JOHN O'CONOR, D Mus,
Sir, - Victoria White's article on the proposed Irish Academy for the Performing Arts (April 29th) is truly astonishing. I did not expect to see such a hastily cobbled together and ill-informed article in a newspaper of your calibre.
It is difficult to know how to respond to such a bewildering article. For instance, if I could understand the sentence: "The RIAM pulled out in 2000 due to disagreement as to who it would be combined within the IAPA." (sic) then I could give a reasoned reply. Similarly: "He managed to get sell his idea to Sile de Valera" (sic) and that "the project might have been salvaged by a competition for the contract as independent assessor"?!!
Ms White gets many facts wrong - even the amount of the Government grant to the project. It offered £35 million in 1999, not the £44.4 million (€56 million) she states. And Patrick Sutton, three dance educators and I most certainly did not commission the Deloitte and Touche report on the IAPA in 1999.
When she states that the IAPA "is another storey on a structure without foundations" this does a grave disservice not only to the established schools of music, drama and dance but also to the generations of private music, drama, elocution, ballet and dance teachers who kept the performing arts alive at a time when governments in the past paid scant attention to the educational requirements. That we need top-level structuring for the performing arts now is a tribute to the teachers of the past - and let's not forget the part the nuns played throughout the years.
Ms White's sneering remark that my "quick-fix approach" would become "a world-class FAME school" is unworthy of detailed response.
What is more disturbing is her quoting Dr Danny O'Hare's opinion in an aide memoire to the Department of Education that "neither the RIAM nor the Gaiety School of Acting could be regarded as world class". I shall leave Joe Dowling and Patrick Sutton to answer for themselves. However, I am amazed that Dr O'Hare would set himself up as an expert in the field of music education. He has an interest in music but that hardly qualifies him to make such statements.
What does he mean by "world class"? Surely it means that our students should be able to stand on an equal footing with students of similar establishments around the world? If so, then the successes of our students speak for themselves. The first prize winner of the Clara Haskil International Piano Competition in Switzerland in 1999 was then a student at the RIAM; the second prize winner of the Oliver Messiaen International Piano Competition in Paris in 2000 was then a student of the RIAM; the first prize winner of the Cologne International Piano Competition in 2001 is a current student at the RIAM; an ex-student who left only last summer is the first prize winner of the Franz Liszt International Competition which took place in Holland last month; the Julliard School in New York only accepted two pianists from all over the world into its prestigious Artists Diploma course this year - one of them was a student of the RIAM; the RIAM Chamber Orchestra made a four-concert tour of the United States last autumn and received excellent notices in newspapers as prestigious as the Boston Globe and the New York Times. Allan Kozinn in the New York Times praised the "zesty, superbly unified account of Mozart's courtly Divertimento in D (K136)" and even went so far as to say that "this sixteen-player group made a fine case for the state of music education in Dublin". Excuse my frustration - but who the hell are you to disregard such achievements Dr O'Hare?
Ms White quotes Dr O'Hare's "ideal solution" and her own views on what would be "a truly positive development" and what "needs foundations". I can answer by quoting back to her the only paragraph in her article which I enjoyed: "There is, however, a cryptic handwritten note in the Department files: Don't believe there is only one expert in any field."
Too right! - Yours, etc.,
JOHN O'CONOR, D Mus,
FRIAM,
Director,
Royal Irish Academy of Music,
Dublin 2.
Victoria White writes: My article on IAPA was the result of intensive research over a number of weeks. I regret as much as Dr O'Conor that the published version was marred by typing errors and an editing error which led to the figure of €44.4 million, which I had supplied correctly, being converted to pounds and then again to euro.