Engaging Students with Music Education

DJ decks, urban music and child-centred learning

Pete Dale

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317511830
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Didattica generale

Engaging Students with Music Education is a groundbreaking book about using DJ decks and urban music in mainstream schools to re-engage disaffected learners and develop a curriculum which better reflects overall contemporary tastes. Many young learners are 'at risk' of exclusion; this book argues that for such individuals, the implications of such a shift in the music curriculum could be especially positive.

Drawing extensively on the author's own wealth of teaching experience, and bridging the gap between practice and theory, this book demonstrates through case studies that DJ decks can prove extremely valuable in mainstream classroom situations across the secondary school age ranges. Addressing challenging and crucial topics, combining rigorous theoretical analysis with practical suggestions, the book addresses questions such as:

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• Are DJ decks actually a musical instrument, and are they suitable for classroom teaching?

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• Will Ofsted's school inspectors approve of music teaching involving DJ decks and urban music?

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• If we bring urban music into the classroom, will this further marginalise classical music?

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• Are DJing and MCing skills recognised within examination specifications, at least in the UK?

Current teachers will find the practical advice on how to incorporate DJ decks and urban music into their classroom especially helpful, whilst educational researchers will be captivated by the critical discussion of the child-centred tradition and a theoretical approach which stretches from 'continental' philosophy to practice-based reflection.

With an insistence that the starting point for music education should always be the interests and experiences of the learners, this book is essential reading for those music teachers and researchers interested in the benefits of non-standard music-making in the classroom.

PART I

Engaging disaffected students

1

CURRICULUM TENSIONS

What to teach? It is a rather important question and, despite the increases in prescription faced by contemporary educators (in the UK’s mainstream school system, at least), one which remains open – up to a point, at least. We will examine the UK’s National Curriculum for Key Stage 3 in some detail in Chapter Seven below but for now, we can note the first stated aim of the current National Curriculum. According to this document, all students should ‘perform, listen to, review and evaluate music across a range of historical periods, genres, styles and traditions, including the works of the great composers and musicians’. The statement is clear enough but, we should add, there is quite a bit of room to manoeuvre. Which ‘great composers and musicians’ should we listen to, review and evaluate? (Which of their works, come to that?) What kind of performing should we be aiming to encourage/develop/instigate? How do we best select ‘periods, genres, styles and traditions’ from the impossibly wide range of possible selections within this thing called ‘the history of music’?

The music teacher has to make some decisions, in practice. Inevitably, this will include some exclusions. For a long time, including this author’s years of secondary-level education (11–18 years of age, in the UK), popular music was the institutionally excluded other: twentieth-century music, in educational terms at that time, meant Bartok, Schoenberg, Britten, but certainly not Elvis, the Beatles or even Miles Davis. In the mid-1980s, when I was studying for my O-level, one might well have found some jazz and pop in the school orchestra’s repertoire and one’s school master might even be willing to encourage pupils to form rock bands. Such was the periphery, though, not the expected core of the curriculum. The O-level syllabus which I encountered between 1985 and 1987, for example, had one of Corelli’s concerti grossi, Brahms’ Academic Festival Overture and Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra as the core study pieces. One would sit at one’s desk, gamely trying to follow the score (many of my classmates were even worse at this than I was, which is saying something). Intermittently, the teacher would pull the needle out of the groove of a recorded rendition of the work and draw our attention to a specific bar or two, in order to tease out the significance of one cadence or another, or perhaps to ask a question relating to the composer’s decisions in his employment of the resources of the orchestra.

I honestly enjoyed this work, up to a point at least: it was a challenge, but I learnt a great deal about harmony, timbre, the history of European art music and so forth. That said, I was near seventeen years of age (being an October-born child) when I sat the exam: my favourite bands, at that time, were probably Stiff Little Fingers and the Smiths. I would soon be listening to the likes of the Pixies and Sonic Youth – contemporary US ‘indie rock’ groups whose employment of dissonance seemed to me, then and now, to be a fascinating correlate of the experimentations with harmony, timbre and rhythm which had been undertaken by the twentieth-century composers I had learnt about in my O-level. The curriculum, then, was far too restricted. Most of the thirteen learners in my class of ‘87 were listening to heavy metal, if the truth be known. Although I may have been the least unenthusiastic about the Baroque music of Corelli within my class, I think it is fair to say that we were part of a whole generation who thought of ‘music’ as encompassing a considerably wider bracket than that which our curriculum covered.

