Anthonie Tonnon was one of the first students at the University of Otago’s then-new school of rock in the mid-noughties. He did a double degree in music and history, apt qualifications for someone whose 2023 Taite Prize-winning album Leave Love Out of This had songs about the Mataura paper mill and US general Douglas MacArthur.
It’s where he started writing songs, but he still had a lot to learn after he graduated.
“When I was at university it was the bums-on-seats era,” he says. “I felt part of a massive stream, just a torrent flooding into universities and polytechs.”
While he’s appreciative of his music school experience, Tonnon wonders if curriculum adjustments were already being made to get more passes, more students and more funding. He got his lowest grade, a B-minus, in a first-year musicianship skills course – “it’s all the really hard stuff”– but returned the following year to find the stage-two paper in the subject was no longer compulsory. So he dropped it. He occasionally regrets he didn’t persevere or wasn’t made to.
“These days I’m working with people who went to jazz schools, which had a more practical, more polytech approach. They had those hard parts of musicianship that are much more based on rote and memory – almost like language learning – and I’m so much slower. I have to work a lot harder to analyse what I’m hearing.
“And that was the pressure on universities, in that trying to get as many people through, they were taking out everything that required a lot of contact time and focusing on learning more broad skills. But if you take out enough you actually lose quite a lot.”
Those enrolment boom times are well over. Many of New Zealand’s tertiary institutions teaching music of any genre are facing post-pandemic deficits. Cuts are looming at Victoria University’s New Zealand School of Music (see story next page) as well as Tonnon’s alma mater and elsewhere.
Auckland music polytechnic the Music and Audio Institute of New Zealand (Mainz) closed this year despite a roll of graduates that reads like a nomination list for the Aotearoa Music Awards.
But just as not everyone who studies English is en route to writing a novel, not everyone who studies music sees it as their path to a career.
At Otago, senior teaching fellow David Harrison instructs students in the art of the electric guitar and music production. He says getting a rock-star education isn’t just about a path into the big time.
“It’s not even close to being ‘I want to be the next big thing on TikTok’ any more. Our graduates have gone on to do lots of amazing things, from operating submersibles for oil rigs to all manner of creative businesses, and all attribute their success to being involved in music.
“What even the students themselves don’t understand is the development of soft skills that learning and understanding music really helps them with – like problem-solving. If you are singing and playing guitar in a band on stage you are solving a lot of issues all the time, at light speed. Those sorts of skills are incredibly powerful. Anyone can train to be an accountant but not everyone can play drums or sing.”
According to Education Counts statistics and research website, the nationally averaged ratio of students to academic staff in 2022 was 18.6 for universities, 15.0 at national polytechnic Te Pūkenga and 11.9 in private training establishments (PTEs).
It’s not Keynesian theory
The reality is whereas an economics professor can unpack Keynesian theories to as many students that a lecture theatre or online learning technology will allow, learning a musical instrument, composition or audio production requires some one-on-one attention. That makes the economics of tertiary-level music education challenging.
Late last year saw the cutting of two bachelor of creativity degrees majoring in music and performing arts, two music diplomas and three certificate courses at the campuses of Wellington-based Whitireia and WelTec. Mainz closed in April.
Since then the malaise appears to have spread to the nation’s universities and what is currently playing out at the capital’s New Zealand School of Music (NZSM) points to a looming crisis.
The NZSM has long been considered the apex of the nation’s music education providers, an incubator of world-renowned composers and musicians, a talent resource for our best orchestras and an integral component of the capital’s vaunted arts culture. The proposed cuts were described by school head Sally Jane \ as the institution “being gutted”. Classical performance, music studies and composition programmes are all facing the axe, Norman told RNZ. Of about 26 full-time-equivalent academic staff, the proposal was to remove eight, plus her own role as head of school.
Another challenge facing music academia is the recent secondary school push towards STEM subjects, encouraging students to pursue careers in science, technology, engineering and maths. Inevitably that has affected the number of new tertiary students embracing the arts and humanities.
Throw in the confusion and future insecurities around the financially bungled arrival of Te Pūkenga, the mega-polytech with national oversight, and the whole sector is facing a perfect storm.
It was an actual storm that hit Mainz when floodwaters swamped its near-new Māngere campus just before the 2023 academic year. The institute had already been in a precarious position on account of its beleaguered parent body, the Greymouth-based Tai Poutini Polytechnic, then the subsequent shaky stewardship of Invercargill’s Southern Institute of Technology (SIT). In April Te Pūkenga/SIT advised the remaining dozen-or-so Mainz teaching staff that no new enrolments would be accepted. So the 26-year-old Auckland school, whose alumni include Grammy-winning producer Joel Little, Troy Kingi, members of the Naked and Famous and Gin Wigmore, was effectively closed.
Hello Sailor members Harry Lyon and Dave McArtney were among the industry veterans on its teaching staff over the years.
