Musical cultures and music colleges: articulations, tensions and best practices

Against this backdrop of heightened visibility, it's time to take a closer look at professional music teaching institutions. How do these institutions relate to their own musical heritage - repertoires, practices - and to the heritages of other cultural areas? What best practices can we suggest for dealing with this question of cultures and traditions within our schools?

In the 19th century, music teaching in Europe gradually crystallized into specialized institutions, taking the form of conservatories or academies. These institutions often promoted national culture: the Paris Conservatoire, founded in 1795, aimed to "train citizens" and build "a French school" to counter foreign hegemony. In the spirit of the Enlightenment, such a national cultural project was combined with a universalizing, even scientific aim, proposing a conception of music as independent of cultures: the founding prospectus of the Conservatoire de Genève, in 1835, insists on an a-cultural project of solfeggic literacy, through learning to read and write music.

It is no doubt from this tension between local promotion and universal aim that our institutions will be somewhat timid in thinking about diversity and entering into dialogue with other musical cultures. In the early years of the 20th century, for a composer like Debussy, the inspiring encounter with music from elsewhere came not from his attendance at the Conservatoire, but from the opportunities offered outside the institution by major international exhibitions. For a long time, practical art schools remained impervious to outside cultures, while universities were quick to consider non-Western arts as objects of study, within disciplines such as archaeology, art history, anthropology and its musical component, ethnomusicology. 

The reasons for this deafness certainly have a Eurocentric hubris component. The considerable success of Western classical music outside Europe has fed the tendency to attribute to it, in discourse, a status of universality. Contemporary and "international popular" music also appear to be converging towards a modernity that heralds the end of history and the end of cultures. But other models than this convergence have been imagined for thinking about the world, such as that of multiple, parallel modernities, proposed by Samuel Eisenstadt. 

The creation of a Master's degree in Ethnomusicology, a joint program between the Haute école de musique de Genève, and the Universities of Geneva and Neuchâtel, was an opportunity to consolidate the practice of non-Western music within the institution. Some of these musics, such as the Gamelan of Bali or Java, have long been integrated into certain Western institutions. Others, such as Chinese or Oriental music, are less common. These practices have spread widely within our school, meeting with unhoped-for success. In addition to mastering a specific repertoire, they question the foundations of our approach to music: themes emerge, such as the relationship between the spoken and written word, virtuosity in improvisation and ornamentation, interactions within an ensemble, modes of transmission, the relationship to tradition, and so on.  Above all, these practices propose a decentering of the gaze. 

Our schools are excellent exponents of the Western classical tradition - even if authorized voices point out that this tradition has now largely shifted to East Asian countries. To keep it alive, it is essential that this tradition continue its dialogue with other music, a dialogue initiated by composers throughout the 20th century.^e century. Our academic structures and curricula struggle to create spaces for such dialogues: our vision of the history and future of music remains one of convergence, relegating external forms to the status of protomusic, raw materials that modernity will transmute into "true art". Conservatories in non-Western countries are themselves struggling to balance the practice of their own traditions with that of "international" music. There is considerable potential in the development of intercultural dialogues to nourish and revitalize our curricula.

Xavier Bouvier
... is head of the ethnomusicology department at the Haute école de musique de Genève - Neuchâtel.