Learning to Teach Music in the Secondary School

A companion to school experience

Carolyn Cooke, Keith Evans, Chris Philpott, Gary Spruce, Carolyn Cooke, Keith Evans, Chris Philpott, Gary Spruce

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317219248
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This 3rd edition of Learning to Teach Music in the Secondary School has been thoroughly revised to take account of the latest initiatives, research and scholarship in the field of music education, and the most recent changes to the curriculum. By focusing on overarching principles, it aims to develop reflective practitioners who will creatively and critically examine their own and others' ideas about music education, and the ways in which children learn music.

Providing an overview of contemporary issues in music teaching and learning from a range of perspectives, the book focuses on teaching music musically, and enables the reader to:

• place music education in its historical and social context
• consider the nature of musical knowledge and how teachers can facilitate their students to learn musically
• critically analyse the frameworks within which music teachers work
• develop an understanding of composing, performing and responding to music, as well as key issues such as creativity, individual needs and assessment
• examine aspects of music beyond the classroom and how effective links can be made between curriculum music and music outside of school.

Including a range of case studies, tasks and reflections to help student teachers integrate the theory and practice of music education effectively, this new edition will provide invaluable support, guidance and challenges for teachers at all stages of their careers, as well as being a useful resource for teacher educators in a wide range of settings.

1 The place of music in the secondary schoolIdeology – history – justification

DOI: 10.4324/9781315621203-1

John Finney

Introduction

This chapter sets out to stimulate thought about the place of music in the secondary school, to consider what role it might play within a general education and to do this within a historical perspective. Particular attention will be paid to some of the beliefs and ideologies, including dominant ideologies, that continue to shape current thought and practice. This in turn will lead to a consideration of the kinds of justification made for music as a subject of the curriculum.

Objectives

By the end of the chapter you will be able to:

• discuss with other beginner teachers, with music teachers and school administrators the value placed on music education in the secondary school;
• examine critically the validity of arguments supporting the place of music in the secondary school;
• distinguish between justifications made for music education and music educational advocacy;
• read with insight official documents defining the place of music in school and its contribution to the whole curriculum;
• create in outline the case you would want to present in support of musical study, whether in a job application letter, at interview or at a meeting of parents and governors.

A moral and political question

Writing in the fourth century BC, Plato saw music as educating the soul, as affecting human character and the whole personality. Music could be of good and bad character. Music's modes and rhythms were to be selected with care. Some were vulgar, some sentimental, not all were equally civilising. After all, the modes had been named after tribes of people, some to be admired, some not. A mode was constructed out of musical proportions, some able to bring about the harmony of mind, body and soul, some not; some able to bring about perfection, some not. In this way of thinking, music education was in need of regulation (Plato 1982).

Plato's ideal state required men of courage, disciplined in war, reflective in peace, physically agile and politically adroit. Thus, the character of boys should be developed through modes that were modest, simple and masculine rather than violent, effeminate or fickle. Music, like the other arts, touched emotion, affected mood and character, and in Plato's theory of knowledge had low status. Music was less cognitive than other subjects and potentially dangerous. A music education, then as now, was wholly implicated in the moral and political life of society and of greater or lesser interest to those who wished to educate, manipulate and govern. From earliest times music had been recognised as a medium through which to induct and socialise each new generation into the norms, values and aspirations of a society. However, that this process should take place in schools attended by all young people is a relatively new practice. As nineteenth-century Europe embraced the idea of mass education, so in 1870 universal education was established in England. Music in the form of singing was officially sanctioned in schools.

Music, high status, exclusive

The idea of music as a subject of study, as having a distinctive contribution to make to the whole, had emerged from antiquity. One form of this conception, frequently referred to, was what became known as the Seven Liberal Arts. Here the curriculum was divided into lower and higher divisions: the trivium (grammar, logic and rhetoric) and the quadrivium (arithmetic, astronomy, geometry and music). The trivium was concerned with the arts of language, leading to the mastery of self-expression and understanding of the human mind. The quadrivium, on the other hand, took the learner out into the world of ideas and abstractions and here music was given high status, a subject to be engaged with by a few initiates thought qualified enough to probe the mysteries of the universe and to search for ultimate truths.

