VOICE and the MCA
On Sunday, 27 September, and Monday, 28 September I attended the National Assembly of the Music Council of Australia (MCA) in Melbourne. The MCA is a body that brings together the diverse strands of the musical community in Australia. It conducts research, undertakes advocacy, and gets many different bodies to communicate with each other. I wanted to get a better idea of what is happening in school music, community music, music on radio and music on stage. And I particularly wanted to hear what is happening in relation to the arts in the development of the national school curriculum.
That’s where VOICE comes in. Dr Di Hughes (Music, Macquarie University), Dr Anne Power (Education, University of Western Sydney) and I have formed Vocal Ownership in Cross-Curriculum Education (VOICE), a national advocacy group championing the introduction of cross-curricular voice studies in school education. See
http://www.dcms.mq.edu.au/staff/dianehughes/VOICE.html. Development of the national curriculum is proceeding very slowly, but a lot of work is being put into ensuring that music takes its place. Ideally we’d like to see voice not just as singing as part of Music, but also in the subject area of Drama, and as units of work in the learning areas of Science, English, and Health and Physical Education.