SIMON FRITH

Why music matters

Inaugural lecture given at the University of Edinburgh,
6 March 2007

I should begin this lecture by saying that I feel very privileged and
even more surprised to be addressing you this afternoon as the Donald
Tovey Professor of Music, and it is perhaps appropriate to introduce
my remarks by referring to an essay written by Paul Johnson in The
Spectator a couple of months ago under the heading: ‘The best thing
ever written about music in our language’. Johnson opens his essay
with these words:

If I had a teenage child with a passion for serious music I would not
hesitate to give him or her Essays in Music Analysis by Donald Francis
Tovey.1

The basis of these essays was the programme notes Tovey wrote for the
concerts he conducted with the Reid Orchestra, which he founded
when he became Reid Professor of Music at Edinburgh in 1914.
Johnson calls Tovey’s Essays ‘his masterpiece, his monument and his
achievement, without parallel in the history of music in Britain’.
Having begun by describing Tovey as one of ‘the three greatest writers
on music in English’, Johnson concludes that he is the greatest, ‘because
of his combination of originality, authority (based on his enormous
knowledge) and nerve’.
In occupying the chair bearing his name, I suppose the only one
of these qualities I might possess is nerve. (And certainly, on
this occasion, nerves.) But, in fact, Donald Francis Tovey and I
do have two things in common. First, we both went to Balliol
College, Oxford – though admittedly he had a music scholarship
while I read Philosophy, Politics and Economics. Second, we both
wrote musical entries for the Encyclopaedia Britannica, though
admittedly his entries were devoted to what Paul Johnson calls
‘serious music’ while mine covered rock music, the novelty song and
the pop ballad.
166 Critical Quarterly, vol. 50, nos. 1–2

I have no idea what Professor Tovey would think of someone like me

occupying a chair in his old department in his name – though in his
views of the significance of recording, for example, he was much less
conservative than one might expect. But I have no doubt at all that Paul
Johnson would be appalled. A little over forty-three years ago, on 28
February 1964, Johnson wrote another essay on music, this time for the
New Statesman rather than Spectator, under the title ‘The Menace of
Beatlism’.
I remember reading this article when it first came out – I had left
school but not yet started university and in retrospect I can see that it
had a significant influence on my academic career, if not quite for the
reasons Johnson might have intended. It should be stressed that
Johnson’s article was not called ‘The Menace of the Beatles’. He had no
interest in the Beatles’ music; he assumed its worthlessness. What
concerned him was intellectuals taking such music seriously. ‘Of
course,’ he wrote,

our society has long been brainwashed in preparation for this apotheosis
of inanity. For more than two decades now, more and more intellectuals
have turned their backs on their trade and begun to worship at the shrine
of ‘pop culture’. Nowadays, if you confess that you don’t know the
difference between Dizzy Gillespie and Fats Waller (and what is more
don’t care) you are liable to be accused of being a fascist.
To buttress their intellectual self-esteem, these treasonable clerks have
evolved an elaborate cultural mythology about jazz, which purports to
distinguish between various periods, tendencies and schools. The subject
has been smeared with a respectable veneer of academic scholarship, so
that you can now overhear grown men, who have been expensively
educated, engage in heated argument as to the respective techniques of
Charlie Parker and Duke Ellington. You can see writers of distinction,
whose grey hairs testify to years spent in the cultural vine-yard, squatting
on the bare boards of malodorous caverns, while through the haze of
smoke, sweat and cheap cosmetics comes the monotonous braying of
savage instruments.2

Johnson could only explain such ‘intellectual treachery’ by reference to

what he called the new ‘cult of youth’. And here, he suggested,
intellectuals were wilfully misreading the Beatles’ significance. ‘At
sixteen,’ he writes,

I and my friends heard our first performance of Beethoven’s Ninth

Symphony. I can remember the excitement even today. We would not
have wasted 30 seconds of our precious time on The Beatles and their ilk.
Are teenagers different today? Of course not. Those who flock round The
Beatles . . . are the least fortunate of their generation, the dull, the idle, the
failures: their existence in such large numbers is a fearful indictment of
 Why music matters 167

our educational system, which in ten years’ schooling can scarcely raise
them to literacy.

