Almost thirty years ago, Dansk Musik Tidsskrift (Danish music review) ran a small series of articles reporting on the state of twentieth-century (classical) music educa-tion at Danish universities and conservatories.1 The institutional structure of Danish higher education in music has not changed significantly since then, except for fusions of the smaller conservatories into larger institutions. Musicology can be studied at three Danish universities – those in Copenhagen, Aarhus, and Aalborg – and studies in twentieth- and twenty-first-century music at the conservatories is concentrated in the institutions where composers are educated: the Royal Danish Academy of Music in Copenhagen, the Danish National Academy of Music in Odense, and the Royal Academy of Music in Aarhus/Aalborg.
Universities
Musicology faculties at Danish universities aim to educate high school music teachers as well as musicologists working within the fields of research and specialised knowledge, and to produce professionals suitable for various positions in music institutions. Each of these three main areas account for approximately a third of the candidates employed.
Consequently, a considerable number of students are admitted to the programme of study every year – in 2017: 76 in Copenhagen, 43 in Aarhus, and 21 in Aalborg.
The 1989 article concluded that twentieth-century music was present as part of the curriculum and that it was possible to learn about Danish as well as international new music. This was, however, regarded as insufficient by the authors as it was not the case that music after 1945 had become a natural part of the students’ learning in-terests, nor a frequent area of enquiry for the researchers.2 It is interesting to see how this has changed over the past three decades to the present day, but one needs, at the same time, to recognise that what had been achieved in 1989 was due to joint efforts of a few professors and students participating in the study board and other bodies of the universities.
1 Trine Boje Mortensen and Morten Michelsen: “Universiteterne og den ny musik – en kort situati-onsrapport fra de musikvidenskabelige institutter i Danmark”, in: Dansk Musiktidsskrift 64 (1989/90), pp. 87–89; Bertel Krarup: “Konservatorierne og den ny musik”, in ibid., pp. 128–130; 156–159.
2 Ibid., p. 89.
In the 1980s, one of the demands from the students was that contemporary clas-sical music, as well as popular music, should be included in the curriculum, which was traditionally based on a canon of classical music from the Middle Ages until the first half of the twentieth century. The programme of study was conceived of as a core of music history classes combined with analytical tools and practical skills re-quired for high school music teaching. After a first year introduction to music history through the times, most classes were single topic seminars, and the way in which it was ensured that twentieth-century music was learnt was through an obligation that at least one paper or examination should address classical music after 1900. A student educated around 1990 would have absolved two specific music history classes at BA level and five at MA level before delivering a master’s thesis, which might, of course, happen to be on twentieth-century music.
Examples of courses offered within the curriculum approximately twenty years ago is illustrated in Table 1.
Semester BA level MA level
Autumn 1998 • New Danish music – documentation and promotion
• Vienna around 1900
• “Warsaw Autumn” international festival of contemporary music (with excursion to Warsaw)
Spring 1999 • Eisler and Brecht • Eisler and Brecht Autumn 1999 • Lied in the 19th and early
20th centuries
• Musical analysis: dodeca-phony and serialism
• Techniques of composition: Oliver Messiaen I
• Music analysis: Danish modernism I
Spring 2000 • Mahler, Strauss, Schoenberg – the modern in music 1889–1914
• Jazz-Opera
• New in many ways: aspects of new music after 1945
• Techniques of composition: Oliver Messiaen II
• Music analysis: Danish modernism II Autumn 2000 • Danish music (from the
16th to the 20th century)
• Modern music, new music and neo
• Music analysis: post-tonal music
• Instrumentation: orchestral techniques in the 20th century
Spring 2001 • Techniques of composition: composing with systems Table 1: Courses related to twentieth-century classical music in the study years 1998/99–2000/1 in the musicology faculty at the University of Copenhagen3
3 Det Humanistiske Fakultet. Lektionskatalog (Autumn 1998; Spring 1999; Autumn 1999; Spring 2000;
Autumn 2000; Spring 2001); printed catalogues of courses offered at the Faculty of Humanities, University of Copenhagen.
The table shows that contemporary classical music was present in the study pro-gramme of each semester, and sometimes in rather ambitious formats, such as the excursion to the “Warsaw Autumn” festival. As twentieth-century music was always part of the first year music history introduction, all BA and MA students had access to learning about contemporary music, and were required to do so at least to some extent. In my experience, it was important that students had the opportunity to join trips to the “Warsaw Autumn” festival, the NUMUS festival in Aarhus, or to the first performance of a Stockhausen opera. Those who took part in such trips often subsequently specialised in contemporary music and pursued a career in which such knowledge was required, for example in the Danish National Radio, as music pub-lishers, ensemble managers, or concert organisers. Nevertheless, most of the students still did choose to specialise in other areas.
