Ian Pace

Highbury

Contributor at The Conversation (Australia)

Pianist, Prof of Music, Culture, Society, @CityUniLondon. Tweeting in personal capacity. Secretary, @lucaf_london, co-convenor @CityUniAFAF. Also at @drianpace

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Articles

The Problem with Cultural “Realism”, Part 2

1 month ago | cafeamericainmag.com | Ian Pace

Realism is frequently identified with the literary work of writers such as Dickens, George Eliot, Balzac, Flaubert, the Goncourt brothers, Theodor Fontane, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Mark Twain and many others; and also in the theatre with Ibsen and Chekhov; in the visual arts with Courbet, Daumier, Adolph Menzel, Ilya Repin, Whistler, and others.
How could anyone seriously think that Wagner's antisemitism hasn't been discussed enough?

1 month ago | spectator.co.uk | Ian Pace

Text size Small Medium Large Line Spacing Compact Normal Spacious Comments In a recent article, the historian Katja Hoyer describes an event at the German Embassy prior to a Royal Opera House performance in May of Wagner’s Die Walküre. There she spoke with various individuals, some of them clearly Wagner ‘fans’, and she righteously declares: ‘having studied [Wagner] as a historical figure, I’m perhaps also less able than most to forget the man behind the music.’ Following some discussions...
Cardiff’s music closure will hasten the fading out of UK musical scholarship

Feb 16, 2025 | timeshighereducation.com | Ian Pace

Source: Darwin Brandis/iStock In a recent radio interview, Cardiff University’s vice-chancellor, Wendy Larner, defended her proposal to drop music degrees (among others) by arguing that “there are two music schools in Cardiff” and that “in a context where resources are so constrained, the sector cannot afford to compete in the way it has historically”. The point about competition may well be true.
Against Cultural Populism

Jan 17, 2025 | cafeamericainmag.com | Ian Pace

Commercial culture has never had it so good, at least from the point of view of its producers.
We need higher standards for academic writing

Jan 8, 2025 | thecritic.co.uk | Ian Pace

Confused thinking and confusing prose has led to a reversible decline At the end of 2024, a short-lived Twitter/X storm raised significant questions about the nature of academic work and public engagement with such work, especially on social media. It also raised questions of the types of language, which some would call jargon, used in certain forms of academic writing, and what purpose it actually serves.
My contribution to the Durham Union debate ‘This House would decolonise the curriculum’

Dec 5, 2024 | ianpace.wordpress.com | Ian Pace

| Filed under: Academia, Higher Education, History, Politics | Tags: Alan Sokal, angela last, anibal quijano, anna krylov, arab mathematics, austrian empire, bach, beethoven, carol azumah dennis, charles aldous, chemistry, christina mobley, colonialism, decolonisation, decolonising the university, decolonization, dream of the red chamber, engineering, ethiopian music, frantz fanon, gottfried wilhelm leibniz, gurminder k.
The Higher Education and Free Speech debate at City St George’s - my opening statement

Oct 31, 2024 | ianpace.wordpress.com | Ian Pace

| Filed under: Academia, Conservative Party, Higher Education, History, Labour Party, Politics, Westminster | Tags: abhishek saha, academic freedom, academics for academic freedom, advance he, akua reindorf, amber rudd, amnon aran, arif ahmed, athena swan, bds, birkbeck college, black lives matters, boycott, boycott divestment sanctions, bridget phillipson, cardiff university, charles lees, cieo, city st george's, civitas, claire coutinho, committee for academic freedom, confucius institutes,...
Why Christian culture is essential to education

Oct 27, 2024 | thecritic.co.uk | Ian Pace

It deeply informed our art and our ideas The news that the University of Nottingham issued a trigger warning to students concerning Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales (1387-1400) (as well as to the work of other medieval authors such as William Langland, author of Piers Plowman (c. 1370-1386), John Gower and Thomas Hoccleve) on the grounds that these contain “expressions of Christian faith”, along with depictions of violence and mental illness, has generated much comment.
Music in UK Higher Education 3: Undergraduate Cohorts 2019-2023

Oct 10, 2024 | ianpace.wordpress.com | Ian Pace

| Filed under: Musical Education, Musicology | Tags: education, ethnomusicology, Higher Education, Higher Education Standards Authority, music, music education, musicology, scholarship | [This is a revised version of an earlier post, updated with new data for 2022-23 made available by HESA] The Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) make available in the public domain figures on cohorts across the HE sector, which can be broken down by subject (in terms of the subject groups they use) and...
Academia must not dissolve scholarship into politics

Aug 21, 2024 | thecritic.co.uk | Ian Pace

Scholarly rigour must be put above ideological virtue signalling A series of incidents on social media have highlighted the extent of politicisation of academia, in ways of which a wider public may not have been aware, and constitute a legitimate concern at a time when the very nature of the UK HE sector faces difficult questions.