June 2006 – Music and work

A discussion last week at the Purcell School, one of the UK’s leading music schools was exploring the theme: music and its relationship to life. There seemed to be a consensus from what turned out to be a lively debate that music is given insufficient space in either the curriculum or, indeed, in the workplace.

The Hertfordshire-based school, that attracts gifted young musicians from around the world, is committed, as its headmaster, John Tolputt declares on the school web site, to providing “a rounded education with music at its heart”.

But shouldn’t music and the arts be at the centre of everyone’s education? At school I remember receiving one music lesson a week. The music teacher was sidelined by a headmaster who had little interest in music, so the lessons usually involved unstructured discussions about anything that came to mind.

This probably explains why music has featured only sporadically in my working life. In the past I have encountered management training with percussion instruments and leadership classes held by conductors such as Benjamin Zander, conductor and director of the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra and Roger Nierenberg, music director of the Stamford Symphony Orchestra.

Their classes were one-off events, about people working as teams and leaders bringing the best out of people. Mr Zander, for example, made the point that: “The conductor is the only musician who doesn't make a sound. His power lies in his ability to make other people powerful. He is a conduit for the possibility of music from the players to flow through him.”

In a similar vein Mr Nierenberg has a management presentation, called “The Music Paradigm” designed to “dramatise and translate management situations into musical metaphors.” If music can be a medium for learning, can listening to music improve the way we work?

There are people still working today who will remember when music was considered by the Government as a stimulus to productivity.

It is 39 years since the daily feature “Music While You Work” was dropped from the BBC Light Programme on radio, at the same time as the Light Programme itself made way for Radio Two. I remember well the “Daa di daa, di daa daa daa daa” signature tune written by Henry Coates.

The introduction “Calling all workers, music while you work is brought to you today by….” was a regular feature of factory life for thousand of assembly workers from its inception during June 1940 when Britain was facing the prospect of a German invasion after defeat in France, to its abandonment in 1967.

The programme, that played during the morning and afternoons, was designed to maintain the rhythm of work, not to relive the monotony. Some types of music, such as slow waltzes, were ruled out because of their “soporific tendencies”. Others, such as “Deep in the Heart of Texas” were banned because workers would beat their hammers in time, damaging their work benches.

The BBC standing instruction to band leaders stated: “There must be as little variation of tempo as possible, the ideal being to maintain the same beat throughout the whole programme. Artistic value must not be considered. The idea is to produce something that is monotonous and repetitive. Subtlety of any kind is out of place.”

Except for the recorded music used in the last few years of the programme, performances went out live. On one occasion a piano-player fell off his stool and was left on the floor until the end of the show when he was found to have died.

Such institutionalised music has disappeared from the workplace and many may agree that’s a good thing, given the “Brave New World” approach that regarded factory workers as little more than units of production. On the other hand, the human side of enterprise was recognised in another favourite work-focused variety programme, “Workers’ Playtime” broadcast daily during the war years and beyond from factory canteens.

Today music is returning, particularly among software programmers, many of whom use headphone-piped music to help them concentrate as they assemble lines of code.

Evidence suggesting that music could improve people’s powers of concentration emerged in a 1993 University of California study. It found that college students who listened to a Mozart piano sonata for ten minutes before taking an IQ test scored on average eight points higher than those who did not.

In Boulder, Colorado, an internet-based service was started three years ago called “Music for Cubicles” that does bear some resemblance to Music While You Work, offering what it says is “a custom blend of music designed to make any office or workplace more enjoyable, interesting and stress-free.”

But why should workplace music be piped, recorded or radio and web-based? Why can’t companies engage live musicians to perform on office floors or include music teaching in their training budgets? Many companies have art works on their walls. Why is music not introduced in the same way?

My own theory is that in the UK and other Protestant countries music has suffered, like work itself, from a separating of purpose that occurred more than 400 years ago, particularly within the Puritan ethic.

In the Elizabethan court, the jester and the lute player were fixtures in the daily routine. But after the English civil war, music was expunged from the rituals of daily life. After the Restoration it never emerged from the box marked “entertainment” that was separated from the tasks that came to be understood as work. And that is where it remains today.

This means that when Government ministers have looked at educational reforms they have focused almost entirely on designing a curriculum to prepare people for the kind of work that creates quantifiable goods and services. In today’s schools children are prepared to pass examinations. There is little room in a rigid curriculum for a focus on the arts unless children commit themselves very early in their school life to pursuing an artistic talent vocationally.

The system ensures that these children are not deprived of other subjects, but for those who pursue traditional academic disciplines, music and the arts are easily discarded in the teenage years because they are not regarded as priorities in life.

Why do subjects such as music, drama and the arts that stimulate creativity, receive such a raw deal in the curriculum? Industries need constant innovation to remain competitive.

But an argument for music as the food of work should not be framed solely in the language of economics and productivity. Music should need no justification for its place in society. Nor should it be seen as something extraneous or peripheral to the workplace where too often it can be regarded as a more of a distraction than beneficial. If all that is good in life is filtered out of work as distracting, what are we left with?