Since then, everything has changed, and nothing has changed. It might still be fair to conclude, that twentieth- and twenty-first-century music is present in the cur-riculum, but not on the level that provides a natural first choice for students to make it their preferred field of study. Some students do, and they have the opportunity to do so in seminar papers and in their BA or MA theses, and there are professors and associate professors available who are working with twentieth- and twenty-first-century music. At the same time, though, the context has changed significantly; the way the programme of study for musicology is conceptualised has been adapted to new approaches to musicology. On an institutional level, all former independent de-partments of musicology in Denmark have been merged into larger dede-partments – in Aarhus, called the School of Communication and Culture, and in Copenhagen, the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies. In these universities musicology has been preserved as a separate section with a specific programme of study within the depart-ment, while Aalborg University has kept just the programme of study.
For example, the programme of study at the University of Copenhagen has imple-mented three compulsory classes in the first year, which are introductions to music history and music historiography, to popular music studies, and to music anthropol-ogy. In the second year, a class on cultural theory and aesthetics is mandatory. Within these classes, topics of twentieth- and twenty-first-century classical music are always present, but necessarily, this has to be done through selected examples instead of as full presentations of the topics. Consequently, we are confronted with students much better equipped to deal with multiple approaches to the study of music, and at the same time with less specific and detailed knowledge of the history of music. This has affected us as lecturers as well, and even when I teach detailed music history, I tend to regard myself as an anthropologically informed historian of music rather than a music historiographer in nuce. New classical music is to me a specific musical culture of today, not simply the newest part of ‘music’.
In the most recent full academic year, 2017/2018, the “Introduction to music his-tory and historiography of music” course included a session on postmodernism and history, discussing avant-garde music from the 1950s and 60s (Messiaen, Ligeti, Be-rio, Varèse, Schaeffer). For second year students, the compulsory class on musicol-ogy, aesthetics, and cultural theory began with a discussion of “Why is this topic important?” using a new work by Danish composer Niels Rønsholt, premiered a few months before, as a starting point. Throughout the course, examples of classical mu-sic of the twentieth century were discussed together with examples of older clasmu-sical music, popular music and sound studies against a variety of aesthetic and cultural theories (including those from modern critical theory: Benjamin, Adorno, Eisler, and others). A seminar on modernism and narratives of modernism was announced but had to be cancelled due to more stringent class size requirements. A seminar called “Sound studies – an introduction” was symptomatic of the opening of the cur-riculum towards other concepts of sound that can be recognised as aesthetic entities, which is a strong feature in twenty-first-century thinking about music. A seminar for students writing bachelor projects facilitated discussions of Western art music of the eighteenth to twenty-first centuries.
In the spring of 2018, a seminar on love songs across centuries and genres included new compositions as part of the topic, and a seminar on compositional techniques focused on extended tonality in late nineteenth- and twentieth-century settings for choir. A specific seminar on modernism and avant-garde (1950–2000) was also dedi-cated to late twentieth-century composers, focusing on traditions regarded as the core of contemporary music.
Conservatories
New (classical) music at the conservatories has a history of being situated in the de-partments of theory and composition, mainly at the larger conservatories where edu-cation of composers had its strongholds. Historically, the conservatory in Copenha-gen went without serious competition in this field until a dispute over a professorship in composition in 1965 made Per Nørgård leave Copenhagen for the conservatory in Aarhus with a group of talented students.4 The rector Tage Nielsen, and later the composer Karl Aage Rasmussen, made Aarhus a hub of new music activities, with the NUMUS festival being the leading new music festival in Denmark for three de-cades. Later, the conservatory in Odense caught up and ran the festival “Music Au-tumn”, but for now they have focused the programme for composers on film music.
4 Krarup: “Konservatorierne og den ny musik” (note 1), p. 128.
In the meantime, Copenhagen has regained its position, and with professors of com-position such as Bent Sørensen and his successor Niels Rosing-Schow, this has be-come an internationally recognised conservatory for young composers. The new music festivals in Aarhus and Odense do no longer exist. Instead, the Copenhagen conservatory runs a large Pulsar Festival each year, where students, staff, and profes-sional orchestras work together on providing ten days of free, well-attended concerts with new music. Besides being an instrumental part of public musical life, it gives the students of the conservatory an opportunity to work on contemporary music. All students are required to work at least to some degree with new music, and this incites them to make it part of their repertories.
