From Muti to festa Music

Recently the issue of a musical academy in Malta, which is very close to your heart, cropped up again. For the first time, perhaps, someone has dissented from the previously unanimously held view that the setting up of an academy of music deserved to be the priority in Malta's cultural policy. What is your reaction?

Nobody is a more ardent admirer of Michael Laus both as a conductor and pianist than me. Indeed, I rarely praise him because for me to do so to someone whose musicianship is so masterly, makes me feel as absurd as passing judgment on Renzo Piano as an architect.

However, in the field of educational management, in which I am less of an ignoramus than I am in the arts, the excursion by Laus shows that he may not be so utterly dependable as an adviser.

Of course, he is obviously right in saying that the academy would not have as rich a pool for recruitment without a considerable raising of standards in music at the primary and secondary level. But then, he declares that such an improvement will not come about without a more abundant supply of well qualified teachers. And how are these teachers to be produced except through an academy with initially significant reliance on international staff? To give top priority to the academy is definitely putting the horse before the cart.

The main point that I want to reiterate once more is that the greatest need is for overall co-ordination to obtain the best-integrated management of our scarce resources. In Malta, we simply cannot afford to have the orchestra following a policy in complete isolation from the provision of teaching, or for the music division at the University to develop out of dialogue with the school of music and the educational managers within the ministry, and all of these, in complete dissociation from the band clubs, jazz and popular music.

The University is striving to introduce new courses on technology and music that will bring us into the electronic age and other new courses aimed at assisting band club conductors. However, complex and subtle operation such as ensuring integrated management of recourses in an area notorious for personal rivalries and exacerbated individualism is not the function of the University. It could be that of the academy, if this institution is set up by the government with an appropriate autonomous statute and terms of reference.

It was said that Muti's patronage would have been an advantage to the academy from a marketing more than from an educational point of view. Do you agree?

I probably would have before I came into close contact with Muti when he conducted his first set of master classes here. I was able to hear Muti's plans from the horse's mouth as a result of the very professional manner in which Mario Frendo, first arts executive of the Malta Council for Culture and the Arts, and later lecturer at the University, was doing preparatory work in view of the setting up of the academy.

Muti, who already had offers for top, lucrative positions in the musical world, told me he felt that he had achieved the best of what he was able to in conducting, and that he wished to dedicate the remainder of his life to passing on what he had learnt to younger generations.

He also told me that his concentrated interest in recent years on Neapolitan music had convinced him of the fruitfulness of exchanges between the European and the Arabic musical traditions. He had received requests from several Arab counties such as Syria to assist in this regard, but he definitely felt that Malta was the ideal centre to set up a Mediterranean oriented academy, rather than a parochially narrow Maltese one.

This orientation can still be followed if the government so wishes, even without Muti's unique patronage. Admittedly, we have sadly lost Charles Camilleri who was a pioneer of international stature in the cross fertilisation of European and Arab music. This was evident not only in works of world importance such as Maqam and Taksim, but also in theoretical monographs, such as the booklet on Mediterranean Music which he co-authored with me, that was published under the auspices of UNESCO.

We still have experts who are inadequately known here, such as, to mention just one, Philip Ciantar, who has established himself as an authority because of his research on Sufi-inspired music in Libya, a previously uncharted field.

I should have mentioned that Muti had scarcely any awareness of Malta's rich heritage of composers trained in the Neapolitan school and he was excited when he obtained materials that were readily available, such as recordings by Fr John Galea and writings by Vella Bondin.

I had hoped that Muti would have given a further decisive boost to international knowledge of Maltese Baroque music of the calibre of that by composers like Benigno Zerafa. Diffusing this knowledge should be a prime task of the Maltese cultural institute that needs setting up through collaboration between the ministries of culture, of foreign affairs and of tourism, almost if not quite as urgently as the Academy of Music.

What other boost do you think music in Malta badly needs?

Most festa music in our churches is not of liturgically supreme quality, but it deserves much better delivery than it is now unfortunately getting, apparently because very little money is being devoted to it. Can the Curia do something about it?

Fr Peter Serracino Inglott was talking to Alessandra Fiott.