Saturday, September 24, 2005
Rock guru brings a radical perspective to Tovey chair
By KENNETH WALTON
"THERE'S a delicious irony in the recent announcement of Simon Frith as the newly-appointed Tovey professor of music at Edinburgh University. Frith, a sociologist who gained his PhD from the University of California with a thesis on elementary schooling in 19th-century Leeds, and who is currently professor of media and film at Stirling University, is probably best known among those of a certain age for his engaging newspaper columns of the 1970s and 1980s on pop.
He was the first rock guru to bring serious thought on the subject to the serious papers - principally as pioneer pop critic on the Sunday Times, later the Observer, and writing more recently in The Scotsman. He told us then, and he'd probably tell us now: pop is with us, it's here to stay, so you'd better just get used to it.
Placing someone of such a populist, broad-minded bent on the Tovey chair is bound to get the Morningside chattering classes spluttering into their sherries. After all, its legendary donor, Donald Francis Tovey, was an old-school Oxbridge academic of the first order. His Edinburgh University classes in the early 1900s were an institution (even earning an honourable mention in Muriel Spark's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie); his erudition beyond reproach; his analytical writings rigorous to the point of grandiose prolixity; his directorship of the famous Reid Orchestra, dictatorial; and his own compositions were monolithic examples of the great post-Brahmsian Teutonic lineage.
Tovey professors at Edinburgh have generally been musicologists firmly focused on the past - entrenched in the mysteries of 16th-century counterpoint or unravelling a symphony through Schenkerian analysis. Frith knows plenty about such things - "my musical tastes are totally and utterly eclectic," he declares - but he's more interested in music's place in society. "His musical knowledge", a former Scotsman arts editor told me, "is encyclopaedic."
Frith began writing on popular music culture while he was a sociology graduate student in America. It was the era of the groundbreaking Rolling Stone magazine. "I felt I had developed the confidence to write on rock as well as anyone else," he recalls. Rock critics were few and far between, so he was among the first.
Frith has produced books on the subject with impressive regularity, ranging from The Sociology of Rock through Music and Copyright to editing The Cambridge Companion to Rock and Pop. Performing Rites, published in 1998, is a remarkable exploration of how society functions in response to music and performance across the genres of folk, classical and pop music. The sociologist in Frith is never far from the surface.
"Over the last ten to 15 years, I've found the distinction between musicology and sociology difficult to maintain," he says. Which is why he is quite comfortable with a career that has taken him from sociology lecturer at Warwick University (1972-87), via chair of the Department of English Studies at Strathclyde University (1987-1999), and film and media professor at Stirling, to his new post at Edinburgh, which he takes up in January.
Frith's appointment is a radical change for Scotland's oldest surviving university music department, which the classical conservative set will view as just another stage in the so-called dumbing down of traditional classical music education.
But we shouldn't confuse the general lowering of expectations in musical education, particularly in schools (although that has its knock-on effect on the standards of university entrants), with an inspired move by Edinburgh University to broaden the department's research and teaching base, and to provide a breadth of expertise capable of servicing music's wider range of contemporary interests.
Leeds University already offers degrees in popular music running parallel to its traditional classical training, and Liverpool's Institute of Popular Music is part of its university music department. There are also established courses in Newcastle, but Frith's professorial appointment in Edinburgh represents a pioneering step for Scotland. As well as triggering the re-instatement of the Tovey chair - which has gathered dust, unfilled, for nearly a decade - it is, I believe, a sign that the university's music department, still smarting from its recent loss of faculty status and the stripping away of its historic Reid Library, is planning a vigorous future.
Two interesting and influential figures now head it. Alongside Frith is the existing Reid professor, Nigel Osborne, a composer whose music-based projects in such war-torn countries as Bosnia and Croatia, geared to rehabilitating refugee children and reconstructing whole education systems, are at the forefront of research into learning through music. Osborne recently established a unique new research base at Edinburgh centred on the benefits of music-driven therapy.
Frith acknowledges there will be tensions over his arrival. How long will it be before he is labelled the pop professor? "Classical musicians will have skills I don't have," he says. "What I can bring is a sociological perspective on music making, through my experience in the business of judging music, and the knowledge I have of music policies and copyright".
It will be interesting, too, to see what influence he brings to bear on traditional historical music research and formal undergraduate teaching. You only have to look at recent books on age-old subjects - Jane Glover's newly-published Mozart's Women, for instance - to detect a greater interest by musicologists in the wider sociological factors that drove the great composers and their music. Frith believes firmly that to understand art, you need to understand the people who created it and the society they lived in.
His aspirations, however, extend beyond the purely educational. Frith sees his new position as "an ideal base from which to establish debate". "Edinburgh is central to the culture of this country," he says. "Scotland is desperately in need of a coherent music policy. There is so little political interest." It's one of his key ambitions to see that changed. We desperately need someone of influence and intellectual weight to tackle that issue. A century ago, Tovey would not have been backward in expressing his views. Could Frith be the man to argue music's case in 21st-century Scotland? By January, if he wishes, he'll have the platform to do it."
