Music Education and relevance to the interests of the kids

‘It is one of the most deeply rooted superstitions of our age that the purpose of education is to benefit those who receive it. What we teach in school, what subjects we encourage in universities, and the methods of instruction, are all subject to one overarching test: what do the kids get out of it? And this test soon gives way to another, yet more pernicious in its effect, but no less persuasive in the thinking of educationalists: is it relevant? And by relevant is invariably meant ‘relevant to the interests of the kids themselves.’ [1]

Thus writes Roger Scruton, philosopher of both conservation and political conservatism. He has written on the aesthetics of music, on beauty, sexual desire, environmentalism and much more. His thought has surely been influential in the making of recent educational policy.

For Scruton culture is the ‘best that has been thought and written’. Culture is a form of knowledge. Culture is civilising. Learning to appreciate the best involves learning the right feeling. [2]

We need not subscribe to Scruton’s trenchantly argued position on culture, aesthetic value, the significance of the canon etc. to raise questions about the current enthusiasm for music education to be ‘relevant’ to the interests of the kids themselves.’

It seems that what is meant by relevant to the interests of the child in the case of music is relating to the music that chimes with the child, the music that they easily identify with, see themselves in. The music that readily confirms who they are, the group to which they feel they belong, the music they come to school with in their heads, their lived experience

Another perspective on what interests a child is given by Kieran Egan who shows how children’s interests are centred differently at different stages of development. [3]

First comes the mythic stage when children respond best to stories. Then the romantic stage when children are keen to gather facts about distant matters yet which relate to matters close to home. Next the philosophic stage, a time for developing generalisations and principles and finally the ironic stage, a sign of the mature mind, where focus shifts to the exploration of those instances which do not obey the rules.

In this view a child’s musical interests live alongside other interests and ways of understanding. Young children enchanted by music telling the story of the Pied Piper, year 8 drumming, dancing and singing an apartheid song, year 9 moved by Reich’s Different Trains might be examples.

For Egan, it is the development of human interest that is important where ‘relevance’ is a matter of connections made and this can be with what is strange, alien, unfamiliar as well as familiar.

Scruton maintains that education is for affirming, sustaining and growing a particular set of cultural values. It is duty bound to maintain a conversation between the past and present and that while teachers love their pupils, they love knowledge more. Education is subject centred not child centred. The example of engaging with what is of human interest above is unlikely to persuade.

However, while we may not agree with Roger Scruton, we ought to be able to articulate something more than ‘it’s for the kids’.

After all music education is hardly ennobled if we think it is only for the benefit of those who receive it.

Notes:

[1] Scruton, R. (2007) Culture Counts: Faith and Feeling in a World Besieged. Encounter Books: New York. p.28.

[2] Chapter 3 of Culture Counts is titled ‘Knowledge and Feeling’ and deals with the goals of knowledge, types of knowledge, ends and means, knowing what to feel, teaching virtue, conserving practical knowledge and answering the critic.

For a fascinating debate on ‘culture’ see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOdMBDOj4ec

Scruton’s concept of culture is distinctly at odds with the anthropological concept of culture.

[3] See http://www.mantleoftheexpert.com/studying/articles/KE%20-%20Cognitive%20Tools%20of%20Children%27s%20Education.pdf

Ways of listening, ways of knowing

On Wednesday this week I attended the English National Opera’s production of the Philip Glass opera Akhnaten. I am something of a devote of American minimalism.

(When I introduced it to my U3A Group they weren’t impressed. They made no sense of it. what is the point of it was a very good question posed. Their habituated mode of listening didn’t work in this case so it seemed.[1])

I have seen both Philip Glass and Steve Reich in concert and a wonderful Kronos Quartet performance of Reich’s Different Trains.

I recall in 1984 running a workshop making minimalist music on an Arts in the Curriculum in service training day for staff in my secondary school. I was learning how to master whole class workshopping at the time.

Both Reich and Glass reject goal directed music, use repetition to deny the building up of expectation, tension and release and all that the Western European Art Tradition relies upon to create narrative structures through time.

In Anahid Kassabian’s fascinating ‘Ubiquitous Listening’ [2] reference is made to Adorno’s typology of listeners. [3] The expert listener has the ability to follow the musical narrative – the capacity to follow a theme throughout its journey, relating past, present and future together. ‘Such a listener is fully conscious, fully attentive, and able to hear longitudinal, structural relationships in large-scale musical works.’ [4]

Listening to a 1985 Glass work this week the musical method was predictably minimal. What might have been a music phrase curled to nothing, cyclical drumming did its work, pungent chords stood alone. Being one of Adorno’s expert listeners I had to think differently rather like I have to when involved in a Frankophone drumming ensemble and when listening to music beyond the white frame of Western European Art Music.

