To be critical is to be thoughtful, reflective, evaluative, analytical, knowing, insightful and a symbol of becoming wide-awake to the world: musical experience, if it is to be educative and part of a compulsory education, calls for a critical orientation. It calls for a growing awareness of what music is, how it is used, how music is given meaning and how these meanings are continually negotiated and re-negotiated. It calls for a recognition that music has human interest: social, cultural and political. Without a critical orientation music ceases to be a subject of significance.
In this paper I set out to envigorate the idea of musical criticism and move beyond its traditional musicologically constrained meaning. I will do this by showing how processes of musical meaning making can be foregrounded as part of a pedagogy that is both dialogic, and importantly, critical.
I present two classroom scenarios from the music programmes of two secondary school music teachers, each working with a class of twenty five pupils aged twelve to thirteen in the East of England in their once weekly music lesson.
Who will start the conservation?
This was the question asked by the teacher Katie at the beginning of their weekly music lesson. ‘Who will start the conversation’. So what was the conversation to be about? The class had entered to Mars the Bringer of War from Gustav Holst’s The Planet Suite. They have settled quickly and attended to the music. White boards are given out and pupils asked to write down a question they would like to ask another pupil, their teacher or their visitor (that’s me) about the music. And hence the question from the teacher: ‘Who will start the conversation?’
The class are used to being asked this question. It is a question that opens up a dialogic process of enquiry at the heart of which are questions about the meaning of music. In this case an enquiry into the meanings that might be ascribed to the experience of the music just heard.
If as Chris Philpott maintains [2] it is the making of meaning that is at the heart of our reason for engaging with music in the first place, then it becomes a responsibility of the teacher to not only to acknowledge this but to bring the matter to the foreground of classroom experience. And this within a general music education for all pupils.
Who will start the conversation?
The first question is asked of the teacher:
Q: ‘Why did you choose this piece of music?’
A: ‘It is a piece to react to; a piece to feel and think about. It’s a piece to respond to.’
Second question from Holly to Samantha:
Q: ‘What is your favourite part of the music?’
A: ‘I like all of it. And you want to know what is going to happen next.’
Q: ‘Have you ever heard music like this before? …’
Now the Star Wars connection comes out and is in play as part of the conversation.
Then, an interesting turn:
Q: ‘Was this music composed by a boy or a girl?’
A: ‘Boy, it’s loud and dramatic.’
Q: ‘What was going through her mind when she composed it? …’
The conversation returns to Star Wars:
Q: ‘Do you think this music is scary?’
The music’s delineated meaning have become the focus.
Teacher intervention: ‘Let’s listen again, how does it start?’
Pupils: ‘Really low notes’ … ’it folds in and folds out’ … ’tapping’.
The teacher’s intervention has led to a turn toward the music’s inherent meanings. Yes, the music begins with low pitched sounds and the folding in and out is a likely reference to the surging sforzando effect, while tapping being a reference to the insistent rhythmic ostinato.
The teacher links these responses to earlier pupil questions.
Now composing a piece in response to the music as a whole class. Each pupil invents a response to the music of Holst. There follows a period of listening to each other’s musical ideas engendering a whole class musical dialogue. Through teacher-pupil dialogue a whole piece is assembled, a performance of which becomes a fitting ending to the one hour of musical meaning making.
In this case, a new project for the class has been initiated through experiencing music new to the pupils, a new experience offering opportunity for pupils to open themselves up to the meanings that radiate from the music. In presenting the music free from any predetermined set of meanings the teacher has created a space for dialogue and unimagined fresh webs of meaning.
It is worthy of note that the pupil’s questions and responses are likely to have been beyond what the teacher or any of us might have imagined.
Yet the pupils come to the experience with histories of musical meaning making, with a set of inherited prejudices or prejudgements and nascent theories of their own about musical meanings – that music delineates meaning, that it can be gendered, for example. They come with critical acumen.
In this example of meaning making through dialogic practice the teacher is causing pupils to think differently, to think critically. And this we further see in my second example.
Here the teacher is exploring an approach developed from his recent introduction to critical musicology. He makes what he terms ‘a philosophical enquiry into the music classroom’.
Thinking differently in the time of Tsunami and the Arab Spring
Here the teacher is testing out ways in which a class of year 8 pupils could be challenged to think about music differently, how their habitual ways of thinking about music might be disturbed. A sequence of music lessons with composing at the centre were presented to pupils as an enquiry structured by the question: what does music mean? The teacher provides his class with what he referred to as provocative scenarios. His intention was to stimulate the student’s curiosity and questioning, as they embarked upon their composing. The year is 2011 and two events of international significance are in the news. In Japan there has been a devastating tsunami and in the Middle East there is revolt that has come to be known as the Arab Spring.
