Teaching Music Musically (Classic Edition)

Keith Swanwick

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781136623783
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

'There are countless gems within these pages... Swanwick seems to write from more experience as a musician and teacher than most others who write for this audience. There is a real sense of his having been there. - Patricia Shehan Campbell, Professor of Music, University of Washington, USA'... contains the essential and highly valued hallmark of

Chapter 1

Musical Value

It so happened that, while I was working for a few days in the Sibelius Academy of Music in Helsinki, I found myself invited by the management of my hotel to a reception. The group consisted mainly of business travellers from Nordic and other northern European countries. Eventually I fell into conversation with a friendly Finn. She had a combined degree in economics and chemistry and was working from Sweden for a company which makes and sells flavourings for food and drinks. She spoke Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish, English and recently had begun to learn Estonian to help her sell her products in a region of Europe where she saw a promising new market opening up.

After a while I tentatively asked where she stood in relation to contemporary economic theory. She said she believed essentially in market forces. I wondered aloud how, for example, young children or sick and very old people fit into a world where they may seem to have little if anything to offer in the marketplace. She maintained that we all have something to sell and as an example spoke of her grandmother who is able to recount her family history and is especially illuminating on how things were with the family during the Second World War. In the view of this economic chemist even people who are very ill or those who can hardly communicate at all can teach us something about being a human being. I was very impressed. This is obviously a concept of a market not only for material products and services such as banking and insurance but also where ideas and relationships are commodities at least as valuable as apples and potatoes, motor cars and apartments.

It did not occur to this businesswoman to think for one moment that her job was unimportant or, indeed, that mine was, though I felt mine was nowhere near so clear-cut and useful as hers and any outcomes from my job were far more nebulous. Her attitude, though, was totally positive. We all have goods to trade with others and we are part of the market system, part of life.

What are those of us who work in music or music education to make of this? Of course, music can enhance the profile of a school, college or other organisation. Music can be pleasurable, it can keep people off the streets, it can generate employment, it can enhance social events. But by themselves these reasons are not enough to justify music in an education system. Nor do they provide a rationale for teachers or other musicians who know that what they do is significant, but don’t know how to articulate what it is that makes music worth doing.

There is an important issue here. I want to argue that music persists in all cultures and finds a role in many educational systems not because it services other activities, nor because it is a kind of sensuous pleasure, but because it is a symbolic form. It is a mode of discourse as old as the human race, a medium in which ideas about ourselves and others are articulated in sonorous shapes.

I intend to use the word ‘discourse’ throughout this book in an everyday, non-technical sense. Associated terms include ‘argument’, ‘interchange of ideas’, ‘conversation’, ‘expression of thought’ and ‘symbolic form’. And discourse manifests itself in a variety of ways, not only through words. For example, Gunther Kress and Theo Van Leeuwen have demonstrated the existence of a grammar of visual design (Kress and Van Leeuwen 1996). In their quite different ways others have attempted to show how music functions as a symbolic form (for example, Cooke 1959; Goodman 1976; Langer 1942; Nattiez 1987/1990). Discourse continuously modifies the symbolic form in which it appears. Take for instance the daily extension and evolution of languages evidenced in the rapid revision of dictionaries. And discourse can appear in new or fresh combinations of symbolic forms, such as film, television and internet publishing. Discourse is a useful generic term for all meaningful interchange. It encompasses the trivial and the profound, the obvious and the recondite, the new and the old, the complex and the simple, the technical and the vernacular.

As with any other medium of thought, musical discourse can be socially rein-forcing or culturally provocative, soporific or challenging. Understanding arising within musical discourse, as in any symbolic form, can be illuminating and rewarding. Many people recognise that music augments the quality of human life and would not wish a day to pass without it (Storr 1992). And this is not simply a sensory pleasure, like eating a banana or taking a shower. Music is part of what Oakeshot calls the skill and partnership of conversation (Oakeshot 1992). For those on the inside of this conversation, such experiences can at times be powerfully insightful. Musical engagement ‘speaks of perfection’ (Paynter 1997: 15). As discourse, music significantly enhances and enriches our understanding of ourselves and the world. No wonder music is so often interwoven with dance and ceremony, with ritual and healing, and that it takes a central role in celebrating significant life events: birth, adolescence, marriage, death.

