The Mind’s Music

‘Hearing and comprehending in one’s mind the sound of music that is not or may never have been physically present.’

This is possibly Edwin Gordon’s sharpest definition of the term audiation or better in its active form, what it means to audiate.

Audiation is the central concept in Gordon’s music learning theory and his notion of musical aptitude. For Gordon there are types and stages of audiation and the means of constructing sequences of learning. His book ‘Learning Sequences in Music: Skill, Content, and Patterns – A Music Learning Theory (1997) provides a comprehensive account of his theory.

In England, at least, audiation is not a term in common use. It is not at the forefront of many music teacher’s minds or a part of their pedagogic decision making. The recent Ofsted research review has one passing audiation reference.

Yet, notions like the inner ear, aural imagery, sub-vocalising, internalising and the mind’s ear are familiar enough terms in use seeking to describe and capture something thought to be fundamental to the growing musical mind and the capacity to make music well.

The term audiation is able to easily embrace such terms while transcending their folkiness into a powerful explanatory unity.

‘Hearing and comprehending in one’s mind the sound of music that is not or may never have been physically present.’

Gordon sometimes writes about the mind’s music.

The mind is a place of thinking and feeling, a place for thinking and feeling music.

Gordon makes an important clarification. Audiation is not aural perception. Aural perception deals with the immediacy of sound events. Audiation brings to those events what has been heard and comprehended in the past through memory and predicts what might be heard in the future. Gordon uses the parallel of hearing and comprehending speech.

Audiation is in play whether we are engaged as a listener, performer, improviser, composer or music reader.

Gordon’s audiation types include notational audiation – the capacity to hear and comprehend the sounds represented by notation in their absence, a capacity thought to make a pupil’s work musical rather than mechanical.

Then there is creative audiation – the capacity to work on and transform both existing and new musical material.

The reader will be able to imagine many ways of deploying audiation as a pedagogic tool and reflect on the ways they already encourage their pupils to think and feel in sound.

Perhaps the first step is to ensure our pupils understand that they are audiating beings.

Music educational purpose [3]

My third purpose addresses the child and young person as an individual independent of the social order and quite separate from any general notion of a person. Instead as an autonomous subjective self with the possibility of living creatively and critically. There was intimation of this in purpose [2]. Yet, neither purpose [1] or [2] recognises the uniqueness of each recipient of a music education. Controlling our own musical destiny is a neccessary resistance to the socialising process. Here is the possibility for personal agency and musical self-government.

Thus purpose [3]:

To enable all children and young people to become unique individuals, subjectively enriched, and able to know a sense of personal freedom through making music well.

And presented as a whole incorporating [1] and [2]:

The purpose of music education is:

To induct all children and young people into existing musical practices with the potential for the regeneration of these practices through critical engagement and with the knowledge of how to make music well, enabling all children and young people become unique individuals, subjectively enriched.

Notes:

[1] In proposing such a purpose I have followed the philosopher Gert Biesta’s approach to framing educational purposes.

[2] The reader is directed to chapter 16 of Music in the School: Significance and Purpose in The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education: Perspectives and Practices edited by Zack Moir, Bryan Powell and Dylan Smith in which I set out the purposes of music education more fully.

[3] The three purposes are meant to be overlapping and mutually affirmative. The balance between the three can be made in responsne to circumstances. I can imaging purpose [3] might dominate at times, for example.

[4] I am at some pains to emphasise the ‘all children and young people’ phrase as my concern is a music education available to all and well represented by the idea of a statutory music education 4-14.