The mystery remains there despite all that New Musicologists try to remove it - it's just they are pathologically unable to see it (not least because many of them have highly undeveloped powers of musical perception).

Nothing waffly about that, thompson.

I wonder about making a radical suggestion, that the divide between music colleges and universities is dissolved, and that wider institutions are formed in which one can take various types of course involving different degrees of performance, composition and academic study? Separating the things out, particularly so that those involved in different fields have little contact with one another, rarely seems that productive to me.

I came at this topic elliptically but I'm encouraged by the scepticism about new models of FE as applied to Music
expressed here and by colleagues in academia. I had dinner a while ago with a couple of practicioner-lecturers
who recounted that earlier in the day their students had walked away from the opportunity to perfect a performance which was wobbly on the basis that they'd done their allotted time. Were they full-on pros this would
be understandable, but echoing Reiner's fine homily earlier it seems moronically churlish to adopt such a pose
when an oportunity like that presents itself. The same torpid attitude was about in parts of a media course I was
on in ancient times, wheras waht is needed now in that industry ,as in the portfolio careers of today in Music, is
can-do drop-of-a-hat flexibility.
There is something joyless yet fetishistic about the academic experience as a must-have in this day and age which
I would like to see replaced by, in effect, drop-in Professional development in which avowed practicioners learnt
and taught on an equal footing. The net may yet yield this, and a course I'm contemplating online seems to have
elements of this.

I've finally got around to posting on this thread, now that term has ended.
My experience of a BA course in a fairly traditional music department, was that most of my classmates didn't actually like classical music (many of them told me this) and had no intention of doing anything other than getting a reasonable classification and then going on to do a job which involved them earning a lot of money. There were, however, a core of deeply committed people who set out to make the most of the opportunities granted them (I'd like to think that I was one of these). The course was extremely easy in the first year (mainly making sure that we had a basic grasp of music history from Bach to Beethoven; could produce Bach chorales, Haydn string quartets, Mendelssohn songs and fugal expositions on demand; had heard some music from outside our dominant culture (where I discovered Tibetan music); had heard some music written after 1945; and had mastered basic keyboard harmony, figured bass realisations etc. as well as demonstrating our performing abilities (or lack).
In the next two years we could specialise more and more (though by the time I got to my third year, the paucity of modules from which I could choose and the specialism of said modules was so extreme that I found it quite difficult to choose).
Throughout all three years, I spent most of my time composing and reading about composers and composition. This was reflected in many of my marks in other areas unfortunately...

My MA was in another university that offered a BMus course. The course was much more focused on practical aspects of music: on performance and on composition. The students put in an incredible amount of practice time but tended to see academic work as a distraction from what they were really there to do. Many of the students that I knew had a real passion for performance and wanted to go on to do something related to music.

I came back to my first institution to begin my PhD, and since then I have become more and more involved in the teaching side of the coin.
Some of our lecturers don't seem to be interested in teaching.
The RAE (or some twisted interpretation of same) is king in the academic world (or at least in this version of same).
'You've discovered what? Where are you getting it published and when? I don't care how interesting it is! If you don't get it published in this list of peer-reviewed journals then I'm just not interested.'
If you think that students are lazy, wait till you get into a staff meeting.
If our department was a business, it would have been declared bankrupt years and years ago.
Mismanagement, complete lack of training and completely missing-the-point bureaucracy make the whole thing completely problematic.
Academics are getting promoted to positions of responsibility on the basis of the length of time that they have been working for the university and the 'importance' (i.e. their research has got RAE brownie points) of their research, not on their ability to cope with responsibility, and then they aren't receiving any kind of training to deal with such responsibilities.
We have meetings where minutes are taken and then only circulated a week before the next meeting of that flavour (and believe me, we have more flavours of staff meetings than Walls do of ice cream), which is normally the next term, and then we sit around going through the minutes of the last meeting, only to discover that no-one has done anything...
Our HoD recently told me that he's found that lecturers coming from FE and from post-1984 universities, are more willing to put the time and thought necessary to teach effectively, and to fulfill deadlines (which, let's face it, if you're expecting students to fulfill deadlines is kind of necessary), and to do all the little things that would help the department run smoothly and effectively, than more 'traditional' HE academics.