The teacher David writes about making music together as a whole class:
‘All students sat in a circle playing barred instruments. The first third of their piece we created used the Japanese semi-tone major 3rd scale on B (B-C-E-F-A). Against the backdrop of a pianissimo rolled E, an F was gradually faded in and out, exploring the initial tensions of the tsunami. The B-C was then added to emphasise the nervous mood. All the notes gradually underwent a crescendo and were sustained fortissimo for a few moments before a sudden silence. A similar process was repeated, this time using a second, more blues-like Japanese scale. The familiarity of the sound led one student to interpret this section as the reaction of the international community.’ [3]
And now another pupil has the idea of using the two scales at the same time. And so the lessons proceed in dialogic fashion, with the teacher skilfully leading the way provoking thoughtful questions that challenge assumptions about music and its meanings. And now the introduction of the composition task: to make a soundtrack for a montage of images of the recent Egyptian revolution using the Japanese scales. Why Japanese scales, some pupils ask? More dialogic work follows, with more thinking nurtured by the teacher’s gently teasing responses.
Neither of the two examples is commonplace in our school music classrooms in England. Both adopt a dialogic pedagogy through engaging their pupils in an enquiry and it is this that draws the learning forward. In this the processes of making of musical meaning are brought to the fore. The music of Gustav Holst and then the juxtoposition of scalic delineations heighten questions about meaning and its making understood as ‘open interpretation’ or what Chris Philpott ‘the practice of music as hermeneutics’ and ‘the discourse about music as hermeneutics’. [4]
We might speculate how over a series of lessons the music of Gustav Holst might continue to stimulate an ever expanding range of interpretations, opening up fresh lines of enquiry, creating fresh complexities and contradictions in the way the second teacher did.
The kind of contextual richness emerging in these classrooms is not typically to be found, complexities are rarely embraced and the demands of school assessment structures frequently bring about the early closure of what is there to explore. [5]
I think these two scenarios throw into sharp relief what the English National Curriculum for Music refers to as critical engagement.
Within the purpose of study for pupils aged 11-14 we read:
‘As pupils progress, they should develop a critical engagement with music, allowing them to compose, and to listen with discrimination to the best in the musical canon.’ [6]
The place of critical engagement with music is acknowledged as a part of pupil’s musical development and by implication their adoption of the role of musical critic, yet this is within a closed musical order.
In the Oxford Companion to Music musical criticism is defined as ‘the intellectual activity of formulating judgments on the value and degree of excellence of individual works of music, or whole groups or genres’. [7]
Here musical criticism is placed within the tradition of European Philosophical Aesthetics and created to serve the valuing and promotion of European Art Music.
So what might be understood by ‘critical engagement with music’ in a scheme of music education?
A minimal understanding of critical engagement might expect processes of reflection, evaluation and that contribute to the education of judgement. Indeed, this could be aligned with the notion of musical criticism as commonly understood as part of the scholastic tradition of Western European art music.
However, in the scenarios presented there is evidence of something rather more than this. We see critical thinking arising from dialogic practice [8], where active participation from the whole class community suggests a model of democracy, where assumptions are disrupted and re-examined. There is engagement with complexity calling for awareness of what music is, how it is used, how music is given meaning and how meanings are continually negotiated and re-negotiated. It recognises that music has human interest – social, cultural and political. This would seem to be rather more than the minimal kind of critical engagement conceived of in the official curriculum and in traditional notions of what is understood by musical criticism.
In so far as the pupil is changed from being the object of the classroom to being an active critical subject given critical agency, I hope to have presented a window into what a critical pedagogy might consist of, relying as it does on dialogic-participatory practice foregrounding processes of musical meaning making. And, with the potential to contribute to an open rather than closed musical order.
Notes:
[1] Paper delivered at the European Association for Music in Schools, Belgrade April 8th 2022 as part of the symposium What do we mean by meaning in music education?. The symposium was led by Chris Philpott – A framework for meaning in music education with further contributions form Gary Spruce – A social justice perspective on musical meaning and Carolyn Cooke – Making meaningful relationships.
[2] See Philpott, C. (2021) Music and the making of meaning in (eds) Finney, J., Philpott, G. and Spruce, G. Creative and critical projects in classroom music: Fifty years of Sound and Silence. Routledge.
[3] Thompson, D. (2011) Investigating pedagogic strategies for increasing students’ understanding of the constructed nature of musical meaning: Igniting Wenger’s Local-global Duality in a year 8 music class. In-depth study, University of Cambridge, Faculty of Education.
[4] Philpott, C. (2021) Music and the making of meaning in (eds) Finney, J., Philpott, G. and Spruce, G. Creative and critical projects in classroom music: Fifty years of Sound and Silence. Routledge.
See also Wicks, R. (2013) The art of interpretation – Hans Georg Gadamer in European Aesthetics: A critical introduction from Kant to Derrida. Oneworld Book Publications.
Kramer, L. (2011) Interpreting music. University of California Press.
[5] See Kathryn Jourdan’s Through the lens of Levinas https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/256142?show=full
[6] Department for Education (2013) National Curriculum for England. Music Programme of Study. London.
[7] The Oxford Companion to Music was published on-line in 2011.
[8] See Spruce, G. (2021) The pedagogues of the creative classroom: Towards a socially just music education in (eds) Finney, J., Philpott, G. and Spruce, G. Creative and critical projects in classroom music: Fifty years of Sound and Silence. Routledge.
Music Education Now 