Page 2282 - Week 06 - Wednesday, 9 May 2012
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performance musical skills. I appreciate that most professional musicians these days, like most professional actors and professional artists are, in effect, small business people. If they wish to survive as artists, they have to be competent at small business. But that is not the major thing they need to be competent in. They need to be competent, I would hope, in their artistic endeavours, and music in particular in this regard.
The changes proposed by the vice-chancellor could make a substantial change to the School of Music. I repeat Mrs Dunne’s quote from the CSO:
… future students will not graduate as highly trained performers ready to develop their professional career through the CSO, amongst other orchestras in Australia and the world.
That is from the CSO’s media release, and I will continue on with a bit more from the media release that Mrs Dunne did not quote:
We hope that the ANU SOM will recognise its place in and responsibility to the community that nurtures it. The CSO and many other arts, government and commercial organisations in Canberra have benefitted from the activity at the SOM and students who have graduated from it. The community as a whole will feel the long-term loss of not having high quality musicians at its disposal.
You can look at the music scene in the ACT as somewhat of a pyramid—from the elite world performers at the top who fly in and do a one-night performance which we are all awed by down to the kindergarten kids who are having a great time playing their triangles and learning how to play the recorder and all that sort of stuff. There is a graduation in between that, and all of these parts are important. The ANU’s School of Music has an important part in that. They are our professional, elite-level musicians in the ACT, and we will all be a lot poorer if they do not exist. Who is going to teach the kids in the ACT if we do not have the School of Music? The School of Music provides a huge proportion of the people who teach kids in the ACT.
I have been contacted by a lot of people about this. I have been very surprised at the amount of community feeling about this. One of the emails I have received is from a graduate of the ANU School of Music:
As an undergraduate, one-on-one lessons were by far the most important, inspiring and influential aspect of my music education. They have informed my work as a performer, educator, researcher, and composer since the first lesson I had at the School of Music in 1998.
I, in fact, had flute lessons at the predecessor of the School of Music before it was combined with the ANU. I am one of the older members of the Assembly, I guess you could say.
As well as comments from the arts community, we have also had substantial comments from the NTEU and ANU student representative bodies. As well as an artistic issue, we have industrial relations and educational issues here. That is possibly not as important as the musical issue, but they are also important issues, and my amendments go to both of them.
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