EVEN as the ANU is shunting its teaching staff at the School of Music out the door, it’s busy replacing them—but at a much lower level. 

A curious advertisement, featuring an image of happy drumming hands, has appeared online at http://music.anu.edu.au/node/4401, calling for music tutors to service the new Bachelor of Music Performance courses commencing in February next year.

“Are you interested in becoming a tertiary instrumental tutor at the ANU School of Music?” the advertisement asks. “The ANU School of Music invites expressions of interest from qualified people interested in contract tutoring at undergraduate level for courses in (Semester 1) or July 2013 (Semester 2).”

Academic staff accustomed to having their long years of high-level performance and training recognised and honoured with professorial status have already been sidelined with a planned curriculum that will place musicology and doctoral theses ahead of practice, though the ad is careful to tick the box that says, “a key element of music instruction is the individual one-to-one mentoring of the student by the tutor.”

According to a group of staff members who preferred to remained unnamed, the new Head of School, Peter Tregear, has counselled students to bargain with tutors to get their fees down so that the proposed Professional Development Allowance (PDA) for students can go further.

It can easily cost between $100-$170 an hour for a top level instrumental teacher and under the old model that was incorporated into the main course. But this advertisement makes it clear that the actual teaching of an instrument is a service provided to the course, not a central element of it.

The ad goes on, “Your contract as an Instrumental Tutor will be for a specified number of one-hour-long one-to-one lessons per week over the teaching semester specified (usually 13 lessons, or one per week). For each contact hour, the rate of pay includes an expectation that the tutor will provide a lesson schedule for each student, and at the end of each teaching period, submit a Student Progress Report to the School of Music on each student’s performance development over the semester.”

Although the repeated assertion has been that the old School of Music model was too costly, it is well-known that the ANU’s planners have long nurtured an ideological antipathy to conservatorium-based music studies, seeing itself as a centre of loftier investigations into theory, musicology and composition. There are parallels in other disciplines which involve practice.

Though the university believes competition for places at the School will still be still keen, the word around the traps is that elite musicians will go anywhere but Canberra for their higher education, with the Queensland Conservatorium at Griffith University looking likes the big winner.