Something had to shift at an institutional level and, in the UK at least, it began to do so thanks to two main factors. Firstly, the replacement of the O-level with the GCSE, from 1988 onwards. Secondly, and in the same year, the introduction of the National Curriculum. From a music education perspective, these brought an immense shift. The GCSE allowed students to compose relatively freely rather than simply to attempt to replicate the highly formal rules of counterpoint and SATB harmony; the listening paper could include popular and ‘ethnic’ music and was much less notation-focussed. These and other developments made the new qualification very different from the O-level which had preceded it, and allowed learners with less traditional musical skills to score higher grades. The National Curriculum, meanwhile, gave a crucial entitlement to practical/creative music-making in the classroom. Although actual music-making will doubtless have occurred in some classrooms prior to 1988, Gary Spruce has suggested that music education had for too long been ‘dominated by passive listening and the didactic imparting of information’ prior to the ‘remarkable transformation’ within which the introduction of a National Curriculum was a crucial component (Spruce 1996: 3).

Even with these improvements, though, the situation for music education remained imperfect. For example, Peter Dunbar-Hall argued in the mid-1990s that ‘Popular music, despite its existence on syllabuses in various forms, is still a problem for many music teachers’ (Dunbar-Hall in Spruce 1996: 216). In his view, the ‘art music backgrounds of many music teachers act against an understanding of popular music’ (ibid.). Within the same mid-1990s survey of music education, George Odam reports a students’ view that ‘most teachers … don’t listen to pop music or understand it. Schools haven’t got the right equipment or the right sort of rooms to work in’ (Odam in Spruce 1996: 186). Bernarr Rainbow argues that disdain for popular music goes back at least to the beginning of the twentieth century when the likes of Arthur Somervell (HM Inspector of Music at that time) believed that ‘an important part of their task was to wean their pupils away from “the raucous notes of coarse music-hall songs”’ (Rainbow in Spruce 1996: 14).

Few, if any, who are au fait with the general state of play for music education in the UK would deny that this situation has improved in the twenty years since Spruce’s Teaching Music was published. Today, many music teachers do have a good understanding of pop and rock and many have a background in making such music. Most schools, if not all of them, now have some suitable equipment for mainstream popular music: guitars, drums, electronic keyboards, software for recording and editing music and even for ‘making beats’ (although too few schools have DJ decks and too many music teachers lack the knowledge as to their use, unless I am sorely mistaken). With the increasingly common introduction of music-editing software, indeed, there has been at least some engagement with EDM (Finney and Burnard 2007). There is much room for improvement, however. For one thing, it remains the case that ‘Teachers tend to use elaborated codes derived from Western European “elite” culture, whereas students use vernacular codes’, as John Finney puts it (18). By elaborated code, Finney means musical values such as ‘periodic phrasing, harmonic conventions, extended phrases, developmental variation and so on’ – relied upon at least partly because ‘teachers know that examiners also operate within elaborated codes and will negatively assess work that does not conform to the norms of the code’.

In my view, Finney’s complaint is most astute: even if a teacher is sympathetic to the culturally-specific appeal of musical effects such as, for example, the repeatedly thumping bass and repetitively-delivered simple phrases found in happy hardcore EDM, the teacher is also likely to be conscious that an institutional preference is at large in music education. Many teachers, rightly or wrongly, assume that such music cannot be granted much if any value for assessment purposes. This institutional preference remains tied, as Finney highlights, to the elite art music which originated in Europe. Things have improved, certainly, with music education being much more likely to reflect the musical interests and passions of learners in the twenty-first century relative to the state of play even in the later decades of the twentieth. However, if popular music is now a fairly central plank within school-level music education, rather than existing at the periphery as it did for so long, it nevertheless remains the case that certain kinds of popular music are much more likely to receive coverage than others. ‘Popular music’, after all, is a hopelessly broad church: the term, in the last analysis, can be used to cover absolutely everything beyond the confines of European art music and, for this reason, the journal Popular Music has even gone as far as to ask ‘Can We Get Rid of the “Popular” in Popular Music?’. Consequent to this terminological/categorisation problem, the acceptance of popular music in the classroom has, in practice, meant the acceptance of only the most central forms and types: the peripheries are less well served. Hardcore EDM, we can add, is arguably the least well-served area of contemporary music within the supposed broadening of the music curriculum which has been occurring for the last quarter of a century. (One could also note the poor fit of death/doom/screamo/grindcore metal, avant-garde noise and other peripheral forms of so-called popular music with the preferences and tendencies of mainstream music education at the present time, but this would be beyond the scope of the present study.)

