A Developing Discourse in Music Education

The selected works of Keith Swanwick

Keith Swanwick

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138906433
• eBook ISBN: 9781317443117
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

In the World Library of Educationalists series, international experts compile career-long collections of what they judge to be their finest pieces – extracts from books, key articles, salient research findings, major theoretical and practical contributions – so the world can read them in a single manageable volume. Readers will be able to follow the themes and strands and see how their work contributes to the development of the field.

Since the publication of A Basis for Music Education in 1979, Keith Swanwick has continued to be a major influence on the theory and practice of music education. The international appeal of his insights into the fundamentals of music and music education is recognised in invitations from more than twenty countries to give Key Note presentations, conduct workshops, and advise as a consultant. These include such diverse places as Kazakhstan, Colombia, Iceland and Papua New Guinea. During 1998 he was Visiting Professor, University of Washington.

In this collection, Swanwick brings together 12 of his key writings to present an overview of the development of his own work and of the field of music education. The text allows the reader to consider Swanwick's approach to music education and how it is characterised by a concern for musical, and to some extent wider artistic, processes, shaped by his experience as a teacher and performing musician in a variety of settings, and also by the influences of philosophers, psychologists and sociologists.

Chapter 1 The Arts in Education

Dreaming or wide awake?

DOI: 10.4324/9781315695495-2

When preparing for an occasion such as this, there is always some difficulty about getting the thing right. I am conscious that what I say will probably be published and one is, therefore, torn between a literary and conversational style. Writing can be much more ‘dense’ than speech. Talk needs more breathing space. I am also conscious that there are people present whose daily problems are of a highly, even urgently, practical nature, and others who have come to hear an academic paper, and that I should try to engage everyone, including the Chairman, who is very soon to be Principal of the University of London. You may care to amuse yourselves by estimating the extent to which these difficulties have been resolved.

This is a lecture about the arts in education. I considered trying to incorporate substantial direct experience of the arts, but drew back from this for several reasons; one of which was the technical risk involved, another that music and dance, for example, would come out very badly in a published version. Let me assume, then, that my audience knows what experience of the arts is like, and that memories of that experience will be activated during the presentation.

One more preliminary. By the arts, I mean those activities linked with the concept of ‘artist’; not the Arts in a general way as different from the Sciences. I include not only ‘high’ art – the ‘posh’ art of museums, concert halls, theatres and so on – but also folk and popular forms of art.

In this lecture I intend to speak about the arts in education, referring principally to art, dance, drama, literature and music. Music education is my own special field and it is with some diffidence that I approach to others, sustained only by the thought that I care about all the arts, even if I only practise one of them, though I did once teach English literature to boys in Paddington.

It would be presumptious in a paper of this kind to offer specific advice on teaching in any of these five diverse, though apparently related fields. Instead, I hope to put forward a reasoned and positive view of the arts as essential for the development of mind, and to raise with you general implications for education and for teaching.

My method will be more akin to the making of a Sibelius symphony or a Henry James novel than to the construction of a scientific paper. That is to say the themes should emerge organically, though I hope logically and cumulatively, as we proceed. I shall draw, without apology, upon certain psychological work, especially that of Freud and Piaget; regarding this as neither the private property of psychologists nor beyond the wit of artists to understand.

In May 1981 I happened to find myself in Alice Springs, Australia, on ‘Bangtail Muster’ day, a day of sports and festivities. Fairly early in the morning I came upon two groups of people gathered in the sandy bed of the dried up river Todd. One group consisted of about ten aboriginals sitting in a half-circle in the shade of a tree, quiet and still – dreaming perhaps? Maybe they dimly recalled their ancient ‘Dreamtime’ mythologies? Nearby were upwards of a hundred white people having a good time. Some of them appeared to be wearing top hats. This was no casual, dreamy meeting, but a planned and advertised ‘champagne breakfast’. They were certainly wide awake (though later in the day several wilted under the influence of champagne and sun). By mid-morning, more aboriginal people were gathered among the crowds on the main street, along which passed a procession of floats, horses, commercial vehicles and parading Scouts and Brownies. After an initial, mildly curious look at the first display or two, the native people went back to their dreaming, quietly sitting together on the grass where it was not possible to see anything of the parade. The rest of us stood our ground, to be entertained by earthy humour, serenaded by well-amplified music and pelted with flour-and-water bombs. On the Brownie float were written many things that Brownies are, or should be: ‘Brownies are helpful’, ‘Brownies are tidy’, ‘Brownies are wide awake’. Here then is an old issue, sharply illuminated for me in Alice, set in the context of the most striking contrast of cultures anywhere in the world: is it better to dream or to be wide awake? Is it better to remain ‘undeveloped’ and stay close to nature and the ‘Dreamtime’, or to be well-organized, articulate, technically advanced and have champagne breakfasts?

