IT is not just Australia's financial institutions that are suffering from a profound crisis of confidence; several of our music institutions also seem unable to extract themselves from ongoing, often internally generated, troubles. The visceral impact on our lives of the former, however, serves only to underline the apparent insignificance of the latter.

No wonder it must have seemed a particularly opportune moment for the federal Government to withdraw support for Australian National Academy of Music. Although it has subsequently been announced that ANAM will be replaced by an Australian Institute of Music Performance, run under the auspices of the University of Melbourne, this prospect has done little to restore the faith of a sceptical music profession. Not only does the plan fail to address legitimate questions about whether the unique, widely praised, character of ANAM can survive inside a sprawling campus, the takeover occurs in the context of a troubled merger between the university's faculty of music and the Victorian College of the Arts.

Approved earlier this year, this merger is advancing without a viable business plan or permanent senior leadership in place to guide it, or even suitable accommodation to house it. For many, the absorption of a free radical institution such as ANAM represents a solution being handed to a problem.

Historically, though, music has always struggled to maintain its place on campus. Although it may have undoubted power to fire the human imagination across time and culture, it is far from being a "universal language" (a naive formulation at best). Rather, it is a inescapably mysterious and capricious language. Unlike the other literary and plastic arts, it does not reflect nature directly or project a stable code of signifiers. "Sonata, what do you want of me?" Fontenelle once famously cried; we can never provide a definitive answer.

The view that music education instead should be essentially professional training is one that is probably shared by most students at the start of their studies. Music academics, however, have seen it as part of their mission to show how music making is improved, if not ultimately sustained, by the ability to reflect on the act of performance and the nature of the music being performed.

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