THE EDITOR: Sir:PLEASE PERMIT me some space to reply to Miss Dawn Ritch's article of Sunday, August 3, 2003. As head of the Piano Department of the Jamaica School of Music from July 1976 to 1989 I can at least set the record straight about the innovations during that period which Miss Ritch deems fit to castigate.
The school at that time saw the implementation of structured programmes causing its transition from a "music studio" to a tertiary institution. The new programmes were vetted and accredited by Catholic University, Washington, and the school named as a Centre of the Americas by the Organisation of American States.
The philosophy was to present all genres of music as viable and raise the level of the participants so that they could distinguish excellence according to the internal dictates of the particular music being studied. Hierarchies were discouraged and the basic understanding of musical modalities laid as a foundation. Literacy was accentuated and all students had to take courses in what Miss Ritch would recognise as "theory and musical appreciation".
The tutors were heavily weighed towards the Western European tradition and investigation of the curricula of this period would demonstrate this leaning. But we did not exclude popular and folk music and the latter was made a foundation course in which students could explore the genesis of their culture. Placed not only in Jamaica but worldwide our graduates are best able to assess our success or failure.
If our attempts are viewed as "terminal decline" it is in no small measure as a result of the hostility that we received from the so-called "classical" establishment. Any attempt to seriously analyse and engender critical appraisal of popular music was met with a howl of protest. We were a "reggae" school teaching only "bass" drum beats. We were said to have given over our "higher" training to the vulgarity of popular culture! It was interesting that the exponents of European music should feel so threatened.
Miss Ritch lauds the music classes in our high schools of the '50s and '60s. Having attended one of these schools myself I can only attest in my case to the boring nature of its musical delivery and the arid irrelevance of its content. It speaks to the quality of the genre that an inexplicable connection to its essence could be made by some students despite the presentation. Music in all its forms need not be so strenuously defended as it will continue despite all efforts to contain it and Western European music is no exception.
Miss Ritch would be better served by doing some real research into the fascinating subject of the effect of music on behaviour for which there are documented theories than retiring behind the old and tired rhetoric of blaming the Jamaica School of Music of that period for the perceived decline in popular music.
I am, etc.,
AUDREY COOPER
Kingston 6
