Where universities "are going so wrong with modern music" - new book

The chapter is a blank page.

The book is We Don’t Need No Education (published by pageturna.com; hardback, iBook, audiobook; ISBN 978-1-0684186-3-1; £12.99). Kev, who lives in Streat, near Lewes, offers it as an uncompromising account of how modern music education lost its way – and how it could still be saved.

Told in two parts, the book charts a transatlantic rethink of what learning music should actually look like. Part One begins in the UK, with Kev’s experiences at the top of the British music industry, and his co-founding of BIMM, the Brighton Institute of Modern Music in 2001 which then opened in four cities over ten years, making BIMM the biggest music college in Europe.

Created as a direct response to losing his artist Kirtsy MacColl, but also the failure of universities to take modern music seriously, plus the music industry's failure to train its future leaders, BIMM was designed to function more like an a 1960s art school than an academic institution, Kev explains. BIMM prioritised live performance, songwriting and real-world experience and was taught by successful working musicians rather than career academics.

In the book, Kev argues that universities have sidelined modern music, misunderstood popular culture and treated contemporary musicians as an academic inconvenience. His argument is that education became obsessed with theory, hierarchy and qualifications while ignoring how quickly the music world was evolving to the great benefit of millions of young people.

“Most music departments over the last 100 years have spent the vast majority of their time teaching about music from the previous 100 years. I think it's prejudice, the belief that classical music is better than modern music. But who makes that decision?”

As he argues, it's more than 40 years since Michael Jackson sold 50 million copies of Thriller: “But if you talk to academia about that they just don't think that it's valid. But Michael Jackson’s influence on our modern life is far greater than any classical composer from the 1800s. But the universities just don't see it as important. They just don't consider modern music as relevant. The answer is obvious. Of course it is relevant. If you look at its popularity then you can see that it's more relevant than anything that was happening in the 1800s.”

And that's what the universities have to embrace: “It is a question of being willing to change. If you look at universities, they are mostly run by boards of governors and rather like the political landscape there are not many young people on those boards of governors. The majority of them are 60-plus and I don't have any problem with that but the point is that they have to be open minded and ready to embrace change. The technology departments have done that but it's not true of the arts. In academia the arts come last.”

Part Two moves to Detroit, Michigan where the story widens into Kev and his wife Sarah Clayman taking their UK model and bringing it into the American higher education market, a pioneering venture in possibly America’s greatest music city. Against the backdrop of 2013 Detroit, a city shaped by Motown and the motor industry, and economic collapse, Nixon & Clayman created DIME, the Detroit Institute of Music Education Detroit – which becomes both a classroom and a case study, showing how modern music can be taught seriously without being stripped of its cultural roots.

Against all odds DIME was a rapid success and opened a second college in Denver Colorado within two years of opening.

We Don’t Need No Education is the story of Kev and Sarah’s twenty years of willing the music industry to take a stake in educating for its own future.

“The book challenges the idea that music education belongs in orchestra halls, questions who music careers are really for and makes the case for education rooted in experience, history and human connection.”