I am left wondering about music education’s commitment to producing Adornoian expert listeners. And just who is the expert listener?

On Wednesday the audience’s appreciation was fulsome.

Notes:

[1] See my blog ‘The Impatient Music Teacher’.

[2] Kassabian, Anahid, 2013 Ubiquitous Listening: Affect, Attention and Distributed Subjectivity. University of California Press.

[3] Adorno, Theodor, 1988. Introduction to the Sociology of Music. Continuum.

[4] Kassabian, Anahid, 2013 Ubiquitous Listening: Affect, Attention and Distributed Subjectivity. University of California Press. Page xxii.

The Mind’s Music

‘Hearing and comprehending in one’s mind the sound of music that is not or may never have been physically present.’

This is possibly Edwin Gordon’s sharpest definition of the term audiation or better in its active form, what it means to audiate.

Audiation is the central concept in Gordon’s music learning theory and his notion of musical aptitude. For Gordon there are types and stages of audiation and the means of constructing sequences of learning. His book ‘Learning Sequences in Music: Skill, Content, and Patterns – A Music Learning Theory (1997) provides a comprehensive account of his theory.

In England, at least, audiation is not a term in common use. It is not at the forefront of many music teacher’s minds or a part of their pedagogic decision making. The recent Ofsted research review has one passing audiation reference.

Yet, notions like the inner ear, aural imagery, sub-vocalising, internalising and the mind’s ear are familiar enough terms in use seeking to describe and capture something thought to be fundamental to the growing musical mind and the capacity to make music well.

The term audiation is able to easily embrace such terms while transcending their folkiness into a powerful explanatory unity.

‘Hearing and comprehending in one’s mind the sound of music that is not or may never have been physically present.’

Gordon sometimes writes about the mind’s music.

The mind is a place of thinking and feeling, a place for thinking and feeling music.

Gordon makes an important clarification. Audiation is not aural perception. Aural perception deals with the immediacy of sound events. Audiation brings to those events what has been heard and comprehended in the past through memory and predicts what might be heard in the future. Gordon uses the parallel of hearing and comprehending speech.

Audiation is in play whether we are engaged as a listener, performer, improviser, composer or music reader.

Gordon’s audiation types include notational audiation – the capacity to hear and comprehend the sounds represented by notation in their absence, a capacity thought to make a pupil’s work musical rather than mechanical.

Then there is creative audiation – the capacity to work on and transform both existing and new musical material.

The reader will be able to imagine many ways of deploying audiation as a pedagogic tool and reflect on the ways they already encourage their pupils to think and feel in sound.

Perhaps the first step is to ensure our pupils understand that they are audiating beings.

Music educational purpose [3]

My third purpose addresses the child and young person as an individual independent of the social order and quite separate from any general notion of a person. Instead as an autonomous subjective self with the possibility of living creatively and critically. There was intimation of this in purpose [2]. Yet, neither purpose [1] or [2] recognises the uniqueness of each recipient of a music education. Controlling our own musical destiny is a neccessary resistance to the socialising process. Here is the possibility for personal agency and musical self-government.

Thus purpose [3]:

To enable all children and young people to become unique individuals, subjectively enriched, and able to know a sense of personal freedom through making music well.

And presented as a whole incorporating [1] and [2]:

The purpose of music education is:

To induct all children and young people into existing musical practices with the potential for the regeneration of these practices through critical engagement and with the knowledge of how to make music well, enabling all children and young people become unique individuals, subjectively enriched.

Notes:

[1] In proposing such a purpose I have followed the philosopher Gert Biesta’s approach to framing educational purposes.

[2] The reader is directed to chapter 16 of Music in the School: Significance and Purpose in The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education: Perspectives and Practices edited by Zack Moir, Bryan Powell and Dylan Smith in which I set out the purposes of music education more fully.

[3] The three purposes are meant to be overlapping and mutually affirmative. The balance between the three can be made in responsne to circumstances. I can imaging purpose [3] might dominate at times, for example.

[4] I am at some pains to emphasise the ‘all children and young people’ phrase as my concern is a music education available to all and well represented by the idea of a statutory music education 4-14.

