Making Music in the Primary School

Whole Class Instrumental and Vocal Teaching

Nick Beach, Julie Evans, Gary Spruce

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781136850417
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Educación general

Making Music in the Primary School is an essential guide for all student and practising primary school teachers, instrumental teachers and community musicians involved in music with children. It explores teaching and learning music with the whole class and provides a framework for successful musical experiences with large groups of children.

Striking the perfect balance between theory and practice, this invaluable text includes case studies and exemplars, carefully designed activities to try out in the classroom, as well as a range of tried-and-tested teaching strategies to help you support and develop children's musical experience in the classroom.

Grounded within a practical, philosophical and theoretical framework, the book is structured around the four key principles that underpin effective music teaching and experience:

• Integration – how can we join up children's musical experiences?
• Creativity – how can we support children's musical exploration?
• Access and Inclusion – how can we provide a relevant experience for every child?
• Collaboration – how might we work together to achieve these aims?

Written in a clear, accessible and engaging style, Making Music in the Primary School will give you all the confidence you need when working with whole classes, whatever your musical or teaching background.

Part 1
Setting the context

Chapter 1
How did we get here?

The historical and social context of whole class instrumental and vocal teaching

Julie Evans

Introduction

This chapter aims to consider the history of how children have learnt to sing and play instruments in large groups and whole classes, both within and beyond the curriculum. It is important to establish that much instrumental and vocal learning has always taken place (and continues to do so) in informal contexts with skills being passed on from one generation to the next, mainly through an aural tradition. In the West, from medieval times onwards, formal instrumental and vocal teaching and learning was important in both church and court contexts and from the eighteenth century onwards such formal learning was additionally available via private tuition and in conservatoires. The predominant model for this instrumental and vocal teaching was the ‘master and apprentice’ model with an emphasis on one-to-one tuition and the imparting of skills from an expert to a novice, and this model continues to be influential even today. What might be less evident is that, in the context of the English education system, children have learnt to sing and play instruments in large groups and whole classes for a surprisingly long time and quite systematically since the nineteenth century.

The establishment of music in schools

Music has not always been valued in English schools. Before about 1840 the study of music in schools was almost non-existent, but Russell states that from the 1840s onward

there were always a number of teachers entering the profession who were at least partially qualified in the teaching of music. But the scope, quality, and indeed the actual existence of school music was still almost entirely dependent upon the whim of individual teachers, and there were undoubtedly many schools in which music had no place in the curriculum.

(Russell 1987: 44)

Despite the fact that there is now a national curriculum for music in England some of these statements may still apply.

An important development in the early 1840s was the introduction of the sol-fa system into English schools by proponents such as John Hullah, John Curwen and Sarah Glover. In England in the early nineteenth century a surprisingly large proportion of the population were involved in choral singing and became able to sight-sing through reading tonic sol-fa. Hullah, Curwen and Glover each developed a slightly different system, Hullah using a ‘fixed doh’ principle and Curwen and Glover a moveable doh where the tonic of any new key was always ‘doh’. Each system was based on the principle that ‘traditional’ stave notation was hard to read and that tonic sol-fa allowed musical reading issues to be overcome. Those currently teaching whole classes to sing or play still have to grapple with similar concerns about what notations are accessible or even necessary for children to progress in their musical learning.

The Education Act of 1870 established a national system of state education but music was often excluded in schools as a curriculum subject because it did not receive a subsidy. Eventually music was included and it was even decided that any state elementary school not including music on its syllabus would lose funding. Initially, a heavy emphasis was placed on singing and the acquisition of musical aural and literacy skills. Plummeridge suggests: ‘With the establishment of a national educational system, choral activity and music reading were encouraged in schools, partly in the hope that such action would eventually lead to an improved standard of musical performance in church services’ (Plummeridge in Philpott 2001: 5). Russell also states that ‘its great appeal to both educationalists and many music specialists lay in its cheapness, and above all its value as a vehicle for moral education’ (Russell 1987: 45).

Parallels can again be drawn with recent thinking. The Music Manifesto Report No. 2 (DfES 2006) emphasises that singing is for everyone and, whilst it does not discuss moral education, it does state that singing can build communities and contribute to better mental and physical health. Some of the results were more tangible, and Russell (1987) suggests that, by 1891, 60 per cent of children in English and Welsh elementary schools were being taught to sing from one form of notation or another.

It is a common misconception that most of the singing that took place in late nineteenth-century schools was of hymns and sacred music. In fact the Education Code sought to ensure that state schools were non-denominational. The singing of folk songs was common but some suggested that these songs displayed ‘frank vulgarity’ and

when the debate over music in education moved increasingly from a moral to an artistic basis, there was further criticism that the songs, normally learnt by ear and sung in unison, were damaging the quality of sight-reading and part-singing.

