Some musical notes

My blog posts have been a bit heavy of late, so thought I should share something a bit more cheerful. I have just made a SoundCloud account, and will be uploading live recordings from gigs to it.

Link here: http://soundcloud.com/jackdaviesmusic

I've put a couple of tracks on - one from Southbound's London Jazz Festival Gig, and one from my big band's gig at the Forge in October. Will stick some more up soon.

Enjoy!

The death knell for UK conservatoires?

Today the government voted to increase the cap on tuition fees to £9,000 per year for undergraduates, but for conservatoires the real damage is yet to come.

English music colleges currently rely heavily on grants from HEFCE, and there are reports that all conservatoires are very likely to lose 100% of their teaching grants.

This is how much each conservatoire is set to lose: (Total teaching funding grants)

Trinity Laban School of Music and Dance - £8.44m

Royal Northern College of Music - £5.83m

Royal College of Music - £4.19m

Royal Academy of Music - £3.99m

Leeds College of Music - £3.19m

Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts - £3.19m

Guidhall School of Music & Drama - £2.53m

Some conservatoires (the Royal Academy of Music and GSMD for example) will be able to replace some of this funding with additional private funding, but since the actual cost of undergraduate courses are more like £20,000 pa per student, most conservatoires face an insurmountable cut in funding.

I received an email from the head of a major UK conservatoire who made it clear that if the government do not change their position on this HECFE funding for music colleges, most conservatoires are likely to close.

We will then be left with only the few colleges that are able to draw significant amounts of private funding, and fees of around £20,000 pa for UK undergraduates.

This will signify the death knell for UK conservatoires as we know them.

There is a precedent for the closure of music degree courses in this country, and we must be wary of complacency: this is very real, and will affect everyone, not just those who will be applying to study next year.

The announcement of the HEFCE block grant allocation is likely to be in March. We must mount a concerted campaign to educate people of what the consequences of this cut will be, and fight as hard as we possibly can against this terrible decision.

The scholarship question

We are currently witnessing a huge shift in the ethos behind the funding of Higher Education in this country. With tuition fees set to rocket, and with most government funding for conservatoires disappearing, the conservatoires themselves must take responsibility for ensuring access is as good as it can possibly be.

In my view, the conservatoires should means-test all of the funding they give to students. The entrance auditions should be enough of a selection process, and then funding should be allocated on purely a need basis. Scholarship funds should be converted to bursaries.

Controversial? Perhaps, but it really shouldn't be. The current system often descends into bidding wars for the best students, with some students (often from the most privileged backgrounds) being given far more funding than they need, while other students do not receive enough for them to be able to take up their places.

Here are the main conservatoires' statements on scholarships and bursaries:

RNCM

The Students Awards Fund is a registered charity offering scholarships to exceptionally talented students who need support with their fees and sometimes living expenses.

RAM

Each year, the Royal Academy of Music auditions talented students from the UK and across the world who may not have the means to cover the fees necessary to complete their studies. Since the Academy wishes to recruit on talent alone, we are striving to build up our Scholarship Fund so that we continue to attract the very best students regardless of background and circumstances.

With this in mind, we distribute over £1million in the form of bursaries each year. Some of this is from the Academy’s own endowments, but the rest is from external sources. The need for funding for bursaries remains paramount – we are only able to fulfil one in every five requests for help. Last year, the requested amount of bursary support from students was over £3million. Our aim is to distribute as much money as is available.
 


The Academy is committed to ensuring that scholarships are awarded on the basis of financial need with assessment taking place to ensure that the most deserving and talented individuals receive support.

Trinity Laban

Each year over 200 Trinity Laban students benefit from scholarships. They range from the lowest level of support at £1,000 per year, to a few exceptional scholarships of £25,000 per year, which covers both tuition fees and living costs. Scholarships are awarded for excellence, but donors often wish to ensure that financial need is a factor in scholarship selection.

GSMD

All students are eligible to apply for support from the Scholarships Fund. The School makes awards according to each student's talent, their potential to benefit from our distinctive training, and their own financial need.

