Conservatories used to be a lot easier to figure out. The grandfather Neapolitan schools—San Onofrio, Turchini, Loreto, and Gesu Cristo—operated under a basic assumption that they were training young men to play an instrument, sing, or write music. Period. To that end, Neapolitan conservatories were run somewhat like monasteries (or even concentration camps), the instrumental and composition students all herded together into common rooms where they worked on their projects simultaneously. (The singers, particularly the delicate castrati, were typically kept separate.) The places were cacophonous zoos, undoubtedly scenes of heart-stopping virtuosity as well as heartbreaking misery. Neapolitan students had no life beyond the conservatory. Students at San Onofrio didn’t study European history or mathematics or write term papers. They practiced; they sang; they worked on part-writing exercises. They did it from dawn to dusk, often sleeping on cots that became their practice benches by day. Neapolitan conservatories were grimly inhumane places, and not just by today’s standards, either. Michael Kelly—who was to become Mozart’s Don Curzio in The Marriage of Figaro—swore never to step foot inside the Loreto after his initial visit, while the great English historian Charles Burney was shattered by the dismal reality of San Onofrio.
But the musical profession has changed, and conservatories have been obliged to adapt. They may not castrate, freeze, starve, infect, or otherwise torture their students. They must grant degrees instead of awarding certificates. They are subject to oversight if their students are to receive government-sanctioned financial aid or insured loans. They are expected to provide at least a semblance of a broadly-based education or forego worthwhile degrees, financial aid, or loans. They are governed by boards who oversee administrators who oversee a departmentally-organized staff and faculty, instead of being the satrapy of a Primo Maestro whose word is law. None of this has come easily or without abundant resistance from some quarters. Whether a modern conservatory remains at heart the total-immersion trade school of the past or has morphed into a college that specializes in music performance remains an ongoing debate. The issue is by no means unique to conservatories: it is reduplicated in the practical-vs-broad discussions that characterize a great deal of contemporary pedagogical discourse. The governments are typically practical in their outlook, holding that higher education exists to help people become higher wage earners, to be more informed citizens. Academics tend to be much more broad about it all, insisting that higher education exists to help people learn how to think, to broaden their scope and open them up to hitherto unsuspected possibilities.
The general consensus is that higher education is perfectly capable of doing both; behind that agreement lies the notion of a major field surrounded by a core curriculum largely composed of the humanities with some science and mathematics added for good measure. The core curriculum is a time-tested notion, dating all the way back to the medieval universities with their trivium and quadrivium. An emphasized major field of study, pursued within an encompassing curriculum that is considered applicable to all students, is a solid idea that has withstood any amount of challenge.
At a conservatory the issue plays itself out with slight variation. Even though conservatories offer majors (typically in instruments, voice, composition, and conducting), and impose a core curriculum made up of not only humanities but also broadly-applicable music courses such as theory, history, and eartraining, a conservatory is likely to experience most of its tension between studio and classroom, rather than major-vs-core. One could define the studio folks as representing the “trade school” aspect and the classroom folks as the “college” component. That’s a dreadful oversimplification. Even worse, conservatories aren’t altogether dualistic between studio or classroom factions—there are professors who work in both bailiwicks, for example, and sometimes classroom subjects really belong more in the realm of studio performance rather than being classes in the traditional sense.
So I’ll allow that the studio-classroom duality is crude. Nonetheless one does encounter folks in conservatories who sign on very strongly to either side, while others huddle about somewhere between the two polar extremes. The 100% trade-school folks might insist that the only reason this student is here is to play the ‘cello. So don’t bother me about her failing theory; she can keep failing it forever as far as I’m concerned, because it doesn’t matter. An all-classroom attitude might run along these lines: these kids are spending all that time practicing but you know perfectly well that most of them are going to wind up doing something else because the field is overcrowded and they’re not anywhere near good enough to compete, so they had better acquire some skills and abilities that can feed them.
Incidentally, the above are paraphrases of statements I’ve actually heard from my colleagues; I’m not making anything up. Obviously both are extreme cases, willfully and deliberately avoiding any ameliorating considerations. In the first case, the question of music theory’s worth aside, that kid who is flunking theory might wind up losing her scholarship or even being dismissed for a low GPA, and that is going to limit her future options—even in the relatively blue-collar conservatory sphere, much less the greater academic world, where it may well prove devastating. In the second, my colleague was ignoring the fact that some of a conservatory’s students are going to stay in performance, and that some of them are going to achieve their dreams of becoming full-time opera singers or guitarists or whatnot. If we accept students as, say, piano majors, we cannot approach their training with an underlying assumption that the whole shebang is futile; that’s a perfect recipe for a self-fulfilling prophecy.
A steady dialogue between the two camps has been the general response from most conservatory administrators, and on the whole it’s probably the only remotely viable response. Unfortunately, dialogue is doomed to failure when the extremists seize the forum to hammer in their point of view, and given the borderline autism of some musicians, that happens too often for comfort. It doesn’t help any that the extremists have a tendency to be “star” faculty — the ones with the prestigious studios, the authors of the standard textbooks, the Pulitzer-prize winning composers. The end result is that the moderates are apt to tune out of the discussion, recognizing that there is no place for them in a polarized atmosphere. Thus roundtables, discussion groups, and faculty retreats can easily result in intensified polarity. And contrary to what one might think, the middle-grounders tend to come from both studio and classroom folks.
Do I have a solution? Oh, no; I’m a middle-grounder down to my toes. My background alone screams moderate: I started out as a typically walleyed piano major, but moved out of that into teaching theory, eartraining, music lit, and nowadays I have mixed in a happy and successful second career as a music commentator. There’s no way I could be anything but a moderate on this issue. On the whole I’m inclined to think that conservatories would do well to hitch their wagons to larger colleges or universities, such as is the case with Eastman, Oberlin, Peabody, and the Cleveland Institute of Music. That could open the possibility of a more balanced outlook, depending on how porously the conservatory is encased by its collegiate surroundings. I remember that during my days at Peabody, the school was still independent and suffered from an absolutely dismal core curriculum. I think I would have liked the “Peabody Institute of Johns Hopkins University” of today a lot more than the plain old “Peabody Institute” that I attended. Maybe a very few schools could offer a more singleminded curriculum, by cleaving even more closely to the Neapolitan model—Curtis, for example, minus the disease and starvation, of course.
But there might be less need for Curtis-type schools than people think, and a much greater need for the Shepherd Schools of Music, Oberlins, and Eastmans. The $64,000 question: what does the future hold for professional musicians? If we can get a broad grasp on that, then we’ll have a better idea about the conservatories that best serve our profession.