Preparing the music technology toolbox: Addressing the education-industry dilemma

The growth in popularity of Music Technology degree programmes in the United Kingdom has been paralleled by the apparent decline in informal apprenticeship systems that have typically provided a gateway to employment in the recording industry. This article takes a critical approach to the tensions that exist between higher education and the music industries by exploring contemporary and historical approaches of apprenticeship. Drawing on interviews with industry professionals, current students and recent graduates who have achieved some success in the music industries, this article explores some of the perceptions, myths and contradictions of the apprenticeship-training model with changes in the contemporary professional environment. Our findings suggest that training for the music industries is more flexible and open-ended than some of the published narratives on apprenticeship would suggest. In addition, educational frameworks over the past twenty years have often focused on the technical aspects of studio practice at the expense of the social, aesthetic and human skills required by the industry. These formal frameworks often only focus on the transference of knowledge to the individual diminishing or ignoring the important processes of interaction with the participants in the field. Using the metaphor of a professional 'toolbox', we argue that there is a need for an approach that reconsiders the industry-education divide and considers the value of the educational process in a much wider, contemporary framework Some twenty years since the initial development of Music Technology programmes in the United Kingdom, and in the context of the rapidly changing nature of the music industries, it is an appropriate time to reconsider the nature and relevance of Music Technology programmes in higher education.