What the Beatlists failed to realise, in Johnson’s words,

is that the core of the teenage group – the boys and girls who will be the
real leaders and creators of society tomorrow – never go near a pop
concert. They are educating themselves. They are in the process of
inheriting the culture which, despite Beatlism or any other mass-
produced mental opiate, will continue to shape our civilisation.3

Even when I was a teenager Johnson’s argument seemed boneheaded. I

was someone who had (not atypically) queued all night to get Beatles
tickets while revising for A levels, and I was listening at this time, with
equal excitement, to Jerry Lee Lewis and Dave Brubeck, Gilbert and
Sullivan and Penderecki, Dusty Springfield and Mahler’s Song of the
Earth. I certainly didn’t regard myself as the least fortunate of youths.
And, on the other hand (and even putting aside Johnson’s class
snobbery), the account of ‘civilisation’ he offered seemed remarkably
limited, implying that the musical activities and pleasures of the
majority of the world’s population had nothing to do with culture at
all.
My response to Johnson, in short, was a conscious decision to
become a treasonable intellectual, to treat popular music as serious
music. More particularly (and it took my undergraduate degree to help
me make this an academic decision), I decided that music was a
suitable subject for sociology and, further, that there was no reason for
a sociologist to accept a priori any difference between serious and
popular music at all.
I need to make clear what I am arguing here. It is obviously the case
that by the end of the nineteenth century one could describe, in broad
terms, two different musical worlds in Britain, organised in different
institutions, understood according to different musical discourses.
Various (not altogether satisfactory) labels can be applied to these
worlds – the high and the low, the serious and the popular, art music
and commercial music, and so forth. Such distinctions both shaped and
were further institutionalised by the new mass media of the twentieth
century – recording, the radio, et cetera. But, from a sociological point
of view, these worlds were aspects of a single music culture, a music
culture that developed in response to the experience of social change in
the nineteenth century – industrialisation, urbanisation, globalisation
and all the other consequences of the rise to dominance of liberal,
market capitalism.
168 Critical Quarterly, vol. 50, nos. 1–2

My concern here, though, is not this history but its effect on how we
now think about music, and my point is that the separation of musical
practices and experiences into the high and the low is not helpful when
we seek to understand how music works in our lives – its role in
human development, in people’s sense of personal and social identity –
or when we try to explain the nature of musical pleasure and value –
whether for performers or listeners. To start from a premise that only
music made in the Western classical tradition is worthwhile is to beg all
the questions that are interesting. How peculiar it would have seemed,
for example, if my esteemed colleague (and current Reid Professor),
Nigel Osborne, had named the IMHSD the Institute for Serious Music in
Human and Social Development. We must start from the assumption
that music is music. From this perspective the high/low construct is, if
you like, a cultural aberration, a way of thinking that may not even be
the most helpful way of approaching the problem it emerged to
resolve: the problem of making music in the marketplace.
On the one hand, from the ‘high’ perspective, there is a tendency to
assume that high music – music made in the Western classical tradition,
with a particular concept of art as motivation – is autonomous, has
nothing to do with market forces, while low music, popular music, is
driven only by commercial calculation, and therefore isn’t really music
at all. Until really quite recently university departments of music thus
excluded many kinds of music from their curricula. The assumption
here is clearly expressed by the pianist Susan Tomes in her collection of
reflections on the craft of performance, Beyond the Notes. We don’t need
to consider pop music in a study of musical performance, she suggests
(and her definition of pop music includes rock – her contrasting term is
folk). We don’t need to consider it because, in her words, ‘pop music is
cynically designed to be short-lived, entirely commercial’.4
The problem of such an assertion, common enough in the classical
world, is not simply that it misdescribes how pop works, but also that
it suggests a depressing lack of curiosity. The question that’s interesting
about rock performers is precisely how their performing craft has
developed to take account of such commercial pressures – pressures
not entirely unfamiliar in the classical world.
On the other hand, from the ‘low’ perspective, there are equally
problematic populist assumptions about high music, most obviously, of
course, the customary philistinism of the popular press, dismissing
‘high’ music as difficult, elitist, inaccessible, pretentious, et cetera,
familiar enough in Scotland from long years of the ‘problem’ of Scottish
Opera. But what concerns me more is the equally problematic
assumption that, by contrast, popular music making is ‘easy’, as if it
somehow doesn’t involve skill, hard work, discipline and, indeed,
 Why music matters 169

