The President’s year: Chris Collins describes his experience of leading the ISM Council in extraordinary times

Few Presidents in the ISM’s long history have served during such an extraordinary year as 2020-21. Professor Chris Collins looks back at the past 12 months in conversation with Clare Stevens

Above: Clare Stevens Photo: Bruce Childs

Read our annual review of the ISM, ISM Trust and ISM members fund on pages 18, 26 and 28 respectively

Left: Professor Chris Collins Photo: Pontio / Bangor University Each of us has their own lockdown challenges; for Professor Chris Collins, ISM President for 2020-21, one of the biggest was concluding his tenure as Head of the School of Music and Media at Bangor University in North Wales and moving to Scotland to take up a new role as Head of the School of Language, Literature, Music and Visual Culture at the University of Aberdeen. No farewell parties, no graduation ceremonies for his last cohort of students at Bangor, just a very complicated removal process involving varying COVID-related regulations for three different countries, followed by meetings with his new colleagues and students that were mainly conducted via webcam. There was a brief period in the autumn when he was at least able to visit his new campus, but when we spoke (over Zoom, of course) in January 2021 almost all the university’s administration and teaching had once more moved online.

Collins became involved with the ISM when he was Vice-Chair of the National Association for Music in Higher Education – now known as MusicHE – and the two worked closely together in responding to proposed changes to GCSEs and A levels. ‘We were fighting against such things as increasing the examhall-based element of the assessment, which doesn’t encourage creativity at all. I became aware of just how professional the ISM team is in the lobbying work they are doing, and how well connected they are both to their members and to the politicians, policy makers and so on; so I decided I wanted to join this organisation. I joined the Council a couple of years after that, representing Wales.’

As an aside, Collins says he would encourage any members who have never really thought about the ISM Council and its work to consider putting themselves forward. ‘Vacancies arise regularly and it’s really important that we have a good geographical representation, and a representation of all the musical professions. We do still need more representatives of non-classical styles of music and younger musicians.’

Asked about his experience of being ISM President in this utterly extraordinary year, he responds: ‘It has been humbling, frankly, to see the amount of work the staff team has been doing, in incredibly difficult circumstances. They are all working from home, and yet they are dealing with many more enquiries and requests for help from members than ever before; their workload has more than doubled. Knowing that so many members who are in need are being provided with information and services that can help them, in the midst of all this adversity – it’s fabulous. Deborah and her colleagues are totally on top of both the pandemic and Brexit and the difficulties they are causing for musicians. It feels as though the ISM is a light that people can turn to.

‘Our involvement as Council members has two aspects. There’s the regulatory oversight, which is very important because ultimately we’re there to make sure that the members get the best out of the society’s resources. But we’re also the eyes and ears of the team, often picking up what members’ concerns are going to be in the next couple of weeks, as we are all musicians, and we represent the whole of the United Kingdom and all the different professions that fit within the music industry.

‘The decision that was taken very early on in the pandemic to make that vital practical advice linked to both COVID-19 and Brexit available to everyone, members and non-members alike, was very important. The ISM exists primarily for our members, but we also want to be the first port of call for all musicians looking for advice. Hopefully they’ll then want to join us! The website is an incredible resource: only the ISM is providing things like the country-bycountry visa advice.

Above: Some of the beautiful buildings on Aberdeen University’s campus Above right and far right, opposite page: some of the university’s music students photographed before lockdown Photos: Courtesy Aberdeen University

‘The growth in ISM membership through the middle of a pandemic, when many musicians are unable to work, speaks for itself. To have 400 people attending the amazing online Empowered Musician event was remarkable.

‘The pandemic has defined the entire period when I’ve been President and I wasn’t expecting that,’ he continues. ‘However, I’d like to celebrate the way in which people have adjusted. I’ve seen it with my own team in two places, in Bangor and in Aberdeen, in the way for instance that the instrumental tutors, many of whom had never taught online before, have embraced that and are really making it work. I’ve been really impressed with the way in which the students have accepted that there are things that can’t happen at the moment and have found other ways of being innovative and creative.’

The virtual environment did actually make it easier for Collins to get to know his new colleagues, who would normally have been off on holiday or pursuing their various academic interests when he arrived at the end of the academic year. Online meetings have enabled planning to take place and relationships to develop. Getting to know the students personally has been harder; and of course that element that normally brings the members of a musical community together quickly, live performance, is missing.

‘Whatever the end product of virtual performances, stitched together from individual recordings – and they can be very good – it’s the process that has been lost and that’s what music is about really, it’s about communication,’ he says.

