When Disaster Strikes: Saving Music for the Nation

The current New Zealand School of Music is a train wreck. It has to be saved. It has to change.

Wellington the City of Culture is a culture of bureaucracies: the City Council, the two Universities, the NZSO, Creative New Zealand, Government, Education. All interlocked in the ill-starred merger called the New Zealand School of Music from whom the Key government has now withdrawn a token pledge of $11 million of financial support offered by Michael Cullen as crumbs to attract matching private investment.

Flushed with the success of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings, the original merger initiative was launched as an outwardly rational move to enhance Wellington’s musical prestige and draw in much-needed commercial sponsorship. In reality the lure of government largesse, put up for grabs unresearched and without quality controls in place, only succeeded in encouraging protracted rivalries and infighting among pompous academics, pipe dreaming professionals, architectural firms hungry for fame and fortune, and bogus local government quangos feeding off Greater Wellington ratepayers to the tune of $5 million a year.

The problems for Wellington are stark. First, a lack of suitable private studio space for hire for recording music for the movies. Second, lack of expertise in media performance training, which has special sight reading and technical requirements. Third, entrenched hostility in music schools against the very principle of offering industry-approved professional training and research in classical sound recording, sound design, and computer modelling in music and sound. Fourth, a local tradition of academic contempt toward technology and innovation, of which the universities’ failure to obtain industry support is only the most obvious and glaring consequence. Fifth and finally, a political culture of local and national government bureaucracy that would rather play games of one-upmanship and pass the parcel than cooperate sensibly to find solutions.

Six years ago, when the Tertiary Education Commission refused to certify the proposed joint School of Music training programme because it did not aim to achieve a high enough standard to qualify as research for special financial assistance, the message was obvious. The government was effectively saying that a teaching programme biased in favour of jazz, free composition, and big band music from the Glenn Miller era was neither academically nor professionally equipped to meet the standards of skill and innovation required by industry. In order to have any chance of top-up funding under the Centre of Excellence scheme, School of Music planners would be better advised to hive off courses in jazz and popular music to an alternative provider like Whitireia or Natcoll, in order to focus on art music training and repertoire, audio training, and sound design research and development at the highest level, areas of cultural and technical merit having the best potential to attract government funding and industry sponsorship.

Turning their backs on the implications of the TEC ruling, university administrations sought to buy time by recklessly hiring an unknown US academic as Director on the strength of her remarkable track record of raising large endowments for a community music college located in a region of conspicuous private wealth and traditional generosity in funding education and the performing arts. But New Zealand is not the Boston suburbs. The universities’ implied snub to government and local industry advice misfired so totally that in the five years of Dr Hudson’s appointment not a single one among Wellington’s select group of arts benefactors has publicly volunteered to contribute to the new building proposed for Ilott Green.

For a restructured School of Music and Centre of Excellence to choose to focus on classical music rather than jazz and hiphop journalism is vital for the obvious reason that sight reading, teamwork, extended repertoire, orchestration, and time management disciplines are basic skills requirements for industry investment and support. These skills are irrelevant in the toxic, laid back, finger-clicking environment of fifties jazz and the Sound Lounge. By all means provide such training, but not at a university and not at the expense of quality performance and research. Let the tourism industry pick up the tab for courses in bar-room entertainment as a promotional aid for our food and wine.

What the world expects is music created to exacting international standards and offering well executed and technically flawless audio backdrops to an intricate visual choreography. In the wake of the movie Avatar the challenge is increasingly to extend and manipulate sound tracks in three dimensions. You will not find the skill sets in research and innovation in any New Zealand university music school at the present time. Not even Otago, whose Music Department only last February announced the purchase of a million-dollar digital mixing desk, paid for by university grant aid, a gesture of stretch Humvee immodesty for which Music Department personnel currently have neither the operating skills, nor the least intention, to provide suitable undergraduate training.

