Music School - History

History

Although music and music education may have been in existence for thousands of years, the earliest history is speculative. Even when history starts to be recorded, music is mentioned more frequently than music education. Within the biblical tradition, Hebrew litany was accompanied with rich music, but the Torah or Pentateuch was silent on the practice and instruction of music in the early life of Israel. However, by I Samuel 10, Alfred Sendrey suggests that we find “a sudden and unexplained upsurge of large choirs and orchestras, consisting of thoroughly organized and trained musical groups, which would be virtually inconceivable without lengthy, methodical preparation.” This has led some scholars to believe that the prophet Samuel was the patriarch of a school which taught not only prophets and holy men, but also sacred-rite musicians.

The Schola cantorum (papal choir), may be the first recorded music school in history, when Gregory the Great (590–604) made permanent an existing guild dating from the 4th century ('schola' originally referred more to a guild rather than school). The school consisted of monks, secular clergy, and boys. Wells Cathedral School, England founded as a Cathedral School in 909 a.d. to educate choristers, continues today to educate choristers and teaches instrumentalists. However the school appears to have been refounded at least once.

Saint Martial school, 10th to 12th century, was an important school of composition at the Abbey of Saint Martial, Limoges. It is known for the composition of tropes, sequences, and early organum. In this respect, it was an important precursor to the Notre Dame School. It was the Notre Dame school (late 12th and early 13th century) which was the earliest repertory of polyphonic (multipart) music to gain international prestige and circulation. The school was a group of composers and singers working under the patronage of the great Cathedral of Notre-Dame in Paris.

The term Conservatory derives from Renaissance (16th century) Italy where orphanages were attached to hospitals. The Orphans (conservati) were given a musical education and the term gradually applied to music schools. The Conservatories have been the first secular institutions equipped for practical training in music. By the 18th century, Italian conservatories were already playing a major role in the training of artists and composers.

The Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia (English: National Academy of St Cecilia) is one of the oldest musical institutions in the world, based in Italy. It is based at the Auditorium Parco della Musica in Rome, and was founded by the papal bull, Ratione congruit, issued by Sixtus V in 1585, which invoked two saints prominent in Western musical history: Gregory the Great, for whom the Gregorian chant is named, and Saint Cecilia, the patron saint of music. It was founded as a "congregation" or "confraternity" – a religious guild, so to speak – and over the centuries, has grown from a forum for local musicians and composers to an internationally acclaimed academy active in music scholarship (with 100 prominent music scholars forming the body of the Accademia) to music education (in its role as a conservatory) to performance (with an active choir and symphony orchestra).

It is in the city of Naples where the term “conservatorio” was strictly associated with a secular place for teaching and learning specializing in music education. In Naples, there were four conservatoires already active in the 17th and 18th century: "I poveri di Gesù Cristo", founded in 1599 by Marcello Fossataro and already including in their official record a “magister musicae” and “magister lyrae” in 1633 ; "Santa Maria di Loreto" where the composer Giovan Battista Pergolesi (1710–1736) studied; "La pietà dei turchini" was founded in 1583 and the earliest findings suggest musical activity around the year 1615; "Sant'Onofrio a porta Capuana", where the composer Giovanni Paisiello (1740–1816) studied and then thought, started teaching music in the mid-1600 and in the following decades will give more priority to the “opera buffa”; plus one only for girls called "dell'Annunziata" It is in these very institutions that the so called Scuola Musicale Napoletana was developed thanks to the work of musicians and educators like Alessandro Scarlatti (1660–1725) and Francesco Durante (1684–1755), who was also Pergolesi’s and Paisiello’s teacher.

It was the example set in Naples, where admission was by competitive examination and tuition was free, that was then copied, with modifications, in many European cities, including Paris (1795), Bologna (1804), Milan (1807), Florence and Prague (1811), Warsaw and Vienna (1821), London (1822), the Hague (1826), and Liege (1827). The second half of the 19th century saw the network expanding to the Americas, Rio de Janeiro (1847), Boston (1853), Baltimore and Chicago (1868), Havana (1885), and Buenos Aires (1893). Establishments for advanced training in music were organized in the 1940s in several Asian and African countries, including Iraq, Lebanon, and Kenya.

To this extent, projects like El Sistema are more in line with the tradition set in Italy (where tuition at conservatoires are still free) than English speaking country where there is a tendency to charge students with very little access to bursaries (see the Royal Academy of Music or the Royal College of Music in the UK).