Thread by @Prolapsarian

What we should be talking about is how massive cuts to funding and successive governments who do not take music seriously has led to most people not getting decent skills at school. Oxbridge music is packed out with toffs both because the depts want them to be, to keep chapels

https://twitter.com/katherineschof8/status/1376128966117879810

running, and because it's nearly impossible to get the sort of education you need for admission in comprehensive schools. Like to get in I had to do all sorts of crap in interview and testing I had never been taught by anyone. Widening curriculum would be a good thing - as would

changing the entry requirements to reflect this. I've been out of musicology a long time now, but thankfully the weird and incoherent subdiscipline of "ethnomusicology" where "everything else" was shoved is improving, from the dead end of a place for bad anthropologists and bad

musicologists that it was 20 years ago. In any case, everyone in these departments know that if you are gonna be serious about 18th-20th century Western music you're gonna be helped by knowing how to write a fugue and smash out a bunch of harmony. That isn't gonna change. It has

been the same since Fux fucking wrote the book, and Oxbridge is just about the only place (rightly) defending this stuff. Studying this music without this is a bit like trying to do maths without geometry. It's just how people in a certain context understood and learnt things

for hundreds of years. But knowing geometry isn't an argument against, for example, set theory. I do also think it's fine if these places want to carry on just teaching effectively European art music courses. But they should say that explicitly and it is actually useful to give

students options around that and outside it even if it is the course focus. Anyway, my personal view is that all the public schools and Oxbridge should be levelled to the ground, the aristocracy flayed and forced to eat their own skin, and please god no more Stanford in G, which

really is how I imagine the music of the worst excesses of Britain's imperial moment to sound.