MAKING THE BEST OF THE MMC – THE CHALLENGE: Towards a strategy for action Robert Bunting April 2021

Many of us are angry about the MMC.  It seems to discard, even trample on, things we have given our lives to. But there are dangers in presenting ourselves as bug-eyed radicals bent simply on tearing it down.  And I don’t think we need to. We can see it positively, as a challenge and an opportunity.

I guess most of us feel positive about at least some of the ideas introduced to the NC by the MMC; for instance 

• performing for an audience 
• promoting aural memory 
• revisiting listening repertoire year-on-year 
•  introducing young people to living composers.  

There are other areas where we may be happy with the MMC’s general position, but don’t like the tone, the over-emphasis on conservative cultural values.  For instance, the listening repertoire seems acceptably varied, yet we might feel there’s a hidden agenda about the superiority of the ‘Western Classical’ tradition. 

Still, there’s wiggle-room to work inside the frame: we’re encouraged to adapt the repertoire to suit our own circumstances.

Similarly with composing.  We can at least be relieved that it has a secure place in the MMC.  But we can be very unhappy about the prescriptive approach to teaching ‘technique’, and the staggering lack of awareness of what’s been going on in classroom composing.  50 years of development in expressiveness and inventiveness, in dialogic teaching, building on cultural awareness and thinking about young peoples’ own musical values, have been just ignored! But again – we’re not forbidden to follow our own path!  Perhaps we could find ways to incorporate some at least of the MMC’s treasured ‘technique’ within our preferred way of working?

The MMC’s fundamental flaw is the assumption that the chief aim of the music curriculum is to produce cohorts of dedicated musicians. This is a naive unexamined assumption, but it isn’t actively evil.  The MMC means well; it’s just banal, mediocre, ill-informed, that’s all.  

Some teachers will embrace it.  But others will feel that in order to meet these requirements they will have to dumb down, so they might as well stop searching for anything better.  So – is there space to support teachers in adopting the ways we believe are best within the MMC framework?  Or are there deal-breakers, things we’ll never be able to stomach?  

Here are some acid tests.  Do we agree:

1. that all young people should have some experience of ‘classical’ styles and techniques along with other styles and genres?

• that focused ‘audience listening’ in the classroom can be a valuable experience?

• that all young people should have some understanding of the concepts of pulse and metre, how scales and modes work in different traditions, and how tonal harmony works?

• that all young people should understand the purpose and the basic principles of stave notation, and how it impacts on styles of composing and performing?

If we do, I suggest we could accept the MMC framework.  Those who wrote it may interpret these issues very differently from us, but we could use their language for our own ends.  We could position ourselves, not as determined to tear down the MMC, but as aiming to make it work well, to bring it some quality, imagination, originality, and cultural awareness.  

In the process we might  significantly modify the values of the MMC, but we might be able honestly to say:

• The MMC gives us a good base to build on.  We aim to help teachers and other practitioners bring out its full potential by drawing on the wide range of current classroom practice that emphasises critical and creative thinking and draws on children’s own funds of musical knowledge.

Such a position would give us scope to engage with a wide range of teachers.  Some we may never move, but there are plenty who will respond.  It would also enable us to build bridges between the MMC and those composers, performers and instrumental teachers who are asked to work within its boundaries.

A coherent curriculum for such an approach, progressing stage by stage from Y1 to Y9 and blending creative with formal, is perfectly feasible.  But the advocates and practitioners of this sort of approach to music education have not as yet produced such a curriculum.This may be because much of their (often outstanding) teaching takes the form of brief interventions and highly individualised ways of working – workshops, residencies etc. – rather than sustained year-on-year teaching and a community of shared practice.  If we want young people’s musical education to reflect the best practice available today, we must buckle down and remedy this lack.  Until we do, the authors of the MMC cannot be wholly blamed for falling back on the only curriculum model available.

The first challenge is to develop an approach that marries ‘formal’ with ‘creative’ in a way that more traditional music specialist teachers are happy to embrace.  The second (and even greater) challenge is to make at least some of this approach accessible to non-specialist Primary-phase teachers.  Both of these challenges call for a community of practice, with shared language and pedagogy, sustained by a strong model of progression and some agreement on what constitutes quality of achievement.

Why the MMC approach to composing is so poor – Robert Bunting April 2021

Craft and Technique

The MMC defines the essence of composing as “the craft of creating melodies”  and “familiarity with music in a range of styles and genres” (p.10).  But neither melodies nor pastiche are the only approach to teaching composing, and for school purposes they are emphatically not the best.