Music educational purpose [2]

In last week’s blog I proposed knowing how to make music well a worthy purpose of music education. I argued that while musical knowledge could be framed in a number of different ways, knowing how to make music well was a way of expressing a form of practical knowledge embodying the Greek techne and phronesis, an embodied form of knowledge, and expressed as knowing how and conditional on the ‘well’. If you like, knowing how acts as a kind of spearhead subsuming other forms of knowledge while not being reducible to these.

One faithful and astute reader of last week’s blog pointed out that my blogs take a helical form, that is, they are spiral-like, twisting like a corkscrew back and forth as they interrogate key topics over time – a perpetual return to earlier arguments as a way of generating moves forward and perhaps ironing out contradictions while no doubt creating new ones. The nature of musical knowledge is one such topic.

If the first purpose of music education addresses the question of musical knowledge, the second moves to culture and the idea of social practices which are the bearers of musical cultural life.

It is through processes of socialisation that we become members of society in which music exists and is practised. But we learn that its practices take many forms, and that not all musicians behave in the same way or that the music they make is necessarily comparable. The ancient practice of handbell ringing, while sharing something of the ethos of gamelan playing, enjoys a vastly different set of values to blues singing, for example. The world offers a vast range of musical practices. It is the potential for the regeneration and transformation of practices nurturing a critical orientation that is called for as a second purpose. [1]

Thus a second purpose of music education also embracing the first:

The induction of all children and young people into existing musical practices with the potential for the regeneration of these practices through critical engagement and with the knowledge of how to make music well.

Note:

[1] Somebody said the curriculum is a selection from culture.

Music educational purpose [1] Knowing how to make music well

Say the words ‘musical knowledge’ and thought goes heavy, rushing to the ‘knowing that’ kind of knowledge, theoretical knowledge, ‘knowing that’ this is an ostinato, ostinato as fact. It is known what an ostinato is, key words, concepts, encyclopedias, dictionaries. 

Thankfully, we have another kind of knowledge, ‘knowing how’ – knowing how to create an ostinato, knowing how to make effective use of an ostinato. If you like, ‘practical knowledge’. [1] ‘Practical knowledge’ – yes, still knowledge, really useful knowledge, musical knowledge experienced. [2]

The Greeks had a number of words to denote knowledge. The way I am intending ‘knowing how’ to be understood can be associated with the Greek’s ‘techne’, meaning skill, craft and then ‘phronesis’, meaning practical wisdom.

And it is this way of knowing that I am privileging.

In recent times the distinction has been made between doing and learning as a way of giving intention and purpose to learning that is activity. Ofsted are keen to underline this distinction, for example.

The question is asked: ‘Ok, this is what they are going to do, but what are they going to learn?’ 

So why not think in terms of knowledge and say, ‘well, what are they going to know how to do’ (no, not ‘be able to do’ but ‘know how to do’). Doing and learning become one, raised to the status of knowledge. And we will have ready-made assessment criteria. Take the example of Year 7 Gamelan: knowing how to make sonorous sounds; knowing how to coordinate pulse and tempo; knowing how to make melodic patterns etc. And of course knowing how to do these things implies expressive control and its contingent fluency. The ‘well’ takes on significance.

I once met Schools Minister X X. He raised the question of ‘knowledge’. I set about trying to explain that knowledge could be thought about in a variety of ways (ie. after Plato, Aristotle). I was met with not so much as incomprehension as with not being heard at all. What I was proposing couldn’t be heard, wouldn’t be heard, ever. I was talking to a wall. Knowledge = facts. That was it. The subject changed.

Knowing how to make music well; knowing how to think in sound; knowing how to think about music – knowing how to think critically about the way music is practised. These things matter.

Notes:

[1] There are of course many ways of thinking about knowledge. In chapter 3 of Roger Scruton’s ‘Culture Counts’ he examines a variety of forms of knowledge and relates these to the education of feeling while making a case for cultural preservation.

[2] See Gilbert Ryle, ‘The Concept of Mind’, London, Hutchinson (1949), Chapter 2 for the distinction between ‘knowing that’ and ‘knowing how’.

The point is made, of course, that knowing how to do something does not equate with actually being able to do it. So you can know how to play the piano with the left hand but you can no longer do it in view of losing the hand in an accident.

However, thinking of know how as practical knowledge I hope is sufficient to overcome this objection.

