[MUSIC] The Sydney Conservatorium of Music is one of the top music schools in the southern hemisphere. Our professors include the best practitioners in academic in their fields, including many of us Australians most highly respected performers, composers and musicologist. The depth of training provided here is incredible, from standard instruments of both Western art and contemporary music, to new connections we're making Chinese instrumental teaching and our own Gamelan ensembles. For jazz ensembles rehearsing every week with some of Sydney's hottest players to totally hit early music ensembles or specialist operatic training. From composition techniques, such as orchestration through to computer music programming and interactive installation. Or from ethnomusicalogical experts in Australian indigenous music and other regions around the world, to expert teaching and research on everything from Liszt to Jay Z. And we have one of the only four year music education degrees in Australia that is still taught in a specialist music school rather than an education faculty with all the benefits that brings to our own cohort. There isn't a day that I'm not humbled to be working among such talented colleagues. As you might expect entry is very competitive on the conservatorium with nearly a thousand on the graduate and post-graduates students from all over the world auditioning and taking music skills test every year to try to gain entry. And when they graduate, they're successful in many musical and artistic domains. Not just becoming performers or composers in and for orchestras and opera houses around the world, but as leaders of new music ensembles, in popular music, film, as arts administrators, educators, and many other fields. Some even stick around and become professors themselves. There's only one problem with this model when it comes to music education. And it's a problem that research tells us is present in every institution, anywhere in the world. The most typical path to gain entry to a music education degree is to succeed in the music education system. To study an instrument privately, play in school or community music ensembles usually in a western art music tradition, which involves reading music notation, theory and eschews practices such as improvisation, unless you're a jazz major of course, or popular music. And those who succeed in this tradition are a very significant minority of our high school graduates. So why is this a problem? British music education researcher, Lucy Green has pointed out that it creates a cycle. Of the small group of students who successfully negotiate the traditional music education pathway, an even smaller group, selected in the same way, gain entry to study music at a tertiary level. And an even smaller group of those also gain teaching qualification. That small minority then become music teachers and the model of their own success is transmitted to the next generation. To succeed in music, you must train the Western art music way, producing another generation of musicians with similar values and world use about what's important in music education. Effectively and possibly not deliberately, we've created a music education system, not for every student, but for a tiny minority that can perpetuate it. Let's see whether the participants in the course fit this paradigm. So, in my courses here at the Sydney Conservatorium, I say to my students you are not normal. Not meaning to be mean to them, but to remind them that as successful products of the classroom music education system, their experience cannot have been that of the typical high school student. And that those are the students they need to learn to teach, not just the students who may turn out to be like them. It may seem like a dreadful insult but I remind them that as a trained composer and music educator with a whole swag of degrees, I'm not normal either. Let's informally test this notion by asking students on a break here at the Conservatorium what their music education experience was like. I started when I was about three and I really wanted to play piano. And, my parents were pushing violin on me. I was like, I don't want to play violin. I want a like big piano. I just started to get singing lessons, which introduced me to classical music. I thought, maybe opera is something I could do. [LAUGH] I actually remember the very moment I was and we were driving through Bulara and I looked out the window and I said Mom, I want to learn the violin. I had some lessons but they were with dodgy teachers and stuff. You have to start somewhere but it was fun and I really enjoyed it and that was kind of the way I got involved in music as well. I would say that I'm more of an auto autodidact and I did a lot more playing myself in exploring how I'd get better at this instrument myself. You have to find the right teacher to give you the right guide, to tell you what's the right standard to be in a such an institute like the Con. I realized I loved performing. I wanted to be on stage and that was what I wanted to do. Side tracked to studying occupational therapy and becoming an occupational therapist for 15 years. I was like I have to audition for the Con and see what I can do with music and so I just practiced I took a year off after high school I had a gap year, did the whole Europe thing, but during the other nine months I was pretty feverishly trying to get ready for my audition. Once I finished my degree, I was very fortunate to land a job with the ASO. And I spent five years there watching conductors. [LAUGH] And I went, maybe I can have a go at this. I can't remember how many times I was going to quit. [LAUGH] But every time when my mom start to say, I'm going to sell your piano if you don't practicing, I start to get regret, I start to put hard work back in. I went to the Sydney Uni open day, and suddenly I saw music was there. And I could do a double degree, and I was like, maybe I should actually do this. And then, like, best decision ever. This does not come as a surprise. The word conversatorium derives from the Latin conservare, to conserve. This is an institution dedicated to the preservation of the very best music has to offer and that's a great thing. But our music education pre service teachers need to care about all their future high school students in understanding that their own wonderful experience of music learning wasn't normal is a starting point. In the next video, we'll look in more detail at what NYU lecturer Ethan Hein says is wrong with classroom music education expanding on some of Lucy Green's research and ideas. [MUSIC]