(The Scotsman, Mon, Sept 19, 2005) ¶ 9/24/2005 09:22:00 AM
By KENNETH WALTON
"THERE'S a delicious irony in the recent announcement of Simon Frith as the newly-appointed Tovey professor of music at Edinburgh University. Frith, a sociologist who gained his PhD from the University of California with a thesis on elementary schooling in 19th-century Leeds, and who is currently professor of media and film at Stirling University, is probably best known among those of a certain age for his engaging newspaper columns of the 1970s and 1980s on pop.
He was the first rock guru to bring serious thought on the subject to the serious papers - principally as pioneer pop critic on the Sunday Times, later the Observer, and writing more recently in The Scotsman. He told us then, and he'd probably tell us now: pop is with us, it's here to stay, so you'd better just get used to it.
Placing someone of such a populist, broad-minded bent on the Tovey chair is bound to get the Morningside chattering classes spluttering into their sherries. After all, its legendary donor, Donald Francis Tovey, was an old-school Oxbridge academic of the first order. His Edinburgh University classes in the early 1900s were an institution (even earning an honourable mention in Muriel Spark's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie); his erudition beyond reproach; his analytical writings rigorous to the point of grandiose prolixity; his directorship of the famous Reid Orchestra, dictatorial; and his own compositions were monolithic examples of the great post-Brahmsian Teutonic lineage.
Tovey professors at Edinburgh have generally been musicologists firmly focused on the past - entrenched in the mysteries of 16th-century counterpoint or unravelling a symphony through Schenkerian analysis. Frith knows plenty about such things - "my musical tastes are totally and utterly eclectic," he declares - but he's more interested in music's place in society. "His musical knowledge", a former Scotsman arts editor told me, "is encyclopaedic."
Frith began writing on popular music culture while he was a sociology graduate student in America. It was the era of the groundbreaking Rolling Stone magazine. "I felt I had developed the confidence to write on rock as well as anyone else," he recalls. Rock critics were few and far between, so he was among the first.
Frith has produced books on the subject with impressive regularity, ranging from The Sociology of Rock through Music and Copyright to editing The Cambridge Companion to Rock and Pop. Performing Rites, published in 1998, is a remarkable exploration of how society functions in response to music and performance across the genres of folk, classical and pop music. The sociologist in Frith is never far from the surface.
"Over the last ten to 15 years, I've found the distinction between musicology and sociology difficult to maintain," he says. Which is why he is quite comfortable with a career that has taken him from sociology lecturer at Warwick University (1972-87), via chair of the Department of English Studies at Strathclyde University (1987-1999), and film and media professor at Stirling, to his new post at Edinburgh, which he takes up in January.
Frith's appointment is a radical change for Scotland's oldest surviving university music department, which the classical conservative set will view as just another stage in the so-called dumbing down of traditional classical music education.
But we shouldn't confuse the general lowering of expectations in musical education, particularly in schools (although that has its knock-on effect on the standards of university entrants), with an inspired move by Edinburgh University to broaden the department's research and teaching base, and to provide a breadth of expertise capable of servicing music's wider range of contemporary interests.
Leeds University already offers degrees in popular music running parallel to its traditional classical training, and Liverpool's Institute of Popular Music is part of its university music department. There are also established courses in Newcastle, but Frith's professorial appointment in Edinburgh represents a pioneering step for Scotland. As well as triggering the re-instatement of the Tovey chair - which has gathered dust, unfilled, for nearly a decade - it is, I believe, a sign that the university's music department, still smarting from its recent loss of faculty status and the stripping away of its historic Reid Library, is planning a vigorous future.
Two interesting and influential figures now head it. Alongside Frith is the existing Reid professor, Nigel Osborne, a composer whose music-based projects in such war-torn countries as Bosnia and Croatia, geared to rehabilitating refugee children and reconstructing whole education systems, are at the forefront of research into learning through music. Osborne recently established a unique new research base at Edinburgh centred on the benefits of music-driven therapy.
Frith acknowledges there will be tensions over his arrival. How long will it be before he is labelled the pop professor? "Classical musicians will have skills I don't have," he says. "What I can bring is a sociological perspective on music making, through my experience in the business of judging music, and the knowledge I have of music policies and copyright".
It will be interesting, too, to see what influence he brings to bear on traditional historical music research and formal undergraduate teaching. You only have to look at recent books on age-old subjects - Jane Glover's newly-published Mozart's Women, for instance - to detect a greater interest by musicologists in the wider sociological factors that drove the great composers and their music. Frith believes firmly that to understand art, you need to understand the people who created it and the society they lived in.
His aspirations, however, extend beyond the purely educational. Frith sees his new position as "an ideal base from which to establish debate". "Edinburgh is central to the culture of this country," he says. "Scotland is desperately in need of a coherent music policy. There is so little political interest." It's one of his key ambitions to see that changed. We desperately need someone of influence and intellectual weight to tackle that issue. A century ago, Tovey would not have been backward in expressing his views. Could Frith be the man to argue music's case in 21st-century Scotland? By January, if he wishes, he'll have the platform to do it."
(The Scotsman, Mon, Sept 19, 2005) ¶ 9/24/2005 09:22:00 AM
