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| 1 | Where did music education start? |
Introduction
The way that we educate people has come a long way over time, and this can be seen in the vast and varied ways that people think today. The differences in ideas reflect the multiple events and developments that have occurred within society. These are usually based on ideas taken from the observation of personal experience or from developing the ideas of other people. Music education has had a similar evolution. As this book primarily addresses Western music education, the perspective and history is considered from the Western point of view (other potential views to consider include Eastern music, tribal music or world music).
Impact of psychological thinking on music education
Historically in the West, people originally believed that the body and personality could not be separated and, as spiritual beings, people or personalities were beyond explanation. This was reflected in the heavily religious influences within the arts, including within music. In the 16th century, thinkers began to suggest that the body was separate to the mind, which was considered a strange and revolutionary idea at the time. By the next century, after many fictitious, deceptive claims and old wives’ tales were proven false, people began to look for evidence of proof by asking for facts that could be verified independently through the senses. When it came to education, babies, for example, seemed to be unable to demonstrate anything that was asked of them, so it was believed that babies were born knowing nothing, merely blank tablets waiting to be trained. In the 18th century, people began to think about how individual personality influenced the way people saw events, and in the 19th century they experimented on people to understand the way that the brain worked. It was around this time that people began to develop ideas concerning effective teaching, where the most popular approach to promoting successful methodologies included demonstration classes. These were held relatively publicly, sometimes at national or international conferences so that interested subject leaders could observe the effects of students learning in these new ways. From early childhood theorists (Montessori, founder of child-led educational approaches) to psychologists demonstrating mental proficiency (Binet, founder of the IQ – intelligence quotient – test), education techniques developed at the same time as individual education subjects became more specialised, including music.
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Impact of the Industrial Revolution on music education
In the 20th century, as the demand for skills increased through the development of the Industrial Revolution, psychologists, educators and scientists began to consider how learning occurred so that children could be taught more effectively. By the late 19th century, in the Victorian era, industrial ideas were applied to education settings, including deliberately restricting life experiences to change the behaviour of both people and animals. For example, society used to limit the time children spent with their parents because it was thought that this would encourage early independence. In the early 20th century, common changes were identified in children, like the age range covering the stages of sitting, crawling, walking and talking. Specialists also considered the way that teacher and peer interaction impacted learning, from teacher-led to student-led to peer-led teaching. Some leading thinkers promoted the idea that students should be led with clear objectives, while others argued that people learnt quicker when they were free to learn according to their interest, some considered the effect of the external environment between social groupings and relationships the strongest defining characteristic, while others considered the effect of internal, individual needs as the source of explanation for all behaviour. As business became more efficient, the concept of productivity was introduced within education at the turn of the 20th century, with interest developing in testing abilities to identify which types of people were best suited to different types of work. These ideas and developments also impacted music education, where composers of the day challenged themselves to find better ways to teach music using the increased knowledge of science, the body and the mind.
Impact of social development on education
Society was changing alongside these ideas, with developments in philosophy, science and technology, and these changes were reflected in the developments of the arts. From medieval times, changes in laws began to regulate the way that people interacted culturally, and scientific knowledge began to travel around the world, where ancient Greece knowledge started to be translated and used in Latin countries. Renaissance inventions like the printing press continued to change the way and extent that knowledge was accessed, including theories and explanations for common phenomena like gravity, giving people a deeper understanding of how the natural world worked. By the early 16th century, unproven ideas like midwives’ tales were challenged, with new requirements for evidence and generalisability. In the early 19th century, the first attempts were made to understand people through psychology: from the way that they thought, to repairing bodily injuries. At the same time, different ways of passing on knowledge were explored through experiments on both people and animals, with philosophical ideas developing based on personal experiences. Some of these philosophies were used to guide judgements made by governments and law makers, seen clearly in the way the law has changed to accommodate human-centred thinking and racial and gender equality.