Next week music educational purpose [2]

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Music as Social Life at this Christmas Time [1]

Better try over number seventy-eight before we start I suppose?’ said William, pointing to a heap of old Christmas carol books on a side table. [2]

Thomas Hardy’s Under the Greenwood Tree, like much of his writing, contains references to music-making. Hardy’s interest in the social conditions of his characters is matched by interest in the social conditions of their music-making.

For Hardy music is social practice. Musical meanings and musical knowledge are made here and now together and bound to the meanings made through the relationships of those participating. And all this in relationship to their place in the social order.

In the case of Under the Greenwood Tree there is the story of the Melstock choir, a band of local musicians playing and singing in the west gallery of their village church. Their music is silenced by the installation of the organ and a well-tutored organist. The imagined mediocrity of the locals is replaced by the imagined more refined and civilising sounds of the organ and the organist’s playing.

The musically disenfranchised locals inhabiting Hardy’s rural Wessex had come to enjoy in Michael Gove’s words:

‘… a shared appreciation of cultural reference points, a common stock of knowledge on which all can draw, and trade, in a society in which we all understand each other better’. . . [3]

Well, of course, I am being a little ironic, for Michael Gove was not referring to local traditions such as those of Hardy’s musicians and their customs held in common, but to the proposition that:

‘… there is such a thing as the best. Richard Wagner is an artist of sublime genius and his work is incomparably more rewarding – intellectually, sensually and emotionally – than, say, the Arctic Monkeys’. [4]

Or shall we say, not the Arctic Monkeys but the carollers on the western edge of Sheffield  whose singing this Christmas-time makes connections with that nearly lost repertoire of Hardy’s childhood time and now lost to the Christmas canon. [5]

The world of Wagner and that of Hardy’s local musicians along with the carolling in North East Derbyshire this Christmas present two utterly different conceptions of what music is, what it is for, how it is educative; what culture is and what it is for.

While there is the knowledge of the powerful [6] exemplified in the edicts of politicians and cultural administrators, it may be the carollers at the Sportsman Inn this Christmas who will be in touch with incomparably more knowledge of music as a human practice and perhaps, just perhaps, of humanity too.

‘Number seventy-eight was always a teaser – always. I can mind him ever since I was growing up a hard boy-chap. But he’s a good tune, and worth a mint o’ practice.’ [7]

Wishing you a very happy Christmas!

Notes:

[1] First published Christmas 2014.

Readers will find a number of previous blogs dealing with the idea of culture. This blog connects well with ‘How culture counts for music education’ https://wordpress.com/post/jfin107.wordpress.com/1038

This title is indebted to Thomas Turino’s Music as Social Life in which the category Presentational Performance is contrasted with Participatory Performance. For more on ways of thinking about musical performance in music education see Exploring Performing, Elizabeth MacGregor in A Practical Guide to teaching Music in the Secondary School, eds. Carolyn Cooke and Chris Philpott, Routledge, 2022.

[2] Under the Greenwood Tree by Thomas Hardy, London, MacMillan, 1964 page 24.

[3] Gove, M. (2011) The need to reform the education system. Speech made at the University of Cambridge, November 24.

[4] Ibid.

[5] ‘Pubs preserve the carols dusted away by the Victorians. Guardian, Monday 15 December 2014 page 5.

See http://www.localcarols.org.uk/sings.php for this year’s programme of singing.

[6] Michael Young contrasts ‘The knowledge of the powerful’ with ‘powerful knowledge’. See http://www.fpce.up.pt/ciie/revistaesc/ESC32/ESC32_Arquivo.pdf I have simply appropriated the phrase ‘powerful knowledge’ here and don’t necessarily imply anything of Young’s thesis, interesting though that is.

[7] I do concede that I am in some part a romantic. Philosopher Michel Foucault notes that nostalgia can be a rich source of critique should readers think I am indulging.

Musical criticism, musical meaning and music education [1]

To be critical is to be thoughtful, reflective, evaluative, analytical, knowing, insightful and a symbol of becoming wide-awake to the world: musical experience, if it is to be educative and part of a compulsory education, calls for a critical orientation. It calls for a growing awareness of what music is, how it is used, how music is given meaning and how these meanings are continually negotiated and re-negotiated. It calls for a recognition that music has human interest: social, cultural and political. Without a critical orientation music ceases to be a subject of significance.

In this paper I set out to envigorate the idea of musical criticism and move beyond its traditional musicologically constrained meaning. I will do this by showing how processes of musical meaning making can be foregrounded as part of a pedagogy that is both dialogic, and importantly, critical. 