pretension. Just as high/low accounts of music are constructed in

relation to each other, so elitist/populist discourses simply reflect each
other’s limited accounts of why music matters: because it is popular;
because it is unpopular. From my perspective, as a sociologist, the
problem of making music in the marketplace – which all kinds of
performers face – is therefore better understood along other axes,
according to different sorts of opposition, which run across high and
low music alike.
Take, for example, the perceived tension in music policy between
access and excellence. In a speech to the Association of British Orchestras
on 30 January 2006, the then Westminster culture minister, David
Lammy, acknowledged that

As a Culture Minister, there’s nothing that I – or any of my colleagues in

Government – can do to create a musical genius. No-one can legislate to
produce a Mozart. But what we can do is try to create the conditions in
which world class ensembles can thrive – and make sure enough people
have the means to access what they offer.
And I am under no illusions about which of these two things, the twin
pillars of arts policy for as long as we can remember – excellence and
access – should come first. Work of the highest quality must take
precedence. Every time.5

The tension Lammy is describing here is between two different

approaches to educational and cultural policy. Should the state invest
in the technical education of the talented few, subsidise ‘centres of
excellence’? Or should it develop music education for the participation
of the many, invest in community musical activities? Is the experience
of musical engagement more or less important than the quality of the
music or performance resulting?
But the terms here – and this is what makes music such an
interesting form of human activity – may not be quite the right ones.
Music, that is to say, may be made by the few – a few with great skill
and discipline – but to be enjoyed by the many, who engage with music
at quite profound levels, without themselves having, or even
necessarily understanding the meaning of, those skills and discipline.
To put this another way, musical excellence and access are not
necessarily contradictory. I’m not convinced, for example, that music
education is necessary for musical appreciation or that ‘music
appreciation’ is necessary for musical experience. It is a common trope
in the autobiography of musicians that they heard a piece of music by
chance – at a concert, on Radio 3, on someone’s record player – that so
moved them that they then pursued a musical education. The same
experience is common in popular music. The reason I was so knocked
170 Critical Quarterly, vol. 50, nos. 1–2

out by black American rock’n’roll in the 1950s – heard on Radio

Luxemburg and AFN – was that it sounded so odd, so different, so
difficult even.
Access is about music being available – not about it being easy or
familiar. What matters is that people hear the music and then access
affordable instruments and teaching. How much this can be the result
of rational educational planning I don’t know.
Or take another common opposition, culture and commerce. In music,
perhaps more than in any other cultural area (and in spite of the
significance of market forces on musical tastes and practices), there is,
in fact, a significant blurring and overlap between the amateur (the
music lover) and the professional (the music worker), between those
musicians whose careers and livelihood depend on music making and
those for whom it is a leisure activity, a hobby, something done for its
own sake.
Sociologists like Robert Stebbins and Antoine Hennion have pointed
out the paradoxes here – it is the amateurs who enjoy music more, who
are more committed to performance as performance, rather than as a
way of keeping the money coming in.6 But what interests me is
something different. While there is a clear difference between the
musical amateur and professional in terms of career commitment, self-
definition and, of course, playing skills, there is a less clear distinction
in what might be called the musical commitment involved.
An amateur musician must also practise, be disciplined, take on
something difficult that needs work, take part in performance practices
in which self-expression is subordinated to collective ends. Amateur
ability, that is, depends on skills and aptitudes that must be learned,
worked on, developed. As James Fenton noted in the Guardian last year,
reflecting on his return as an adult to piano lessons, ‘I am learning to
play for my own pleasure’ is a misleading statement – that pleasure
involves a high degree of self-discipline and a submission to authority,
the authority of the tutor (person and book), the authority of a grade
examiner.7 And much ‘amateur’ performance involves professionals
too – to provide accompaniment, as soloists; just as in the popular
music world being a professional musician describes a part of a career
that begins and ends and is interspersed with living as a music
amateur.
When reading such dire warnings as Sir Peter Maxwell Davies’s that
our appreciation of serious music is at risk of being destroyed by
television and pop,8 or Sir John Eliot Gardiner’s that Britain’s music
culture is ‘getting worse’9 it is worth noting, then, the sheer amount of
music making that amateur musicians take part in daily. A 1991 UK
survey, for example, suggested that as many people in Britain (2 per
 Why music matters 171