‘I last made any music in March. We went from one week of my usual life with a big orchestral rehearsal on a Monday night and a big choral rehearsal on a Wednesday night – with conversations in the tea break, “I wonder what’s going to happen here?” and “are we going to be able to do this concert?” – and then suddenly everything stopped. And no concert, of course.

‘Initially it seemed manageable, because the government was giving target dates and saying, “this is for three weeks and then we’ll review it”. In our innocence we believed that we would be able to get going again quite soon. But now we’re familiar with how it works, and we simply don’t know when we’ll be back. Students are in university for three years, or four years here in Scotland, and some of them have now lost out on a third of their university experience of ensemble performance.

‘There is light at the end of the tunnel, but it’s a very long tunnel and it’s difficult to see sometimes, though we know that it’s there.’

Asked how his students’ morale is holding up in these circumstances, Collins says that it varies. ‘With academic music we can carry on teaching and supporting them in their research and their composing projects, so we can build up relationships with them on that level. We’re still delivering all our teaching and we’re still as accessible to our students as we always have been, just by another route. There are some students who have really benefited from that and have found it a better environment to work in and to communicate in; there are many more who haven’t.

‘Even in academic work there are challenges: how do we get the library open safely for research students, for example? We often overlook the physicality of the books on the shelves and the serendipity of finding a better book next to the one we thought we were looking for. Of course Google has introduced us to things that we would never have found before, but for choosing repertoire, say, there’s nothing like browsing a shelf of scores.’

Collins adds that the effects extend beyond the walls of the music department, as much university music-making is extra-curricular, involving players or singers who are not actually studying music – a biologist who might be a very good cellist, for example.

‘Most of our students understand that the government advice and legal guidelines make it impossible to run rehearsals or performances; but they are worried about not knowing what they will be doing after they graduate. I’ve been trying to counter that by telling them that this is a strength, actually; they will be going out into their careers in a brave new world with lots of new opportunities, new avenues to explore, and, as innovators, they’ll be in a strong position when the music industry bounces back. The world is still their oyster.

‘But it is extremely difficult for them. Many had a very clear idea of what they wanted to do and it involved performing or directing, or composing soundtracks for films – there’s very little of that happening at the moment. Everybody is uncertain about where this is going to lead them.’

Collins himself is an authority on the life and work of the Spanish composer Manuel de Falla; he also works on a broader range of early 20th-century music and on popular music, focusing especially on the period from the mid-1960s to the early 1980s. Born in Warrington, Cheshire, he was the first musician in his family; he studied the piano from the age of eight and developed his interest in the subject through listening to and reading about music as much as through performance. ‘That is quite an unusual route in, but perhaps explains where I’ve ended up and where some of my interests lie.’

He was an undergraduate as well as a member of staff at Bangor University and says there are similarities between Bangor and Aberdeen. ‘Both have broad music departments that cover a very wide range of history, repertoire, approaches, methodologies and so on. That’s exactly what I think we should be providing students with – a very broad, holistic understanding of music and how all those things fit together. Here at Aberdeen we also have a couple of other strands: a BMus in Community Music that provides our students with wonderful opportunities to share the gift of music widely in the real world; and another in Music Education, with qualified teacher status at the end of it. That’s another can of worms really – it hasn’t been easy to provide the experience of working in schools for our students, at a time when most classrooms are virtual ones.’

In comparison to other universities where music has been forced into mergers with other subjects, Collins says, ‘one of the beauties of Aberdeen is that interdisciplinarity has grown organically. I have colleagues in English Literature, for example, who are also pianists and are interested in how culture translates across different art forms; similarly, I have colleagues in Music who work on the relationships between word and sound. Creative activity spans several disciplines – performance art brings together students in film, visual culture, electro-acoustic composition and so on.

‘A good example of the lively cultural scene is the Sound festival of contemporary music, involving both our own staff and students and guest composers, performers and speakers. This year the festival has been entirely online and this has given us an opportunity to do even more than ever, with a second tranche of events taking place literally as we speak. This is a great place to be.

‘If there is a positive message to come out of this period, it’s one that we can’t always see at the moment, though we were getting glimpses of it at the Empowered Musician conference – it’s that after the pandemic is over we will benefit from what we’ve learned during this period. Whether that’s finding new ways of teaching, finding new audiences, operating in different ways – we’ll all be even better musicians when that experience is layered over the top of what we’ve been doing for hundreds of years.’

Above: Chris Collins conducting an orchestral ensemble before lockdown in his previous post at Bangor University, North Wales Photo: Courtesy Pontio/ Bangor University