contributors

Articles by Ann Werner

1. Olli-Pekka Martikainen: Music education for new needs

   Olli-Pekka Martikainen is the Secretery General of the Association of Finnish Music Schools, an umbrella organization that includes 97 schools. He has a doctorate in music and he previously worked as the vice dean of the Sibelius Academy, University of the Arts Helsinki. Apart from leadership in higher music education Martikainen has worked as an orchestral and chamber musician and as a teacher at the Sibelius Academy. Martikainen holds the first artistic Doctoral degree in the field of percussion music in Finland. Ann Werner asked him questions about higher music education in the Baltic region with her own research on nation and gender in higher music education as background.

2. Introduction The national and gendered meanings of higher classical music education

   Countries in the Baltics and Central and Eastern Europe have been called home by some of the great composers of music history, and the region hosts some of the world’s most prestigious higher classical music education institutions. Despite this fact, Liisamaija Hautsalo states in her essay, the last of this section, that the Finnish-born composer Kaija Saariaho was perceived as being from “a faraway periphery” when she moved in the classical music circles of France, Germany and the US. In a scholarly context I was recently told that (post-communist) Central and Eastern European institutions are not representative of European higher classical music education. The person making this statement obviously assumed that European higher classical music education happens in the UK, or maybe in Germany and Austria. While I did not agree, this feedback speaks volumes about how classical music and higher classical music education is constructed as belonging to Western Europe in international academic debate today. In this special section the authors wish to problematize the role of nation and gender in higher classical music education, and the classical music contexts this education operates in, by focusing on the Baltic and Central and Eastern European region. By doing so we put the assumed Western European identity of classical music and higher classical music education in question.