Compared to the situation of twenty years ago, it is significant how those musi-cians educated today, unless specialising in other specific genres, are familiar with playing at least twentieth-century music at a high level. It seems to be an integrated part of the education. Those who choose to specialise in new music are generally per-forming on a level which – at least to my recollection – is significantly higher than at most contemporary music concerts I heard in the 1980s and ’90s.
What’s next?
One significant observation that ought to be taken into consideration is that the con-cept of what is regarded as ‘new music’ has changed significantly. The notion that
‘Neue Musik’ was a well-defined tradition of innovations within a modernist dis-course has turned into a field of experiments within multiple traditions. Further-more, the structures of musical life are changing. It seems that the reasonably stable structure of a specific section of (classical) musical life reserved for ‘new’ or ‘con-temporary’ music that was established in the wake of the First World War is under reconstruction, at least in Denmark. For a country that was co-founder of ISCM in 1922, it would be interesting if we are again participating in the formation of new ways of organising musical life.5
Like in the rest of Europe, the early 1920s were the years in which an abundance of societies and concert series for contemporary music was established, and ISCM was founded as an international superstructure with sections in each member state. This meant that contemporary music was presented in settings with specialised musicians performing for a specialist audience. Furthermore, a specific modernist discourse on contemporary music emerged that was prominent in the process of selecting what
5 Michael Fjeldsøe: “Organizing the New Music. Independent Organizations for Contemporary Music in Copenhagen, 1920–1930”, in: Musik & Forskning 21 (1996), pp. 249–273.
was to be played and how composers and students of musicology were educated. This resulted in closed circles of new music performers and listeners who knew each other.
In the 2000s, these societies literally died out in Denmark. Instead, a Secretariat for Contemporary Music (SNYK) took over the ISCM membership and took on the role of promoting new and contemporary music rather than organising concerts.
New concepts of music festivals used different kinds of venues where theatre go-ers, listeners of popular music or avant-garde artists were accustomed to attending cultural events. New (classical) music was mixed with other genres. The audiences were becoming larger and more diverse. Older modernist works were presented as
‘modern classics’ and at times drew sold-out houses. Contemporary music itself was changing as well, being much less concerned with exploration of compositional tech-niques and the notion of progress, and much more open to performativity, stylistic diversity, and playfulness.
One example of what is happening, is that the venue Jazzhouse in Copenhagen made a new agreement with the Danish Arts Foundation in 2017 on the terms for public support for the next four-year term. They changed the main objective from presenting and promoting “established as well as progressive and experimental jazz”6 to “experimental contemporary music”7. In the process they merged with the world music venue Global, and changed its name to Alice. At the same time, the ‘classical’
organisation SNYK changed its objective from promotion of ‘new music’, first by adding ‘sound art’, and then by recently changing the objective of what they promote to ‘new, experimental music and sound art’.8 When the former leader of Jazzhouse, Bjarke Svendsen, was appointed new head of this reformed SNYK in 2018, he stated that he was taking stock of a situation already present: Experimental music of today can emerge from any genre, and meet in a field of genre-open, progressive, aestheti-cally challenging works meant for curious ears. A recent analysis of these develop-ments in the field of institutionalisation of musical life suggests that we might be wit-nessing “a reconstitution of the institution of contemporary music”, and that “the field of experimental contemporary music” could constitute a renewed notion of where to look for the new in music across traditional genres.9
6 “Rammeaftale om det regionale spillested Copenhagen JazzHouse [2013–2016]”, unpubl.
document, p. 1.
7 “Strategi 2017–2020 for Global/Jazzhouse”, upubl. document, p. 1. Translation by Michael Fjeldsøe, as with all other translations in this article.
8 Asta Louisa Bjerre: “SNYK skal både ae med og mod hårene. Interview med Bjarke Svendsen”, 22 October 2017; http://seismograf.org/interview/snyk-skal-baade-ae-med-og-mod-haarene, last accessed 3 May 2019.
9 Asta Louisa Bjerre: “Eksperimenterende samtidsmusik: en rekonstituering af institutionaliseringen af samtidsmusikken?”, Master’s thesis, University of Copenhagen, 2017.
One could easily turn an account of the current teaching of twentieth- and twenty- first-century contemporary music into a lamentation over budget cuts and negligence in a most important part of musical life. On the other hand, one should beware of becoming one of the conservatives, who claim that since the new developments in music once came from within the classical, contemporary music, this must remain the tradition taught. The real challenge is to remain open to the quality of newness; that quality which provides a sense of being something actually new and of our time, not just any piece of music recently written.
Priscille Lachat-Sarrete