At times music has the power to lift us out of the ordinary, to elevate our experience beyond the everyday and the commonplace. For many people music gives rise to what have often been called ‘aesthetic’ experiences. But what kind of experiences are these? And how can musicians and teachers help audiences and students towards the possibility of such ‘perfection’? These are important questions. For unless we have a clear vision of the potential nature and significance of music it is unlikely that our performance and teaching will come to very much.

My first task in this book is therefore to uncover some of the foundations of musical experience. In order to do this it is necessary to clear some ground through the jungle that has sprouted around the idea of the ‘aesthetic’. I have no intention of attempting to negotiate its sprawling and controversial literature. However, it is necessary to attempt some clarification, since ‘aesthetic’ and ‘artistic’ are words often uttered in the same breath.

The Aesthetic and the Artistic

The aesthetic tends to be defined in a multiplicity of ways and is very often an unsatisfactory confusion of several different concepts, including the aesthetic, the artistic and the affective. For example, Bennett Reimer sees the aesthetic, artistic and intrinsic as interchangeable (Reimer 1989: xiii), while Peter Abbs views aesthetic experience as those encounters which are highly memorable or over-whelmingly affective. If we take the view that there is a special kind of experience called the aesthetic then we are likely to push all the arts together into this overall category. This is so for Peter Abbs who advocates the idea of a ‘generic community’ of the arts. This aesthetic community has three shared characteristics that distinguish it from other areas of human activity (Abbs 1994: 92).

1. All the arts ‘create forms expressive of life’.
2. All for their meanings ‘depend upon their formal constructions that cannot be extracted or translated without significant loss’.
3. They require ‘not a critical response but an aesthetic response – a response through feeling, the senses, and the imagination’.

Thus stated, the problem becomes fairly clear. The first of these defining statements must surely apply to all forms of discourse unless a very restricted meaning is placed upon the phrase ‘expressive of life’. Science and philosophy, for instance, also create meaningful expressive or communicative forms. The second statement may appear to be more artistically distinctive but is also true of inter-personal relations, sexuality and humour, in fact of all intuitive or holistic ways of taking the world. And I suspect that much advanced thinking in mathematics might also depend on ‘formal constructions’. The third statement containing the idea of aesthetic response seems more easily justified, even if the argument is somewhat circular. Even here though, it is difficult to imagine artistic participation, let alone teaching the arts, which is divorced entirely from critical awareness. In any case, is this aesthetic response through the senses not also characteristic of eating, drinking, participation in games and in the enjoyment of nature? So it seems that all three of Abbs’ allegedly distinctive ‘aesthetic’ characteristics appear to be shared with several other forms of symbolic discourse.

There is a related difficulty in that aesthetic experience itself is often thought to include appreciation of non-artistic phenomena. The play of light on water, a golden sunset, a fine shot in a ball game, an elegant experiment, a tight argument: all these may qualify as aesthetic. Malcolm Ross stretches the concept even further until it becomes a kind of generic life-force.

A good aesthetic education, a healthy aesthetic development, will, by definition, increase the life-force, empower the life-drive, release all our instincts to savour life and live life to the full. It will be strengthening – virtuous.

(Ross 1984: 65)

For Ross aesthetic education is not an induction into what he calls the ‘artistic predilections of a privileged social minority’ but has to be a much more inclusive activity. In his ideal conception:

The classes would be jam sessions and the public events community happenings. Arts lessons would generate an artistic dimension in the school’s life – not merely function as yet another variation on an academic or vocational theme. There would be room for cartoon, comic strip, food, film, make-up, D.I.Y., clothing, the fairground, muzak, Boots Art, pop, electronic games, cars, bikes, hair, graffiti, advertising, entertainment, politics. The esoteric practices of the studio, the theatre, the concert hall, the gallery would be replaced by an altogether more robust, more plebeian, more ephemeral range of activities – all imbued with what I have called the vernacular spirit (46).