There was thought to be interconnectedness between disciplines, and this involved a search for common patterns and analogies. This concern for overall coherence was matched by the counterbalancing features of the two divisions. There was the trivium's sacredness and the quadrivium's secularity, the trivium's reaching inward and the quadrivium's reaching outward, keeping the knower in relationship with what was known. The linguistic nature of the trivium was complemented by the quadrivium's concern with the numerical, the spatial and the temporal. It is tempting to seek parallels with modern ideas of curriculum balance and coherence, but these are made with caution.

Of enduring interest is the character given to music in the scheme. Music is given high status through being recognised as a natural science and for its abstract qualities, rather than as an art and as a source of self-expression. In all this, the idea that music is a temporal art bringing time and space to order remains fundamental to much thought about music: to be and become musical requires organising time, and a musician's craft requires playing with time as well as playing in time.

Task 1.1 What kind of subject is music?

How do you view music as a subject of study?

Make contact with another beginner music teacher. Decide on one of the following talking points and, through discussion, find arguments for and against the statement selected:

• Music is a subject that enables self-expression.
• Music is a subject with a strong mathematical orientation.
• Music is by its nature an exclusive subject.
• Music is a subject that orders time and space like no other.
• Music is not a subject but an activity to participate in.

Revisit this task at the end of the chapter.

The Seven Liberal Arts proved to be a prototype of what came to be thought of as liberal humanism and the idea of a liberal education able to bring about understanding of ourselves and the world in which we live. In this view, education, and with it music education, had intrinsic worth, with the potential to open the mind to creative possibilities and meetings with the unexpected. This was an education that, through its rigour, discipline and training, was thought to be liberating, while serving the common good.

The aim of Plato's regulation of music was to preserve the state, to ensure social order and to establish and sustain a common culture. In more recent times, and now with music as a school subject, this expectation continued to be placed upon music, and this focused on which music was taught and the repertoire of music used. In suggestions made to music teachers by the Board of Education in 1927, the following recommendation is made:

As a rule the music first learned by children should be drawn from our Folk and Traditional songs. These are the true classics of the people, and form the foundation on which a national love of music can be built up . . . a pupil whose memory is stored with these songs from his earliest school days has the best protection that education can give against the attractions of vulgar and sentimental music when school days are over; and it is not always realised how strong and vital a tie between the members of a school, a college, or even a nation may be formed by their knowledge of a common body of traditional song.

(1927: 253)

Here is a conviction that, through singing, shared identities would be formed and a national community of common values created. Music education was in this way conceived of as an education in citizenship and in many respects as an education to be regulated in the way that Plato had proposed. Vulgarity and sentiment in music militated against ‘good taste’, and ‘good taste’ was related to what was civil and civilising. An ideology with a long history was being sustained. But there was to be a change of mood. Task 1.2 asks you to consider music as a civilising influence, drawing on your own experiences of music education.

Task 1.2 Music as a civilising influence

Based on your in-school observations, consider:

• To what extent do you consider the issue relevant in the light of what you have observed in school?
• To what extent do you think the task of music education is to educate taste?

Exchange your views either face to face with another beginner teacher or via social networking.

Concessions and change

By the 1950s a curriculum had evolved to which His Majesty's Inspectorate referred as ‘singing plus’. Singing, the appreciation of music and the acquisition of a clearly defined set of skills, techniques and repertoire of music were the common fare of music classrooms following the Second World War. However, experience often resembled a narrow course of musical training. Overemphasis on technical matters frequently got in the way of musical experience and enjoyment. While the Board of Education of 1927 had called for careful management of repertoire, the Scottish Education Department in 1955 called for concession. Writing of the choice of music for instruction in listening, music teachers were given the following advice:

At first it should not be too unlike that which the pupils are accustomed to hear in the cinema or at home. The lively polkas and graceful waltzes of Strauss, for example, are a means of capturing the interest of the pupils who may not respond so quickly to the music of Bach and Beethoven. The simple classics should remain the foundations of good musical training, but the interest of the pupils in contemporary popular music should not be ignored. When they leave school – indeed, while they are still at school – the pupil's interest is drawn towards this very attractive, although perhaps ephemeral, music, which forms so large a part of their musical experience. The schools’ obligation is not to dissociate itself entirely from this kind of music but to teach some discrimination in sorting out the good from the bad.

