The day the music died

By Winged Rodent

Beethoven, Pavarotti, David Bowie – where would they have been without music lessons? The thought of the great composer as a chimney sweep, or Ziggy Stardust pumping gas is positively criminal. Yet in New Zealand today potential virtuosos and rock legends are being denied access to the career kick start many young musicians received at school.

The Itinerant Teacher of Music (ITM) scheme has been helping out young Kiwi musicians for more than 50 years. Set up in 1945 it was billed as part of the vision of a “generous and well-balanced education”, and it has been giving opportunities to those who otherwise might not have access to musical tuition since. Unfortunately our government, which claims to be a supporter of the arts, is now doing its best to make life difficult for musicians.

The ITM scheme involves music teachers traveling to secondary schools around the country to provide instrumental tuition. It has been vital for students who wish to pursue a musical career but whose parents do not have the money for private tuition, and invaluable to schools that do not have the resources to give specialist instrumental training themselves.

Things went off-key in 2006 however when the Ministry withdrew funding for travel between schools. The ITMs are attached to a number of host schools, which have been receiving funding for the past 10 years. Now schools receiving tuition through the scheme are being asked to provide extra staffing money to make up for the shortfall and there are fears that schools will withdraw from the programme because of the added costs.

The Government then struck another bum note with ITMs by diverting $600,000 from their programme and using it to set up the artist-in-residence scheme it launched last week .The Government trumpets this new proposal without acknowledging that it’s come at the cost of music provision in secondary schools.

Education Minister Chris Carter is fiddling while Rome burns.

But the music teachers are not going to take this quietly. Fifty ITM representatives will be meeting in Wellington on Friday to discuss the future of the scheme and ways of preventing its collapse. The aim of the meeting will be to try to find out why the Ministry has decided it’s no longer interested in supporting school music, and what consultation it has undertaken with the public on the decision. The ITMs hope it will be a way of making public the Ministry’s strategic strangulation of a scheme that has provided support to schools and students for more than half a century.

We would love to hear your thoughts on the future of the ITM scheme and the impact it has had on your schools and we hope you will join us in our push for it to continue.