Please save the School of Music

I have been following the School of Music saga with emotions varying from incredulity to horror to wanting to bang my head against a wall.

The Johann Strauss School of Music, it was reported, is going to be overhauled, a fancy word for ‘given a facelift’. Surely, you would say that is brilliant news, given the pathetic, crumbling and dilapidated state of the once-glorious Valletta building.

Of course it is good news. Every time I dropped off my friend’s child for his music lessons I half-expected the rickety building to crumble under the mere strain of the child’s tiny footsteps.

But this relief came along with a piece of appalling news: the school is not being relocated and the teachers will instead be used for an ‘outreach’ programme, giving lessons in a multitude of villages around Malta, with the aim to make music more ‘accessible’.

That’s funny; the school has been accessible enough for the past 30 years. What, pray, can be more accessible than Valletta?

“Yeah, let’s go and get ’em students,” one bright spark must have said, in what can only be described as a “We shall fight on the beaches” Churchill moment.

Instead of pushing the school towards a ‘Fame Academy’ philosophy, we are turning the best music teachers on the island into a travelling troupe of Pied Pipers.

The reason behind this escapes me. I would have thought that the job of daytime music teachers in primary and secondary schools was one of ‘outreach’, of trying to nudge students to fall in love with music and then move on to Johann Strauss.

But without a fixed house for a School of Music, where will these students move on to? Beats me. It seems they will just keep on hopping from one village to another.

What’s my interest in this? I was planning on sending my daughter there next year. Yes, the school is cheap – as we all know the cost of private music tuition is exorbitant.

But it’s not just the financial matter, it’s also because, musicwise, it’s the best place to be for a child interested in music. It is the reason why the school has quite a happy mix of students, rich and poor, coming from all backgrounds.

Where else can children have individual lessons in piano, strings, woodwind, brass, percussion, voice, harp, guitar and jazz, jazz improvisation and even aural training? There’s a choir, an orchestra, workshops for students, for parents, for teachers and public lectures on various topics.

Moreover, the school offers networking opportunities: contacts for students to take their studies abroad, should they so want to.

But most of all it is a building which houses a collection of musical resources and which brings together the best music teachers on the island. It’s a social meeting point for people who have a passion for the same thing and it allows for the exchange of that beautiful energy called music. Which is crucially vital if students are to learn that no musician is independent of the whole, but that each musician is a part of that whole.

The dedication of teachers and the passion they instil in students and the sense of belonging to a music body will be lost if the School of Music is not housed in a single building. Surely somewhere in Valletta or Floriana, there must be an empty government building, where everything can be moved lock stock and barrel, until the Valletta building is renovated?

I am so very upset because this is yet another divestment in our children and in Malta’s cultural future. A country without a hub of education for music is a very impoverished one indeed.

Are we going to sit back and let another culture point be squashed into nothing? Are we happy with being a nation which values the useless Eurovision Song Contest as the highlight of our musical aspiration?

Agrrh, it makes me want to gnaw my knuckles in frustration. We are lucky that talent abounds on this island, but it is only through sheer determination and persistence of individuals that it shines through, and not because as a society we encourage it.

Can you imagine how grand Maltese culture would be if we tackled it like a human pyramid – getting together in formation to support the very best to reach the top?

Culture is priceless. In Malta, to our eternal detriment and shame, it’s most often thrown to the dogs. Please let’s do the right thing this time, for the sake of our children, let’s save the School of Music.

krischetcuti@gmail.com