Expressiveness and Inventiveness

In KS1 children “start to learn some simple compositional techniques and structures …. The curriculum is technique-based” (P.11)

This would be fine if it were based on a more fruitful idea of what composing ‘technique’ might mean. For MMC, ‘technique’ must mean tonal, metrical and note-by-note.  But young people work with a broader brush, a freer ‘whole-piece’ approach.  This might include expressive gesture in sound – experimenting with timbre, dynamics, texture, and pitch patterns – inventing motifs, sequences and structures – beginning to get the hang of design processes.  These too are techniques, aurally and intellectually demanding ones, and techniques that provide a rich field for imaginative thinking, inventiveness and expressiveness, which are the true foundations of music. Of course, formal note-by-note harmonic and melodic techniques are an essential part of the curriculum, and at a later stage, if enriched by this imaginative approach, their contributioncan be extremely fruitful.

But there’s no hint of such an approach, as we soon discover.

In Y3 children are expected to “combine known rhythmic notation with letter names to create rising and falling phrases using just three notes (do, re and mi).”(p.23)

Where’s the imagination and expressiveness in that?  Where’s the fun? Is Y3’s time really best used cobbling together meaningless three-note phrases?  Why the insistence on notation?  What is going on here?  It’s a stifling note-by-note approach, like painting by numbers, or constructing a toy car from a set of instructions – not in the least creative.  Children are being trapped in a box, moulded to think in a certain way.  No Art or Drama teacher would work like this.

Instead of asking themselves how young people think musically, how their understanding grows, or what fires their imaginations, the committee has fixed an academic ideal of what techniques should be known by age 14, and invented a progression going backwards by ever simpler steps to arrive in Y3 at do re mi.

Moving on from Y3 with its 3 notes, by Y6 we arrive at this (p.34):

“Plan and compose an 8- or 16-beat melodic phrase using the pentatonic scale… and incorporate rhythmic variety and interest…. Notate this melody. “

“Compose melodies made from pairs of phrases in either G major or E minor or a key suitable for the instrument chosen”

What strange briefs!  How children’s thinking is boxed in!  See how once again notation quite gratuitously rears its head! Variety and interest should be where composing starts, not something to be tacked on afterwards.

And in KS3 (p.37) “… by the end of Year 9, all pupils should be able to form and use primary chords in a number of keys and embellish these with bass lines, melodies and rhythmic accompaniment. Many pupils will have developed confidence in handling more sophisticated harmony …”

Does creative thinking always and only start from a chord sequence?  Are melody, rhythm and bass merely ‘embellishments’?  Is our over-riding aim simply to become more ‘sophisticated’ in our ‘harmony’?  The unexamined assumptions in every word of this one sentence are quite suffocating.

Quality, progress, progression

The Model Curriculum shows no understanding of the musical imagination, no recognition of exploration and inventiveness, no awareness of the power of design processes. It can thus provide no measure of quality in composing, nor of progress in the mastery of craft and technique. For the MMC progression exists merely in a mechanical sense, as the use of increasing numbers of notes and more complex chords, scales and textures – however poor the resultant thinking may be.

This is all the more depressing because the UK can draw on a much richer vision of classroom composing, with a fifty-year history, which has generated a wealth of brilliant practice embodied in current major national projects and recent publications.  Was any effort made to draw on this?

Critical thoughts on the Model Music Curriculum – Robert Bunting 2021

Some strengths of the MMC (above and beyond those that are already in the NC):

1. “LISTENING” (close studies of individual pieces of music) is promoted to become the driving force of the curriculum.  Handled in the right way(dialogic, imaginative, integrated with composing and performing), this can be a powerful approach (though we would need better guidance on teaching strategies than the MMC provides).
2. And given that, it is absolutely right to insist on sometimes stretching young people’s imaginations through close attention to classical music.
3. Some listening pieces are intended to be revisited year on year, giving scope for systematic building on previous learning.  This is a powerful but under-used strategy. For young people to leave school with a life-long memory bank of a few well-understood and well-loved pieces of music would be an excellent outcome.
4. PERFORMING stresses the value of whole-class presentations to an audience. This handled well can gives young people valuable insight into the design processes – choosing repertoire, rehearsing, programme planning, venue issues, stage management, connecting with the audience, evaluation –  at the heart of any performer’s thinking.
5. There’s a welcome emphasis on building aural memory – this is crucial to all music learning, but isn’t mentioned in the N.C. 
6. Schools are encouraged to introduce young people to living composers.
7. The MMC does insist on the need for progression across the age-range. We may have strong reservations about the narrowness of the model they put forward, let alone its feasibility in practice, but this is a worthy and much-needed aim.