cent of the population) sang in choirs as were engaged in playing rock

and pop music and I doubt if the figures have changed much since
then. The Music Industries Association follow-up 2006 survey of
Attitudes to Music in the UK concluded that 21 per cent of the population
over 5 played a musical instrument and that 11.25 million households
owned at least one. (The most musical population in the British Isles, it
seems, with 28 per cent of the population able to play an instrument, is
Central Scotland.10) I’m not altogether convinced by such figures
(drawn from a telephone survey of just 1,000 households in the UK) –
the 1991 statistic for people over 5 years old playing a musical
instrument was 5 per cent – but as the RSAMD 2003 audit of youth
music in Scotland, What’s Going On, concluded, to look at what people
actually do is to look at ‘an amazing range of activity’.11
And looking at the professional end too – at chamber groups and
choirs and contemporary and experimental ensembles, at jazz, folk,
traditional and Gaelic music, at rock and pop in all their various forms
– these do seem rather good times for Scottish music. I’ve certainly
been to as many good concerts in Scotland in the last twelve months as
at any time in my life. To talk, like Davies and Gardiner, of a crisis in
musical life seems odd.
It could certainly be argued that if music is just something we do, as
humans, as members of society, then music making will go on
irrespective of market forces, educational decisions or music policies.
That said, music making can be helped and hindered by such forces
and decisions and policies, and there are two issues I want to discuss
here – one concerning Scottish music education, one concerning
Scottish music policy – that in my view reflect the continuing unhelpful
effects of the high/low distinction I’ve been seeking to critique.

Music education
Most of my colleagues in university music departments in Scotland
would agree, I think, that changes in the last few years in the
curriculum and standards of Music Highers and Advanced Highers
have had a deleterious effect on students applying from Scottish
schools to do music degrees. I could point to specific issues here – the
downgrading of instrumental performance grades needed to achieve
Higher/Advanced Higher passes; the downgrading of aspects of music
theory – harmony and counterpoint, for example, the notational bases
of Western classical (and popular) music; the lack of discipline required
now for ‘invention’; the shifting use of the term ‘creative’ to mean
personal work rather than to describe a displayed understanding of
compositional processes.
172 Critical Quarterly, vol. 50, nos. 1–2

But the issue here is not simply that would-be music students now
leave school without the technical knowledge and aptitude that
university teachers once took for granted. The issue, rather, is that
music has been changed from a difficult to an easy subject, in which the
emphasis on access and self-expression and the incentives for pupils to
work in and with forms that are entirely familiar, remove precisely the
challenge that is necessary for the emergence and development of
musical talent. This is nothing to do with high music or elitism, but
concerns the way in which one learns the mental and physical skills
necessary to express musical ideas fluently and interestingly in the first
place. When the Herald reported the anxieties in the Scottish music
world about the revamp of Highers and Advance Highers, the key
quotes came from jazz rather than classical performers, from Tommy
Smith and Cathy Rae.12 The issue, to put it succinctly, is that the new
curriculum seems more concerned to give children the chance to
experience music than to learn it.
This is not just a Scottish issue. The UK-wide National Association
for Music in Higher Education has expressed similar concerns about
what is happening to A levels. In the Association’s words,