(Russell 1987: 46)

The educationalist Arthur Somervell encouraged the production of the National Song Book (1906) which used many British ‘national songs’ from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as opposed to folk songs. As Cox suggests:

The strength of the book lay in its substantial selection from all four nations of the kingdom, as well in the sheer scope of a project including 200 songs. It represented the triumph of the orthodoxy of the national song, as opposed to the more recently discovered folk song. The collection became universally used in schools.

(Cox 1993: 78)

Thus singing was established as a central music curriculum activity and this remained the case throughout the next century.

Instrumental teaching and learning in schools

From the end of the nineteenth century many schools and authorities moved beyond teaching just vocal music and the violin became the main school instrument that was taught. In 1898 a system was initiated by Murdoch and Company at All Saints National School in Maidstone which became known as the ‘Maidstone System ’. The company provided a violin on hire purchase for three pence per week and arranged for tuition at a further three pence a week. In 1907 William McNaught (in Russell 1987)saw an estimate claiming that 10 per cent of English children were receiving school violin tuition and by 1909 Murdoch and Company claimed to have supplied violins to 400,000 pupils in over 500 schools. The ‘Maidstone System ’ undoubtedly contributed to the formation of school orchestras at the beginning of the twentieth century and many of these orchestras were comprised almost solely of violins. A National Union of School Orchestras was established and claimed to have involved 100,000 pupils by 1906.

The violin proved a popular school instrument because it was inexpensive and portable but similar schemes based on piano tuition were not successful. The cost of instrumental lessons was a problem even at the beginning of the twentieth century. McNaught carried out an investigation of instrumental tuition in Bradford schools in 1898 and found that, although in some schools almost half of pupils were learning to play an instrument, in schools attended by poorer children ‘the percentage learning instruments is, as may be expected, very low – sometimes in the boys schools as low as one per cent. The obstacle to instrumental instruction is entirely one of pounds, shillings and pence, and most especially pounds ’ (Russell 1987:47).

Despite the success of these innovative large group teaching projects they were largely decimated by the effects of the First World War. However, the recorder emerged as another instrument that could easily be learnt by whole classes. Arnold Dolmetsch was a pioneer of the use of early instruments, including the harpsichord and recorder. He realised the potential that the recorder could have in music education as it was easy for a beginner to produce a good tone. Having initially made wooden recorders with his own design of mouthpiece, Dolmetsch, in collaboration with Boosey and Hawkes, went on to mass produce instruments in plastic rather than wood and schools were then able to afford to bulk buy them. This enabled generations of school children to learn to play the recorder.

Music appreciation, extra-curricular music and grade examinations

Alongside singing and recorder playing, music appreciation became an important whole class activity in the period after the First World War and this was clearly related to the development of the wireless and gramophone. This emphasis on an essentially passive musical activity was certainly detrimental to practical musical engagement by whole classes. Another development was the area of ‘extra-curricular ’ musical activities and this was particularly true in independent and grammar schools where choirs, orchestras and bands began to flourish. This was a major development which had some not entirely positive consequences since, as Gordon Cox suggests: ‘We can see a foreshadowing of the gulf that was later to become characteristic between the “extra-curricular ” and classroom work ’ (Cox 1993:135).

Performance examinations were also firmly established by this time, having been offered by Trinity College of Music since 1876 and soon after by the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music (ABRSM). Pitts believes: ‘As well as setting the precedent that serious musical skills could only be acquired from a private, expensive teacher, such a system advanced the notion that music was not for everybody, but only for the skilled or wealthy ’ (Pitts 2000: 11).

Beyond performance

Until this time making music in schools centred on performance. In the 1940s a major development in instrumental teaching and learning in schools was the pioneering of the Percussion Band movement, led by Louie de Rusette. In percussion bands, children played parts on drums, tambourines and triangles, whilst a pianist supplied the melodic and harmonic texture. A key feature was that the children acted as conductors. More importantly, Rusette believed that the children should be encouraged to express themselves through rhythm, melody and harmony and not just imitate music, stating: ‘We shall not become a musical nation until music is treated as a creative art in the Primary school’ (Rusette in Philpott and Plummeridge 2001: 13). This was a forward-looking view of the potential of instruments in the classroom.

Cox believes that ‘in schools, instrumental music was clearly in the ascendant’ (Cox 2002: 15) at this time and he suggests that music teachers had a whole range of classroom instruments available to them including percussion band instruments, stringed instrumen...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Figures
• Tables
• Contributors
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Part 1 Setting the context
• Part 2 Access and inclusion
• Part 3 Integration
• Part 4 Creativity
• Part 5 Collaboration
• Part 6 Assessing, evaluating and reflecting
• Index