Placing musical concepts in the order of things

Does using the so-called ‘elements of music’ as a classificatory framework lead to obscuring the particularities of musical phenomena and the erosion of difference?

I have derived this statement from Adorno’s concept of identity thinking. [1]

I will try to show how a critique of what Adorno calls identity thinking raises questions about the desirability of a concept-led music curriculum. As an alternative I will propose a music curriculum drawn forward by musical meaning making in which musical concepts know their place.

Propositions:

1. Music is non-conceptual
2. There are concepts about music
3. But the concept is not identical with the musical object or musical practice (the thing) which it claims to represent
4. Thus, the concept mis-represents the reality of the thing
5. The reality of the thing is more complex than can be contained by concepts (words)
6. In this process of mis-representation particularities revealing its infinite uniqueness are lost
7. The thing’s uniqueness and incomparability with, and infinite difference from other musical things is negated
8. A concept-led music curriculum values homogeneity over difference

The so-called elements of music – pitch, timbre, rhythm, pulse etc. (and paralleled in visual art: colour, line, perspective, composition etc.) and their subsidiaries are examples of concepts about music.

The musical elements are used widely within music education as the preferred classificatory framework. In enabling discourse about music the framework acts both positively and negatively in the way that it narrows, contains and constrains responses to music. This is exemplified well in the GCSE Music written exam.

This classificatory framework emanates from a western art music tradition, yet comes to be freely applied to all musical traditions and their diverse practices. Application easily becomes insensitive to a vast range of cultural expressions and their characteristically idiosyncratic musical features. [2]

Thus, the tendency to diminish difference through assigning a musical element – concept, as a common denominator across different musics.

Furthermore, in the language that is sanctioned through a concept-led curriculum there is little place for the personal, poetic or the lyrical. Again, we see this most vividly played out in aspects of the GCSE Music written exam.

The order of things

To be clear, while music is non-conceptual, concepts about music inevitably play a part of music as a subject of the curriculum. However, I suggest finding their place in the order of things is worth considering. So, what would this look like?

It would assume that what was being brought to the classroom offers something of complexity, something rich with context and charged with the possibility of in depth meaning making. [3] Secondary school music teacher Jo did this by playing Steve Reich’s Different Trains to her year 9 pupils.

Music critic Richard Taruskin writes:

‘… in Different Trains (1988) Mr. Reich went the full distance and earned his place among the great composers of the century. …  Mr. Reich based the melodic content of the piece on the contour and rhythm of ordinary human speech. But in his case the speech consisted of fragments of oral history, looped into Reichian ostinatos, then resolved into musical phrases conforming to normal tunings, scales and rhythms of ‘Western music’, imaginatively scored for string quartet. These speech melodies were set in counterpoint with the original speech samples, all of it measured against a Reichian chug.’ [4]

What if we presented the above for year 9 pupils to read? What sense would be made of it? You might say, ‘not much, it’s packed with sophisticated concepts’. I counted twenty-five! A lot of abstractions there. And a lot not accounted for in the music.

But what is a speech melody? I guess year 9 know what a melody is and they have sung and imagined a good many musical phrases. Fragments of oral history? Counterpoint? Reichian ostinatos? String quartet? Not so likely.

Perhaps these will be things we talk about, ideas that become a part of our classroom discourse over time as work unfolds, as a curriculum response to Different Trains emerges. [5]

Taruskin continues by telling about the significance of Different Trains. Reich’s childhood train journeys from coast to coast and the train journeys of children to Auschwitz.

I note above that Richard Taruskin places Different Trains in the 20th century canon of art music and Reich becomes a ‘great composer’. What a ‘talking point’. Jo’s pupils are well schooled in purposeful talking with ground rules well internalised.

And there are lots more talking points to intersperse and enrich the sustained periods of music making. Who is a great composer? Who decides? What is art music? What is a canon? What’s your canon? Why does it change? Does it?

So perhaps the Taruskin text rewritten by the pupils and the teacher could be a central resource.

What narratives, musical and literary, will pupils produce as they develop their processes of making life narratives through music?

In the pupils own musical narrative creations, what range of musical techniques might be useful?

How will technologies serve the musical impulses that arise?

At what points will Steve Reich be invited (metaphorically) into the classroom as a guest?

What range of interventions (disruptions) might the teacher have in mind to help deepen and sustain the work? Will these come from the pupils ?

How will the work generate fresh thinking, further possibilities, ideas about other good places to go?

What novel concepts will have emerged to enrich understanding of the music made. Tariskin has given us the Reichian chug.

Well, that’s enough.

A whole term’s work here, at least. Not led by concepts. Not a project driven by key concepts or enslaved by knowledge organisers, but one which allows conceptual thought to emerge through recognising something of the uniqueness of Different Trains and its realities. Its objectification is kept at bay.

Engaging with Different Trains here is led not by concepts but by an impulse to make meaning, the reason for engaging with any music in the first place as Chris Philpott points out. [6]

So, not a concept-led curriculum, rather one from the outset for making musical meaning.

Does using the so-called ‘elements of music’ as a classificatory framework lead to obscuring the particularities of musical phenomena and the erosion of difference?

Well, that depends you might say.

Notes:

[1] Adorno’s critique of identity thinking is central to his magnum opus Negative Dialectics.

[2] It may be interesting to note that Keith Swanwick argues that it is features that strike us about the music we experience, not concepts.

See Swanwick, K. (1994) Musical Knowledge: Intuition, Analysis and Music Education. Routledge.

[3] See https://jfin107.wordpress.com/through-the-lens-of-levinas-practices-of-facing-in-the-music-classroom-and-beyond/   

[4] Taruskin, R. (2010) The Danger of Music and Other Utopian Essays. University of California Press. Page 102.

[5] On emergent curriculum see Cooke, C. and Spruce, G. (2016) What is a curriculum? In Learning to Teach Music in the Secondary school 3^rd. edition (eds) Carolyn Cooke, Keith Evans, Chris Philpott and Gary Spruce. Routledge.

[6] See Philpott, C. (2021) Music and the Making of Meaning. In Creative and Critical Projects in Classroom Music: Fifty Years of Sound and Silence, (eds) John Finney, Chris Philpott and Gary Spruce. Routledge.