NZSO, Music Schools ponder values of real estate

In NZ Centenary Year 1940 National Radio Founder Director James Shelley envisioned an integrated national music service to include a permanent symphony orchestra and Conservatorium of Music housed side by side in Wellington. Seventy years later, Shelley’s original plan is still lying on the table.

Opinion piece by ROBIN MACONIE

The NZSO and two New Zealand university schools of music are currently embroiled in controversial real estate negotiations to relocate to new buildings on small parcels of open space in their respective city centres. For Canterbury University School of Music (estimated cost $24+ million), the site is a parking lot in Hereford Street; for Victoria and Massey Universities, the designated site for a new New Zealand School of Music (current estimates $50–95 million) is Ilott Green, an abandoned corner of Civic Square in Wellington’s CBD. Though larger and more central than their present accommodations, both projected new buildings are too small for their anticipated use, have no room to expand, and are located on busy streets, requiring costly soundproofing. The marketing assumption is that a high-profile building project in the central city will be able to turn around the fortunes of existing teaching programmes to create competing “NZ Centres of Excellence”. Six years ago the gamble misfired when the NZSM plan failed to meet quality guidelines for Centre of Excellence cofunding. Despite the setback, universities refuse to consider updating teaching programmes as a necessary precondition to rebuilding and relocating. Nor are they prepared to consider lower cost build options, as long as funds are available to cover architects’ drafts and scale models.

For a fraction of these estimated costs, Erskine College in Wellington’s Island Bay is available for purchase and conversion to a joint New Zealand School of Music and NZSO centre and studio complex. The historic main building is huge. A world-class 100 piece orchestra studio home for the NZSO would fit on the site of the present college gymnasium. Teaching members of the NZSO would be able to direct classes in the adjacent main building, containing practice rooms, editing suites, an anechoic chamber, and music library, along with research and online teaching and podcast services reaching the whole of New Zealand. There is a fine chapel with a wonderful acoustic. A separate, dedicated 55 piece orchestra studio for movie recording, with private access, could easily be accommodated on site to service the movie and recording industries and provide additional income.

Ten years ago in affluent times a proposal to merge the NZSO and two Wellington university schools of music under one roof in the CBD might have made sense. Today in times of serious economic recession, alternative plans deserve to be considered, especially in a case where the same goals can be attained at a fraction of the cost by the NZSO and NZSM relocating to Erskine, which offers more space, room to expand, and a noise-free environment. For the government and people of New Zealand, major stakeholders in the NZSO, Arts minister Chris Finlayson is bound to take an interest in a refurbished national heritage site as a cost-effective alternative to building new NZSO and School of Music accommodation from scratch on a cramped corner of land in the CBD. To purchase the entire Erskine College site in its unimproved state would cost an estimated $6 million. The current rateable value of the entre site is considerably less.

Since closing its doors in 1985 the former Sacred Heart Girls’ College has seen use as a set for an early Peter Jackson horror movie, a recording location, and as a popular wedding venue. For ten years to 2009 the main building was occupied by The Learning Connexion, a community arts college. In August 2009 the entire site came under a Heritage Protection order. Unfortunately the order is unenforceable, the fabric is not being protected, and the threat of ongoing deterioration is being used by owner Ian Cassels of the Wellington Company as leverage to seek Council dispensation to part demolish and convert the property to luxury apartments.

The original 1906 Erskine main building is generously proportioned, containing a rich variety of room sizes acoustically suitable for music rehearsal, study, recording, and performance, and finished in rare New Zealand native hardwoods. The west-facing site is isolated and sheltered from main road and air traffic, so does not require expensive cladding to make it soundproof. Allegations that the building is an earthquake risk are inconsistent with structural reports, though repairs and reinforcements are necessary to meet new and severe guidelines.

Owners The Wellington Company insist they have never been opposed to the concept of a music school on the Erskine site. Instead, NZSO executives and members on the staff of the School of Music are refusing to move to a location in the suburbs that they regard as inconvenient and beneath their dignity. After five years of failure to to attract any significant private funding, the current NZSM directorship remains determined to pursue a face-saving plan to build an expensive and useless monument to celebrate its lack of success. Super-rich potential benefactors Peter Jackson and Weta Workshop are declining to commit to a bailout as long as the parties involved refuse to come together and agree on coherent education and training strategies. For its part, Wellington City Council is equally reluctant to see the NZSO relocate away from the Michael Fowler Centre, a rental facility for the use of which Council currently extracts a significant chunk of the NZSO’s taxpayer-funded $24 million annual budget.

After years of messy indecision, in a move finally breaking ranks with the School of Music administration, Peter Walls and the NZSO are pinning their hopes on a counter-proposal, announced in November by Greater Wellington marketing consortium Grow Wellington, to erect a recording and technical training platform for the NZSO on the foundations of a former car dealership site in Abel Smith Street, a site also owned by Ian Cassels and The Wellington Company. The proposal is doomed in advance. In common with previous schemes, the Lilburn Studio site is too small, lacks parking, and lies on a main traffic thoroughfare. Having been quoted in the DomPost press release of November 6 as endorsing the project, in a humiliating about face Peter Walls the same day retracted his endorsement in a hastily arranged interview with Eva Radich for Radio NZ Classical’s noonday “Upbeat” news programme. The NZSO CEO continues to avoid endorsing any of the spin given to the proposal by Grow Wellington, while expressing a wan hope that a rescue operation along the lines of the Abel Smith Street initiative may soon be possible.

Weak and incompetent leadership, lack of appropriate expertise, refusal to consult, and total media lockdown are familiar features of a Kafkaesque cultural bureaucracy that is out of control, frothing at the mouth, and threatening the survival of classical music as a beacon of culture in New Zealand national life. We know what Peter Jackson and the movie industry expect of our music schools, since Becca Gartrell, the award-winning young balance engineer overseeing the Lord of the Rings trilogy, was hired by Jackson while still a student on work experience in year 2 of a BBC and film industry-approved Tonmeister course in classical engineering at Surrey University. Trouble is, there has never been such a course available in New Zealand and there are no plans to start one. There has never been official recognition by any school of music in New Zealand, of classical sound recording as an academic qualification with earning potential, worthy of investment in a professional quality recording studio and teaching programme.

Grow Wellington’s incompetent marketing strategy is now permanently exposed on the electronic record to alert potential rescuers worldwide to the ever present risks of investing in NZSO and music schools’ artistic and technical development. Claims unlikely to mislead the public are Grow Wellington’s unauthorized appropriation of the name Douglas Lilburn Studio Trust, a ripoff of the real charity the Douglas Lilburn Trust. The so-called New Zealand Institute for Screen Innovation is an empty shell dreamed up by general manager Laurence Greig and lawyer Michael Stephens simply to gain traction and lend an air of legitimacy to a “knowledge sharing agreement” with an unknown Hong Kong conglomerate cosigned under pressure by Wellington’s mayor.

Robin Maconie is composer of the music score for John O’Shea’s pioneer New Zealand road movie Runaway (1964), and also of the first electronic music by a New Zealander in 1965. He developed intelligent music software as a lecturer in music technology at Surrey University in the early 1980s, and in 1983 composed some of the first hybrid computer music to be created in surround-sound. He is internationally recognized as a leading expert on Stockhausen and the musical avant-garde. In 2009 he galvanized local musicological circles by proposing that Maori imagery influenced the music of Mozart and Beethoven, in a paper to be published in April 2010 by The Musical Times. His latest book, Musicologia: Musical Knowledge from Plato to John Cage is to be published in 2010 by The Scarecrow Press.

ENDS

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