REGULAR readers of The Scotsman's Friday Review supplement will have noticed, on its recent back pages, stunning examples of original artwork created by Higher Art students in Scottish schools – part of the SQA's (Scottish Qualification Authority's) Art and Design Exhibitions at the Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh and at the People's Palace in Glasgow.
Isn't it a shame that the same public profile is not afforded to those studying Higher Music? There must be hundreds of talented young musicians in our schools, creating compositions as an obligatory part of the course, whose work literally never see
s the light of day. Why, when SQA's art division is teeming with ideas to showcase the creative output of art candidates, does it not see a similar need to showcase the creative fruits of our budding composers?
Part of the answer lies with the personalities involved. It is well known in educational circles that the art personnel at SQA are a go-ahead lot: collaborative, highly visible within schools and imaginatively pro-active. As a result, the current course is challenging and highly respected by the art schools to which many of the students will eventually hope to proceed.
In comparison, SQA's music operation is a shrinking violet, more concerned with political standardisation of the subject than making it the exciting and aspiring option it ought to be. In order to fall in line with the number of assessable units in other subjects, assessment of composition was recently downgraded from an externally assessed mark to an internally-generated pass or fail. When did the creative arts ever flourish without stamping their own personality and taking risks?
I return to this old chestnut because I have recently been involved (wearing my educational hat) in a fascinating project led by composer John Maxwell Geddes, which culminated last Sunday in an impressive showcase of young compositional talent. Just over a year ago, Geddes received a £30,000 Creative Scotland Award enabling him to work with 20 aspiring young composers from five Scottish schools who were commissioned, under his guidance, to write short pieces for performances by members of the Paragon Ensemble. The project was called New Vistas.
The final batch of performances – featuring specially composed chamber music by pupils from the specialist Aberdeen City Music School, Castle Douglas High School and from Glasgow – Hutchesons' Grammar, Kelvinside Academy and Jordanhill School – were unveiled at Glasgow University's Gilmorehill G12 venue, and each revealed a stunning array of imaginative thought and technical ingenuity.
Not only did these works receive performances by some of Scotland's top professional players, but they stood side by side with two new works by Geddes himself – his beguilingly evocative Tercet III Dark Star and the flippantly virtuosic From Davy Jones' Locker – written as part of New Vistas, and incorporating snippets of material generated by the students in their own compositions.
Having overseen the work of my own students in the project's early stages, two things struck me as critical in helping them achieve the remarkable standards they did.
The first is incentive. Right from the outset, it was clear in the students' minds that the end result of their efforts would be a high-profile public performance. Compare that inducement to the typical expectation of a Higher candidate, whose composition will normally simply be graded pass or fail and stuck in a folder for re-assessment should it be required. It utterly depresses me to hear successive new Higher candidates ask the perennial question: "How much do I need to do to pass?" Such low aspirations were never an issue with the New Vistas students.
The second benefit of this project was live, ongoing interaction with the performers. What use is a composition without a performance to bring it to life? At various "staging post" workshops en route to last week's grand finale, Geddes and the Paragon musicians played through the scores, demonstrating to the students what worked and what didn't, asking questions about things that weren't clearly communicated in the scores, then sending the young composers off to reassess their ideas and how they might better present them.
So New Vistas proved to be a magical inspiration for pupils who can, of course, now present their excellent works – along with professional recordings of them – as Higher submissions. The tragedy is that this project is an independent, one-off initiative to which only a handful of schools have been lucky enough to gain access.
Sure, the highest academic assessment they will ultimately gain from all this is a "pass", but they will have the more valuable satisfaction of having heard their music materialise through top-notch performances and applauded by an admiring audience.
It's unlikely the SQA will change its mind over the marking of the Higher composition unit – both the teaching of the subject and the assessment of it has, I believe, proved too troublesome in the past for that to be a priority. But there is no excuse for the SQA's music division not following the stimulating example of its visual-art colleagues and providing a platform for the best of the Higher compositions, and a wider representation of them to boot.
Give young people an incentive to be creative, and they will respond with mind-blowing energy and imagination. The SQA's series of art exhibitions – and the accompanying glossy brochure – are astonishing proof of that. "The walls of the Scottish Parliament building are filled with paintings and poetry," says John Maxwell Geddes. "But where's the music?"
The full article contains 930 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