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Impact of social development on music education
Table 1.1 shows that music as a discipline has developed substantially from the beginning of recorded history where it began as vocal training for part of society, developing into a religious activity during the gradual decline of the Roman Empire. Music education reflected these changes – the heavy religious emphasis gradually developed into human-centred and emotive music. Through developments in the Industrial Revolution, new instruments were invented and perfected, providing the same musical accuracy as the human voice, and standardised musical notation was introduced which allowed musical influences to travel over distance and time. Orchestras of varied instrumentalists developed, along with operas that combined instruments and voice, with the purpose of moving the audience to experience the emotion of the composer. The audience changed too, from having music composed only for the aristocracy to it being written to appeal to a wider audience, it gradually became more accessible to the public. The increased access to music led to an increased interest in learning to perform music. Consequently, different ways to teach music were developed, the main foci of which were movement, vocal development and instrumental rhythms. Musical philosophers developed ways of understanding and appreciating differences in historical music compared to modern music, while composers explored new ways to express the social and political changes of the time. Table 1.1 compares the time lines of a selection of scientific discoveries with musical periods and education or music education events.
Music education today
While music education has gradually become more accessible to everyone, music education has received increased public interest in recent years for specific reasons, having been in and out of the news in different ways. New evidence of additional benefits of musical education have been suggested through various studies, along with impressive claims from supporters, only to be challenged in small ways and found to be only valid for a small group of the population. An example of this is the Mozart effect (McKelvie and Low, 2002). After the initial results were published showing that students who listened to classical music before tests achieved higher academic scores, the governor of Georgia, USA, proposed that every new born child received a CD of classical music to improve the learning potential of those children. Within a few years, other researchers found different results when they tried to replicate the study. Further detail indicated that the effect was only seen in a group of American college students (significantly older than babies or primary children) and indicated that they were able to recall significantly more facts in a test straight after listening to classical music while revising. However, within weeks, a retest indicated that the increased knowledge gain had not been permanent as their results now matched their peers. In fact, it was later shown that the same results were achieved by students who revised while listening to a story being read, or while chewing gum. Although the promotional angle was that music enhanced learning, this study showed that people learn more effectively when more areas of the brain are being used at the same time, supporting the idea of multi-dimensional learning.
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Table 1.1 Table comparing scientific inventions, musical composer periods and music education developments
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Musical education in research
Music is not the only educational area to experience disparate claims – consider the on-going debate of the benefits of phonics, and the introduction of “new” maths, and “discovery learning”. However, instead of listing all the contentious educational issues, what may be more useful is to identify common themes and areas of clear success, and to evaluate critically the contribution these ideas have made to our understanding of the learning process, and how these may be effectively applied. With influences from areas including biology, neurology, physiology, philosophy, pedagogy, politics, economy, sociology and mathematics, it may be valuable, then, to understand the prominent music education theories in order to appreciate where music education may be headed. For example, musical instruments discovered from stone-age times show that the ability to make music has been honed by people since humanity first invented a way to record events. This demonstrates that there has been a human need for music since the beginning of time.
Music education in history
From the first written accounts of education, musical training in ancient and biblical times originally only involved vocal and aural teaching – musical people chanted and sang without accompaniment. Primitive wind instruments made from bird bones have been discovered, dating from 40–70,000 years ago, using breath in a different way. With technological advances, alternative instruments developed, for example, the harp (seen in ancient Egyptian paintings in 3000 bc) developed into the harpsichord, which required a different type of physical effort – pushing keys that struck the strings of an instrument – eventually led to the development of the piano (1709). The beat and the notes, rhythm and melody, were the most important features that determined the quality of the music. Over time, more nuances were introduced where music could be graded into how loudly or quietly, quickly or slowly it was played, and even whether it reflected activity or emotion. This led to the first operas being written (1597), with the specific intention of evoking emotion in the audience. In ancient times, different note combinations described scales and harmonies where qualities like meaning, importance, good and evil were attributed to them. In medieval times, notes played together were considered pleasing or displeasing, however, many of these judgements were based on the personal views of an aristocracy that could afford to financially support the composers of the style of music they favoured. Musicians out of favour had to rely on income as music teachers, and with the aristocracy only able to provide limited support, an increasing number of music teachers looked elsewhere for students. New students came from varied backgrounds and so music teachers needed to find different and creative ways to teach people with very different skills from very different backgrounds.
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Specific interest in music education seems to have developed at the same time as the growth of international interest in the mind and, subsequently, learning progressed. Along with the theories that were developing through psychology, a few composers began to experiment with the most effective ways to teach by applying new ideas to their classrooms. Initially, adult students received these experimental methods, all performing more accurately almost immediately, which led to these composers becoming involved in teaching school children and adapting their techniques accordingly. Most of the leading music education ideas are refer...