This is not the place to enter into such alarming philosophical and socio-cultural speculations, but at that time I became deeply interested in some loosely associated implications for the arts in education. Are the arts, so to speak, away from the main parade of education? Are they more a kind of dreaming than fields of systematic study? Can we institutionalize arts activities without losing the essence of arts experience? Are the arts for private gratification or are they a form of public discourse? Can they be handled in classrooms or are they best enjoyed away from the crowds? Is assessment in the arts rather like grading a dream? Can we teach dreaming? What important purposes, if any, lie behind our attempts to educate in and about the arts?

These are more than questions of justification, more than an invitation for special pleading for time, resources and recognition. For if we subscribe to an inadequate or false account of the value of arts activities, we shall mislead others and distort the enterprise itself. Inevitably, curriculum decisions, choice of classroom activities, teaching styles and modes of assessment, depend upon the formulation and the tone of voice of our answer to the question: ‘why the arts?’, ‘why my art?’.

The Gulbenkian Report, The Arts in Schools, helpfully assembles before us a whole range of answers to the question of value.¹ The arts are here seen as distinct categories of understanding, special forms of thought; they give us a grasp of the ‘growth and tenor of our civilisation’; they are ways of having ideas, of bringing about new insights and illuminations; they provide a counterbalance to analytical forms of discourse, such as science and mathematics, and lead us towards synthesis and wholeness; they utilize the right hemisphere of the brain, with its propensity for dealing with the sensuous, intuitive and spacial elements of perception and action. The arts confer other benefits through the processes of transfer: they develop certain qualities and abilities such as poise, grace and co-ordination; they encourage ‘discipline, dedication and attention to detail’; they aid interpersonal and even international understanding.

Admirable and true as all this is, I find it somewhat unsatisfactory. There are, perhaps, too many good reasons; too many witnesses are called. There is too much ‘post-haste and rummage in the land’. The Report is a most illuminating document, but it lacks a steady value description based on a convincing account of the development of mind; and this is crucial, for unless the arts can be seen to develop mind (in the broadest sense), they cannot ultimately be justified and find a central role in education. For education is surely more than having ‘experiences’, or acquiring a repertoire of skills and facts. It has to do with developing understanding, insightfulness; qualities of mind.

Where the arts have been seriously taken into a view of mind, it has proved difficult to transcribe the complexities and range of argument into a working philosophy for teachers. (I refer here especially to the extensive and influential writings of Suzanne Langer and Louis Arnaud Reid.) Where a theory of mind has been linked with teaching and learning in the arts, I believe that the wrong theories have usually been invoked. Here I think especially of Robert Witkin and Malcolm Ross, whose books, The Intelligence of Feeling² and The Creative Arts,³ have emphasized a quasi psychoanalytical value position for the arts. Through artistic creation, it is claimed, we can recognize, order and externalize our feelings, thus achieving catharsis. Unfortunately, this account of the arts is weak in two important ways. It is not able to deal convincingly with our response to existing works of art, or to explain how, during our encounters with art objects and events, we often feel ‘stirred up’ with feelings rather than merely discharging them. The arts are once again seen to be ‘subjective’, on the side of ‘feeling’, ranged against the more ‘objective’ sciences and humanities. This relegation of the arts to a realm of private feeling, or ‘subject-reflexive’ action, is not retrieved by arguing that such experiences are legitimate alternative modes of discourse, having their own special logic and intelligence. The break with cognitive processes and other acts of mind becomes hard to mend.

