To Study or not to Study?

Should indie pop musicians go to University and study music or not? This week, that, is the question. I’m still reverberating from that “one-man band” article in the New York Times a week or so back. When that paper calls a musician “unabashedly articulate” you wouldn’t normally think they were writing about an indie pop sensation like Final Fantasy. The roots of modern pop music are more on the iconoclastic and anti-establishment side (never mind “sex, drugs and rock and roll”). After all, the Beatles were still learning how to play their instruments when they were already an international sensation.

When I was a student in music school most of the young composers were coming in with a stronger background in rock than in classical. Some had gotten bored with formula driven pop music and were looking for something more substantial. They wanted to create music that would be more complex. New classical was just the thing. It could be as intellectual and intense as you wanted. Studying the classical tradition, usually at a university school of music, was the normal road to follow.

On Sunday I’ve lined up a crop of tracks from musicians who have solid training in classical music, but who’ve turned their talents and creativity to alternative pop music. Alexandre Désilet, Son Lux, Julia Kent, Ólöf Arnalds, and Patrick Wolf all fit this profile, and every week I seem to come across more.

Are they running away from classical music? That seems unlikely. You don’t have to do a lot of research to know that there are pop musicians who get ideas from listening to classical music. PJ Harvey and Elvis Costello are just two who are happy to acknowledge that they listen to new classical music.

What good does it do a would-be pop star to study how Beethoven planned the modulations in his piano sonatas or how Stravinsky used the octatonic scale? I teach in a school of music and I’m not sure of the answer to that question. We seem to be going through one of those major shifts in musical history. They do happen every once in a few hundred years, like when European musicians discovered the joys of writing music for more than one part (that happened during the move from Gregorian Chant to polyphony in the Medieval period). The same kind of shift happened in the Baroque period when classical tonality caught on. In our time we’re moving through the “post-everything” period to the “what the hell do we do now” phase. Our university music schools are mostly stuck in the past, with curricula that haven’t changed much in a hundred years. Yeah, some have added jazz programs, but they’re still mostly butting heads with the required classical courses.

A few years back universities started giving out honorary doctorates to aging pop stars. Neil Young, Cat Stevens, Bono, The Guess Who, Nick Cave and Tom Cochrane are just a few who can now be called Dr. So now that university senates have legitimized pop, how can we continue to indoctrinate our students that classical music is “better” than any other kind of music? Outside my office at Brandon University I have a blurb taken from Parmela Attariwala’s website. We’ve played Parmela’s music on The Signal many times. She’s working on a doctorate in music and her dissertation will be about “the impact of globalization and post-colonialism on contemporary music-making.” She’s asking some pretty tough questions about how our programs should be structured and who should be welcome in the hallways.

This isn’t the first time that this has happened. Sixty years ago classical music performers weren’t welcome in the university. They were trained at independent conservatories. As North American universities grew after the Second World War, classical performers and composers edged their way in and seem to have forgotten that not long ago they were outsiders. Creating us and them camps is mostly destructive. After ten years of studying classical music at university, I had drawn a pretty narrow circle around myself. I thought I knew what music was worth considering and what wasn’t. Then I met Leonard Bernstein and he pretty much trashed my little world. For him, there were only two kinds of music – good and bad. He was just as excited about Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and the Kronos Quartet’s arrangement of Jimi Hendrix as he was about the Rite of Spring he was conducting that week.




I can’t help but think that if we look at all the music being made in the world, that we’ll find a crazy amount that’s good, if not great. The mix tape we create at The Signal each week is just a window into the world of “new” music that’s being made outside the boundaries. I think that university music professors need to learn from their students on this one. We’ve fallen too far behind the curve. It’s time to get with the program!