Facing the music

With one music school already closed and our most prestigious one facing cutbacks, tertiary music education is weathering a perfect storm of post-pandemic defi cits, polytech restructuring and a swing away from the arts

- RICHARD THORNE

Anthonie Tonnon was one A of the first students at the University of Otago's thennew school of rock in the mid noughties. He did a double degree in music and history, apt qualifications for someone whose 2023 Taite Prize-winning album Leave Love Out of This had songs about the Mataura paper mill and US general Douglas MacArthur.

It's where he started writing songs, but he still had a lot to learn after he graduated.

"When I was at university it was the bums-on-seats era," he says. "I felt part of a massive stream, just a torrent flooding into universities and polytechs."

While he's appreciative of his music school experience, Tonnon wonders if curriculum adjustments were already being made to get more passes, more students and more funding. He got his lowest grade, a B-minus, in a first-year musicianship skills course "it's all the really hard stuff"- but returned the following year to find the stage-two paper in the subject was no longer compulsory. So he dropped it. He occasionally regrets he didn't persevere or wasn't made to.

"These days I'm working with people who went to jazz schools, which had a more practical, more polytech approach. They had those hard parts of musicianship that are much more based on rote and memory - almost like language learning - and I'm so much slower. I have to work a lot harder to analyse what I'm hearing.

"And that was the pressure on universities, in that trying to get as many people through, they were taking out everything that required a lot of contact time and focusing on learning more broad skills. But if you take out enough you actually lose quite a lot."