IF you’re one of the thousands of people who, as a child, studied piano or violin, you’ll know exactly what the AMEB is – the Australian Music Examinations Board.

With its official centenary celebrated two years ago in 2018, its work actually began back in 1875 in Victoria and South Australia, so it has a very long history of educating and more particularly accrediting musicians through the teachers.

Music studies were the backbone of the newly developing culture in colonial Australia and many households even in the remotest parts of the outback once boasted at least an upright piano.

And now, during COVID-19 isolation, there’s hardly a digital piano to be bought in Australia and guitars and ukuleles are flying off the shelves.

It’s hardly surprising, then, to learn that the AMEB is at the forefront of a move to ensure that music can still be taught all around the country during the COVID-19 crisis through a new series of webinars, called “Break the Isolation.”

I caught up with CEO Bernard Depasquale by phone to Melbourne, where he was busy implementing the board’s new courses.

With eight episodes already released, the webinars, open to everyone, feature interviews with musicians, teachers and other experts and cover topics like “Music in Times of Crisis” with conductor Benjamin Northey and “Indigenous Language Alive through Song” with educator-composer Candace Kruger.

Based in Adelaide and a pianist by trade, Depasquale and his violinist wife Sarah met at the Elder Conservatorium and later formed the well-known Tea Rose Duo, performing around Australia for many years, often at the School of Arts Café in Queanbeyan, until Depasquale, who also has a law degree from Flinders University and a Graduate Diploma in Arts Administration from the University of South Australia up his position with AMEB and moved to Melbourne.

“I grew up on AMEB exams every year, they were part of my upbringing,” he says. There are also Australian and New Zealand Cultural Arts, Trinity Guildhall Examinations, Australian Guild of Music Education Inc. and St Cecilia School of Music, but the vast majority of all exams in music, he estimates, come through the AMEB.

“So much has happened over the last seven or eight weeks,” he tells us, “We knew that teachers wanted to keep teaching and we ran our first webinar on how to teach on March 25.”

More followed, initially once a week but then twice a week, with a diversity of teaching techniques developed to take in different instruments, including brass and ensembles.

“Music is at its most powerful when experienced live and in person,” he says, but now he sees educators adapting and pivoting to new models that enable music to be taught remotely.

To be sure, there are technological problems like time-lag, which he says is a big issue because each Internet server has a different capacity, “but that is a physics thing, not something we can fix”.

“We quickly realised online teaching was a way of expanding beyond our immediate community, so we made our online theory courses [Grades 1, 2 and 3] free until June 30 on YouTube and Facebook… The response was huge, with over 35,000 people redeeming that offer, far more than they would normally take in a year,” he says.

The webinars are free at the moment and he’s arranged a free licence allowing teachers to screen-share AMEB publications on their chosen online lesson platform, “to do the right thing in protecting copyright”.

The hope is that some of the new students will take their new-found studies seriously, go online for exams and get qualifications through the video exams available for students in lockdown and throughout the year.

As for would-be music students starting from scratch, in Depasquale‘s view it’s still important for them to find a teacher and that’s why the AMEB’s first task is to help the teachers who provide the benchmarks throughout the country.

“We’re not doing this as a money earner, we want music teachers to keep teaching,” he says.

To access the free AMEB courses, visit ameb.edu.au/online-theory-courses and ameb.edu.au/breaktheisolation