RCM

The key aim of the RCM's Scholarship Fund is to ensure that no student with the potential to benefit from study at the RCM misses this opportunity through financial constraints.

The most detailed and progressive statement comes from the Royal Academy of Music, but even they stop short of means-testing all their scholarships. Most of the conservatoires’ statements are focused on the instrumental achievement of funding candidates, whilst ignoring their financial need.

This needs to change. The conservatoires, alongside the major funding bodies, must adjust to the post-Browne environment and cull the culture of using scholarships as lures for those students who are most accomplished in their entry auditions. There is a great opportunity here to improve access to conservatoires with a simple, progressive measure.

Further reading:

A system in need of overhaul: Postgraduate conservatoire funding

The #BigArtsGive : Showing that private funding does not work

An organisation called Arts & Business has been running a campaign, called the #BigArtsGive, to encourage more philanthropy for the arts in the UK. The project illustrates perfectly why a move towards private funding, rather than public subsidy will be incredibly damaging for this country's cultural ecosystem.

The #BigArtsGive demonstrates the way in which private funding gravitates to larger organisations and more traditional establishments, whilst overlooking those organisations which take more artistic risks, or are less traditional in their output. This may seem obvious, but these statistics show that not only is this true, but that this is being actively encouraged by a publicly funded body.

Here are some facts I dug out of the list:

• Only 12 out of 95 of the organisations are based in the North of England, and of those only one is based in North East England.

• Out of 95 organisations, 18 are music related. All of these are Classical Music specific, with 6 being Opera specific.

• In terms of the funding, the target for Glyndebourne Opera alone is 34% of the overall music target, with Opera accounting for 58% of the overall music target.

• There is only one contemporary music-specific project being funded, run by the London Philharmonic, and this is for only £20,000 - accounting for 0.6% of the total music funding target.

• There is not one single Jazz, or non-classical music organisation on the scheme.

Here are the full target figures:

OPERA:

Glyndebourne - target £1,000,000

The Opera Group - target £341,746

The Classical Opera Company - £200,000

Opera North - target £82,400

English National Opera - target £66,000

Bampton Classical Opera - target £18,500

TOTAL: £1,708,646

CLASSICAL MUSIC:

National Children's Orchestra of Great Britain - target £525,000

Dunedin Consort - target £117,982

Royal College of Music Scholarship Fund - target £100,000

Ulster Orchestra - target £100,000

Halle Concerts Society - target £100,000

The English Concert - target £81,589

Montverdi Choir & Orchestra Ltd - target £68,091

Ulster Youth Choir - target £50,720

Ensemble Cymru - target £26,500

London Philharmonic Orchestra - target £20,585

Gabrieli Consort & Players - target £20,000

Manchester Camerata - target £15,000

TOTAL: £1,225,467

COMBINED TOTAL: £2,934,113

What does this teach us? It shows that the "Big Society" will only support the great ivory towers in the cultural landscape, leaving the more vulnerable, and in my view more important organisations to flounder and fail.

This scheme is a perfect example of the dangers of relying on private funding, rather than pubic subsidy. We cannot let the ethos guiding this project to pervade arts funding as a whole, or the damage will be irreparable.

As the DCMS have just announced they will be spending £80m on similar "match fund" schemes, £50m of which will come directly from the Arts Council's budget (11% of the total Arts Council budget) we should all be very worried indeed.

On a related note, one of the projects being supported is the Royal College of Music Scholarship Fund (target: £100,000). The RCM state:

"The key aim of the RCM's Scholarship Fund is to ensure that no student with the potential to benefit from study at the RCM misses this opportunity through financial constraints."

An admirable aim. However, I do not believe the RCM is means-testing its scholarship fund. Perhaps they would like to lead the way in this regard? Let's drop the Scholarship Coordinator an email to encourage them: keberwein@rcm.ac.uk

Source:

http://www.artsandbusiness.org.uk/