A music teacher teaching uninformed by cognitive science

In this secondary school year 7 pupils are learning to sing O Waly Waly.

The teacher has selected O Waly, Waly ‘simply because it is a beautiful song’ and is intent on teaching the class to make a beautiful sound.

I’m interested to know whether the singing is accompanied or unaccompanied.

The teacher adds:

‘I play the piano, sometimes big, juicy, arpeggiated chords, and sometimes simple, still chords. Always with much dynamic contrast and rubato. They follow me well, and enjoy it when I prolong the silence before the penultimate line. When they get it right, it is magical.’

‘I prolong the silence before the penultimate line.’

The teacher explains:

‘I think the silence creates a moment where not a single student can escape from being musical or from being ‘in flow’. In that silence, every student is compelled to engage in musical feeling, watching, breathing, pitching, and enjoying a resolution. All bodies need to be dancing together.’

O Waly, Waly is a song of good provenance as they say. [1] Some claim it as a song from the sixteenth century, some that it has Irish origins, some say Scottish, some English.

An internet search shows a great many performance versions and arrangements, and even a discussion forum relating to its provenance.

A Pete Seeger version of the song is near the top of the internet library along with responses from listeners. One response told that the performance was intended to draw attention to the pollution of the Hudson River. Well, we know Pete Seeger was a political activist.

As you will have noted, the teacher’s choice of O Waly Waly is leading me to open up a conversation with the song and to examine its provenance. I am reminded of Chris Philpott writing:

‘Each piece of music (whether we are performing or creating it) comes with an ‘attitude’ of its own and along with our own values and beliefs (which Gadamer calls ‘prejudices’)  engages in a playful dialogue in order to construct meaning.’ [2]

The teacher above achieves this playful dialogue with the ‘silence’ before the penultinate line of each verse. I have taken the idea of playful dialogue to a second level in searching out the song’s provenance. And I have only just begun.

O Waly Waly – the teacher has something of a treasure in her hands opening up ‘complex webs of meaning’ and placing interpretation at the heart of a music education. And this means critical engagement, and rather more than what is usually taken as appraising.

Notes:

[1] Provenance seems to have two meanings, the first begets the second.  First ‘origin’, and then ‘history-lineage’; we find the term provenance much used in relation to antiques. What is its source, origin, its life history, its condition, how has it been looked after?

If ‘musical provenance’ is important, as Ousted in the past have suggested, we should ask ourselves: is the content of what is brought to the classroom rich, thick with possibilities? Will it defy easy assimilation and mastery?  Will it call forth thinking? Will it defy methods of assessment that prohibit openness? Will activities defy being matched with tidily delineated outcomes?

[2] Philpott, C. (2013) The justification for music in the curriculum, in (eds) Chris Philpott and Gary Spruce, Debates in Music Teaching. Routledge: London.Advertisements

Audience Listening in the MMC

Robert Bunting continues his review of the Model Music Curriculum.

What are we to make of this?Some of it it seems good: there are emphases on aural memory and on deepening learning through returning to music studied in previous years, both of which are excellent. And many teachers, particularly non-specialists,will find the lists of suggested items from such a wide cultural range extremely useful.

Then suddenly it looks sinister. The language is constantly that of ‘shared knowledge’, as if it’s the sharing that’s important; and it’s here that my doubts surface. MMC’s Appendix 2 gives us some guidance on what this ‘shared knowledge’ should be, and it’s just basic factual information about composer andwork, with perhaps a bit of banal cultural background. This seems a very limited concept of what gathering ‘knowledge’ of a piece of music means. We search the music we hear to discover technical secrets and to make our own meanings, and each time we return to a familiar piece we progress; we listen more skilfully, we find new meanings.

The programme also seems unrealistically demanding.There’s a wide range of styles, genres and traditions, which is good; but to specify 30 pieces of music peryear implies acquiring shared knowledge of one new piece per week – as part of a 60-minute lesson which must also include singing and/or learning to play instruments, composing, and learning to read notation. It can only mean that this is minimal shared knowledge is to be imparted directly and rapidly to the class by top-down transmission; only then does rattling once through each of those 30 items,each with its little bundle of received information and opinion, suddenly becomefeasible.

There’s an underlying (unacknowledged) sense of Western Classical Music as the‘canon’, the one tradition everyone should know. For example, p.18. “Pupils will further develop their shared knowledge of important moments in the evolution of music”. For classical music this is a key part of one’s indoctrination, but are we expected to extend it to the evolution of jazz, Middle Eastern music, or qawwali? Another telling example is the Y1 repertoire suggested on p.14 for ‘moving to thepulse’: Stepping (e.g. Mattachins from Capriol Suite by Warlock) – Jumping (e.g.Trepak from The Nutcracker by Tchaikovsky – Walking on tiptoes (e.g. Scherzofrom The Firebird Suite by Stravinsky). And in Y2 the examples for ‘walking in timeto beat’ are (p.17): La Mourisque by Susato- Maple Leaf Rag by Joplin – TheElephant from Carnival of the Animals by Saint-Saëns.Only a died-in-the-wool classical musician could have chosen just this range of pieces.

