Hong Kong’s Music Meritocracy Starts After the Expensive Part

Two students arrive to play a short passage. One has used an instrument they know and has rehearsed for somebody who understands what the panel will hear. The other has practised whenever a shared room is available and has never been told how a room like this one behaves. The judges may do a beautiful job of hearing both. Later, the institution may describe the difference as talent.

I would like that phrase to come with an invoice. Room to practise, a decent instrument and the ability to keep the same evening free every week are resources. So is access to an adult who can tell a child which opportunity matters and which one can wait. These things can disappear completely from the finished performance, which is partly why a finished performance makes such tempting evidence of the kind of person a young musician supposedly is.

When opportunity arrives too late

Hong Kong does have public programmes that broaden access. The Music Office’s training scheme offers instruction across Chinese and Western instruments and provides loans for selected instruments within the scheme. An example like this matters because the deprivation involved has an administrative shape. Programs can change who gets to try the thing in the first place. The details decide who actually benefits. Eligibility, instrument availability, travel and practice space remain part of the price. Music Office Instrumental Music Training Scheme.

An ensemble choosing someone for a concert may need the strongest player on that particular day. There is no point pretending readiness is irrelevant. The judgement becomes larger than its evidence when it is treated as an answer to who deserves future investment. A programme that is supposed to cultivate excellence should have some ability to see the young person who will be very good after their first serious access to the work, rather than the young person who arrived already familiar with the test.

One form of brainwashing is to get people who have been well prepared to believe they produced their preparation privately through virtue. Another is to persuade the unfavoured child to accept the same explanation. Both interpretations make it easier to reproduce the conditions of the last audition. Both are a poor account of how musicians become able to do difficult things.

I would keep demanding standards at the moment a performance matters. Before that moment, I would be more interested in the life a school can give someone who hardly resembles a promising candidate when they first walk in.