What Britain can learn from Latvia's incredible music education system

In the United Kingdom, music has always been the Cinderella of education, constantly praised by ministers in high-flown speeches but never really high on their agenda. What truly fires them up is training workers for the knowledge economy and focusing on STEM subjects (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics).

Not that they ignore music; on the contrary, one of this Government’s boasts is that every child will have access to instrumental lessons at some point during their school career, for free. But the truth is that this access is fleeting, lasting only a term at most, and the pupils have precious little say in the choice of instrument, so the child who might have made an enthusiastic trombonist ends up reluctantly strumming a guitar.  

After that, if the child wants to continue, the parents will have to cough up. As for the prominence of music in the general life of the school, and in the curriculum, it’s entirely at the whim of the head teacher. Having access to a good regional music “hub” for extra-curricular music is a matter of luck, with the South doing markedly better than the North.  

Could we not do things better? The experience of one small country by the Baltic Sea on the Eastern fringe of the EU suggests that we could. By any measure, Latvia’s music education system is a marvel, and one telling piece of evidence for that is the number of world-class musicians that have emerged from this country of fewer than two million people. There are the conductors Andris Nelsons and the late Mariss Jansons, the violinist Baiba Skride, the opera singers Elīna Garanča and Kristine Opolais, the composer Pēteris Vasks, to name just a few.

Even more impressive is something that is unique to Latvia; the Song and Dance Festival that takes place every five years. This is a huge affair which involves around 40,000 mostly amateur singing groups which come together for vast outdoor events. It’s estimated that around a quarter of the entire population attend them.

Since 2019, something new has been added to Latvia’s cultural calendar, the Riga Jurmala festival, named after Latvia’s two biggest cities. This year’s festival, spread over four weekends from July to September, features some of classical music’s biggest names including pianists András Schiff and Yuja Wang, the conductor John Eliot Gardiner and the brand-new Mariss Jansons Festival Orchestra. 

So what accounts for this musical passion? Partly it’s a matter of Latvia’s unusual history. As the one-time Latvian ambassador to Britain Baiba Braže pointed out to me, Latvia’s Lutheran heritage means that communal singing of God’s word is an important part of worship. That laid the foundations for the country’s great singing tradition, but even more important was the rise of the national independence movement in the 19th century, when Latvia was part of the Russian Empire. “The idea of the nation through all the many occupations was preserved through our folk-song and dance, right up to the end of the Soviet era,” says the pianist Daumants Liepiņš, one of many young Latvian musicians being noticed in the wider world.

That focus on singing is at the heart of the Latvian education system. There’s nothing eccentric about this: the great music educator Zoltán Kodály insisted no child should start instrumental lessons until they had a firm grasp of music’s rudiments through singing. It roots a feeling for music in the one instrument we all possess, which makes it inherently democratic and communal. 

Most importantly, musical teaching is universally available. The country has a network of more than 150 specialist schools in arts and music, which operate in the afternoon after the normal school day ends at 2pm. Music schools make up by far the largest proportion of these. It means that every child, no matter where they live in the country, can get a good music education over a period of years, right through to the age of 18. Singing is at the heart of it, with every child, no matter what their specialism, joining one of the school’s choirs and taking some individual lessons. Around 17 per cent of all Latvians have attended them, an incredibly high proportion.  
“You have to pass an audition to get in, and if you pass the education is free, with just a small charge for the others,” says Liepiņš, “and once you are in there is a proper curriculum, with ear training and history lessons and choir and ensemble rehearsals. I was supposed to have two piano lessons a week, but my teacher could see I had talent so I had much more than that.”

But the system is not perfect. It is enormously expensive, swallowing up one-third of the cultural ministry’s budget as well as funding from the education ministry and municipal governments. Nauris Puntulis, the culture minister, admitted to me that the population is declining in Latvia’s rural areas, which makes ensuring access to quality music education in those regions difficult and even more expensive. And Latvia can’t be totally isolated from the cultural politics that makes music education such a contentious subject elsewhere in the world, particularly in the UK. Up to now, the Latvian music education system has been dominated by classical music and Latvian folk song, but now there are concessions (some might say essential ones) to broaden the musical range to include popular music and jazz. 

One senses the Latvians are engaged in a delicate balancing act; adjusting their world-beating system to take account of present-day realities, while keeping their faith in music as an expression of the nation and of social solidarity more generally. As Baiba Braže put it to me: “It’s about getting people away from their computer screens, and also about creating a sense of belonging to the nation through music.” Those good things are no less urgently needed in the UK.

 The Riga Jurmula Festival continues until September 5. riga-jurmala.com

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