It’s 1970 and John Paynter and Peter Aston’s Sound and Silence: Classroom projects in creative music is published, their highly original contribution to music educational thought and practice.
Sound and Silence is a substantial text – three hundred and sixty five pages, thirty six projects along with rationale and guidance for the teacher – replete with a glossary of 60 musical devices and a discography listing 132 musical works imbuing the project as a whole with a rich core of musical knowledge and cultural legitimacy.
The work, apart from its english speaking diaspora was translated in part or whole into seven languages. It remained in print for nearly twenty years. [1]
Paynter writing in 1989 notes:
‘Peter Aston and I would be gratified if it were felt that Sound and Silence has stimulated people’s thoughts about the place of music in the school curriculum and had given some help with the development of classroom practice.’ [2]
A music teacher of the time recently noted:
‘Two years into my teaching career, in 1970 Sound and Silence struck me like lightning from a clear sky. Rather than a tame, tidy teaching manual, it was a buzzing, glittering bundle of radical ideas. Here was a complete rejection of academic music education with its complacent conservatism; instead, our pupils found themselves venturing into often unfamiliar sound-worlds, as if breathing the air of another planet. This was tremendously exciting. So too was the astonishing idea that young people could think musically for themselves, that teaching could be a dialogue between their ideas and ours.’ [3]
‘THAT TEACHING COULD BE A DIALOGUE BETWEEN THEIR IDEAS AND OURS.’
To mark the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Sound and Silence Chris Philpott, Gary Spruce and myself, along with twenty four other contributors, offer Creative and Critical Projects in Classroom Music: Fifty Years of Sound and Silence – both as a celebration and extension of John Paynter and Peter Aston’s groundbreaking work on creative classroom music.
And this is at a time when creativity for all children is under deep scrutiny in a neo- traditional swing of the educational pendulum.
Like the original, we move against the flow seeking to stimulate people’s thoughts about the place of music in the school curriculum and provide some help with the development of classroom practice.
You are invited to view
for a description of the book and a table of contents.
Thank you for reading.
Notes:
[1] Copies of Sound and Silence remain available at https://www.amazon.co.uk/Sound-Silence-Classroom-Projects-Resources/dp/0521095972
[2] John Paynter (1989) Sound and Structure, CUP: Cambridge. Page 7.
[3] Robert Bunting recalling his meeting with Sound and Silence in Finney, J., Philpott, C. and Spruce G. (2020) Creative and Critical Projects in Classroom Music: Fifty Years of Sound and Silence, Routledge: New York. Page 23.
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