I present two classroom scenarios from the music programmes of two secondary school music teachers, each working with a class of twenty five pupils aged twelve to thirteen in the East of England in their once weekly music lesson.

Who will start the conservation?

This was the question asked by the teacher Katie at the beginning of their weekly music lesson. ‘Who will start the conversation’. So what was the conversation to be about? The class had entered to Mars the Bringer of War from Gustav Holst’s The Planet Suite. They have settled quickly and attended to the music. White boards are given out and pupils asked to write down a question they would like to ask another pupil, their teacher or their visitor (that’s me) about the music. And hence the question from the teacher: ‘Who will start the conversation?’

The class are used to being asked this question. It is a question that opens up a dialogic process of enquiry at the heart of which are questions about the meaning of music. In this case an enquiry into the meanings that might be ascribed to the experience of the music just heard. 

If as Chris Philpott maintains [2] it is the making of meaning that is at the heart of our reason for engaging with music in the first place, then it becomes a responsibility of the teacher to not only to acknowledge this but to bring the matter to the foreground of classroom experience. And this within a general music education for all pupils. 

Who will start the conversation?

The first question is asked of the teacher:

Q: ‘Why did you choose this piece of music?’

A: ‘It is a piece to react to; a piece to feel and think about. It’s a piece to respond to.’

Second question from Holly to Samantha:

Q: ‘What is your favourite part of the music?’

A: ‘I like all of it. And you want to know what is going to happen next.’

Q: ‘Have you ever heard music like this before? …’

Now the Star Wars connection comes out and is in play as part of the conversation.

Then, an interesting turn:

Q: ‘Was this music composed by a boy or a girl?’

A:  ‘Boy, it’s loud and dramatic.’

Q: ‘What was going through her mind when she composed it? …’

The conversation returns to Star Wars:

Q: ‘Do you think this music is scary?’

The music’s delineated meaning have become the focus.

Teacher intervention: ‘Let’s listen again, how does it start?’

Pupils: ‘Really low notes’ … ’it folds in and folds out’ … ’tapping’.

The teacher’s intervention has led to a turn toward the music’s inherent meanings. Yes, the music begins with low pitched sounds and the folding in and out is a likely reference to the surging sforzando effect, while tapping being a reference to the insistent rhythmic ostinato.

The teacher links these responses to earlier pupil questions.

Now composing a piece in response to the music as a whole class. Each pupil invents a response to the music of Holst. There follows a period of listening to each other’s musical ideas engendering a whole class musical dialogue. Through teacher-pupil dialogue a whole piece is assembled, a performance of which becomes a fitting ending to the one hour of musical meaning making.

In this case, a new project for the class has been initiated through experiencing music new to the pupils, a new experience offering opportunity for pupils to open themselves up to the meanings that radiate from the music. In presenting the music free from any predetermined set of meanings the teacher has created a space for dialogue and unimagined fresh webs of meaning. 

It is worthy of note that the pupil’s questions and responses are likely to have been beyond what the teacher or any of us might have imagined. 

Yet the pupils come to the experience with histories of musical meaning making, with a set of inherited prejudices or prejudgements and nascent theories of their own about musical meanings – that music delineates meaning, that it can be gendered, for example. They come with critical acumen.

In this example of meaning making through dialogic practice the teacher is causing pupils to think differently, to think critically. And this we further see in my second example.

 Here the teacher is exploring an approach developed from his recent introduction to critical musicology. He makes what he terms ‘a philosophical enquiry into the music classroom’.

Thinking differently in the time of Tsunami and the Arab Spring

Here the teacher is testing out ways in which a class of year 8 pupils could be challenged to think about music differently, how their habitual ways of thinking about music might be disturbed. A sequence of music lessons with composing at the centre were presented to pupils as an enquiry structured by the question: what does music mean? The teacher provides his class with what he referred to as provocative scenarios. His intention was to stimulate the student’s curiosity and questioning, as they embarked upon their composing. The year is 2011 and two events of international significance are in the news. In Japan there has been a devastating tsunami and in the Middle East there is revolt that has come to be known as the Arab Spring.