So, what about the students?
Most students coming here enter at 1st year level with very little knowledge of the repertoire, outside of (normally) a maximum of 4 works that they have studied at A-Level, with almost no historical background to those pieces.
Most students are unable to perform basic stylistic composition, basic aural tests, notate music neatly, talk coherently about music or write essays.
When I started university, there were 4-5 people in my year group (about 50) who hadn't done Bach chorales before coming. Now, we find that there are 4-5 people in the year group (about 60) who have.
Given the feedback that we receive, many students believe that lecturers should only lecture on what will appear in the exam, and that everything that is necessary to getting a first in the exam, should be made completely available to them.
(By this I'm not saying that they expect that everything that they need for a first should be presented in a lecture, but more that they expect a rigorously circumscribed list of texts and recordings to which they should listen, without going through the indignity of using their initiative and seeking out alternative sources of information.)
Some of the teaching staff don't help matters by focusing on writing about writings on music in the undergraduate course.
We are potentially training a generation of students who can get a music degree without having to read a single note of music throughout their course.
This may be what the government wants, but it isn't what I (and many other music students and music academics) signed up for.

So, what can we do?
How can we revise the system, when the very people that we need to perform this revision (the academics) are going to want to protect their positions of irresponsibility? I really don't think that bringing in a national curriculum is going to help anyone (it's almost a given that it's going to be the reverse - after all, why do you think the standard of our incoming students is so low?) so it comes down to individual departments slowly transforming themselves. I'm quite willing to believe that some have - the attitudes that I was getting from the Manchester department when I applied for a job there certainly suggested that standards were higher there - but from where I'm standing, it's not going to happen here any time soon.

I really worry that students graduate, go into the real world to make lots of money, find out that they have to take initiative and 'think outside the box' and are completely freaked out. Crash and burn.

As you can see, I'm a little bit depressed about the state of my own department, and more generally about the state of music in HE in general, based on what I've seen here. The real problem comes down to coordinating the entire department to make a difference. If some of the members of staff are willing to spoon-feed the students, others are willing to near-completely abandon them to the lecture notes that they wrote 15 years ago, then how are they going to react to really positive models of teaching?

By the way, isn't it interesting that higher education is the one place where no sort of training whatsoever is deemed necessary for teaching? I'm not advocating that we should have mandatory teaching qualifications in order to teach in universities, just suggesting that teaching ability itself seems to be perceived as of relatively little consequence in such places. One can do the poacher-turned-gamekeeper process in just a year or few years, going from student to lecturer in the same subject. And also be assigned duties of personal responsibility for students, many of whom are away from home for the first time and in a highly vulnerable situation. At the last institution I was at, I found it shocking what a callous attitude towards the students, as people, certain lecturers had. Happy to bitch about them, dismiss them with just a few words, but utterly uninterested when they did well. Just mere teaching fodder. They deserve better.

At the three HE institutions I have taught at, the first was a straight into the lion's den situation, with no help, guidance, mentoring, etc etc; the second ditto although there are the occasional gusts from Human Remains about keeping our noses clean re sleeping with students etc (ie we can do it so long as we tell our line managers and then don't assess the students concerned...); the third is the only place where I have gained a certificate "proving" I can teach, although the day's training didn't involve anything to do with teaching other than being told that "the attention span of students is notoriously short - change the delivery method of your lectures every 15 - 20 minutes." Oh, and how to spot plagiarism in essays. (Something that I suspect anyone with half a brain can do anyway.) The second institution is trying to encourage all staff members to get membership of the Institute of Teaching and Learning (or is it the other way round?) at OUR expense... HR comes up with all sorts of schemes to justify its existence - appraisal, peer review, etc etc which it quickly loses interest in (my last appraisal was in 2003 and it was never written up...) These schemes are to HR what RAE is to the higher echelons of the institution. I could go on, but like hh find it too depressing...

Ian, I'm not sure that the cynical attitude towards students that you mention would necessarily be mitigated by having the lecturers attend more courses! I think, from my position of relatively little experience, and, from the comments on this thread, obviously untypical experience too, a lot of these problems must arise from university teachers feeling that their day job is an onerous necessity forced on them by the impossibility of making a living at whatever their vocation might be, rather than an opportunity for their teaching activities to feed into the practice of that vocation in a creative and enlightening way, so that students and teachers both benefit from the relationship, instead of neither of them doing so (apart from the teacher receiving his or her salary).