One thing that I’ve been adamant about for the almost 30 years that I’ve been teaching in music colleges is that no student should ever play like they’re in an exam. The idea that the skills and awareness that they are accumulating through study should be presented merely as a demonstration of those skills to an examiner is a massively missed opportunity to frame every assessment opportunity contextually.
This has been part of how I teach bass privately for decades, to put any exercise in a context as soon as possible – to take a technical exercise away from the realm of ‘is this correct’ and into the aesthetic space of ‘is this good?’ as soon as possible, returning to the more analytical space when the contextual work reveals areas of weakness or a lack of clarity over elements of the work.
So back to exams – the work that we as teachers, tutors, lecturers put in to help the students towards true excellence is vital to the students finding the inspiration to develop a practice that doesn’t just pass assessment criteria but puts art out into the world that is worthy of attention and an audience. Every specific set of assessment criteria is an invitation to contextualise, to talk about what this means to us as creative practitioners, as professionals, as collaborators, as artists with an audience and engaged in the work of audience development. Without that context, we’re robbing them of the meaning behind the attention they’re giving to their practice.
The reasons for this are both obvious and manifold. Art produced solely to pass an exam is literally worthless, on a metaphysical level. What a moribund aspiration it is to aim solely to pass an assessment. The assessment should be a benchmark against which to measure a performance, a composition, an interpretation, the demonstration of ability to execute music to a high standard, but it’s the performance that matters, the composition that matters.
At the beginning of every new academic year I invite my students to be ‘open to the possibility of greatness’. Not as a pressure, but as a moment of recognition that greatness doesn’t happen by accident, and the journey towards it is what makes both education and creative practice worthwhile. There is zero value in intentional mediocrity.
So in what way is your work an invitation to the possibility of greatness? How are you shepherding them towards an understanding of both what it takes to be great, and what the payoff is of that work? The metaphysical purpose of showing up as your best self in a world that will so often attempt to rob you of your originality and value.
Like every area of education in the UK and beyond, music education is facing pressures of privatisation, economic extraction and the collapse of the journey of critical thinking that ought to begin in school and extend to PhDs and beyond… But while we’re in a room with a bunch of students, our task is still to try and inspire and guide them towards making meaning in the world. Anything less is a travesty.
So back to our initial frame – it’s imperative that every assessment is presented as an opportunity to develop practice, to perform, to imagine an audience and play to them. Practically this means thinking about staging, costume, introductions, entrances, exits. Make this a part of everything. There’s no reason not to.
And the associated benefit for us? We get to think about what makes OUR work meaningful, how do we perform? What are we doing to inspire them? Everybody wins.