The best thing about my 12 years at York has been working with some extraordinary students. Two recent events here in the Music Department went  to the heart of what I think is most important about music education. They linked research, performance and real life in a dynamic way that isn’t dependent on teaching (in other words, I can’t take any credit for them beyond enabling them to happen and helping to ensure that the creative process stays on the students’ chosen track). The first was an event by the first and last student to do a Vocal Studies MA by Research.

This was particularly important to me, as it represented everything I value about a performance MA, and it was the refusal of the Music Department to allow me to make the (currently taught) Vocal Studies MA in to a ‘research by performance’ course  that was the final straw in my decision to leave the University (more about that in future posts).

Performance by research is a much-contested idea in academic circles. My own take on it is that if you’re going to have a post-grad course it has to be related to the likely future performing life of the participants. This means it has to be grounded in the students’ own individual performative creativity, giving them the maximum opportunity to experiment. There can be nothing generic about it: it should be loosely structured, with almost no teaching. The role of the supervisor is as a facilitator, enabler, consultant – call it what you will – a role very similar to that of a PhD supervisor whose knowledge and expertise in the relevant area will eventually be outstripped by that of the student.

Nora Ryan is an American singer, dancer, performance artist who has created a portfolio of events both here in York and in Leeds, working in multi-media with musicians, dancers and visual artists. This was one of  her last shows before returning to the USA, where she will continue her career as a freelance performer, and featured some of the Music Department’s most creative improvisers. The event was a stunning tour de force.

Italian opera from scratch

The next day there was the ‘outcome’ (as we academics are obliged to call it) of my final undergraduate project. The Project System at York is unique, and the only reason it’s not copied in universities throughout the land is that the people in suits just don’t get it. It’s an incredibly creative way to engage groups of students over a period of time, enabling them to flourish as individuals within group activity that is challenging, stimulating and fun. It produces highly motivated students, who have a direct educational investment in the process, and highly motivated staff who can teach what they want in the way they want to do it. The suits have tried to rein it in from time to time: we have to produce in advance what they call ‘differentiated outcomes’ for different year groups  (around 3 of each!). This is completely daft, and is only there because (as one of my colleagues put it) our marking system has to be identical to, and understood by, people in the Biology Department). In practice what happens is that everyone takes away a completely unquantifiable set of ‘outcomes’ which is unique to each student and cannot possibly be predicted in advance. I suppose it’s not surprising that a centralising university bureaucracy committed to standardised rule making across the board, can’t get to grips with all that. I mean, what would a Handbook entry look like: we expect you to take away an unknown number of outcomes, none of which we can predict in advance…

The project was called ‘Performing 19^th Century Italian Opera’ (my original inspiration for it was Philip Gossett’s wonderful Divas & Scholars: Performing 19^th Century Italian Opera). I had 20 students for a day and half a week for four weeks. I started by giving them a brief history of the process of creating opera in Italy, homing in some more obscure composers but mostly Rossini, Donizetti, Bellini, Verdi, Puccini and Mascagni. We then set about creating an opera for ourselves, keeping roughly to the kind of process that might have happened in a provincial Italian opera house towards the end of the century. This particular opera house had a company of players but no music, so had to devise a complete show using only what they already knew or could find in time. They were also heavily into the game of Cluedo. I don’t know what Verdi and Bellini would think about some of their best bits being cut up and reused, but we had terrific fun with it. We also inverted the Cluedo plot so there were multiple deaths giving plenty of opportunity to raid the operatic death scene repertoire. It was in a mixture of English and Italian, and featured some of the greatest hits of the 19th century, arranged for an eclectic ensemble of instruments (including accordion and trumpet)  as well as spontaneously improvised recitative and dialogue. It was entirely student-devised and performed, and there were some stunning performances.

Work in Progress…

While on the subject of last performances, Liz Haddon and I are planning our final ‘work in progress’ session in the Music Department on June 22 (we hope to do similar projects elsewhere in the future). These have been an attempt to break down the oppositional nature of the recital genre, and to re-introduce something of the informality of 19^th century domestic performance (for which much of the repertoire was originally conceived). It’s work in progress because we’re not giving definitive fully-formed performances, but exploratory sessions where we sing and play the music at that very creative stage where you’re encountering things in the music for the first time. The idea is to share that experience with anyone who turns up. We don’t expect people to sit there and just worship the music. Eating, drinking, chatting and interaction are encouraged, and we’re quite happy to repeat pieces if we feel there are other interesting things to do. It’s a bit like an open rehearsal. We’ve even been known to start again mid-‘performance’ to look in more detail at something. Not sure what the music will be for this one yet (it’s important we don’t do too much cheating in advance), but it might include some Chausson, Duparc, Tchaikovsky, Webern and early Schoenberg.  The date’s not quite certain yet but I hope   to confirm it shortly.

Diary update

I will get around to doing this when things get a bit less hectic. The next Being Dufay is in Foligno on June 26th in the Dancity Festival (which has a football theme since it coincides with the World Cup). After that I’ll be recording in Vienna with The Sound & The Fury, and gigs over the summer include Bratislava (Dowland Project), the Radovljica Festival (with Ariel Abramovich), the Kultursommer Rheinland-Palz (Being Dufay) and even a couple of rare appearances in the UK. More details next time.