Lyon retired as Mainz’s dean in 2017. He says the institute offered a path to a music career to those who weren’t academically inclined. “The applied nature of the programmes suited the students who historically had predominantly left school without University Entrance, some with no high-school qualification at all.”
Several Mainz students headed to the University of Auckland popular music programme directed by Godfrey De Grut. Auckland’s School of Music has itself had a turbulent time over the past decade with repeated restructurings, staff cuts and a high turnover of creative arts and industries faculty leaders. The academic atmosphere seems to have improved dramatically since Australian David Chisholm took over as head of school.
Chisholm is an internationally recognised composer whose biography notes a career strong on hybrid musical collaborations.
Collaboration is something De Grut sees as the way ahead for tertiary-music tuition, and indeed his popular-music programme has moved to encourage writing collaborations. Creative practice classical, jazz, composition and music studies are the other specialisations offered at Auckland, with the curriculum undergoing major revision for 2025. Classical performance students still dominate numerically, but the old conservatorium model and isolation of students within chosen specialties has begun to change. De Grut is excited at the opportunities such as de-siloing heralds.
“Within the undergraduate degree there seems to be growing advocacy for less specialisation. I’m hoping students might get to explore more pertinent areas of study such as AI-aided computer music or the music of non-Western cultures.
“There is potential for more overlap in the disciplines, and we need to encourage our own students to do other things outside songwriting. Perhaps a Western-classical violinist should be able to do a paper in songwriting at the same time?”
MAINZ’s loss SAE’s gain
Auckland’s SAE Creative Media Institute had already picked up students from Mainz before its closure after some courses were dropped in cuts made by SIT in 2019.
The head of Australian-owned SAE NZ, Suzette Major, is a former head of Mainz. She relishes the autonomy of managing a private training establishment and the opportunity to expand it beyond the school’s previous course offerings.
Although music performance isn’t part of SAE’s present format, the school is seeking approval for proposed songwriting and musicianship qualifications and hopes to start the new courses next year.
SAE charges course fees, which this year averaged just under $12,000 a year. “While music and audio education are expensive to run – being largely technology-based creative practices – the benefits to undertaking tertiary study in this space are enormous,” says Major. “Gaining a qualification not only helps the individual forging a creative career, but qualified creative practitioners contribute to the economic prosperity and social wellbeing of New Zealand. It’s in everyone’s interest for all creative schools to be doing well.”
At the University of Canterbury, executive Dean of Arts Kevin Watson says the music school is weathering the storm well. Canterbury recently appointed a new lecturer in creative music technology to join six full-time academic staff and a dozen-plus part-time performance tutors. Enrolments spiked during Covid, says Watson, and this year has seen another peak with more than 50 bachelor of music first-years.
Watson says the school is finding such new ways to be flexible as introducing conjoint degrees with engineering and other courses.
Also in Christchurch, the Ara Institute of Canterbury/Te Pūkenga arose from the 2016 merger of Christchurch Polytechnic Institute of Technology (CPIT) and Timaru’s Aoraki Polytechnic. CPIT had long been regarded as the South Island’s jazz school and Ara carries that on with about half its 100 students studying jazz.
In the far south, Invercargill’s SIT flourished under its zero-fees scheme, which attracted students from all over the country. SIT first offered a music degree in 2003 and two decades on it has 14 music courses alongside bachelor’s-degree options in contemporary music and audio production.
Now that it’s under the wing of Te Pūkenga (or the “eye of Sauron” as one wag called it) there is uncertainty over whether SIT can guarantee zero fees over a three-year degree. And that likely change is already affecting enrolment enquiries.
The pandemic hit the SIT music courses hard, says programme manager Douglas Heath, who observes that while traditional university and polytechnic models – theory versus practical – are moving closer, the sectors are in competition.
“With Te Pūkenga, collaboration is now happening within the polytech sector, but between polytechs and universities they will still be competing for EFTS [equivalent full-time students], because that’s how the funding model works. The accountants tell us to increase the numbers in order to increase the funding.”
Another weathering a deficit storm, which is threatening jobs in other parts of its university, is Massey’s School of Music and Creative Media Production – Te Rewa o Puanga. In 2016 Massey launched its innovative new bachelor of commercial music degree at its Wellington campus. It was a hybrid theory, practical and technology-focused course still touted as “the most progressive music programme in New Zealand”, or what one observer has described as a “STEM-based music course”.
The degree offers three majors – music technology, music practice and music industry – closer in its real-world perspective to the degree course by then on offer at Mainz in Auckland than any of the other major universities, where instrument proficiency still dominated. Tutors include Warren Maxwell (of bands TrinityRoots and Little Bushman), Flying Nun co-owner Ben Howe, soundtrack composer Grayson Gilmour and Oli Wilson, who divides his time between Massey and being the keyboardist for the Chills. Among Wilson’s master’s graduates is Shihad’s Jon Toogood.
