Musical understanding is commonly cited as a justifiable goal of music education.
Roy loved music with a profound understanding, or so it seemed to me. In his recent passing I have lost a dear friend who I admired and learnt much from. I shared a room with Roy at college. There was me a music student flushed with adolescent musical arrogance pinning a picture of Stravinsky to my locker while Roy was telling me about Sarah Vaughan and how his mother had, in his early childhood, sung him to sleep with ‘Little man, you’ve had a busy day’. I became a secondary school music teacher, Roy a secondary school science teacher.
In later years I would occasionally visit Roy and we would spend time listening to music taken from his vast CD collection, sometimes sharing what we both knew well, sometimes Roy introducing me to the music of composers that I had barely heard of and sometimes introducing me to new voices coming onto the Jazz scene.
Roy had been largely self-educated musically – the songs his mother taught him, a vivid memory from school music days, rugby club singing, ventures into composing morality song cycles for his grandchildren using the programme Band in a Box all featured. Spending time with Roy it seemed to me his understanding of music to be profound.
Robert Walker writing in the preface to Harold Fiske’s ‘Understanding Musical Understanding’, proposes that musical understanding is what the human brain is wired to do and the remarkable thing is that it gets on and does it. It is a part of everyday cognitive activity and this makes musical understanding something personal and private, and intensely meaningful and special to each individual. [1]
For John Sloboda musical understanding is a matter of mind endowing ‘musical events, collections of sounds, with significance: they become symbols for something else other than pure sound, something which enables us to laugh or cry, be moved or be indifferent’. [2] Sloboda goes further maintaining that understanding music is a necessary pre-condition to being moved by it in much the same way that we won’t get a joke unless we understand it. We have to be in the know as it were, be familiar with the ‘language’, know the syntax, and in the case of music something possible through exposure and experience. Kemp, however, argues that this doesn’t account for the way people make sense of music, are moved by it and ‘get it’ without levels of cognitive complexity suggested by the analogy of getting a joke. [3]
Let’s call for help from musicologist Hans Heinrich Eggerbrecht. Making clear what is to be understood by understanding is the starting point. Eggerbrecht tells that
‘Understanding is a process by which something that is external to us loses its externality and gains access to our inner self. Object and self, self and object are drawn together and unite through understanding, in degrees of identity which correspond to the degrees of intensity and understanding. Understanding makes the world our own’. [4]
In broad outline Eggerbrecht proposes an evolving process for musical understanding involving a sensing – perceiving – feeling – intuiting – cognizing – conceptualising spectrum of the human mind seeking understanding and making sense.
Musical understanding is a justifiable goal of music education. It seemed to me that Roy was one of the most musically educated people I have known.
Notes:
[1] Walker, R. (2008) ‘Forward’ in H. Fiske, Understanding Musical Understanding. Lampeter: The Edwin Mellen Press.
[2] Sloboda, J. (1985) The Musical Mind. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
[3] Kemp, A. E. (1996) The Musical Temperament. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
[4] Eggerbrecht, H. H. (2010) The nature and limits of musical cognition. Farnham: Ashgate.
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