The sheer breadth of choices within the A level syllabus means that those
of us in higher education can no longer depend on students having a
knowledge of concepts previously regarded as core (Bach chorale
harmonisation, for example). Nor can we assume much familiarity with
essay writing on musical topics.13

For NAMHE the problem lies partly with ‘the low levels of musical
skills that some teachers, particularly those in primary education,
have’, and one effect of this situation is that the sort of musical
instruction that universities presume – in terms of both instrumental
teaching and music theory – increasingly happens only outside the
state school system – in private tuition, in fee-paying schools. Youth
Music’s survey of The Musical Engagement of Young People Aged 7–19 in
the UK, published in May last year, indicates the effects of this in class
terms: 33 per cent of the AB respondents played a musical instrument,
only 17 per cent of the DE sample.14
In both England and Scotland governments have responded to what
is clearly a problem in the extent and quality of music education
available to children. In England the Music Standards Fund was
established in 1999; in Scotland the Youth Music Initiative was
launched in 2003, on the back of a pledge that ‘by 2006 all
schoolchildren should have had access to one year’s free music tuition
by the time they reach P6’. In both cases central government made
 Why music matters 173

funds available to local authorities to develop their own music

programmes, and the reports on how the money was spent – the
DES Survey of Local Authority Music Services 2005 and the SAC Report on
Local Authority Attainment over 3 years’ Youth Music Initiative, 2007 –
make interesting reading. Both reveal the continuing disparity between
different local authorities’ attitudes to music; both suggest that the
funds are giving schools some encouragement to restore music to the
place in the primary curriculum that was once – before the curriculum
shake-up and resource cuts of the 1980s – taken for granted. And both
reveal that, for most children in most (but not all) authorities, to pursue
instrumental tuition means paying for out-of-school lessons.15
No one can doubt, reading the SAC report on the Youth Music
Initiative, that there are many imaginative music education projects in
Scotland. But no one can doubt either that there’s a slightly dispiriting
attitude here as to why music education matters. Unlike David Lammy,
for example, Patricia Ferguson (then Scotland’s minister of culture)
clearly put access at the centre of Scottish music policy. To quote:

I am delighted that local authorities have embraced the Youth Music

Initiative with such enthusiasm, helping to achieve targets across all 32
areas. Musical activities boost children’s confidence and raise a child’s
awareness and appreciation of different styles and forms of music. It
can also help raise attainment levels and equips them with transferable
skills for their future studies and employment.16

Something similar can be seen in the Westminster government’s Music

Manifesto, established in 2004. In the second Manifesto report,
published last year, the central recommendation is

Putting group singing at the heart of all primary school musical activity
. . . Supporting the primary school campaign will be a wider initiative,
backed by the music industry and the media, to create a singing nation,
promoting the benefits of singing in terms of health, education and
community.17

As someone who wrote his PhD on the history of working-class

education, I can only say: we’ve been here before – in the nineteenth-
century promotion of the sol-fa system in working-class elementary
schools, in Cecil Sharp’s early twentieth-century advocacy of folk
singing in the curriculum,
Music matters, says the Scottish Arts Council rightly, but too often it
seems to matter as an aspect of social or health policy, as a means of
social inclusion or to develop social skills. The qualities that are needed
174 Critical Quarterly, vol. 50, nos. 1–2

to make music well need equal emphasis. I’ll come back to this point but,
first, I want to say a few words about music policy.