The teacher David writes about making music together as a whole class:

‘All students sat in a circle playing barred instruments. The first third of their piece we created used the Japanese semi-tone major 3rd scale on B (B-C-E-F-A). Against the backdrop of a pianissimo rolled E, an F was gradually faded in and out, exploring the initial tensions of the tsunami. The B-C was then added to emphasise the nervous mood. All the notes gradually underwent a crescendo and were sustained fortissimo for a few moments before a sudden silence. A similar process was repeated, this time using a second, more blues-like Japanese scale. The  familiarity of the sound led one student to interpret this section as the reaction of the international community.’ [3]

And now another pupil has the idea of using the two scales at the same time. And so the lessons proceed in dialogic fashion, with the teacher skilfully leading the way provoking thoughtful questions that challenge assumptions about music and its meanings. And now the introduction of the composition task: to make a soundtrack for a montage of images of the recent Egyptian revolution using the Japanese scales. Why Japanese scales, some pupils ask? More dialogic work follows, with more thinking nurtured by the teacher’s gently teasing responses.

Neither of the two examples is commonplace in our school music classrooms in England. Both adopt a dialogic pedagogy through engaging their pupils in an enquiry and it is this that draws the learning forward. In this the processes of making of musical meaning are brought to the fore. The music of Gustav Holst and then the juxtoposition of scalic delineations heighten questions about meaning and its making understood as ‘open interpretation’ or what Chris Philpott ‘the practice of music as hermeneutics’ and ‘the discourse about music as hermeneutics’. [4]

We might speculate how over a series of lessons the music of Gustav Holst might continue to stimulate an ever expanding range of interpretations, opening up fresh lines of enquiry, creating fresh complexities and contradictions in the way the second teacher did. 

The kind of contextual richness emerging in these classrooms is not typically to be found, complexities are rarely embraced and the demands of school assessment structures frequently bring about the early closure of what is there to explore. [5]

I think these two scenarios throw into sharp relief what the English National Curriculum for Music refers to as critical engagement. 

Within the purpose of study for pupils aged 11-14 we read:

‘As pupils progress, they should develop a critical engagement with music, allowing them to compose, and to listen with discrimination to the best in the musical canon.’ [6] 

The place of critical engagement with music is acknowledged as a part of pupil’s musical development and by implication their adoption of the role of musical critic, yet this is within a closed musical order. 

In the Oxford Companion to Music musical criticism is defined as ‘the intellectual activity of formulating judgments on the value and degree of excellence of individual works of music, or whole groups or genres’. [7]

Here musical criticism is placed within the tradition of European Philosophical Aesthetics and created to serve the valuing and promotion of European Art Music. 

So what might be understood by ‘critical engagement with music’ in a scheme of music education? 

A minimal understanding of critical engagement might expect processes of reflection, evaluation and that contribute to the education of judgement. Indeed, this could be aligned with the notion of musical criticism as commonly understood as part of the scholastic tradition of Western European art music.

However, in the scenarios presented there is evidence of something rather more than this. We see critical thinking arising from dialogic practice [8], where active participation from the whole class community suggests a model of democracy, where assumptions are disrupted and re-examined. There is engagement with complexity calling for awareness of what music is, how it is used, how music is given meaning and how meanings are continually negotiated and re-negotiated. It recognises that music has human interest – social, cultural and political. This would seem to be rather more than the minimal kind of critical engagement conceived of in the official curriculum and in traditional notions of what is understood by musical criticism. 

In so far as the pupil is changed from being the object of the classroom to being an active critical subject given critical agency, I hope to have presented a window into what a critical pedagogy might consist of, relying as it does on dialogic-participatory practice foregrounding processes of musical meaning making. And, with the potential to contribute to an open rather than closed musical order. 

Notes:

[1] Paper delivered at the European Association for Music in Schools, Belgrade April 8th 2022 as part of the symposium What do we mean by meaning in music education?. The symposium was led by Chris Philpott – A framework for meaning in music education with further contributions form Gary Spruce – A social justice perspective on musical meaning and Carolyn Cooke – Making meaningful relationships.

[2] See Philpott, C. (2021) Music and the making of meaning in (eds) Finney, J., Philpott, G. and Spruce, G. Creative and critical projects in classroom music: Fifty years of Sound and Silence. Routledge.

[3] Thompson, D. (2011) Investigating pedagogic strategies for increasing students’ understanding of the constructed nature of musical meaning: Igniting Wenger’s Local-global Duality in a year 8 music class. In-depth study, University of Cambridge, Faculty of Education.

[4] Philpott, C. (2021) Music and the making of meaning in (eds) Finney, J., Philpott, G. and Spruce, G. Creative and critical projects in classroom music: Fifty years of Sound and Silence. Routledge.

See also Wicks, R. (2013) The art of interpretation – Hans Georg Gadamer in European Aesthetics: A critical introduction from Kant to Derrida. Oneworld Book Publications.

