The Straits Times’ sister paper, The Sunday Times, ran a straw poll in
yesterday’s edition asking which jobs were thought of being most essential and
which were least essential during the time of the COVID-19 outbreak. Nobody with any knowledge of Singaporean
attitudes will have been in the least surprised by the results. Top of the list came doctors and nurses, with
cleaners and food sellers coming on close behind – after all, it seems that few
Singaporeans can clean their own homes or cook their own food. Equally typical of Singaporean attitudes is
what came at the very bottom of the list; artists.
Of course,
this finding ignited a mass outpouring of shock and horror from Singapore
artists. Many responded in remarkably
silly fashion, criticising The Sunday
Times and its correspondent (why worry about the message, when you can
shoot the messenger?), suggesting that the sample of 1000 respondents was not
typical (I can assure them, it is!), and going on to social media ironically
boasting about their newly-sanctioned non-essential status. But perhaps the proper response should not be
to fight against this finding (which, all my researches over many years, have
shown to be utterly typical of Singaporean attitudes to the arts) but to
question why something which we artists regard as vital to humanity, is, in
fact, not considered such by humanity at large.
It's not
for me to argue the case for other branches of the arts – painters, sculptors, architects,
designers, actors, film-makers, poets, authors, and so on – nor even to argue
the case for those involved in the pop music industry, but I do feel inclined
to comment from the perspective of a “classical” musician working in Singapore.
For us,
music is vital to our existence. It’s
not just that it earns our income, but that it is such a significant driving
force in our individual lives that, without it, we feel we would wither and
die. We know it to be an essential conduit
for our emotions as well as for our mental well-being, and its countless ancillary
benefits (extended concentration spans, increased mental capacity, heightened
intellectual perceptiveness, palliative influence over Alzheimer’s’, etc.,
etc.) need no rehearsal here. However,
that is not how anyone else sees Classical Music in Singapore, and we must ask
why that is. Have we failed to get the
message across, or do we as musicians have an over-inflated belief in the value
of our own art?
Many Singaporeans
believe Classical Music to be alien to their society, forced on them by their
former colonial masters. In this, they
have been greatly influenced by Lee Kwan Yew’s dreadful speech in 1980 when he
claimed that, if a Singaporean had the sort of brain that could memorise and
comprehend classical music, said Singaporean should not waste energies on
music, but instead turn to a career in medicine, law, or anything else which
was seen then, as now, as being “essential” to the good of society. By stating there and then that music should
be provided exclusively by “foreigners” (whatever they are in multi-cultural,
multi-ethnic and multi-transitory Singapore) he indoctrinated a whole generation
of Singaporeans with the notion that classical music was alien to Singapore society. That is an attitude which still persists to
this day; ask almost any Singaporean who has tried to turn to a full-time study
of Classical music, and you will find somewhere in their family group, strongly
voiced opposition; the common belief being that they should really be learning something
which is useful and will earn them a respectable income.
Beyond that
ill-considered utterance of Lee Kwan Yew, Singaporeans have, since independence
from Malaya in 1965, been so concerned in building a stand-alone society, that
their focus for 50 years has been on creating strong commercial and financial
foundations to society. Again, that ethic
has been so driven into Singaporeans, that they see no intrinsic value in
anything which does not yield immediately tangible results in either a physical
object or a clearly delineated financial profit. Classical music yields neither, so it is
regarded as a peripheral activity.
Assuming
that our conviction that classical music is an essential aspect of daily life
is correct, to inculcate that conviction into others is a matter for
education. And that is where Singapore fails
miserably. Yes, we do have a handful of
world-class tertiary music colleges and, yes, there are growing numbers of
highly able Singaporean students emerging from them, but in other respects, Singapore’s
music education is abysmal. Primary and
secondary schools too often approach the teaching of music as a competitive sport. Choirs and bands are shown to be successful
only by winning awards and competitions, while other aspects of practical and
theoretical music are taught with the sole view of achieving examination
success. Graded exams are not seen as stepping
stones towards an eventual goal of a wholly rounded human being, but as goals
to be achieved as quickly and as numerically largely as possible. In only a very few rare instances is music
taught for its emotional and culturally enriching benefits.
But there
is one area of music education which is universally understated in Singapore’s music
education at all levels, which musicians must learn if we are to become
regarded as an essential part of daily life; the role of classical music in the
totality of our society. We equip our students
with the physical tools of the trade – instrumental skills and composing
techniques – but we do nothing to equip them with an understanding of their
place in daily society. Yes, we show
them the benefits of music when presented to care homes, hospices and schools,
but for music to be regarded as essential, we need to show them how music fits
into society outside these specialist (if very important) environments. We need, in short, to teach the context of music
in daily life. We do not do this. How many graduating students really know how
music affects the generality of the society in which they live? They perform brilliant virtuoso pyrotechnics
on the piano, which excites the pianophiles and leaves everyone else cold, they
write complex musical scores, which excite fellow-composers but, again, leaves
everyone else cold. We try to bring
music to the “man in the street” (as we once labelled the general public) by
offering free concerts and colourful musical gimmicks; but, obviously, it
fails. How do we merge our music into
society?
I have long
believed passionately that fully rounded musicians are those who understand their
role in society. As part of our own society
with an unavoidable bias towards what we do, we cannot really step back and
look at our role dispassionately. We
need to study the history and see how our predecessors squared their musical
lives with that of the societies in which they lived. Music history is currently taught too often
as an exclusive, society-alienated thing.
We tell our students that Beethoven was a great hero because he worked
against society, and we hold up Wagner as a social outcast, Mozart is elevated
above Haydn because the former was an exception to society, while the latter
quite happily absorbed himself within it.
We compound all that by placing protective boxes around composers to alienate
them further from the societies in which they lived; hence Bach lived the Baroque
Box, Mozart and Classical Box, Chopin the Romantic Box, and so on. That merely serves to distance music from the
society in which it was formed. Yet, if
we can teach music as something which was not apart from, but an integral part
of society, we begin to see how it has been essential rather than peripheral.
In Singapore
society, classical music is certainly not essential. But it should be, and with careful nurturing
of musicians so that they are less concerned with the exclusive technicalities of
their craft, and more involved in the daily context of the world in which they
live, it will be.
Dr M,
ReplyDeleteI would really be interested if you have an outlook of how people are relating to music (performed / shared / recorded / broadcast / live-streamed...) during COVID-19, what's changing, and what directions this could take in the future.
Best, Peter
I am so GLAD Singaporeans do NOT have to suffer your drivel about non-essential SSO concerts or xyz non-essential musical performances anymore in our local newspapers. Afterall, ink should not be wasted on non-essential music critics who have nothing essential to say in a pandemic.
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