An emphasis by Ross on the virtues of day-dreaming, cordiality and the vernacular is in direct opposition to contemporary educational ‘standards’, learning objectives, vocational attitudes, education as preparation for work, ‘school to work’ programmes, the division of the timetable into ‘subjects’, student assessment and all the other baggage and clutter of the school and college curriculum. I would guess, though, that even in the context of our contemporary educational institutions, we would all want to promote eventfulness, if only as an antidote to the low-intensity sequences of dull routines that so often seem to characterise the educational ‘basics’. It would certainly be very stimulating, affirming and encouraging for arts teachers to see themselves within this kind of frame, as important initiators of aesthetic experience, setting up celebratory activities that illuminate every corner of life, launching events that vitally pulse through the formal curriculum and resonate throughout the communities of schools and colleges. We are all surely on the side of the aesthetic rather than its opposite, the anaesthetic.

The main problem of special pleading for the arts based on the supposed unifying idea of the aesthetic is that it reactivates the underlying old and unhelpful division between the ‘affective’ and the ‘cognitive’, between feeling and thinking. This dichotomy is, of course, false. As John Dewey reminds us: ‘The odd notion that an artist does not think and a scientific inquirer does nothing else is the result of converting a difference of tempo and emphasis into a difference in kind’ (Dewey 1934: 15).

During the late 1990s the ‘aesthetic’ became something of a battleground among music educators, especially those in North America. The idea of music as aesthetic education had previously been articulated most consistently by Bennett Reimer, though he defines aesthetic very differently from Ross (Reimer 1989). Among others, David Elliott felt the need to counter this and he advocates the demolition of this deficient philosophy which, he believes, is characterised by four common, basic and profoundly wrong assumptions:

• that music is a collection of objects or works;
• that these musical works are for listening to and that there is only one way of listening, aesthetically and with attention to the structure of the work;
• that the value of these works is always intrinsic, internal;
• that if we listen correctly to these pieces we may achieve a distinctive aesthetic experience.
  (Elliott 1995: 23)

Obviously, this list represents a very limited view of what music is all about and the uses to which music is put. Unfortunately though, it is a caricature of the views of Reimer. Elliott also manages to misrepresent several other writers whom he clusters together as promoters of the ‘aesthetic concept of music education’, including, I have to say, the present author. It is not my intention to enter this fray; indeed this particular debate can be seen as something of a side-show, offering very little to our understanding of the nature of music or the priorities of music education. Furthermore, neither side of the argument seems to be based on any systematic study of how people actually make and respond to music, let alone teach it. However, we ought to notice one important feature arising from this aesthetic/artistic wrangle.

Elliott seems to confuse the aesthetic with what has been called formalism. On this view, musical meaning and our response to music is associated mainly with internal structural relationships (Meyer 1956). So when involved with a particular performance we build up a set of expectations, in western music perhaps to do with melodic or harmonic direction or with the repetition of metric rhythm patterns. Our response to the music is thus bound up with our predictions, what we are led to expect is going to happen and the tension or release that is generated by what actually happens. This is certainly part of the story and we shall return to it later. However, I would disassociate myself from any extreme version of such a theory. Indeed, in an earlier book I was critical of the limitations of this formalist view.

The problem is that it fails to connect musical experience with other experience in any direct way. Music has once again been removed from life, turned into a kind of game, if of an intellectual kind. It seems more likely that expectation and surprise are part of the mechanism of engagement with the work. It is how we are kept interested and involved, is how we are brought into action with prediction, speculation and ideas about what is happening and what is likely to happen, and in all this there is obviously likely to be a trace of excitement. But it is not the prime source of high aesthetic pleasure. The peak of aesthetic experience is scaled only when a work relates strongly to the structures of our own individual experience, when it calls for a new way of organising the schemata, or traces, of previous life events. This experience of seeing things by a new light is called by Koestler ‘bisociation’. It is a ‘eureka’ experience, what Langer calls the triumph of insight: we discover in the work a ‘point of view’ that seems to us at the moment to be a kind of revelation.

(Swanwick 1979: 36)

If this is what Elliott means by ‘distinctive aesthetic experience’ then I certainly plead guilty to finding it desirable. The important point, though, is that the ‘aesthetic’ is but one element of artistic activity (Best 1989; Reid 1986). As Abbs himself affirms, the arts are symbolic forms, they are shared systems of meaning, what I am calling discourse. They develop within particular traditions. And Me...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. Musical value
• 2. Music as culture: the space between
• 3. Principles of music education
• 4. The why and how of musical assessment
• 5. What of the future?
• References
• Index