A WEEK today in Dundee’s Caird Hall, the Scottish traditional music community will gather for the MG ALBA Scots Trad Music Awards 2016, which will include the naming of the successor to this year’s BBC Radio Scotland’s Young Traditional Musician, the concertina-playing third of the group Talisk, Mohsen Amini. Although there is fierce competition across all categories of the award, with Amini himself nominated in Instrumentalist and a particularly strong Album of the Year shortlist, there is always a focus on the Young Musician title, a recognition of the remarkable growth in the trad music in Scotland fostered by the Feisean movement, the Scottish Arts Council (and now Creative Scotland), and the RSAMD, now the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland.
Making music tuition available to young people is a perennial hot topic. Like mom and apple pie, it is something that no-one objects to, but the rhetoric of the politicians is rarely matched by the reality. Last weekend, prior to the Treasury’s Autumn Statement and quickly lost under its larger numbers, Westminster schools minister Nick Gibb announced £300m of funding for music and arts education south of the border over the next few years, some of which (although not a great deal) was actually new money. The response was mixed: Andrew Lloyd Webber called it “a welcome first step”, a teachers’ union derided a sticking plaster approach.
When Jack McConnell was First Minister he used a St Andrew’s Day speech at the RSAMD, 13 years ago this coming week, to commit the Scottish Government to cultural spending, and while Labour and the SNP now appear to agree on little, that commitment was reiterated by the Culture Secretary, Fiona Hyslop, a decade later at Edinburgh’s Talbot Rice Gallery. McConnell also stated the target of providing music tuition for every primary school pupil, and that aim has been less successful, with the independently-established Venezuelan-inspired Sistema organisation making more of a difference in some of the poorer communities. But in the same year of McConnell’s speech, 2003, the What’s Going On? report into youth music provision resulted in the Youth Music Initiative (YMI), which has pumped millions of pounds into a range of music tuition projects in Scotland.
Although one of Hyslop’s predecessors was publicly sceptical about how that money was being spent, the truth is that YMI stands as an important example of how new money from Holyrood distributed via the arms-length arts funding body Creative Scotland can reach the grassroots and make a real difference. Funding initiatives since the invention of YMI have had rather more of the “see me” approach to them, a consequence of both the difficult birth of Creative Scotland and the SNP’s ascendency at Holyrood.
More recent schemes like the Creative Places awards, the Expo Fund that helps Edinburgh’s Festivals, and the fondness for the “showcase” model to promote artists at events both at home and overseas, have been much more attention-seeking in themselves: the promotion of the funding itself, as well as Scotland as an entity and then, often last in line, the actual art, has become an important part of the game.
By contrast it is the fostering of learning and development that is at the heart of YMI, with no other agenda than enhancing the skills and well-being of young folk. Politicians of all persuasions can, it seems, agree on the value of developing musical skills in our children, but sadly they are also consistent in never quite keeping faith with the bolder policy promises they make to them.
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