How far can we go, then, with the inclusive approach to music education? Is there a point where opening up the classroom to peripheral musics makes teaching itself untenable? Do we risk losing sight of the centre if we over-emphasise the peripheral (the very ‘throwing the baby out with the bathwater’ issue which would appear to have provoked the UK government to introduce the stipulation, mentioned at the top of the present chapter, that secondary-level music education should be ‘including the works of the great composers and musicians’)? Or might it be the case that ‘Music is a universal language’ (the first statement within the UK’s current National Curriculum) and thus the study of any music will aid learning about all music? What about learner identity, furthermore – what are the advantages and disadvantages of teachers reflecting back to learners the music within which they are already enculturated? Would such a reflection constitute merely an empty gesture on the part of the teacher, or could it be highly valuable for those who are already socially ‘marginal’ and thus struggling to associate the academic experience with lived realities beyond the school gates? In order to address such questions, we need to move beyond a purely musical focus and introduce some broader pedagogical theories and debates, and some philosophical theories which I feel are of relevance to the questions at hand. I attempt to do this in the next section.

When is music not good music for the classroom? The inclusion debate

Most urgently within the queries just raised, we must dispel immediately the false idea that music is a universal language. In fact, there is no single element which can be located in everything which calls itself music everywhere. Take harmony, for example: we know that much popular music follows the functional tonality which was formalised within baroque and classical European art music, but at the same time much of it certainly does not. In any case, didn’t the romantic music of the nineteenth century slowly unpick functional tonality until, to cut a long story short, we were left with atonality as a core element of musical modernism? Furthermore, popular music, particular after the ruptures of sixties rock, often relies upon a modal rather than a strictly functional tonality. Much punk, indie and post-punk music, as well as some metal, uses copious amounts of dissonance. In fact, it is not only the case that the harmonic rules which were established within ‘the classical style’ (Rosen 1998) are often a poor fit with popular music (Middleton 1990); it is also the case that art music itself has no universal harmonic language, at least from the outset of the twentieth century onwards. We can easily perform the same deconstruction on any musical element: the status of bar lines in African music is, at best, ‘contested’ (Agawu 2003: 56); many pieces of avant-garde music are devoid of rhythm and melody in the normal sense of those words; and so forth.

Music is also not a universal language because it is not a language at all: it is music. Music cannot say anything whatsoever in the denotative sense; and if it can imply certain things/feelings/sentiments, which doubtless it can, this is no more than the taste of food can do, or the sense of smell, neither of which are languages. Clearly, then, the first statement of the current National Curriculum is nonsense in musicological terms and is about as useful as saying that eating is a universal language. (Everybody eats, granted, but people eat such different things and in such radically different ways, around the world and even within one country, that the idea that there is something universal about eating, beyond the necessity to do it with at least some regularity, is obviously preposterous.) However, to attempt to be generous to the document in question, one can hope that a message of inclusion is intended. Let us note, then, that the statement under discussion leads directly to a demand that ‘music education should engage and inspire pupils to develop a love of music and their talent as musicians, and so increase their self-confidence, creativity and sense of achievement’.

The important words, here, are ‘develop’ and ‘increase’, I would argue. To make the best of the requirements of the National Curriculum, teachers could do worse than to take wherever the learner is ‘at’ (in terms of both taste and knowledge) as the starting point and then to develop and increase this knowledge/experience base. I will say more about such learner-centred pedagogical strategies in Chapter Two, but from the standpoint of the ‘what to teach’ question, for now we can at least say that such will likely be a valuable starting point when deciding how to balance the classical, the popular and any other kind of music.

