Music and Social Justice and I can’t get that MMC out of my head

I have now read the first two chapters of Cathy Benedict’s Music and Social Justice: A Guide for Elementary Educators. Cathy is writing from Canada where Elementary refers to ages 6-14.

Reading Music and Social Justice has proved to be a much needed antidote to reading the DfE’s Model Music Curriculum (MMC) [1]. The MMC is thought to be an outworking of the National Curriculum for Music which as part of the National Curriculum for England claims a commitment to social justice. [2]

Chapter 1 of Cathy’s book is titled Listening and Responding and begins:

‘As a slogan, you can’t beat social justice. It’s ambiguous, and it can be welded by anyone, making it impossible to interrogate and making its purpose up for grabs. The phrase covers intent and interest, while at the same time causing users to feel really good about themselves for using it.’ [3]

Cathy doesn’t indulge in definitions, rather lives out a way of being and becoming a teacher whose classroom is a place of genuine dialogue where dispositions towards a social just world might grow. This involves reflecting on her own story of transition from the monologic conveyer of Kodaly principles to dialogician in the cause of an ethical consideration of what is ‘other’.

Unlike the steady creep within official discourse in England (and as exemplified by MMC) towards a unitary concept of knowledge, Cathy presents ‘the groundwork for engendering epistemic humility, or in other words, the groundwork for honouring multiple ways of knowing.’ [4]

The Listening and Responding chapter interrogates the taken for granted monologic nature of classroom transactions and shows how through modelling a different way of being together, where all voices are not just heard but infused with the capacity to think and feel below the surface of things, we can come to think critically. [5]

Cathy doesn’t underestimate how the teacher’s modelling of the dialogic way requires both patience and persistence. And this she shows through the ways in which she works with students preparing to become music teachers. She writes:

‘Many of them experienced repertoire as curriculum, and most, if not all experienced curriculum as teaching/learning musical literacy. But the skills they don’t usually have are those with which to interrogate the models they came from, which means addressing the equity of who may have benefitted from those curriculum models and who quite possibly did not. What might be needed, then, is a more holistic view of engaging with both the human and the musicking context in such a way that the relationships with the other remain at the centre.’ [6]

This is from the introduction to chapter 2, Communicating Justice and Equity: Meeting the Other. Cathy takes Lullaby as her subject. Hush little baby is the centrepiece for seven activities. Throughout Cathy shares in detail how she teaches, what she does, the questions she asks and those she doesn’t ask. By drawing on multiple renderings of the song children are caused to think in many directions about lullaby and much more.

I need to read chapters 1 and 2 again.

The MMC has placed an emphasis on repertoire. There are long lists of what might be thought possible. The question arises what does a piece of repertoire offer the music teacher and their pupils? I am looking forward to the next chapter of Cathy’s book where Peter and the Wolf becomes a centrepiece and like Hush little baby is likely to be the source of substantive thought and fascinating dialogue.

The point is made in the MMC that repertoire is not to be thought of in terms of ‘set works’, a term applied to works set for study at examination level. Yet doesn’t a musical work thought sufficiently valuable to be included in the curriculum deserve careful attention and some reasonable amount of time dedicated to it. Indeed, just like a set work and despite its closed associations? I think so and it may be that a tightly sequenced competency curriculum is hostile to this.

Alas. Cognitive science has inflicted upon us a demoralising definition of learning and this has been taken up by the schools’ inspection body.

But Michael Oakshott writes:

Learning is the comprehensive engagement in which we come to know ourselves and the world around us. [7]

For Oakshott education is a conversation, a form of dialogue.

Notes:

[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/teaching-music-in-schools

[2] For a comprehensive examination and critique of the national curriculum for music see Bate, E. (2020). Justifying music in the national curriculum: The habit concept and the question of social justice and academic rigour. British Journal of Music Education, 37(1), 3-15.

[3] Benedict, C. (2021) Music and Social Justice: A Guide for Elementary Educators. Oxford University Press. Page 9.

[4] ibid. Page 10.

[5] For an exploration of monologisim, dialogism and social justice see Spruce, G. (2021) ‘The pedagogies of the creative classroom’, in Creative and Critical Projects in Classroom Music: Fifty Years of Sound and Silence, Routledge.

[6] Benedict, C. (2021) Music and Social Justice: A Guide for Elementary Educators. Oxford University Press. Page 23.

[7] Oakshott, M. (1975) Learning and Teaching in The Voice of Liberal Learning. Yale University Press. Page 35.

Making and taking music and a model music curriculum

Model Music Curriculum Key Stages 1-3: Non-statutory guidance for the national curriculum in England has now been published by the Department for Education. [1]

In 1967 the children of the Burnt Yates Endowed Primary School, Ripley in Yorkshire created a musical work. It was titled Sea Tower. They too had a model music curriculum.

You are invited to listen. A notated version can be found on pages 54-56 of Sound and Silence: Classroom projects of classroom music. [2]

We can only speculate on the nature of their music curriculum. But we do know from listening to their musical work that descant recorder playing featured and that a piano, xylophone, glockenspiel and untuned percussion were resources at hand. We might speculate further about the children’s previous musical experiences that had provided the capacity to control their resources and to create the musical material that gave form to their thinking and feeling.

We do know that their work grew out of an imaginative discussion about a fossilised sea-urchin which their teacher had brought into school. One of the children describes what happens in their music.

‘The urchin shell was like the dome of an under sea tower, and a storm came and blew it down. The fish were swimming and then the octopus joined in. After the storm the fish swam again.’ [3]

In stimulating an impulse to make music and to make it go on until a work had been formed, the teacher had enabled the children to draw upon their existing musical schemata and to imaginatively expand these. The outcomes had yielded a range a new musical knowledge to consider. Musical intuition now invited in musical analysis.

One of the possibilities offered by Paynter for follow up enrichment of the musical thinking that had been developed was engagement with La Cathedrale Engloutie, a musical work created by Debussy – bell sounds, intimations of plainsong chant play their part in conveying the pathos of the title in Paynter’s view. New pathways beckon for the children and their teacher.

The children in this model music curriculum were coming to know and understand music not merely through their own processes of making but through their processes of taking too, taking from what other’s have created. They were learning ways of being disposed towards music, acquiring skills and making knowledge. But the relationship between this making and taking was a subtle one.

Such a curriculum has meaning making at its heart enabled by dialogic practices that I might suggest live in a far distant place from the imagination of Model Music Curriculum Key Stages 1-3: Non-statutory guidance for the national curriculum in England and its structuring categories.

In his comments throughout the setting out of this project titled Pictures in Music Paynter provides thought about the nature, meaning and function of music, what kind of thing it is (ontology) and how it can be known (epistemology).

Making, taking and thinking – a contrast to other conceptions of a music curriculum.

Notes:

[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/teaching-music-in-schools

[2] Paynter, J. and Aston, P. (1970) Sound and Silence: creative projects in classroom music. Cambridge: Cambridge. University Press.

[3] The text is probably found on-line.