‘Shared knowledge’ implies that all children should know and feel the same things about the music they’re listening to. It’s an exercise in moulding a whole population’s musical perspectives. Yes, a national curriculum should have the role of creating some sort of nation-wide shared understanding. And yes, the Western Classical tradition is a magnificent cultural achievement all young people shouldknow something about. I don’t have a quarrel with any of that; but I would want to see young people developing the skills to acquire knowledge for themselves, rather than passively receive pre-digested packets of facts.

As so often withthe MMC, it’s what’s left out that worries me.

The MMC doesn’t make it clear how the different styles, genres and traditions relateto each other. Which of the many theoretical or ideological constructs available do they feel best tells us how Reggae and Renaissance polyphony fit together, speak to each other, in the culture of the world? The ideological drive behind the MMC seems to be to inject the entire school population quite passively with a massive shot of cultural capital – the phrase MMC itself uses. The (unspoken) implication is that this equates with Western classical music. And part of me says, yes it’s not a bad idea to widen young people’s horizons and challenge them with some deep, complex music. But young people already have cultural capital of their own – richand growing bodies of both musical experience and cultural constructs; we need to negotiate a careful pathway from there towards any deep understanding of the ‘Classics’. We need to tread delicately. But the MMC doesn’t have much room for delicacy. “Classroom listening is easy-peasy – just sit them down and turn up thevolume…..Flood them with music, they’ll immediately love and understand whatever we expose them to; whatever age they are, they’ll just soak it up unthinkingly”. For over 60 years teachers have tried to do this, and their experiences should tell us that’s not how it works.

‘Audience listening’ is a special and challenging form of listening. It’s not the kindyou do when you’re part of the class rehearsing a song, or roaming the keyboard in search of ideas for your next composition; there’s a crucial element of sitting insilence, giving the sounds alone your full attention for their own sake. Each of you is listening as an individual, trying to decipher another musician’s thinking processes. That’s unfamiliar, and not easy! It takes some learning, but it’s good learning, calling for high levels of responsiveness, imagination, aural perception and memory, supported in the higher reaches by a range of research skills.This kind of listening isn’t in the least ‘passive’ just because we don’t move or make a sound!

Alongside the MMC’s passive ‘shared knowledge’ we need to be fostering individualknowledge and skills – enabling each young person to develop ideas and feelings for themselves. This calls for a teacher who knows how to focus her pupils’ listening and can lead them deeper into the music by skilful questioning and imaginative listening tasks.To take one example, the MMC encourages us to enhanceunderstanding of the music we are studying through performing and composing,which is an excellent strategy.

So – a skilful, knowledgeable teacher, and a series of carefully prepared in-depth listening experiences from a small but varied repertoire, integrated with inventing and interpreting and culminating in individual critical understanding. I would love to be part of that. But do we perhaps need more than one lesson per week to get the benefit? Can we really do this beautiful thing for 30 pieces a year, of wildly different styles, genres and traditions?

Music Education and the Innocence of Childhood

A ten minute presentation at the recent online seminar Paynter organised by the Birmingham Music Education Research Group at Birmingham City University alongside co-editors Gary Spruce, Chris Philpott of Creative and Critical Projects in Classroom Music: Fifty Years of Sound and Silence.

Paynter and Aston’s Sound and Silenceof 1970 begins with three stories of children and young people making music. The first tells us about Alan, aged 6, moving stealthily across the classroom. 

‘He is a ‘wolf ‘creeping out of the deep, dark forest. As he creeps he makes music: a pattern of mysterious taps          and scraping sounds which tell us that the Wolf and the forest are sinister and fearful. No-one has instructed          him: Alan chose the drum himself and decided for himself how the wolf’s music should go.’ [1]

What I want to explore here is how at the time this represented a particular view of childhood and ask what kind of view we might wish to hold at the present time. By childhood I refer to age 0 to 18.

I suggest that this is a crucial question and one often lying in the shadows or hidden under the floorboards of what we do in the name of music education. The assumptions we make about the nature of childhood are of course deeply engrained in society and embedded within our practices..                                                                                                                                       

The image of Alan inventing music as he creeps stealthily across the classroom is a powerful one. It’s an image of a child engrossed in imaginative thought and feeling that fits easily into the tradition of child-centred education emerging from the thought of philosophers John Locke [2] and Jean Jacques Rousseau [3] in the 18^thcentury and stimulated by the English romantic poets of the early nineteenth century. Wordsworth, for example, idealised childhood as a time of innocence and closeness to nature, a time when the child’s way of seeing the world allowed for a unique perspective on reality.  It was thought that the innocent seeing and hearing of the child was paralleled in the visionary seeing of the artist.  And this gave the artist a privileged place in society. [4] If the ideal of perpetual childhood was not possible then it was the child-like adult artist who would be able to sustain this vision of transcendent reality. And indeed we may still think about the artist as foreseeing and visionary. 