Some weaknesses of the MMC:

1. Its core purpose is to give young people “a lifelong passion for music making” (p.36).  To teachers steeped in music this seems obvious – they want all children to grow up, like them, as passionately active doers.   A less narrowly-focused teacher would want each child to grow in its own way, whether music is a passion or not.  A better aim then would be: “to give every young person an understanding of music’s place in their own life and in the world”– thinking and feeling for themselves, not just doing.  But this would call for a very different sort of teaching. 

• The values, and hence teaching styles, of MMC are at heart those of the Conservatoire – based on Western classical music of what to children is the distant past (pre-1900).  This shows itself in countless odd or out-dated choices of word and turns of phrase. True, major and minor scales, triads, 8-bar melodic phrases, Ternary Form are not restricted to classical music, they are part of most popular music genres as well.  But MMC’s approach remains uncomfortably academic, close to that of the old ‘O’-Level exam – especially in its fixation on notation.

• The  over-riding emphasis throughout the MMC is on a progressionthat is narrowly focused on music theory and notation.  This progression dominates the entire composing and performing curriculum. Primary schools are expected to deliver the progression, with its ever-more complex theory and notation; but this is problematic -few Primary-phase teachers will have the required musicianship, especially for the more complex demands of Years 5 and 6. To mitigate this, MMC suggests that a school can put together a coherent music programme “from a combination of schools, teachers, practitioners, professional ensembles, venues, and other Music Education Hub partners working collaboratively.” (p.5)  Quite a hotch-potch!  How likely is this to produce a coherent progressive curriculum? It feels more like a massive exercise in wishful thinking.  Yet if Primary schools can’t deliver the required progression, the whole structure of the MMC collapses.

• Yes, of course we need some model of progression across the age-range, (although one that is a bit wider than crotchets and triads); but the focus on seamless progression in performing and composing from 5-14 is too intense. It channels learning into a narrow funnel and skews priorities.  The rate of progress envisaged is unrealistic; it sets Primary non-specialists up for failure, and dooms Secondary specialists to frustration. Every teacher needs the freedom to provide musical experiences that enrich theseparticular children’s general education at thismoment of time – to respond to what is happening in their lives now, rather than aim always for some far future narrow goal. This would open up a far richer view of what music education can be.

• LISTENING.  The many lists of music recommended for listening cover a commendable range of musical styles. But there’s too much music here!   For each year there are 36 recommended listening items, including 10 different “Musical Traditions” from“non-Western” cultures. Fewer items and more careful study would be a better strategy; getting close to any piece of music and fully connecting to its culture needs skilled, detailed teaching.  Exploring 3 “Traditions” per year in detail is much  more meaningful than dabbling in 10. 

• Unlike performing and composing, there’s no model of progression for audience listening!  It’s a complex skill-set in its own right (analysis, research, cultural awareness…), that takes time to develop and needs to be imaginatively taught. But the MMC doesn’t see it that way; it assumes that children will just instantly absorb the music’s meanings, and that 6-year-old children’s way of understanding music is much the same as that of teenagers. 

• COMPOSING The MMC approach to composing is so misguided, it needs separate consideration (see my accompanying paper “Why the MMC on Composing is so wrong”).  In brief – MMC seeks to define a limited set of ‘techniques’:  it establishes an imaginary ladder rising gradually upwards from Y3, at which stage melodies are limited to just three notes, through Y6, at which stage pupils are considered ready to use the pentatonic scale, to a pinnacle in Y9 where the syllabus includes major and minor scales and triads, bass lines, and melodies constructed in phrases. Instead of starting from an understanding of how children’s own musical thinking develops, the MMC assumes a blank slate and imposes an adult professional model, moulding young peoples’ supposedly empty minds and funnelling them into a totally fictitious progression. In the process expressiveness and inventiveness – the essence of music – are stifled.

The curriculum gives no indication of what would constitute QUALITY of outcomes in composing, listening, or performing (other than to some extent singing).

[Robert’s composing paper to follow.]