After coaching chamber music at various music colleges this week, I’m still baffled about how chamber music can attain its proper status in higher education. My visit often begins with students explaining that they have struggled to find time to rehearse together; this is the reason they are not properly prepared, etc. I’m warned that this or that participant will have to leave my class early because they are required at an orchestral rehearsal. And even though I have asked everyone to be present throughout the class to hear the others’ lessons and provide an audience for one another, it’s usually the case that each chamber group only arrives for their own lesson and departs immediately afterwards, apologising and explaining that they are required elsewhere.
Sometimes, when I comment on how difficult it seems to be for students to prepare properly, staff explain that chamber music is not a credit-bearing activity. Even if students get deeply involved in a string quartet or piano trio, this activity doesn’t always count towards their final mark. Chamber groups receive coaching, are given performance opportunities, and may go in for the occasional chamber music prize, but these are all voluntary activities – even if chamber music is their future career path. Undergraduates cannot major in chamber music, and it’s only in recent years that some colleges have offered it as ‘an elective’. How can students be expected to commit to the intensive work of chamber music if they’re given little or no official credit for doing so? Many of them do, of course, commit to it despite this lack of recognition, but they do so out of sheer devotion.
By contrast, students who play an orchestral instrument are required to take part in the college’s orchestral activities, even being asked to sign an agreement at the start of their course that they will make the college’s large ensemble activities a priority. If they miss orchestra rehearsals, there are penalties of various kinds. This seems to accord orchestral music a status not on offer to chamber music. Could it just be that the authorities realise students will never turn up regularly to orchestra rehearsals unless they are made to, whereas they will always find a way to play chamber music in their own free time, because they love it?
Some might argue that chamber music is best left out of the college ‘system’ and pursued only by those idealistic enough to find time for it. But I often feel that students sense chamber music is a side issue, not a central path, not something deeply valued by the college. Yet not only does chamber music contain some of the finest pieces of music ever written, it develops skills – listening skills, sensitivity, respect for others – which are profoundly valuable.