In John Paynter’s view the child possessed above all else an imagination – the ability to respond to the world, its sounds, its music and whatever other images were there to be encountered. It was simply a case of being responsive to the  here and now and finding an impulse to express thoughts and feelings, and in the case of music, through sound. The child possessed a nascent creativity and was blessed with an innocent ear. 

For the most part, we have come to see this view of childhood as naively romantic – verging on the sentimental, a childhood from which fables are made. Yet it was this belief that enabled Paynter, together with Aston, to realise a highly original book comprising thirty-six projects and a vast number of novel assignments. The tasks set were supported by exemplarly work created by children providing proof of the pudding. But as the authors made clear, this is not just about the process of ‘making’. There needed to be a process of ‘taking’ too. Thus there was the expectation that the maker would be refreshed and come to know a repertoire of musical works. But, and it is a big but, contact with existing repertoire was to be seen as subordinate to what the child had to say musically. While the teacher may take their starting point from the techniques and practices of other composers in order to create a subtle scaffold, the child responds largely unburdened by this knowledge. The child’s newly created piece for prepared piano comes to live alongside the prepared piano music of John Cage, for example. Thus the sovereignty of childhood is celebrated with the child more expert than novice. And this has considerable implications for the way childrens’ work would be given value – that is, assessed.

In Paynter’s scheme childhood was thought of as a time apart from adulthood  – ‘a time in itself’.  Childhood was simply different to adulthood, the two were largely unconnected. Childhood was neither inferior nor superior to adulthood. The child was neither immature or mature. The child was just different and this meant, as the child-centered educators saw it, that music education could offer a space in which, with suitable support and guidance, children could  be composers.  And this would be in a climate where directions of travel were open rather than closed or pre-determined. The classroom was a place where time could be made for ‘interesting conversations to take place’.

Come forward fifty years.  Are our classrooms places where there is time for interesting conversations to take place? 

And what conceptions of childhood dominate now and impinge on music education?

Wyness maintains that today children are thought of as having inferior status to adults and as being limited to subordinate roles. They are thought of as a minority group and above all else dependant. [5] Henry Giroux points out that not only are children presented as dependant but also innocent. Once presented as innocent they are in need of protection, and once protected they are available for exploitation. [6] But perhaps the dominant conception is of the child is one of being immature, becoming something, rather than being something, on a rung of a ladder, becoming school ready, phonics test ready, secondary school ready, always being prepared for the next stage, on a flight path rather than being capable here and now of mature actions. 

On the other hand, Elizabeth Beck-Gersheim referes to children today as freedoms children. Perhaps Greta Gunberg comes to mind. These children don’t accept the agenda given. Freedom has arrived and this means that they expect to have an opportunity to shape their own education. They are ready participants. Elizabeth writes:

         ‘They practise a seeking, experimenting morality          that ties together things that seem mutually exclusive:          egoism and altruism, self-realisation and active          compassion’. [7]

What is clear is that the child is wanting respect and recognition as a potential agent in their own being and becoming, and in conjunction with adults, having a desire for some degree of self-determination.

Distinctions between a child-centred and a subject-centred curriculum no longer make much sense. Even Sound and Silencecan be read as concerned with music’s deep structure as it engages with a vast range of musical techniques. [8]

What it does signal still is that there can be a space in the process of learning where the child feels free to know agency and a good degree of self-determination. We hope that our fifty years on book provides for this and for the dialogic space where knowledge and meaning can be made. And of course there can be no knowledge without meaning.

Notes:

[1] Paynter, J. and Aston, P. (1970) Sound and Silence. CUP.

[2] John Locke’s Treatise on Education and the recognition of childhood play is often seen as a foundational text within the child-centred tradition. Locke has no place for music aligning it with the singing of bawdy singing behaviour in public houses.

[3] Rousseau’s fable Emiledevelops ideas from Locke. There is here however, a substantial commitment to music. Rousseau attends to suitable vocal repertoire and to the child’s capacity to compose music.

[4] See Wordworth’s ode ‘Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Childhood’.

[5] Wyness, M. (2000) Contesting Childhood. Sage.

[6] Giroux, H. (2006) The Giroux Reader. Paradigm Publishers.

[7] Beck, U. and Beck-Gersheim, E. (2008) Individualization. Sage.

[8] For a discussion of the place of pupil voice within music education see Finney, J. A Question of Voicein National Association of Music Educators Magazine, Issue No. 31, Autumn 2010.