Music policy
My starting point here is the reconfiguration of cultural policy as
cultural industries policy and I’ll focus on a question that has been a
recurring policy issue since I came to Scotland in 1987: what should
policy makers and politicians do to ensure that Scotland has a
flourishing music sector? Read any academic study of music scenes
and cities written over the last couple of decades and it’s clear that a
vital music culture calls forth a successful music industry rather than
vice versa.18 Music lawyers, PR companies and managers make money
because their clients make effective music. Musicians don’t make good
music because they’ve got good lawyers, PR companies or managers
(though much cultural industry policy seems to take the latter view).
What, then, is needed to sustain a vital music culture? To answer
schematically:
 Music resources: music lessons, teachers, affordable instruments
 Music spaces: rehearsal rooms, promoters and venues of varying
kinds, art schools, universities, conservatoires, record shops
 Time: being a student or unemployed
 People: mentors, models, other musicians to play with, networks,
friendships – across generations, across musical genres and experi-
ences
 Mobility: the movement in (and out) of new faces, new ideas, new
sound
What is not so significant is a commercial, industrial infrastructure –
record companies, consultants, management companies, media, et
cetera. These follow – gravitate to – successful scenes; they don’t create
them.
What I want to stress here about this picture, though (as a matter of
sociological common sense), is that the cultural strength of a music
scene lies in the fluidity of the people involved, the musicians, and the
flexibility of resources (venues, for example). The most successful such
scenes blur the distinctions between high and low – in terms of who
went through what kind of music education, who plays with whom,
and so forth. And note also that the most significant policy decisions in
the making and unmaking of local music cultures are not music policy
decisions at all, but involve things like licensing and planning (which
affect the distribution of venues), housing and education (which
 Why music matters 175

determine the nature of student populations) and employment and

unemployment regulations (which affect musicians’ use of time).
To replace cultural policy with cultural industries policy in the
music sector is, then, to move attention from the conditions for music
making to the conditions for music exploitation. On 27 February 2007,
the then deputy first minister in Scotland, Nicol Stephen, announced
that

Scotland’s music industry is to benefit from extra and better coordinated

support from the country’s enterprise network. A key element of this will
be a new d500,000 fund – the Scottish Music Future Fund – to support the
music stars of tomorrow. The new fund will be made available across
Scotland.

Further,

The industry asked us to support the proposed new Scottish Music

Industry Association. Scottish Enterprise and Highlands and Islands
Enterprise will now contribute to the creation of the new association.
[Matching, I should add, the commitment to the SMIA already made by
the Scottish Arts Council.] (Scottish Executive press release)

The most interesting discursive aspect of this announcement is Nicol

Stephens’s references to the ‘Scottish contemporary music industry’.
What is meant here by contemporary? Stephen undoubtedly takes the
term from the Cross Party Group on Contemporary Music – the
lobbying body behind his announcement. The Cross Party Group, in
the words of the Scottish Executive press handout, ‘believes that
Scotland has the potential to be a world leader in the creation and
marketing of contemporary music’.
Now ‘contemporary music’ has long been the label applied to
contemporary art music (for which the term ‘classical’ is clearly
inappropriate). Hence the Contemporary Music Network, or ECAT, the
Edinburgh Contemporary Arts Trust, chaired by my colleague Peter
Nelson. From this perspective an example of the creation and
marketing of ‘contemporary music’ would not be Paolo Nutini and
the seventeen other acts subsidised by the Scottish Arts Council to
attend the South By South West rock industry trade fair in Austin,
Texas, but 7Hings, the avant-garde label supported by Edinburgh
University and my department. For the Cross Party Group, by contrast,
contemporary music is defined against traditional music (which has its
own Scottish lobbyists) but also against classical music (complaints
about how much subsidy Scottish Opera and the RSNO receive
are commonplace at Group meetings) and so, by default, against
176 Critical Quarterly, vol. 50, nos. 1–2

