Katy Hamilton

A couple of days ago, on my way to the British Library, I bumped into a friend who asked me what I was currently working on. Enthusiastic, as usual, to share stories about recent projects, I began reeling off some of the jobs currently on my to-do list: CD notes recently completed on music from Armenia and China, programme notes for concerts including repertoire by Medtner, James MacMillan, Bach and Liszt; marking projects about Wagner and Debussy; research on Brahms, and also on 1920s variety shows. As  I counted these various endeavours off on my fingers, I was struck by two things.Firstly, I spend a great deal of time listening to previously unfamiliar music; secondly, I engage with a wide range of repertoires, histories and cultures. And as a freelancer, I do these things far, far more than I ever did whilst working in higher education.

This is ironic, since I genuinely believe, as I wrote just a few weeks ago, that the world needs more musicologists. Nor do I wish to suggest that HE institutions demand narrow focus explicitly. But there implicit are pressures put on those working in HE, largely due to expected models of behaviour, finance, and a perception of ‘appropriate’ skill sets and workloads, which might be responsible for this narrowing.

There is practical music, and there is musicology. These two things are of course intimately intertwined, and yet each allow for different focal points. Practical music is concerned primarily with the creation and performance of sounds. Musicology can be concerned with the history of either of these things (including detailed analysis, shifting practices and cultures) – but it can also be concerned with other, non-sounding elements around music: the history of an individual or institution, the way that music is written or spoken about, sociological or ethnographic issues. Both music and its ology are rich and fascinating, and they can inform each other to the benefit of both (as well as having more far-reaching links outside of the discipline). So far, so good.

Undergraduate degrees usually involve a fair amount of both practical work and musicology, combined. Course schedules are increasingly busy, because with the fee hike, institutions have increased contact time accordingly. That means more work, more study, more assignments. That, plus playing in the orchestra, singing with the blues group and having enough time to go out with your mates means less free time, and you being tired. It’s possible that a part-time job is also part of the equation, given the massive expense of higher education. Which means that the idea of voluntarily spending an evening listening to new music with friends can seem unappealing, one thing too much. Your course tutors are setting you so much stuff anyway, you’re getting the basics already, right? And besides, spare cash for expensive opera and concert tickets (because you only know you’re free last-minute and the advance discounts have gone) is just non-existent.

Say you do make the time, somehow, to do a lot of additional reading and listening. You go on to study for a Masters. You decide that it’s writing, rather than playing, that’s your bag. The assignments are weightier, your debt is mounting and you really need to work as well. You love your course, though, and decide that you would love to do a PhD and stay in academia. So you work on developing a topic, fill in a bunch of funding applications, and cross your fingers.

It works! You get a three-year grant to do your doctorate, you have your niche subject, and you’re away. You’ve stopped playing altogether – no time.  Now your supervisor and other staff members start talking to you about your future. Jobs in academia are tight; you need to get yourself out there, give conference papers and think about publishing. Which means more money (work and/or funding applications) to get to the conferences. And in order to hold your head up in presentations and for article submissions, you need to have read all of the things in your subject area, because you’re going to look like a fool if you’ve missed something. Head down, work on. There’s a set deadline anyway, because the funding runs out after three years. Keep the focus.

And then what? The world of work is liable, if you do get a toe-hold in academia, to demand of you a huge number of things that you previously had no time to consider. You’re a junior lecturer and you have to teach all the things that no one else wants to teach – the chances that these subjects will be in your area are almost nil. You will suddenly become aware that your general repertoire knowledge is actually very limited, because you never had all that much time or money to sit and just listen – and after all, society is so busy telling us to multi-task (for all the good it does us) that it almost seems lazy, just slouching on the sofa with a miniature score and a CD of Dvořák symphonies. And of course, if you want to fight your way up that career ladder, the idea is to reduce your teaching until it’s only on your specialisms, and going off on research trips to gather material for the next super-focused, world-leading book that is going to score you maximum REF points.

For humanities subjects, legitimacy often seems to come from super-specialization – in some ways, we are still in the grip of the ‘high’/’low’ notions of art and its relevance, importance, meaning, from the nineteenth century. Add to this the increasing pressure on new generations of scholars to forge their qualifications in double-quick time whilst fighting with a mountain of debt, and taught by staff who in many cases, through the fault only being part of a different educational era, expect them to make time to listen to three new works a week and read Adorno before breakfast, and you end up with… well, with a bunch of students who have a qualification but were granted no time for deep and broad learning beyond the boundaries of their prescribed lecture slots. And as employed lecturers, the financial strain of the system serves only to perpetuate this –because let’s face it, your department doesn’t have the resources to send you to more than one conference a year, and general conferences are all well and good but won’t give you any specific feedback from other subject experts, will they? So you opt for the specialist meeting, and rarely engage with broader audiences.

Now that I’m my own boss, now that I no longer feel beholden to serving the best interests of anyone but myself, I have become almost lemming-like in my willingness to hurl myself in front of dangerous new things. Composers I’ve never heard of; periods of history I know almost nothing about; pieces of which I have no sonic preconceptions. It’s brilliant. The projects are small – programme or sleeve notes, mostly – which means that I can research broadly but without fear of having to produce extended outputs. I have learned more in the last year than I learned in the previous three. I have a far, far better understanding of developing musical cultures in multiple countries, because in being forced to explain these things to others, I have had to come to grips with them myself.

Specialist research is important and can be deeply rewarding. But the current financial and educational climate is squeezing the time and energy for curiosity out of students… And pressures in administration and resourcing is doing the same for staff. If we can recover an environment in which both groups have the time, money, and crucially the feeling of safety in which to move outside of their comfort zones, the discipline would be a far richer and happier place.