Typically enrolling 80 to 100 students each year, the programme experienced a drop through the pandemic though numbers have bounced back since.
The school’s associate head, Bridget Johnson, says most of the programme’s students are local so it wasn’t dramatically affected by pandemic border closures.
“Our focus is on commercial music practice as well as music technology and educating the future producers, record-label executives, event managers and marketing teams. Music education needs to constantly evolve to keep up with and be at the forefront of industry trends – diversity is a hugely important part of this.”
Downes south
Another venerated campus under the pump is the University of Otago, which has offered voluntary redundancies to help trim $60 million from its annual operating expenditure in the face of a widely publicised deficit and declining enrolment numbers.
Gaining fame over the past decade as the place where the country’s biggest band, Six60, began, Otago took the lead in contemporary music offerings in the early 2000s when it introduced New Zealand’s first degree in rock music under Graeme Downes.
He had been the songwriting voice and guitar of the Verlaines, which had been part of Flying Nun’s first generation of Dunedin bands. Between recording nearly a dozen albums with the group and touring the world he had earned himself a PhD in the symphonies of Mahler.
Downes’ first step into academia was teaching and co-ordinating programmes at the fledgling Auckland Mainz campus in the 1990s.
Returning south, he joined the university in 2000, introducing courses in composition and musicology and developing a songwriting-focused degree format. By 2012 Downes was department head and after retiring in 2020 he was made a Member of the NZ Order of Merit.
“Graeme Downes changed everyone’s lives,” says Tonnon. “He was a thrilling lecturer when he took apart a song in front of 100 students with a guitar, or his famous lecture comparing Nirvana to Shostakovich.”
Bachelor of music enrolments at Otago lifted in the Covid years, an effect attributed by current head of the School of Performing Arts, Anthony Ritchie, to new students having otherwise spare time on their hands. This year, however, has seen a sharp return to pre-Covid numbers.
Degree options now include classical performance and composition, contemporary music (the rock and popular music component), music production and musical theatre voice. About 200 enrolled this year.
Ritchie acknowledges there may be staff cuts ahead, with some valued academics having already opted for redundancy. In 2021, Six60, two of whose members did music papers at Otago, established a scholarship of a $10,000 rent rebate enabling four music or performing arts students to live at the band’s now-famous Castle St flat.
“I think governments generally underfund investment in the performing arts, considering the importance of music in people’s lives, its cultural and health benefits and the money it pours back into the economy,” says Ritchie.
“Look at how Six60 is enriching our lives and mentoring a new generation. We could have a lot more of that sort of thing with decent funding. I would like to see the government offer a special rate of funding for teaching of performance music, which is generally one-to-one teaching.”
Still, says Tonnon, the university approach to teaching contemporary music may need to change.
“The other thing that frustrated me about a university-based music education was that it was really analytical.
“It taught us to be very good critics, but sometimes if you teach the skills of criticism faster than you teach the skills of process and art practice, you can teach your students to shoot down their own planes before they take off.”
Class acts
At the time it was introduced in 2003 the idea seemed almost as unlikely as the name – a start-up music organisation without government backing that would champion songwriting among New Zealand secondary school students. The annual Smokefree Rockquest had established itself as a music contest for high schoolers and the NZ Music Commission had a mentoring-in-schools programme. What could this new concept offer?
This November will mark the 20th anniversary of Play It Strange, the organisation that supports budding teenage songwriters. Taking its name from a Split Enz track, it’s funded largely by the Lion Foundation and Trillian Trust (which in turn are funded by pub gambling machines). Play It Strange stages programmes, concerts and annual competitions that provide an outlet for hundreds of young “bedroom songwriters”.
Founder and chief executive Mike Chunn, who played bass in the Enz and Citizen Band before becoming a record company A&R (artists and repertoire) man in the 1980s, estimates about 5500 new songs have been recorded in that time.
In earlier years they were compiled into CDs and each contributor was given a stack for personal distribution. These days the songs can be found on Spotify and other streaming platforms. Last year about 550 were added.
Play It Strange has helped kick off some successful music careers. Notable past participants include Liz Stokes of the Beths, Georgia Nott from Broods, Kimbra, Louis Baker and Thomston. It has also been an outlet for songs expressing the problems and pains of teenage life.
“I have pride, not so much in what I’ve done but in the extraordinary talent that has come through from people who have just had musical adventures,” says Chunn.
Another achievement – after almost a decade of lobbying, using Play It Strange as proof – the Ministry of Education added songwriting as an NCEA level 3 achievement standard in November 2016.
“I suddenly noticed parents were now interested in their kid doing songwriting when they didn’t want to do maths or physics,” Chunn observes with a wry smile.
Additional reporting by Russell Baillie
Richard Thorne is publisher of NZ Musician magazine.