contemporary work in what is seen by the group as the ‘high’ music

world.
The shift from culture to cultural industry policy, in other words,
seems to become a shift from supporting ‘high’ to supporting ‘low’
music (the popular, the commercial) without a proper understanding
that in terms of the words like ‘creativity’ and ‘talent’ that are bandied
about music cannot and should not be so divided up. It would be an
interesting piece of sociological research to trace how one network of
influence in Scottish music policy making (rooted in academic and
classical worlds) has been replaced by another (rooted in the world of
music industry bodies and consultants). One unduly narrow world,
that is, by another.
But I want to conclude with a different question. What is the place of
a university music department in the ‘contemporary’ music situation?
My starting point here is that such departments should be
unashamedly elitist, concerned with the best students, teachers,
research, ideas, arguments, performances, compositions. But this is
the context for three specific tasks.
First, university music departments should be the setting for
experiment – for what in the sciences might be called blue sky thinking
– whether such experimentation involves technology or technique, the
exploration of new musical languages or forms, the understanding of
music as an aspect of cognition and motor skills, social relations or
sound experiences.
The point here is that university music education is not – in the
contemporary sense of the word – vocational; it is not a preparation for
a professional career. This has to be understood if only because there
are not enough professional music opportunities available annually to
absorb the number of music graduates. (It is hard to get UK figures on
this but a systematic survey of what happened to graduates of German
music academies from 1998 to 2000 suggested that less than 9 per cent
got employment as music professionals. I doubt that the situation
would be different in the UK.)19
But there’s a broader point here. By and large popular music has
become part of the curriculum of FE and HE institutions as a vocational
subject (a Music Teacher survey in 2002 suggested that there were at
least 200 popular music courses in the UK and that the number was still
rising20). Popular music courses prepare people for music industry
careers (and in recent years the government-funded, music-industry-
supported training agency Creative and Cultural Skills has moved
increasingly into the role of benchmarking and auditing popular
music teaching21). The problem of such industry validated courses is
that they are invariably conservative and backward-looking, whether
 Why music matters 177

in terms of the technology training provided – ‘short term practicality’,

in Philip Tagg’s words – or of the structure of the music industry
implied. As Tagg has written,

I don’t know how many students have followed relatively recent music
business courses whose ‘practicalities’ were based on observing industry
structures from the phonogram era (c1900–c2000): fantastic if you wanted
a job in the industry in the 1980s! It reminds me of all those classical
performers who still produce as if we were all living in fin-de-siècle
Vienna.22

This is the context in which ‘elitism’ means exploring musical

possibilities (on the basis of embedded musical skills and theoretical
knowledge, including Western tonal music theory) rather than
subordinating oneself to commercial or bureaucratic or indeed
academic practicality.
The second, related, task of a university music department is to
develop through practice the idea of creativity – a term much abused by
being applied currently, it seems, to every aspect of government and
corporate policy. In the history of British popular music it is striking
how much more significant art schools have been than music schools or
vocational music courses. The point here is that for various reasons art
schools have been, until very recently, the only British educational
institutions that take creativity seriously, seeking to understand it,
nurture it, assess it, display it. Musical creativity may not be quite the
same thing as artistic creativity – it is necessarily a more collective and
collaborative process – but it is not a quite different thing either, and
music degrees and conservatoire courses need to take issues of
creativity as seriously as art schools do.
And this leads to the university music department’s final task: to be
a site for the development of and reflection on music teaching as
centrally important to the ways in which music cultures work. The role
of the music teacher has always been central to the classical music
tradition – a performer’s provenance is established by whom they
studied with; music teachers are central to the history of music theory
and analysis. As we have seen, much current music education policy is
driven by the need – and the problems – of getting music teaching and
teachers back into the school system. (And one of the major problem of
the present plethora of vocational music courses is the very variable
standards of teaching involved.) Teaching, in short, whether done
formally or informally matters to music making – it can’t simply be
regarded as an adjunct to research – it is an aspect of what ‘research’ in
music means. And this is as true for popular as for classical music – in
178 Critical Quarterly, vol. 50, nos. 1–2

