Debates in Music Teaching

Chris Philpott, Gary Spruce, Chris Philpott, Gary Spruce

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136303524
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Debates in Music Teaching encourages student and practising teachers to engage with contemporary issues and developments in music education. It aims to introduce a critical approach to the central concepts and practices that have influenced major interventions and initiatives in music teaching, and supports the development of new ways of looking at ideas around teaching and learning in music.

Accessible and comprehensive chapters will stimulate thinking and creativity in relation to theory and practice, and will facilitate readers in reaching their own informed judgements and rationalising their position with deep theoretical knowledge and understanding. Throughout the book, international experts in the field consider key issues including:

• the justification for music in the school curriculum
• partnerships in music education and the identity of the music teacher
• technology and conceptions of musicianship
• social justice and music education
• the place of diverse musical genres and traditions in the music curriculum
• critical thinking and music education
• autonomy and integrity for music in cross-curricular work
• the politics, sociology and philosophy of music education.

Debates in Music Teaching is for all student and practising teachers interested in furthering their understanding of the subject. Including carefully annotated further reading and reflective questions to help shape research and writing, this collection stimulates critical and creative thinking in relation to contemporary debates within music education.

Part I

Philosophical, Sociological and Psychological Foundations

Chapter 1

What can a reflective teacher learn from philosophies of music education?

From personal philosophy to critical cultural readership

Heidi Westerlund

Introduction

It is widely held that as music teachers, we need to develop our own personal philosophy in order to be conscious of our own pedagogical goals, and to carry out the required educational tasks in a consistent manner. Through this personalized philosophy, we can refer to, or refer to the uniqueness of, the use of our personal practical knowledge in music education (see e.g. Clandinin 1985) or to what Polanyi (1962) calls ‘personal knowledge’. Such knowledge develops over years in and through our own education and through participating in musical practices, along with teachers’ own rational reflections. Personal philosophy may be related to the choice of musical styles and instruments, or possibly to a particular systematic teaching and learning approach, such as Kodaly, Suzuki or Orff. One option for the music teacher when cultivating a personal philosophy concerning teaching music is offered, in a systematic manner, by academic philosophers of music education, many of whom have during the past decades developed comprehensive theories as to how to think of music education and from what kind of basic understandings to build educational practice (e.g. Reimer 1970/1989 Swanwick 1979, 1988, 1994; Elliott 1995). A philosophy, understood in this way, provides conceptual guidelines that aim to capture the features of successful practice.

For music teachers, navigating between diverse philosophies may seem time-consuming and even frustrating as each writer tries to persuade us of the superiority of their version over others: should we educate devoted listeners through selected classics or transmit musical hands-on knowledge for amateurs to enjoy in their future lives, or should we simply feed the existing musical institutions, symphony orchestras and the ilk, with new practitioners? However, rather than taking philosophies of music education as professional ‘bibles’ encompassing absolute truths, we could view these as cultural prophecies, each creating a critical vision for the educational culture (Bruner 1996). This view of philosophy, held by the pragmatist philosopher John Dewey, views philosophers as defining ‘the larger patterns of continuity which are woven in effecting the enduring junctions of a stubborn past and an insistent future’ (Dewey LW 3: 6).

Reading philosophy as thoroughly thought-out cultural critique, and as justified prophecy, allows teachers to further estimate the arguments against the cultural starting points; against their own specific educational culture, historical background and futures. It makes us teachers more conscious of how traditions and practices have nurtured our history and our own growth and path in musical learning; of how they implicitly or explicitly feed our present life and of what kind of future they suggest. Indeed, it is those very habits and beliefs that we grew up with and values that we learned to cherish that will have to be reflected upon when alternative paths and landscapes for music education are opened through philosophical cultural critique.

