Cultures of Work, the Neoliberal Environment, and Music in Higher Education

Abstract

Music teaching, research, and scholarship in higher education is experiencing unprecedented change that is attributed to neoliberalism. Music occupies an uncomfortable position in the neoliberal university on two fronts: first, as humanities disciplines, musicology and ethnomusicology fare poorly in a model driven by economics; and second, as a practical discipline, with specialisations including performance, composition, and sound-based arts, like other performing and creative arts practice disciplines, it is perceived as a fringe-dweller despite accruing prestige and symbolic value. As some of the authors in this book elaborate, practice-led research in music often produces what it calls research, but the data is lacking a conceptual framework and methodology. The introduction addresses these and other issues and provides brief summaries of the chapters that are written by leading international scholars. The chapters are grouped into three parts: ‘Behaviours and Bureaucracies’ evaluates issues of collegiality, gender and its impact on those who engage in work on gender and sexuality, and the influence that metrics and research grants can play on cultures of teaching, research, and scholarship; ‘Teaching Research and Scholarship: Forging New Pathways and Partnerships’ adopts a more upbeat tone as it explores the ways in which cultures of mutual respect across cultures of performance, teaching, and research can be further encouraged to build research capacity in innovative ways, including in graduate programmes, through a variety of emerging methods or approaches such as auto-ethnography; and ‘Higher Degrees, Research Practice, and New Materialism’ explores the relationship between research training and scholarship, the ways in which interdisciplinarity is claimed to work or not work, and how a new materialist approach from the perspective of the listener, one who is not trained in music and one who is trained, brings a new perspective to the analysis of a standard work in the classical canon.