RNCM
degree. You did what was essentially a classical music training and if you wanted to study other musics, well, there wasn’t very much provision. What’s happened in education is that courses have been fragmented into separate genre-based programmes. I always said that, at some point, this would become glued back together again because we would no longer be differentiating on the basis of style. I think that’s ultimately where this is heading.
BCM: Tell us about your vision to engage all of your students with music technology.
JS: Yes, this is also in our Strategic Plan but we are clearly not intending to train our students as music technologists. Looking at the needs of our performers and composers there is a range of technological needs that would support them in their activities: creating recordings for competitions, creating a web presence, self- promotion, and so on. Technology has moved on in terms of usability, lower cost and higher quality. So it’s realistic to bring such technology into rehearsal spaces for students’ individual use, which can be self-managed. It’s a democratisation process where recording no longer
needs to be this elusive, dark art, managed by only a few experts. Instead staff and students can manage their own recordings in their own time and at their own pace. We’re looking at it this on a number
of levels. At the fundamental level students will soon be able to manage their own recording in various spaces without the need for technical support. At the other end of the spectrum we’ve been transforming the Carole Nash recital room to accommodate a very high-quality professional recording studio. We have engaged the services of a very exciting young producer, Alex van Ingen, and the studio launches this term, providing a superb facility to record live performance of classical and contemporary works, and provides an additional creative laboratory for our composers. This facility will be available to staff and students, including our composers who can be expected to work in a range of different contexts involving live and recorded sound. We’ve chosen to install a Yamaha
DM2000 mixing desk in the studio after a lot of internal debate. We wanted equipment you would expect to find in the industry, and to provide an environment in which external producers and engineers can work with very little re-orientation.
Above:
One of the RNCM’s orchestras in concert
BCM: Tell us about the relationship with Yamaha.
JS: It’s been a long-standing relationship which manifests itself in a number of ways. There’s quite a lot of Yamaha equipment here, including orchestral percussion. We have a mixed fleet of pianos including top-end Yamaha concert grands, practice pianos and we’ve recently installed the latest Clavinovas in our group piano teaching studio. Clearly the instrument side is very important. The other part of the partnership
has been the support which Yamaha provides through scholarships, which has been extremely beneficial and much coveted by students. Yamaha’s MD Mike Ketley is actively involved with the college and this is a very clear sign of Yamaha’s commitment to us, from the board level, right down to the provision of specific instruments. We’re now starting to focus now on plans for our fortieth anniversary, commencing in the Autumn of 2012. We are planning an exciting programme of events to celebrate the many achievements of the college since formation in 1972. It’s an important milestone for the RNCM and an opportunity to reflect on our past, present and future.
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