A career in music for the movies, as composer, arranger, or performer, is intellectually and physically demanding work. Innovation means constant exposure to new and unfamiliar repertoire designed to extend artistic skills to the limit and create specialist expertise in acoustics and studio techniques. In turn, the studio funded musical culture in Los Angeles and London stimulates public taste for adventure and innovation in the concert domain. Fantasy and innovation are virtues that local and international supporters of our unique Wearable Art festivals and Wellington City Council and tourism clearly appreciate, but the same are repressed in our musical culture by anxious and anal administrations.

Government or industry funding for classical music services is not an entitlement. It has to be earned. An orchestra comes with its own set of rules, egos, committees and union issues. The movie business has no time for any of that. The industry is unimpressed by names or reputations. It does not hire labels. If Hollywood paymasters suddenly demand an entirely new score for a movie like King Kong to be composed and recorded in four weeks or less, the last thing a producer needs is to have to haggle with management, the Musicians’ Union, the Film Commission, or the city council over whether players are available, or access to the Old Town Hall, or rates of pay, or royalties, or security issues.

What you do need is a pool of local musicians who are technically up to speed, available at short notice, and independent of contractual or union obligations. To provide that talent pool is the responsibility of a School of Music. Like orchards and market gardens, the movie industry is in the business of offering seasonal employment to a capable seasonal workforce. The formula already works for local talent to appear as bit players, in crowd scenes, design costumes, recreate a street in downtown New York on a vacant lot in Petone, make suits of armour, or craft iconic items such as the ring in The Lord of the Rings.

That pool of local musical talent does exist. Ask Donald Maurice, viola player, professor at the New Zealand School of Music, and a consummate fixer. In 2007, together with the Dominion String Quartet and the Alfred Hill Trust, Maurice organized a six week-long festival in celebration of the music of Alfred Hill, pioneer New Zealander of “Waiata Poi” fame, —and composer, in case you were wondering, of the musical score to Rudall Hayward’s pioneer New Zealand movie epic Rewi’s Last Stand. Highlight of the 2007 Festival was a revival of Hill’s massive Commemorative Ode, a choral and orchestral work of Mahlerian dimensions, specially commissioned to celebrate New Zealand’s elevation to Dominion status, thereafter abandoned and totally forgotten since its 1906 premiere. Drawing entirely on musicians from the local community, this major celebration of local pride and local musical history for the City of Culture successfully went ahead without the support or cooperation either of Radio New Zealand or of the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra.

Since then, in their own time and out of their own resources, Donald Maurice and the Dominion String Quartet have launched a series of recordings of Alfred Hill quartets for Naxos, attracting world attention to New Zealand’s classical roots and the quality of Wellington musicianship and musical scholarship. For its part the NZSO later this year will be quietly embarking on yet another costly world tour, organized in more affluent times, unlikely to attract more than momentary prestige and a handful of press cuttings, and in the course of which a number of players may be tempted to jump ship.

It is all very well for the Dominion Post piously to editorialize on the need for the public to stump up private money for a scheme they know to be unworkable. This, remember, is the same Dominion Post who only last November headlined the disastrous Grow Wellington plan to build a sound stage for the NZSO on the foundations of a former car dealership in Abel Smith Street. Since the ineptly named Lilburn Studios plan is clearly a product of NZSO frustration with the failure of the Ilott Green proposal to make any progress, does the Dominion Post now expect its readership to fork out for two inadequate proposals rather than one? Suitable heritage accommodation on the Erskine College site in Island Bay is available, at one-tenth of the projected Ilott Green build cost, to meet the growing needs of both the NZSO and the School of Music. What are readers of the paper’s Fairfax stablemate The Wellingtonian to make of Kerry McBride’s February 11 story, published under the headline “Erskine Unsuitable for Music School”? How can the paper be so confident? Because Peter Walls has said the orchestra will not want to move, or because an anonymous fuddy-duddy refuses to relocate from a comfortable desk down the corridor from the Mayor’s office to roomier accommodation in the suburbs?

ENDS

© Scoop Media