ANAM, AIMP, and UNIMELB (Suzanne)

For those of you who have been following the debacle that is the closure of the Australian National Academy of Music, the below reproduced email is the latest chapter in the saga. You can read the response by Brett Dean, the director of the Academy, here.

Dear Colleagues,

Today, on behalf of the University, I had great pleasure in signing an agreement with Federal Arts Minister Peter Garrett for the University of Melbourne to plan and develop a new Australian centre for elite music performance training.

The new Australian Institute of Music Performance (AIMP) will see the University deliver high-quality training for Australia’s elite classical musicians. It will be a part of the University’s new merged School of Music which, from April 2009, brings together its Faculty of Music and the VCA School of Music to form the most comprehensive music training institution in Australia.

The new Institute will replace the Australian National Academy of Music (ANAM) which will end its program at the South Melbourne Town Hall in December 2008.

The University welcomes the Minister’s announcement that funding for elite performance training will continue in Melbourne. This is an exciting opportunity to create a national centre of excellence across a very broad range of musical instruments which will build on the very substantial resources of our new School of Music.

Because the new AIMP will become part of a School where administration is already in place, much more of the Commonwealth funding will be available for visiting international master teachers, and for scholarships to bring the best students from all parts of Australia.

The students will also benefit from access to the facilities and services that come from being part of a large campus.

It is expected the AIMP will accept outstanding international students, as the University attracts the largest cohort of international students in any Australian music school.

As the new Institute will not commence until July 2009, transitional arrangements are being put in place for students who were planning to enter ANAM next year.

The University has agreed with the Federal Government to offer alternatives for these students for 2009, including opportunities to transfer to the University’s music courses or individual non-award music programs.

We will extend the deadline for applications for entry to our Music programs in 2009 so that eligible prospective ANAM students can make a late express application.

And, for those not eligible for entry into the music degree course, the University will extend non-award programs in music in 2009 to instrumental, chamber and ensembles tuition.

Peter McPhee
Acting Vice-Chancellor

For those of you not familiar with the institution, ANAM was formerly an independent institution with some funding from the University (I am unclear on the specifics) but run separately and not really associated with the music faculty I attend.

A few thoughts: In principle, I think that this arrangement is better than no ANAM at all, and I am generally a fan of more money on teaching and less on administration. But this proposal to me seems to have a number of things substantially wrong with it, in that:

1. I don’t think it’s been publicly stated how the ANAM was being inefficient with their funding… what is the justification of closing ANAM and opening an identical institution later at Melbourne? I mean, I love the Con, but if you want to have less administration this is really not the University for it. ANAM was not by any means unsuccessful. It ran a large program of very cheap, very high-level concerts, including many that wouldn’t have been performed by the more mainstream organisations because of the financial risk (like the Elliot Carter retrospective). It provided personal attention and individualised education with a minimum of the bureaucracy required to run degree-granting programs. It was free. What part of that sounds inefficient? Sure, it was expensive to run, but all good music programs are expensive to run — one-on-one lessons with Boris Berman don’t come cheaply, and it’s not like they’re spending any less on AIMP.

2. From the tenor of the proposal and recent news, it seems to me as if the main objection to ANAM was that it didn’t grant degrees or collect placement statistics (and was therefore ‘unaccountable’) and they wanted to give the funding to a place that did. To me, that just seems like a completely pointless bureaucratic argument — when you are doing auditions, NOBODY cares whether you have a degree or not, or what your marks were, or your AMEB scores. A bum off the street can audition for the Melbourne Symphony; selection is done blind and purely on how you sound from behind the black curtain, so a really good bum could even win an audition. A degree in music is really completely pointless; it’s what you learn that counts. At the level of students enrolling in ANAM, it makes no sense to measure their progress with marks, or to make them go through enrolments. The focus should be on learning, and the lack of a formal degree program is really just a recognition that formal qualifications are beside the point.

This kind of mission really doesn’t produce measurable outcomes in terms of employment either — when the odds of getting a symphony job are 70:1, and a lot of excellent performers spending years without steady work before establishing a career, you can’t really take the employment rate the way you can in other disciplines (after all, the easiest way to boost that figure is for us all to quit the audition circuit and find employment as waiters). I wouldn’t be surprised if the whole plan was written by someone with no idea of how the classical music world works.

3. Transferring the ANAM people to Melbourne degree programs in the interim doesn’t really make a lot of sense. A lot of the students at ANAM have already been to the Con. They graduated from here at the top of their respective classes — that’s why they’re at ANAM now. To return them would be putting some very big fish back into a rather smaller pond than they had at ANAM. If I had the luck to get into ANAM for 2009 after all that work, and was then told to go back to Melbourne while they spent 6 months trying to build a new institution, I would not be a happy camper.

4. The Con also has a large number of students already — in my opinion, too many to really create the intense, quality training you would get at ANAM. Let me be clear that music has probably the smallest class sizes of any faculty. In general terms it is a small faculty with fantastic class sizes. But because music by nature is based on individual progress and frequent feedback, many of the masterclasses here are massive by music standards and compared to classes you would get overseas at comparable institutions (my basis of comparison is the Hong Kong Academy of Performing Arts where my clarinet teacher back home taught). The more elite the musician, the higher the demands on attention. In my heritage degree, they used to cull all but 20 musicians from the Performance specialisation at 3rd year in order to ensure that the ones remaining received decent training (they don’t do that anymore in the Melbourne Model because they’ve tried not to split potential music teachers and performers until honours/post-grad level, although they do still run Individual Program which used to be a fast-track into a Performance major, but is now just the ‘elite’ stream). The VCA just runs a smaller program from the start (as they don’t run programs for classroom teachers or musicologists, they don’t really need to admit as wide a range of performing abilities, whereas I think the practice at the Con is to admit a few who are academic powerhouses but slightly weaker performers in recognition of the fact that not everyone who gets a music degree wants to be a performer [this may have been superseded by the Melbourne Model]). Both institutions’ practices were in recognition of the fact that intense musical performance education cannot be done in large groups.

5. The Con costs money and ANAM doesn’t. The reference to more money for scholarships above make it sound like AIMP students are going to have to pay unless they get a scholarship. You’re not going to get the best if they have to pay. The lack of money in the field plus the high outlay on instruments is why people like me end up wasting practice time on law degrees, and why others can’t practice in order to get more hours at work.

Because of the above, I believe that the replacement of ANAM with AIMP is an ill thought-out proposal and not an adequate response to the restoration of ANAM, and encourage my readers to sign this petition.

P.S. On an unrelated note, why are they still calling us the Faculty of the VCA and Music? No one likes the name. Neither faculty chose the name. The VCA hates it because they want to remain the VCA. We hate it because it sounds stupid. The last time I heard (from the Dean at the last Music Students’ Society meeting, no less) they were planning to scrap it for something better.

P.P.S. While I am an MSS committee member and most of my knowledge of the VCA merger comes from my experience on the committee, I make these comments in a personal capacity and they do not necessarily represent the views of the MSS