Kramer, L. (2011) Interpreting music. University of California Press.

[5] See Kathryn Jourdan’s Through the lens of Levinas https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/256142?show=full

[6] Department for Education (2013) National Curriculum for England. Music Programme of Study. London.

[7] The Oxford Companion to Music was published on-line in 2011.

[8] See Spruce, G. (2021) The pedagogues of the creative classroom: Towards a socially just music education in (eds) Finney, J., Philpott, G. and Spruce, G. Creative and critical projects in classroom music: Fifty years of Sound and Silence. Routledge.

One music teacher’s mission and vision

Here a music teacher was asked to write a few paragraphs about her ideas for music in the school for those attending the school’s Spring Concert.

“For me, music is about working together, and about participation. In the making of music, pupils work with the song or the piece, they work with each other, and they work with their audience. They learn to work with themselves. And when by concentration and practice a performance hits its groove, music can activate a joy or elation in expression that can go on to inform and permeate achievement across the disciplines. This is why music can be – and I believe should be – at the centre of a learning community. But the ideal of participation and collaboration means little if music remains the preserve of a select few. From the moment I arrived at the school this year, I have made it my mission to involve all the children of the junior and senior school in making and performing music. Because we have many children of different ages and abilities, children with different interests and backgrounds, this has meant broadening the kinds of music that we learn, sing, and play, and it has meant developing creative instruction and programming to enable every child to find her rhythm, or his line. By expanding our instrumental exposure – to ukuleles, djembes, and keyboards – and above all by whole-class singing, at the school we are helping students to create transformative experiences and performances that every child can share in, equally and with joy.

The Spring Concert this year has afforded a platform for our established groups and ensembles. But it has also given whole classes an opportunity to perform together, in their own ‘ensembles’. This could be considered a risk! But I am excited for this to be the school where every child is a musician; where every child can approach music with seriousness – faithfully practising, carefully learning, courageously performing and aiming for musical excellence in whatever capacity she or he is capable of. Some children can only play one chord on the ukulele, whilst others can play everything and sing at the same time – this is ok! Perfection is not the goal; instead, I hope all our students can, in their own ways and at their own levels, access that aliveness that comes from performing a piece of music with enthusiasm and commitment.

It has been a huge pleasure for me to see the whole school contributing to our musical life throughout the year – not only in concerts like this one, but in assemblies, lessons, in auditions – and in the hallways! Our pupils are capable of breathtaking musicianship, but they are also capable of something greater, which is listening to one another, trusting one another, and having fun with one another. All of this happens when we bring music to one another – that is, when music brings us together.”

Placing musical concepts in the order of things

Does using the so-called ‘elements of music’ as a classificatory framework lead to obscuring the particularities of musical phenomena and the erosion of difference?

I have derived this statement from Adorno’s concept of identity thinking. [1]

I will try to show how a critique of what Adorno calls identity thinking raises questions about the desirability of a concept-led music curriculum. As an alternative I will propose a music curriculum drawn forward by musical meaning making in which musical concepts know their place.

Propositions:

1. Music is non-conceptual
2. There are concepts about music
3. But the concept is not identical with the musical object or musical practice (the thing) which it claims to represent
4. Thus, the concept mis-represents the reality of the thing
5. The reality of the thing is more complex than can be contained by concepts (words)
6. In this process of mis-representation particularities revealing its infinite uniqueness are lost
7. The thing’s uniqueness and incomparability with, and infinite difference from other musical things is negated
8. A concept-led music curriculum values homogeneity over difference

The so-called elements of music – pitch, timbre, rhythm, pulse etc. (and paralleled in visual art: colour, line, perspective, composition etc.) and their subsidiaries are examples of concepts about music.

The musical elements are used widely within music education as the preferred classificatory framework. In enabling discourse about music the framework acts both positively and negatively in the way that it narrows, contains and constrains responses to music. This is exemplified well in the GCSE Music written exam.

This classificatory framework emanates from a western art music tradition, yet comes to be freely applied to all musical traditions and their diverse practices. Application easily becomes insensitive to a vast range of cultural expressions and their characteristically idiosyncratic musical features. [2]

Thus, the tendency to diminish difference through assigning a musical element – concept, as a common denominator across different musics.

Furthermore, in the language that is sanctioned through a concept-led curriculum there is little place for the personal, poetic or the lyrical. Again, we see this most vividly played out in aspects of the GCSE Music written exam.

