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Back in 2011, it was announced that UEA’s music department would shut its doors by 2014. Since then, letters from support have poured in from across the world, protests have been held, buildings have been occupied, and the music continued. No music students dropped out of UEA, and according to the Head of Music, the marks have even risen. And now, it’s 2014, which means, come June, UEA’s music department will be gone. In this next episode of the Norfolk Storytelling Project, Apollonia Roman takes a look at the department’s closure, what it means for music in Norwich, and the shadow the decision left on education for two students, Gregory White and Bill Vine.
On the forefront of electroaccoustic music
In just a few months, Gregory White will wrap up his music and technology degree. But 2014 is significant for another reason. But it’s not just his final year here: it’s the entire music departments last shebang. Like many of the other almost 50 students graduating in his class, he’s determined to leave a lasting legacy. He wants to go out with a bang. Well, no. Bangs are generic. He wants to go out with noises like those featured in Sonic Arts, the largest running electroacoustic concert series in the U.K. White organized a recent one called “DIY Improvisation: Modified and Homemade. It featured the Sonic Arts Ensemble and the work of Rodrigo Constanzo, who processed a range of percussion sounds through a programme he coded. UEA’s reputation for the avant garde and the strange -- for using music and technology to make art -- was one of the reasons White came to UEA.
“It seemed to be a very free environment where you could experiment with what you wanted to do without having to worry about funding,” White said.
News of the end
UEA’s music school is small, and somewhat removed from the rest of campus. As a Music School should, it's got a Concert Room, soundproofed practice rooms, and four electroacoustic music studios for composition and research. But not everyone sees all this equipment and the school’s small size as beneficial. Just two months in, White learned some news that would change how he would view his education, and arts education, for the rest of his life.
“We were all given an email saying, ‘Come meet in the lecture theatre 2pm.’ Everyone was puzzled. Then they said, ‘We’re going to close the music school down.’” White said. “It was a bit of a shock because you don’t come to university expecting your course to shut down.”
John Charmley, the Head of UEA’s music department, broke the news.
“It was by far the worst day of my academic life,” Charmley said. “It was simply a matter of me going to our normal meeting and saying, ‘Our agenda is cancelled.’ One of my colleagues said, ‘I don’t think I can come to the meeting today. Do you think it matters?’ and I said, ‘I think it does.’”
A musical revival
Charmley was sent to revive UEA’s music department back in 2009. He has no background in music; his background is in history. But he’s also a multi-tasker: he’s UEA’s Director of Employability, the Director of the East Anglian Film Archive, and the Director of the Centre for East Anglian Studies. But he says UEA needed someone with specialty in management to save the music.
“There were problems with the school. The senior professor had died 4 years earlier. The two things that needed doing were getting the student numbers right, because if you don’t have an income stream, you’re going to close,” Charmley said. “The second thing was getting the teaching reputation right. It hadn’t been fairing well in the student surveys, either. The two things were of course apart of a vicious circle.”
Two years after Charmley began his mission to get the reputation of UEA’s music program up, White enrolled at UEA. This was in 2011. By then, the department had the largest number of students it ever had, and was 25% over their target goal. By the time the school’s closure was announced, it was ranked 8th among university departments in the Guardian University League Table. But something happened that Charmley neither expected nor could control - something that had nothing to do with music.
Slashing arts education around the U.K
“In 2010, a new government would come in, and increase funds to £9000 and cut funding at all levels and take away 50% of the capital grant,” Charmley said. “Universities have become effectively privatized, and if we don’t make a profit, we all go under. That was the danger. Not simply that music went under, but that other departments went under with it because they were subsidizing it.”
Bill Vine is one of three Ph. D music students at UEA, and he came to UEA because of its reputation for music.
“To say that a lot of our other departments and universities always looked to UEA’s music department for cues of the direction things were pushing wouldn’t be an overstatement at all,” Vine said.
The campaign
When he learned the school was going to close, Vine put his Ph. D. on hold. All the energy he put into composing music went to composing rallies, petitions, and the Save UEA Music Coalition. There were live music shows and concerts to raise awareness. Just a day after the school’s closure was announced, students occupied the UEA registry. His faith in academia dwindled.
“I know it’s not just UEA that has been closing down parts of music departments. There are others in the country. It’s not something they can easily quantify, so they view it as kind of useless,” Vine said. “They can’t make that conceptual leap that not everything needs to make money all the time.”
Like Vine, White became bitter. He took part in the protesters and campaigns. In one protest, he looked on as a small number of people came out in favor of the department’s closure.
“They were saying you don’t need to go to university to learn to play trumpet,” White said. “What I’m doing at the moment for my dissertation incorporates phenomenology, aesthetics, and psychology, and all these other things I didn’t know about before I came to university.”
Education continues
At the request of parents, Charmley started a monitoring board to make sure the remaining students did what they came to UEA to do: study music. The school wasn’t letting anymore students in and, suddenly, the music department had a student faculty ratio of 7:1.
“But I decided to stick it out because the lecturers were so nice and so passionate. They’ve been helping us to be independent and not lean on the university to do what we’ll have to do,” White said.
There’s talks that the Sonic Arts series he helped organize will go on tour. What really bothers White, though, is that he’s not sure exactly what the closure means. Charmley has some answers.
The future of music
“This building, whatever else it will become, and it will probably have a media centre in it, will still have a Music Centre in it. The university has allocated a £100,000 a year subsidy to keep the centre going.”
Charmley is a historian, and he sees the end of UEA’s music department through historical analogies. “Unless you want to do what Churchill did with Dunkirk, and turn defeat into a victory, what do you say about it?”
But White sees sounds everywhere. He knows the music department isn’t the only place that could use some noise.
“There’s a need to learn certain things. Drama, TV, film schools, journalism. Those kind of courses still need to learn about sound, and there needs to be somewhere that can happen,” White said.
Some audio classes might very well continue at UEA. But for White, when he walks away from this, it’ll be over.
“Maybe, one day, they’ll think, you know what?” White said. “We need a course to go along with these workshops. Why don’t we open a music and technology course?”
This episode featured the music of Benjamin Britten, who helped open the UEA Music School, as well as the Sonic Art Ensemble and Rodrigo Constanzo. Matthew Myles of Grenouilles was also featured in this piece performing 'Bones.’ If you’d like to learn more about the Save UEA Music campaign, go to their Facebook page. If you’d like to find more about the Sonic Arts events, gohere. To contribute to the Norfolk Storytelling Project by producing your own radio stories, email us at norfolkstorytelling@gmail.com.