I do not wish to denigrate the work of Witkin and Ross, and I am aware of the dangers of this over-simplification of their extensive and complex argument. They have communicated a strong sense of the importance of the arts in education and, at times, are nearly right in their descriptions of the nature and value of the arts. However, since I believe their basic assumptions to be shaky, I shall not refer to them again.

The separating out of the arts from the main business of life and education is quite a common attitude. Herbert Spencer put forward the classic view in 1911 that, as the arts occupied the leisure part of life, they should occupy ‘the leisure part of education’.⁴ More recently talk of the special functions of the right hemisphere of the brain, however well founded, has done little to give arts educators confidence that they can handle the sensuous, the intuitive, the inarticulate. Would it not be something like imposing an institutional framework on dreaming? ‘Stop dreaming boy!’, is not an unfamiliar cry in the classroom. Are we then to reverse the command: ‘Right, 3B, start dreaming now!’?

Yet the arts are frequently seen as creating dream-worlds into which we can escape from ‘reality’. Jean-Paul Sartre puts it strongly enough:⁵

Aesthetic contemplation is an induced dream and the passing into the real is an actual waking up. We often speak of the ‘deception’ experienced on returning to reality. But this does not explain that this discomfort also exists, for instance, after having witnessed a realistic and cruel play, in which case reality should be experienced as comforting. This discomfort is simply that of the dreamer on awakening; an entranced consciousness, engulfed in the imaginary, is suddenly freed by the sudden ending of the play, of the symphony, and comes suddenly into contact with existence. Nothing more is needed to arouse the nauseating disgust that characterizes the consciousness of reality.

In case you feel that this is merely one of the negative symptoms of existential philosophy, consider the more moderate and analytical tone of Professor Peters.⁶

It might reasonably be argued that literature and poetry, for instance, are developments of a dimension of awareness of the world, while the other arts, like music, may be creating, as it were, another world to be aware of.

Richard Peters speculates that the non-verbal arts may be like games in creating these other ‘worlds’ that are somehow different from ‘the world’, presumably the ‘real’ (wide-awake) world. The implication is clear: some of the arts, at least, are seen as dreamlike, or, possibly ‘playlike’, in that they are ‘other-worldly’.

The connection between dreaming, or day-dreaming, and play is well made. Freud tells us that the ‘opposite of play is not what is serious but what is real’, and observes that as people grow up they cease to play and seem to give up the pleasure derived from playing.⁷ And he goes on:

Actually, we can never give anything up; we only exchange one thing for another . . . In the same way, the growing child, when he stops playing, gives up nothing but the link with real objects; instead of playing, he now phantasizes. He builds castles in the air and creates what are called day-dreams.

Freud closely identifies one art, the art of literature, with play and with phantasy, or day-dreams:⁸

The creative writer does the same as the child at play. He creates a world of phantasy which he takes very seriously.

This linking of dreams with play and art is fairly common in the literature of psychology. Piaget, for instance, sees dreams as a continuation of play, play with symbolic representation instead of with real objects or people.⁹ Vygotsky notes the clear separation of play from ‘real life’, ‘the first effect of the child’s emancipation from situational constraints’. He defines imagination, a word much used about the arts, as ‘play without action’.¹⁰

We might notice, too, the linguistic relationship between the word ‘play’ and the practice of the arts. We play music; we go to the theatre to see a play; a cunning rhyme may be a play on words. This usage is not confined to the English language and can be found, for example, in the German spielen and the French jouer.

Perhaps then we can proceed conf...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The arts in education: dreaming or wide awake?
• 2 The parameters of music education
• 3 The model in action
• 4 What makes music musical?
• 5 The sequence of musical development: a study of children’s composition
• 6 Musical development: revisiting a generic theory
• 7 Music education in a pluralist society
• 8 Intuition, analysis and symbolic forms
• 9 Musical knowledge in action
• 10 Musical value
• 11 Principles of music education
• 12 Music education: closed or open?
• Index