We know, from an immense literature built up over the last fifty years and more, that many young people start out from a position of enthusiasm for mainstream popular music. This, then, will certainly be a valuable starting point, in many cases, from which to build learners’ ‘self-confidence, creativity and sense of achievement’ (as the National Curriculum puts it – see above). In my own practice, I very often encountered vocalists who arrived at secondary school already being reasonably adept at mimicking contemporary pop singers. I am confident, furthermore, that most secondary-level music teachers can say the same, in the UK and elsewhere. If, say, a youngster who has developed this skill then acquires extended vocal skills such that they can sing elements of harmony, or can vary the timbre of their voice, or extend their range, or can begin to make an association between actual melody and notes on paper, this is surely no bad thing from an educational point of view. There is every reason to think that such a pop-orientated youngster, if exposed to ‘classical’ (ie traditional, essentially) educational challenges, will gain the self-confidence and sense of achievement for which the National Curriculum calls, and doubtless this is to be applauded if it occurs.

Does the opposite apply? Randall Everett Allsup has offered a ‘democratic vision’ of the advantages to ‘classical musicians’ of developing popular music skills, particularly if those classically-trained musicians are to go on to become teachers themselves (Allsup 2011: 34). (My own experiences as mentor to PGCE trainees confirmed the need for this – on more than one occasion, I worked with ABRSM Grade 8 pianists who were unable to busk a piano accompaniment for whole class singing; in practice, however, such is a vital skill for the typical classroom teacher today.) Lucy Green has also argued that, for example, it is beneficial for ‘classical learners’ to become aware that there is not a single ‘correct’ way of making music and that exposure to the ‘informal learning’ which is common within popular music contexts can therefore be valuable to such learners (Green 2008: 171).

By contrast, though, Robert Walker has argued that ‘pressure from parents, teachers or peers’ and/or ‘media pressure’ can make ‘teenage students rate popular music more highly than classical’. In instances ‘where no media or popular music pressure existed, and where classical music experiences were institutionally and culturally supported’, by contrast, ‘powerful emotional engagement with classical music was reported’. Walker concludes from this that ‘where high quality music is institutionally and culturally embedded, it becomes important to young people’ (Walker, 2005: 53). We can note Walker’s problematic conflation of the classical with ‘high quality music’ (and thus his exclusion, by implication, of popular music from such a rating). Indeed, Walker is unambiguous in his dismissal of any worth in popular music: ‘the elevation of pop singers not only denigrates the value which art stands for, but [also] supports an elevation to a spurious greatness with relativistic arguments which ignore the facts of musical content’ (Walker 2007: 7). Nevertheless, perhaps there is an issue worth talking about here, at base. Perhaps the authors of the UK’s current National Curriculum are justified in thinking there is now a need (after decades of pressure for popular music to be recognised as a valid component within music curricula) for music teachers to be reminded that young learners will benefit from exposure to ‘great composers and musicians’. As mentioned above, do we not otherwise risk ‘throwing out the baby with bath water’ (as the saying goes)?

In practice, every student I taught at Key Stage 3 (11–14 years of age, the compulsory period of secondary education) heard the music of Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Mozart and so forth, and most had a go at using notation in order to attempt to perform famous phrases such as the opening of Beethoven’s fifth symphony. Clearly, then, I am in broad agreement that a diet which completely excludes ‘the greats’ would not be the best possible diet. In a school such as the one where I taught, indeed, there was a particularly great need to ensure that every learner at least gained some kind of sketch of basic historico-cultural facts which less socio-economically deprived learners might take for granted (more on this issue shortly). However, I cannot agree with Walker’s implication that exposing learners to popular music will somehow infect their ability to rate classical music – years of teaching has shown me that it is perfectly possible for, say, the daughter of a bricklayer to develop a passion for both Mozart and Lady Gaga before their sixteenth birthday. Indeed, I would suggest (as Green and Allsup also imply) that rubbing classical music against the popular stuff benefits both sides of the (possibly illusory) great divide.

Is it as simple as that, though? Philosopher Alain Badiou has complained of ‘the plurality of “music” – folklore, classicism, pop, exoticism, jazz and baroque reaction in the same festive bag’ (2005: 89). I have critiqued Badiou’s general hostility to popular music at length elsewhere (Dale 2016). Certainly his argument that contemporary music (by which he means, shall we say, post-Schoenberg concert music) ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Engaging disaffected students
• Part II Working with students and whole classes
• Conclusion
• Index