ABSTRACT
This concluding chapter presents and discusses the main findings on nation and gender in higher classical music education across three institutions in Estonia, Hungary, and Finland, and expands on their importance for classical music practice in Europe today. Returning to the theoretical framework of Chapters 1 and 2, we discuss how the higher classical music education analysed in this book consisted of institutions constructed as units where ideas of (white) ethnical-majority national belonging, place, and gender intersected. The institutions discussed throughout this volume all related to a genealogy of masters and founders of the institutions, male founding fathers or defining alumni. By doing so, they articulated an idea of “family” based on a gendered hierarchy and a blood line with certain temporal and geographical spaces in focus. The articulation of “family” was one without demand for actual blood ties, it was a musical family. Where the work of music, as historically embedded and shaped in interpretation and performance was the privileged object, the aim of the institutions in shaping their community revolved around masters and works. The main conclusion—that national belonging colouring higher classical music education institutions shapes how education is gendered in terms of musical families—will influence future music education research by emphasising the importance of transnational studies and intersectional perspectives. Finally, we discuss how HME institutions negotiated their belonging to borderland regions of Europe through both tradition and transformation of higher classical music culture, and by doing so were moving in different directions. We conclude that European higher classical music education is heading for different futures as their belonging in terms of nation and gender are also increasingly different.
