'Giving Back' Tim Homfray finds out what our conservatoires are doing to promote community involvement The idea that musicians might have any business outside the concert hall was slow to catch on. Only 20 years ago the education departments of many musical organisations only existed because they wouldn't get Arts Council funding otherwise and many under-resourced education officers received little support beyond lip service. They also had to find their own way: a lot of school and community work was strong on good intentions but short on lasting value.

Things have moved on a great deal. Outreach departments are now recognised as essential and valuable both to their parent organisations and to the communities they serve, and the musicians who would once have had nothing to do with education work (or were just plain scared) are now committed to it. For many of them, it is as much a part of their career as sitting on the concert platform playing Tchaikovsky.

The music conservatoires have had to address this new phenomenon twice over. Music students now need the opportunity to train in outreach work, in preparation for what is now referred to as a portfolio career: few will earn a living purely by playing. And as music organisations themselves, the conservatoires increasingly recognise their own responsibilities to their local communities.Some of them have been doing community work for years in a more or less ad hoc way but for most a serious commitment to outreach work has only developed recently. Many of the music college education officers and outreach coordinators – they come with various titles – have been appointed to newly created posts within the last few years.

The work they do varies considerably, partly as a reflection of their locality. Some of them provide instrumental tuition. The Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama (RSAMD) provides over 800 children in 14 music centres with weekly music lessons, and there are plans for another eight. It also trains teachers, and the catchment area spreads from its Glasgow base as far as the Western Isles. The Royal College of Music (RCM) in London has started providing music lessons in its home borough of Kensington and Chelsea, which has no peripatetic music provision. Both have students providing at least some of the teaching, for which they get properly paid, and which they can continue to do after leaving college.

All the conservatoires do work in local schools, much of it continuous. As Robert Wells, Guildhall School of Music and Drama (GSMD) teacher, says: ‘We don't have parachute projects, where you go into a school for a short time and then leave them alone. We work in the longer-term, to provide progression and to map students through a series of opportunities. This could lead to them going to Guildhall, or just having an appreciation of music, or playing with friends.'

Guildhall has probably the longest record of community work, going back some 20 years. Trinity College of Music (TCM), which moved from central London to Greenwich in 2001, has built up a thriving outreach programme devoted both to schools in Greenwich and to the community on the Isle of Dogs just across the Thames. Andrea Spain, its head of professional skills since 2005, has also been concerned to build lasting relationships. ‘The feedback from the communities is now very positive.

There was a suspicion when we arrived that we just wanted to do things that would make us look good. Now they've come to trust that we're here for the long term and that we're committed to initiatives that really work for them. We don't come up with big-name projects, we're responsive to local people. We're no good at headline grabbing, But we're good at doing things which have an impact.'

The Isle of Dogs community has problems with economic deprivation and racial tensions fuelled by recent immigration and a lot of Trinity's work is concerned with bringing sections of the community together and with making them aware of their heritage. ‘It's part of our mission that we explore the role of musicians in society, Nowadays the social role of musicians is increasingly recognised.'

The Royal Northern College of Music (RNCM) has recently been exploring another area in which musicians can play a valuable role: health. ‘There is an understanding in the medical fraternity of the power of music,' says professional development manager Holly Marland, who has been pioneering this work in two hospitals in Liverpool and Manchester . The project, which involves five RNCM students shadowing three professionals, is not, says Marland, about simply giving recitals. ‘It's about finding relationships with people in healthcare. Music brings humanity to these settings. It's a powerful therapeutic tool.'

The RNCM's other outreach work has been predominantly with schools. Last year it staged a big composition project, Sound Ideas, in some 30 Manchester schools, involving both technology and acoustic instruments, with pupils having the opportunity to compose for college students. Michelle Robinson, who joined the college two years ago and is now outreach manager, is planning to work with other sections of the community. The RNCM has had an education officer for ten years. ‘In the olden days,' says Robinson, ‘it was about training the students, not about the community. Now the approach is different.'

All the colleges stress that the work is done for the people they work with and not just for the students. As Chris Gray of the RSAMD says, ‘We always emphasise that the music centres aren't there to educate the students. What the students get out of is a by-product of the centres' existence. The centres are there to provide education for children.'
Key to this work is collaboration with local authorities and other organisations, both to coordinate work and to identify where it should be concentrated. The Royal Academy of Music's outreach department, the Open Academy , was set up three years ago and has established links with the Spitalfields Festival, the Wigmore Hall and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment. ‘I want to work with the local authorities,' says John Barber, its newly appointed director, ‘to identify where there are gaps in music provision in the community.'

Robert Wells at the Guildhall works closely with local music services. ‘I am starting to embed our work with them,' he says, ‘and we want to do more projects with them on a regular basis.' Andrea Spain at Trinity says, ‘We are not interested in doing one-off projects which go nowhere, so we plan strategically with local authorities to look at how we can provide progressive opportunities for children and link with what the authorities are providing.'