this respect Tommy Smith’s case for a Jazz Academy in Scotland is

incontrovertible.
The title of this lecture is ‘Why Music Matters’ and it might seem by
now that I have rather rambled off my subject, so let me finish by
saying where I think I’ve got to.
Underlying what I have been saying about music in universities is
the belief that the value of music does not lie in what it is good for.
Music doesn’t matter because it has a positive effect on children’s
behaviour or a community’s health, because it improves exam results
or makes people feel more patriotic or less depressed, or better able to
deal with memory loss. If these were the reasons for music’s value then
it could, in principle, be replaced by pharmaceutical discoveries or new
behavioural modification techniques or indeed by a better distribution
of income. Rather, it is because music matters that it has – or can have –
these other effects. Music may be useful psychologically, socially,
politically or whatever. But that’s not why people do it. Music matters
because it is pleasurable – to do and to experience – and because it is a
necessary part of what we are as humans, as feeling, empathetic beings,
interested in and engaged with other people. To study music is to study
what it is to be human – biologically, cognitively, culturally; to play
music is to experience what it is to be human – physically, mentally,
socially, in an aesthetic, playful, sensual context. Music matters, in
short, because without it we wouldn’t know who we are and what we
are capable of being.

Notes
1 P. Johnson, ‘And Another Thing’, Spectator, 13 January 2007.
2 P. Johnson, ‘The Menace of Beatlism’ (1964), repr. in Mike Evans (ed.), The
Beatles Literary Anthology (London: Plexus, 2004), 127.
3 Ibid., 129.
4 S. Tomes, Beyond the Notes (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 2005), xx.
5 D. Lammy, speech to the Association of British Orchestras Annual
Conference, 30 January 2006; http://www.davidlammy.co.uk/da/29578.
6 R. A. Stebbins, Amateurs, Professionals and Serious Leisure (Montreal: McGill-
Queen’s University Press, 1992; A. Hennion et al., Figures de l’amateur
(Paris: La Documentation française, 2000).
7 J. Fenton, ‘James Fenton Struggles with Piano Examinations’, Guardian
Review, 11 November 2006, 15.
8 I. Bell, ‘Did TV Kill Classical Music?’, Sunday Herald (Seven Days), 1 May
2005, 8.
9 N. Crowe, ‘Melody Maker’, Prospect Magazine, 2006, 124; http://www.
prospect-magazine.co.uk/printarticle.php?id=7538.
 Why music matters 179

10 Music Industries Association, Attitudes to Music in the UK – a Nexus Survey

(London: MIA, 2006).
11 Scottish Arts Council, What’s Going On? A National Audit of Youth Music in
Scotland (Edinburgh: SAC, 2003).
12 J. Kemp, ‘Chorus of Anger at Music Higher’s Lower Standard’, Herald, 18
October 2005.
13 National Association for Music in Higher Education, NAMHE Newsletter,
1:2 (2006), 9.
14 Youth Music, Our Music: Musical Engagement of Young People Aged 7–19 in
the UK – an Omnibus Survey (London: Youth Music, 2006), 3.
15 S. Hilton, L. Rogers and A. Creech, Survey of Local Authority Music Services
(London: Department of Education and Science, 2005); Scottish Arts
Council, Report on Local Authority Attainment over 3 years’ Youth Music
Initiative (Edinburgh: SAC, 2007).
16 Scottish Arts Council, Report on Local Authority Attainment over 3 years’
Youth Music Initiative (Edinburgh: SAC, 2007).
17 Music Manifesto, Second Report (London: Youth Music, 2006); www.
musicmanifesto.co.uk.
18 See, for example, S. Cohen, Beyond the Beatles: Decline, Renewal and the City
in Popular Music Culture (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007); B. Shank, Dissonant
Identities: The Rock’n’Roll Scene in Austin, Texas (Hanover NH: University
Press of New England, 1994).
19 A. Barber-Kersovan, posting to IASPM list discussion ‘What Do Classical
Musicians Play for a Living?’, 4 August 2006.
20 R. Mason, ‘Hello, Pop Pickers’, Music Teacher, February 2002, 26–7.
21 See R. Ashton, ‘Skills Set to Lead Agenda of Government-backed Study’,
Music Week, 4 February 2006, 8.
22 P. Tagg, posting to IASPM list discussion ‘Pop Theory’, 13 January 2007.