(Daily Telegraph)
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2008/04/13/btarts113.xml

Nicholas Hytner said the failure to provide children with an adequate education in music and drama was a scandal whose effects were being felt throughout the arts community.  He said it could take 20 years to put right, adding that arts organisations should not "dumb down" their productions to attract wider audiences.

[The full interview with Hytner referred to in the above article can be found here:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2008/04/14/sv_artslist1.xml ]

Not really schools, and not teachers.  Hytner misses the target ever so slightly, in a way that fails to nail the real culprits.

He's right that many of the problems are connected with schools, but the real problem is finding time in the syllabus and the resources to use that time, and here the question is one of priorities set by others. 

Some examples:

The GCSE music syllabus is ludicrously easy, and offers no challenge or incentive to excellence.  I really don't want to turn into one of those who goes on about the dumbing-down of exams, but GCSE music has to be the exception.  The demans it makes are so low that, hereabouts, sixth-form colleges don't recognise it as an entry qualification for A-level music; they want Grade 5 theory as a minimum, plus Grade 5 on an instrument preferred, both of which go way beyond the GCSE requirement.  Anyone who can use Sibelius or strum a few chords on a guitar will pass the performance requirement.  The only challenge that is provided in secondary schools appears to be where a dedicated teacher is prepared to organise extra-curricular ensembles. 

(Incidentally, I know much less about GCSE Drama but I did once ask one of my daughter's friends what sort of voice training they did.  Answer: none, they have throat mikes these days .... ). 

The local music service here runs a "Vocal Techniques" class for young singers, and the results are little short of scandalous.  I have heard the class perform in a smallish school hall where they are miked ) and it is obvious that they have not been taught to stand, breathe or support - simply to croon breathily into a microphone.  Again, no challenge or discipline or recognition that to achieve something worthwhile demands effort.  It contrasts powerfully with the approach and resources devoted to school sport, but then I suppose that is what politicians care about.

Nothing is done to support children whose parents cannot afford instruments or tuition.  Forget the scandal of the selling-off of school playing fields; peripatetic music services and instrumental provision have been decimated.  Thirty years on, the ethos and funding of, say, the Leicestershire Schools Symphony Orchestra looks like the purest fantasy. 

Most of all, schools and teachers are not equipped to counteract the prevailing culture, in which commercial interests bombard children with content-free stimulus - in particular through TV but other media as well - in which children move from one garish image and loud noise to another.  It's exhausting and seems to me to undermine children's ability to concentrate, to relax, to focus on anything other than the moment.  Add to that the poisonous culture of "cool", in which enthusiasm and achievement are held up to ridicule and playground bullying, and you have a tide of intellectual and emotional sewage that teachers and schools cannot, by themselves, hold back.  What price reflectiveness and seriousness in this environment?

All these problems seem to me to manifest themselves in schools, but the fault seems to me to lie elsewhere.  Don't blame the schools; the root problems are elsewhere.

I think that awareness and love of the arts should be as wide as possible and should be encouraged at all ages, starting as early as possible.  I guess I was conflating performance and appreciation, although I guess that the former can go a long way towards encouraging the latter.  I think what I really object to is the idea that a qualification can give the appearance of accomplishment while denying the reality, and that the curriculum should fail to extend and expand students' consciousness.

But, yes, there should be time and space and resource for appreciation across the curriculum.  If only music got a fraction of the time and effort devoted to sport ...

I'm certainly not going to defend the good old days.    At my public school in the 1970s I fetched up taking brass sectionals for the school orchestra - not because I was the best brass player (which I wasn't by some distance) or most accomplished musician but because I was a senior prefect and because it would have been corrosive to the character for more junior boys to direct those above them in the pecking order ...

I wonder if this

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/04/14/DDM310469E.DTL&feed=rss.entertainment

is the kind of thing Hytner has in mind?

And, as I'm certain we've discussed before, the knock-on effects are crucial. Please let nobody believe that, in terms of musical literacy, performance and creative discipline and technique, A-levels do not similarly suffer, whatever HMG or anyone else says. The proliferation of A-level syllabuses is merely a symptom of the diffusion of 'skills' embedded at GCSE-level.

And then we see the consequences at university level. Smart, able and intellectually mature kids with an 'A' grade at A-level can often barely read music; but if that wasn't cause enough for concern (as it isn't in the minds of some, and I partially understand that), neither can they think critically, analyse, make comparative judgements or demonstrate any kind of comparative musical knowledge. So, we have either to go with that (and lose or ignore what we only recently considered to be core musical values and skills) or backtrack furiously and insert massive amounts of remedial work into the HE curriculum in order to redress the balance. Which, obviously, takes time away from stuff we 'should' be doing etc. etc.

Anytime now, Ian will probably be along to say 'so what?' - and that the time is fast disappearing (if not long gone) when we should be privileging the musical values that we traditionally have in education, and that the musical world just isn't like that any more and is incapable any longer of sustaining this. And perhaps he'd be right. But in any case we may as well face the fact that the kinds of priorities and values that I suspect most of us experinced in our musical education have long since been buried by other types of cultural concerns.

Trombonists, quite often.

When we talk about 'appreciation of the Arts', what exactly do we mean? Are we in danger of limiting the idea of 'the Arts' to a certain conception of 'high culture', especially in the case of music? After all, plenty of young people know a lot about, and appreciate (sometimes with quite intricate forms of discernment and notions of cultural meaning) popular music, but they wouldn't be categorised as having such 'appreciation'. Musical education has had to take account of this, and consider the fact that the various skills involved both for performers and listeners of these other musics at least deserve serious consideration of their own alongside the more traditional 'musical values'.

Learning soprano, alto, tenor, bass clefs is one thing, but mightn't learning tablature notation for the guitar be equally if not more important? And being able to improvise over a basic riff as important as doing traditional keyboard harmony? And knowing about 1960s Motown as important as knowing what Stockhausen or Nono were doing in the same period?

I'm continually in two minds about these issues, not at all claiming to have definitive solutions.