's a good thing we haven't quite sunk to describing McDonald's as popular food.

Although I suppose given the notorious slipperiness of the music-language analogy one should hesitate to draw too firm conclusions from the music-food nexus...

I should clarify what I mean here - there can be absolutely no doubt that gender-based oppression has existed for a great many centuries and continues to exist today. Exactly same applies with respect to racial oppression. However, the real fight in these respects is to be found through political activism, not from some self-publicising academics claiming that the experience of listening to Beethoven, for women, is akin to rape (funny, you would think that would have been noticed before). Any number of smug academics writing self-serving academic papers about 'representations of the 'Other' in Western music, and encoded imperial ideologies' makes not the slightest difference to the very real imperial actions of Bush, Blair et al in the Middle East. Not one Palestinian child was saved from the bullet of an Israeli soldier, working for a military machine funded to the hilt by the US, by musicologists writing about constructions of the Islamic world in Rameau operas. The only people these musicology-up-its-own-backside-protagonists serve are those on the political right who would like to withdraw what meagre funding exists for music as it is. Empty gesture politics as a convenient alternative to the real thing.

'The primary problems which we confront in the new millennium - war, famine, poverty, disease, debt, drugs, environmental pollution, the displacement of peoples - are not especially 'cultural' at all. They are not primarily questions of value, symbolism, language, tradition, belonging or identity, least of all the arts. Cultural theorists qua cultural theorists have precious little to contribute to their resolution.'

Terry Eagleton - The Idea of Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), p. 130.

Well, I think those works like to pin themselves to very specific 'meanings', and almost render themselves somewhat beyond reproach as a result, which I find crass. The New Musicologists, similarly, need to pin music to a relatively unambiguous semantics (they would talk about the 'semiotic' features of music), thus privileging the descriptive, the programmatic, the mimetic, the textual, etc., over the abstract. I fundamentally reject this view, finding value especially in music that cannot simply be reduced to something else. The power of music to exceed the 'known' is one of its greatest strengths.