Few knew about Music Network until U2 gave it €5 million – despite Paul McGuinness once having a role in trying to shut it down, writes ROBERT O'BYRNE.
ON JANUARY 24th, 1986, this newspaper carried an advertisement announcing, “Applications are invited for the position of director of a pilot project in music promotion. The project will involve research, promotion and administration.” A couple of months and several interviews later, I got the job and set about establishing Music Network. Twenty-three years later, Music Network is still in operation, even if much of its work is relatively unknown to the majority of citizens around the country.
But the organisation is in the news following Monday’s announcement that U2 have donated €5 million and the Ireland Funds a further €2 million to allow a national system of music education provision, Music Education for All, to be rolled out between 2010 and 2015. This project will be run by Music Network, which since 2004 has administered similar government-funded pilot schemes in Donegal and Dublin.
The origins of Music Network lay in a seminar hosted by the Arts Council in 1985 (European Music Year) and called to examine the problems of promoting music throughout the State; one of the occasion’s main conclusions was that a central co-ordinating agency should be established to provide music of a sufficiently high standard to venues outside Dublin. The imbalance between what was available to music lovers in the capital and their counterparts elsewhere was much greater then than is now the case. Furthermore, commercial common sense indicated the costs of a concert could be considerably reduced if it were part of a tour rather than being organised by an individual venue. Hence Music Network was established to make live music available and accessible to everyone in Ireland, regardless of their location or circumstances.
It continues to accomplish the same task, albeit on a considerably larger scale. In 1987, its first full year of operation, thanks to an Arts Council grant of £45,000, Music Network organised eight tours comprising 45 concerts travelling to eight venues. Last year’s grant from the Arts Council was €749,650, permitting 225 concerts to be held in 64 different villages, towns and cities across 29 counties. Then, as now, it offered a wide variety of musical genres, from traditional Irish to classical, jazz and contemporary. We wanted to do more but there simply wasn’t a lot of money about at the time; the advertisement for my job counselled the annual salary “will be not less than £13,000” – it certainly wasn’t very much more.
At the start, Music Network’s modest funding hampered its opportunities for expansion; I was the sole employee, a one-man band responsible for everything from writing concert programme notes to driving the vans that took musicians to town halls, churches and school gymnasiums around the country. But from the beginning we looked for additional sources of revenue, working, for example, with a couple of sponsors on tours of young rock musicians; I still have T-shirts promoting bands with names such as Scale the Heights and The Honey Thieves.
And yet, three years into its existence, Music Network was nearly killed off by the very body that had been responsible for its foundation. In 1989 a new board was appointed to the Arts Council, its members including Paul McGuinness, who, along with a number of his colleagues, concluded funding should be withdrawn from certain organisations in order to make best use of the council’s relatively meagre resources. Among those targeted for death by destitution was Music Network.
All groups in receipt of State aid should regularly be obliged to justify their continued existence, and in that respect the Arts Council’s effort to bring Music Network’s life to a premature end was probably no bad thing; it was also unsuccessful. Ironically, two decades after that abortive attempt to close it down, the organisation is about to oversee a scheme that will benefit from the largesse of U2, the band managed by Paul McGuinness.
The Music Education for All project is one of a number of Music Network’s more recent initiatives and arose from the results of a 2001-2003 feasibility study commissioned from the organisation by the Arts Council and the Department of Education. Intended to examine how a national system of publicly supported “schools of music” might be provided in Ireland, it found that music tuition here remained largely the preserve of the urban and affluent. A mere 1 per cent of Irish children of secondary school age receive some kind of instrumental or vocal training, whereas the European average is 6-8 per cent.
The year after the report was delivered, Music Network oversaw the implementation of a pilot music education scheme in Donegal and Dublin city, operated by these regions’ respective VECs and funded by the Department of Education and Science. The Music Network model involves the provision of both classroom and external supports for the delivery of the music curriculums at junior and senior cycles, addressing gaps in the provision of tuition in instrumental and vocal performance.
An independent evaluation of the Dublin and Donegal schemes published last April judged: “this partnership model provides a workable and replicable framework for development of music education services . . . on a wider scale throughout Ireland”. So the model clearly works, but in the current recession finding the necessary funds to ensure the same scheme could be rolled out nationwide seemed impossible. U2, all of whose members benefited from the advantages of a sound music education while they were at school in Dublin, have now come up with the required financial assistance.
It is sometimes said that philanthropic gifts are like water in the desert: their benefits disappear just as soon as the tap is turned off. In this instance U2, along with the Ireland Funds, went to considerable trouble to find a project not only worthy of support but with the greatest possible chance of survival when their participation ends. In a letter written last week to the band and Loretta Brennan Glucksman of the Ireland Funds, Minister for Education Batt O’Keeffe, while noting decisions on department budgets are made on an annual basis, pledged: “I will make every effort to ensure the continuity of this important project . . . I believe that we can progress this initiative, building on cross-departmental co-operation in partnership with Music Network.”
Twenty years after almost being shut down, Music Network is about to embark on the organisation’s most ambitious and worthwhile undertaking yet. It’s a long way from driving a van of musicians to a school hall.
musicnetwork.ie