They represent Nepal to the extent that any group of Nepali workers in Spain, Qatar, or Malaysia right now could be eating daal bhat and talking lightly about Pundit Homnath’s rock-steady classical tabla groove, or Anil Shahi’s lightning fast fusion guitar fingers, or Robin Tamang’s impassioned blues vocals. Nepali people can be proud of such musicians and their music
.
But now let’s take a closer look. Where did these musicians learn to play, write, and sing? Where does their music really come from? Nepal? No. Not a single one. Robin Tamang lived and played in Canada for years before launching his successful career in Kathmandu; Raju Gurung earned a degree at Berklee College of Music in Boston, USA; Anil Shahi learned classical Eastern and Western guitar in India and the UK; and Pundit Homnath Upadhyaya learned tabla in Varanasi, India. Ask any one of them about music education in Nepal, and you’ll likely hear a sad story. Here’s part of that sad story, gathered from six months of interviews, observations, and classes in schools around Kathmandu.
The government doesn’t support music education to any practical extent, and music generally isn’t offered at government schools. Not surprisingly – the government is preoccupied with things like constitutions, federal states, and army staff at the moment, so it could be a while before they consider music with any seriousness. Some of the larger private higher secondary schools offer music teaching, depending on if the director or principal wants to or not, but the focus of this teaching seems to be with making adequate Parents’ Day shows—drilling the students by rote for weeks for a ten-minute performance of songs they already know. Principals and parents walk away satisfied, but what do the students actually learn? To sing songs that they already knew. Music? Hardly.
A music curriculum for Nepal is currently being processed by the Ministry of Education, but many principals have no idea about it, much less their overworked and underpaid music teachers, who often teach part-time at five or more different schools per week in order to make enough money to live. Lucky teachers will have a music classroom, some instruments, a reasonable amount of students, and electricity for part of the time – but only if they are lucky. Even if a teacher knows a music curriculum, he probably can’t teach it—there is no program in the country right now that focuses on music teaching skills, and many music teachers are trained as performers and teach only because it’s a job. They have nowhere to go to learn things like lesson planning, rehearsing, music notation, curriculum, classroom management, and performance organization; they have no resources like method books or syllabi; and they are under no accountability at all except to have their students pipe out 10 minutes of rote memorization once per year