(1955: 218)

The statement is carefully crafted and offers helpful principles that we all might easily commend:

• Recognise the interests of young people.
• Acknowledge their prior knowledge and experience beyond school.
• Move from the known to the unknown.
• Nurture critical judgement and discrimination.

Task 1.3 Enduring principles?

Observe in school and note ways in which these principles work in practice.

Discard one of the above principles that you consider least relevant to a music education today. Replace it with one of your own.

However, in place of former censorships, a patronising attitude to the value of popular music had emerged. As the 1960s and 1970s unfolded, young people were not slow to recognise this. A survey of the attitudes of Young School Leavers (Schools Council 1968) showed music given lowly status as a school subject. A pupil of the time reflects:

It was 1965 and our music teacher tried some experimental lessons when we got to Year 9. We were invited to bring our favourite records to the lesson. I brought Bob Dylan's ‘She belongs to me’. I remember thinking this was a really worthy piece of work because both the words and music had been created by Dylan. This encapsulated my ideal of individual expression and what I considered to be authenticity. The piece connected with my interest in surrealism too. The teacher noted the harmonica playing with some disdain: ‘It's just suck–blow, suck–blow.’ We seemed to be in parallel universes. The teacher always kept a tight lid on discussion to avoid tribal warfare.

(Interview 2004)

Task 1.4 How was it for you?

Make contact with somebody who was at school in the 1960s or 1970s. Find out what they remember most about their music lessons in school. What long-term influence has school music had on their lives?

Use the following prompts to help the process of determining positive as well as negative responses:

• Did lessons leave you feeling musical?
• Did you make up music?
• What is recalled from the listening repertoire experienced?
• Are there songs from school days still in your head?
• Was there a most memorable lesson?

The curriculum offered was experienced as increasingly irrelevant by the young people for whom it was designed. A gap had grown between policy makers, teachers and youth. Children were changing faster than schools, and new technologies provided young people with the means of organising their own music education. The terms ‘good music’ and ‘good taste’ became problematic. Music in secondary school was experienced by the majority, and in particular by older students, as anything but liberating, rather a training in skills and techniques largely considered as irrelevant, or at best relevant to a minority. Like music in the medieval quadrivium, the subject was in danger of becoming exclusive. Responses to this crisis of confidence illustrate well the forging of fresh ideologies and the emergence of competing visions of how music should be thought about, what a music education might consist of and what might be the right place for music in the secondary school.

The creative turn

The most influential of these new ideas came from the composer-educator John Paynter, who, leading a major curriculum development programme at York University, drew on innovative classroom practice. Teachers following the principles of Carl Orff, for example, had developed small-group music making, and, while taking care to teach instrumental techniques, they nurtured improvisation and composition and were willing to build on the ideas of young people. The York Project, as it came to be known, developed the slogans ‘Music for the Majority’ and ‘All Kinds of Music’. Paynter's chief enemy was music education reduced to a narrow course of musical training where tutored skills and proficiencies dominated, to the exclusion of imagination and creativity. This was ‘Music for the Minority’. Paynter set about emphasising mu...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Series editors’ preface
• Introduction: learning how to teach music
• 1 The place of music in the secondary school: ideology - history - justification
• 2 Culture, society and musical learning
• 3 The what, how and where of musical learning and development
• 4 Language and learning in music
• 5 What is a music curriculum?
• 6 An integrated approach to lesson planning
• 7 Behaviour for musical learning
• 8 Creativity and music education
• 9 Performing for musical understanding
• 10 Listening and responding and the ideology of aesthetic listening
• 11 Framing conceptions of technology for learning in music - implications for pedagogy
• 12 Addressing individual needs and equality of opportunity in music education
• 13 Assessment in music education
• 14 Collaboration
• 15 Music, the arts and education
• References
• Index