In this chapter, philosophies of music education will thus be understood as the ordering of ideas in critical and inspiring ways, not for the good, but rather, against certain kinds of practices in a given time and context, some of which will be examined in what follows as they have been presented during the past decades. Their practical power, in this proposed pragmatist approach, will be tested in relation to the meanings they enhance in teachers’ conscious work when developing cultural readership, and within individual and collective attempts to improve educational practices. Thus, philosophical critique provides heuristic points of reference, not necessarily answers, for teachers’ critical reflection.

Appreciation through subjective musical experiences

The call for a philosophy of music education has, by and large, arisen from the need to justify the existence of music in general education. When previous rationales¹ were no longer relevant, it became increasingly evident that a new rationale was needed for why one should be musically educated. At the time when in many countries the school subject was renamed ‘Music’ rather than ‘Singing’ it also became necessary to find a philosophical justification that would point out the specifically musical, rather than the non-musical, outcomes of the profession (e.g., Mark 2002). New technology, such as record players and tape recorders, allowed previously unheard of practices to come into schools, such as listening to professional performances.

One of the most influential post-Second World War philosophical ideas was the recognition of the subjective meaning that music has for human beings and recognition of the value of individual musical experiences. In his A Philosophy of Music Education, Bennett Reimer (1970/1989) suggested that making space for musical experiences within the best works of musical cultures could form the basic rationale that teachers would need to justify their work in schools and to decide on which aspects of music and music education should be emphasized. Students should be educated through the classics of the world’s music cultures in order to learn to appreciate the art of music. Something deeper and more personal that could be carried throughout the students’ life span would be needed in schools where previously most energy had been put into choirs or bands with a limited repertoire, and in which one perhaps would learn a single instrument, later to be abandoned. According to Reimer:

… we have largely neglected the musical needs of the majority of people in our culture – as serving the few who choose to perform – and only secondarily serving the people who will become (and already are) musical partakers of the music produced by specialists. We have so emphasized the few over the many that most people regard us as special education for the interested and talented.

(Reimer 1997: 34.)

Deep musical experiences, that can be called aesthetic experiences, should therefore be the focus of teaching. This emphasis has certain practical implications. Reimer writes:

In the general music curriculum, the point is to experience the great diversity of musics in the only way possible for all people when music is required – through listening as the fundamental behavior. Performing, in the general music program, is an essential but contributory mode of interaction with music. It is a powerful means, among others, for enhancing musical understanding and experience. But the balance between listening and performing will favor listening.

(Reimer 1989: 185, italics added).

Hence this approach remains critical of such lessons that approach musical learning merely from the perspective of advancing skills and music making. Music education as aesthetic education does not expend valuable school hours simply on breathing techniques or fingering, but rather is highly concerned with the musical experiences that one can gain by cultivating an aesthetic mode of knowing, by teaching the ‘distinctive cognitive domain’ through attentive and active listening (Reimer 1992: 25).

Reimer’s philosophical position views students primarily as potential audiences for the musical practices of professionals. Consequently, there are also opposing views. As this approach in its own way starts with the problematic division between potential professionals and those who only appreciate art, studies increasingly point out the consequences of education in which students are selected according to their potential for a professional career, and of silencing those with an assumed lack of talent in order to secure musical products of as high a quality as possible: indeed, one can learn to be unmusical in a school that is in principle based on the idea of equity and democracy (see e.g., Trehub 2003; Numminen 2005; West 2009). Furthermore, as Numminen’s (2005) study on adult poor pitch singers shows, learning how to make music, for instance, learning how to sing, can be made possible for everyone since anyone can advance in it. It has been argued that the enjoyment one gets from performing music ought to be one of the main goals of music education since school may be, and often is, the only place where such enjoyment is made possible (see e.g., Elliott 1995). Furthermore, worldwide emerging online music communities exemplify how the hard boundaries between professional and amateur musicians are becoming more obscure today and how amateur musicians increasingly want to make music just for the sake of the meaning and value that music making and being a musician brings into their life (Partti 2009; Partti and Karlsen 2010). X-Factor type competitions, new television programmes in which anyone can participate in choir competitions or learn alongside professionals, manifest an emerging wider tendency towards a ‘participatory culture’ (see, e.g., Jenkins et al., 2006).

