Challenging Performance: The Book. 7 Teaching

PART 2: The Policing of Performance

 
Alongside and in amongst WCM performers, as they seek to prepare and carry out their job, is a whole army of those whose job it is to constrain them, to ensure that the job is done in much the same way as in the recent past, and to prevent significant innovation. These gatekeepers to the profession include teachers, examiners, adjudicators, agents, managers, concert planners, fixers, record producers, critics, music journalists, broadcasters, bloggers, and more. Their job is to ensure that performers provide positive experiences for audiences with the least innovation that as gatekeepers they can achieve. They believe—and believe is the key word here—that they have a right and a duty to do that. I argue that they don’t have that right, and that they have a duty not to. In Part 2 we’ll focus on teachers (chapter 7) and critics of performance (9), and bring in others as (in chapters 8 and 10–17) we consider a series of themes and problems that make the job more constrained and less rewarding than it need be.

Continue to Chapter 7.1: Teachers and the WCM State

 

7 Teaching

7.1 Introduction: the place of teachers in the WCM State
7.2 Childhood lessons
7.3 Exam boards and the space for creativity
7.4 Conservatoire and creativity: Juniper Hill’s Becoming Creative
7.5 Conservatoire and conformity
7.6 Izabela Wagner on the training of virtuosi
7.7 Micro schools and their discontents
7.8 Competitions
7.9 Alternatives

Back to main Contents menu