Making New Zealand Small Again Part 1: Observations

When the New Zealand prime minister Christopher Luxon says that he is “prepared to see schools deferring the arts and music curriculum to raise achievement in maths and reading”, he shows such a dearth of understanding of how the arts support and enhance maths and literacy, that he is already a leading cause of their further deterioration.

There’s a standing joke in our car whenever we head off to a concert – “there seems to be a lot of traffic tonight; I suppose they’re all heading to the concert.” – They’re not of course, but, while the concert hall might be full, it’s still a small percentage of the city’s population. And in Christchurch where I live, the orchestral musicians on stage comprise a significant number of Eastern Europeans and other immigrants from countries where music education is considered one of the basics.

While most New Zealand schools are more-or-less a level playing field for what are traditionally considered ‘academic’ subjects, the number that can boast high-quality music programmes is variable at best – and, if Mr Luxon has his way, about to get smaller.

Speaking of ‘small’ . . . Long ago I attended the smallest of the three secondary schools that boys could attend in a South Island town. The school had fewer than two hundred students and around nine or ten teachers, none of whom was a music or drama or art or physical education specialist, despite the requirements of the New Zealand curriculum even in those days.
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At my school, in order to pay lip-service to the music curriculum, various teachers (a different one each year as I remember) would enlist the help of the nearest student slaves to haul a record player and its speakers to our classroom where he (always ‘he’) would play a classical LP (‘vinyl’ in today speak) while he marked work of his specialist subject, and we ‘studied’. To this day I still wonder if, on the day that Frank Twiss played Leopold Stokowski’s recording of Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony, any of my 5th form (year 11) classmates experienced even a fraction of the Damascus moment that changed my life that afternoon. With my chemistry homework untouched on my desk, I was gripped and transported by the music as my physical surroundings faded into irrelevancy and made that token lip-service one of the most productive and rewarding lessons of Frank’s career, although he never knew it. I went to him and asked about the music after class, but he seemed to think I was taking the mickey and told me that “you’d have done better to get more work done Ryan!” as he returned the LP to its sleeve and strutted away.

With a piano at home (not an uncommon household item in those days), I organised piano lessons for myself at the age of nine, an expense my parents could ill afford, but indulged nevertheless. I later realised that I’d always responded to music in a more intense way than most, but, as a teenager, it was mainly the current popular chart-toppers that engaged my active interest and which I played by ear on the piano, although the occasional short well-known classical piece certainly made a periodic impression when it chanced to emerge from a commercial radio station's listener request programme. But nothing had penetrated the depths of my being like that Tchaikovsky symphony and its forty-five-minute world of unrelenting power, sweeping passion, and heart-stopping emotional expression. I was so overwhelmed that soon the money I earned from my holiday job began to disappear on whatever random recordings I could find in the thread-bare classical bins of the town’s department stores. And so began a life-long exploration of the art of music, and many years of rewarding adventures in pursuit of its infinite revelations.

In my final year of school, I persuaded my parents and my school to allow me to take music as a Bursary subject (now NCEA level 3). This could only be achieved by my travelling to one of the girls’ schools for music classes, but such inter-school timetabling wasn’t unknown in our town, so the deal was done! Unfortunately it clashed with my other most favourite subject – Latin – a compromise that, on balance, had to be accepted. 

The job money, intended to fund me through university in a year or two, needed subsidising considerably by my father who, when he discovered that my original maths and science focus had changed to music, expressed the hope that “it will end in a job”. At that point, a job was the last thing on my mind, but with the eventual guidance of a wise and pragmatic woman (who remains the main influence in anchoring my feet to terra firma), ‘job’ status was achieved! And so I became a secondary school music teacher and spent the next forty-or-so years indulging my preoccupation with music by inflicting its compulsive properties on thousands of unsuspecting teenagers.

My own performing and composition continued alongside ‘the job’, but the job proved to be a life-long learning experience that benefitted me as much as it did my students. And working with young people continues to inform, shape, enhance and sustain all the other music-making that I’m still fortunate to be involved with.
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As a teacher, I was lucky to always enjoy the support of colleagues and principals who valued and often participated in the music-making that brought such fulfilling rewards to the school community. Of course, there was the odd short-sighted ‘academic’ who believed that music and drama were a distraction from real subjects and real learning; one Head of Science going so far as to refer to the performing arts as “the entertainment subjects”. And now, in New Zealand, we have a prime minister who promotes that same antediluvian attitude. But ‘entertainment’ is so far from the core value of music, that only someone who has never experienced its humanity and spirituality, and who views the world in monochrome, could possibly see it that way. 

Anyway, music is both an art and a science. Its logic, acoustics and sound properties, all require practical scientific understanding. Its rhythms are mathematically complex; its stylistic variety and  its use in different eras, societies, cultures, conflicts and ceremonies provides unique lessons in history and sociology; its wide variety of foreign words and musical terms gives insight into many languages and the ways in which different cultures think (Another lesson for today's NZ government?). Its need for co-ordination, good posture, stamina and accuracy contributes to physical fitness; and its symbols, terms and notation is enhanced literacy in action. And it stimulates the neural circuit (sometimes called the ‘reading circuit’) of the brain. 

But music is also an art which brings all of those different disciplines together for emotional expression, intellectual insights, poetic and imaginative creativity, cultural identity, mutual respect and understanding, and, above all, humanity.

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