Understanding musical meanings and values through multiple activities

Another approach, within one that could be called ‘music education as aesthetic education’ (Regelski 1996), is to categorize the practice of music education into a set of activities that each, in their own valuable way, contributes to the overall goal: musical understanding. Schools may not be seen as extensions of a professional division of labour in which a few produce music, just as equally we do not teach mathematics only to those who have the potential to become mathematicians. This approach, taken, for instance, by Keith Swanwick, aims to open multiple doors for all students.

In his A Basis for Music Education (1979), Swanwick develops a ‘comprehensive model of musical experience’ (p. 55) for organizing music studies, arguing that they should involve composition (C), literature studies (L), audition (A ; meaning ‘the act of attentive and responsive listening, with aesthetic understanding as part of the experience’ (p. 51)), skill acquisition (S), and performance (P) – (‘CLASP’). Swanwick emphasizes the significance of knowledge of music, the direct cognitive and affective experience and personal knowledge that easily gives way to knowledge about music, or ‘to measurable skills, such as playing scales and writing in manuscript from dictation’ (p. 54). He warns teachers not to take ‘short cuts that actually manage to avoid the beauty spots which are the ultimate destination of our journeys’ (p. 54; see also, Swanwick 1994: 16). Music, as such, involves multiple ‘layers of meaning’, some of which are intuitive and some more explicable, and by carefully unwrapping those layers it is possible to learn from others (Swanwick 1994: 2; see also, Swanwick 1999: 36). Our personal interpretations arise from within this meeting point of intuition and explicit analysis in musical events (Swanwick 1994: 176).

Perhaps Swanwick’s most important contribution to the international discussion in music education has been the recognition of composing as a way of understanding music. As music education in many countries still deals first and foremost with a pre-existing musical repertoire that is there for the teachers to teach and students to learn (e.g., Georgii-Hemming and Westvall 2010), composing as a working method and educational activity gives room in a unique way for students’ imagination, creativity and innovation, at the same time as it deals with cognitive tasks, structures, concrete material and tradition (Swanwick 1979: 56).

Both Swanwick and Reimer examine music in schools as subject content in which musical meanings and values transcend particular socio-cultural contexts: ‘Music has a life of its own’ and in education one ought to get rid of its ‘strong idiomatic boundaries’ (Swanwick 1988: 112) that may prevent students from understanding the musical in music. For both thinkers, what is specifically musical in the subject ought to be cultivated in teaching so that it is possible to justify the subject matter in an educational system. Reimer questions any other values that may be considered as the rationale for music education: ‘Why teach social skills through music, if one can do the same with sports?’ (Reimer 2009: 11). In other words, for example, choosing repertoire should be done with musical criteria, not social issues in mind; or, one should avoid ‘strongly culturally loaded idioms until their context has eroded’ (Swanwick 1988: 111).

This kind of ranking of values and the separating of musical values from any other ‘minority values’ (Reimer 2009: 11) is a logical solution considering that the point is to find a rationale that is specifically musical. However, from the school teacher’s point of view, this search may have major consequences. If considering the social values of music is ‘a moral crime’, as it is for Reimer (Ibid.), teachers may even end up setting their own philosophies against national guidelines for music and schooling in general that in many contexts emphasize social values. A more holistic approach may therefore resonate with the ideas of a teacher who is also obliged to design musical learning environments that aim to socially reward musical experiences. This receives support from Dewey: he argued that there is a stubborn idea of ‘educating specific faculties’ and that this idea is repeated in the thought that different subjects represent specific values in the curriculum. According to Dewey, this idea represents ‘the obverse side of the conception of experience or life as a patchwork of independent interests’ (Dewey MW 9: 254). Against this starting point, one can then also wonder if the question of a rationale for music education can be answered by setting values against each other: musical values against...