The order of things

To be clear, while music is non-conceptual, concepts about music inevitably play a part of music as a subject of the curriculum. However, I suggest finding their place in the order of things is worth considering. So, what would this look like?

It would assume that what was being brought to the classroom offers something of complexity, something rich with context and charged with the possibility of in depth meaning making. [3] Secondary school music teacher Jo did this by playing Steve Reich’s Different Trains to her year 9 pupils.

Music critic Richard Taruskin writes:

‘… in Different Trains (1988) Mr. Reich went the full distance and earned his place among the great composers of the century. …  Mr. Reich based the melodic content of the piece on the contour and rhythm of ordinary human speech. But in his case the speech consisted of fragments of oral history, looped into Reichian ostinatos, then resolved into musical phrases conforming to normal tunings, scales and rhythms of ‘Western music’, imaginatively scored for string quartet. These speech melodies were set in counterpoint with the original speech samples, all of it measured against a Reichian chug.’ [4]

What if we presented the above for year 9 pupils to read? What sense would be made of it? You might say, ‘not much, it’s packed with sophisticated concepts’. I counted twenty-five! A lot of abstractions there. And a lot not accounted for in the music.

But what is a speech melody? I guess year 9 know what a melody is and they have sung and imagined a good many musical phrases. Fragments of oral history? Counterpoint? Reichian ostinatos? String quartet? Not so likely.

Perhaps these will be things we talk about, ideas that become a part of our classroom discourse over time as work unfolds, as a curriculum response to Different Trains emerges. [5]

Taruskin continues by telling about the significance of Different Trains. Reich’s childhood train journeys from coast to coast and the train journeys of children to Auschwitz.

I note above that Richard Taruskin places Different Trains in the 20th century canon of art music and Reich becomes a ‘great composer’. What a ‘talking point’. Jo’s pupils are well schooled in purposeful talking with ground rules well internalised.

And there are lots more talking points to intersperse and enrich the sustained periods of music making. Who is a great composer? Who decides? What is art music? What is a canon? What’s your canon? Why does it change? Does it?

So perhaps the Taruskin text rewritten by the pupils and the teacher could be a central resource.

What narratives, musical and literary, will pupils produce as they develop their processes of making life narratives through music?

In the pupils own musical narrative creations, what range of musical techniques might be useful?

How will technologies serve the musical impulses that arise?

At what points will Steve Reich be invited (metaphorically) into the classroom as a guest?

What range of interventions (disruptions) might the teacher have in mind to help deepen and sustain the work? Will these come from the pupils ?

How will the work generate fresh thinking, further possibilities, ideas about other good places to go?

What novel concepts will have emerged to enrich understanding of the music made. Tariskin has given us the Reichian chug.

Well, that’s enough.

A whole term’s work here, at least. Not led by concepts. Not a project driven by key concepts or enslaved by knowledge organisers, but one which allows conceptual thought to emerge through recognising something of the uniqueness of Different Trains and its realities. Its objectification is kept at bay.

Engaging with Different Trains here is led not by concepts but by an impulse to make meaning, the reason for engaging with any music in the first place as Chris Philpott points out. [6]

So, not a concept-led curriculum, rather one from the outset for making musical meaning.

Does using the so-called ‘elements of music’ as a classificatory framework lead to obscuring the particularities of musical phenomena and the erosion of difference?

Well, that depends you might say.

Notes:

[1] Adorno’s critique of identity thinking is central to his magnum opus Negative Dialectics.

[2] It may be interesting to note that Keith Swanwick argues that it is features that strike us about the music we experience, not concepts.

See Swanwick, K. (1994) Musical Knowledge: Intuition, Analysis and Music Education. Routledge.

[3] See https://jfin107.wordpress.com/through-the-lens-of-levinas-practices-of-facing-in-the-music-classroom-and-beyond/   

[4] Taruskin, R. (2010) The Danger of Music and Other Utopian Essays. University of California Press. Page 102.

[5] On emergent curriculum see Cooke, C. and Spruce, G. (2016) What is a curriculum? In Learning to Teach Music in the Secondary school 3^rd. edition (eds) Carolyn Cooke, Keith Evans, Chris Philpott and Gary Spruce. Routledge.

[6] See Philpott, C. (2021) Music and the Making of Meaning. In Creative and Critical Projects in Classroom Music: Fifty Years of Sound and Silence, (eds) John Finney, Chris Philpott and Gary Spruce. Routledge.