Musical Knowledge

Intuition, analysis and music education

Prof Keith Swanwick, Keith Swanwick

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134854875
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The understanding of music involves the mastery of its various layers of meaning. Sometimes this meaning can be acquired through human insight; at other times, it can be learned. The central concern of Musical Knowledge is the tension between intuitive and analytical ways of making sense of the world. Keith Swanwick examines this relationship on three levels: in considering music as a way of knowing; as the apparent predicament between qualitative and quantitative research paradigms; and as a tension in education. Keith Swanwick guides his reader from a theoretical exploration of musical knowledge, through an examination of ways of researching the musical experience to a concluding section which will be of direct practical help to teachers. He suggests ways in which music education can be a vital transaction, giving examples across a range of music teaching, including school classroom and instrumental studios. The book will be of interest to anyone who makes or responds to music.

Part I
Musical knowledge and value

1 The nature of musical knowledge

Without warning or preliminaries, In the South launches off into musical space. With a flourish and a striding fanfare figure over three simple chords— each in turn—triumphantly and with massive energy, the orchestra pushes forward and upward. Out of this explosion of sound the strings and upper wind float easily yet confidently downwards while a pulsing drum marks the time against a background texture of fanfares. The vigorous forward impulse is reasserted and the orchestral sonority is gathered into a single forced note which becomes the signal for the emergence of a broad curling melody against which the horns float their own tune, pushing gently yet firmly down. The fanfares surface again, stronger now than before with punched out notes on the brass erupting into a weight of sound hurled downwards. Strings step out with a square, firm marching tune while the lower brass edge up tightly beneath, insinuating a sense of pressure. The horns sing out exultantly until all breaks loose in impulsive flurries. The music begins to die away, themes become fragmented and all subsides into a single quiet note. The most striking features of the opening passage of this work are its vitality and exuberance. It reaches out confidently in sweeping emphatic gestures from the first phrases.

THE LAYERS OF MUSICAL KNOWLEDGE

Inadequate as any account in words may be, the passage above is how I might begin to describe the first two minutes or so of Edward Elgar’s overture, In performance in London in 1904, the full score published by Novello. In that the South. The work was conceived on a visit to Italy and given its first year the Manchester Guardian newspaper critic noted that ‘the new concert overture struck at once the note of joy of living in the midst of “blue Ionian weather’”. Setting aside any programmatic ideas deriving from the history and countryside of Italy, the opening is clearly characterised by tremendous weight, energy, outgoing and forward impulse.

Music Example 1
The start of Elgar’s In the South

The work is not so well known outside Britain but is a favourite with those who make its acquaintance and especially with those fortunate enough to play it. Apart from any intrinsic value, its presence here is intended to give specific reality to an otherwise abstract problem: the nature of musical knowledge.

This is important. This chapter is a first stroll through the garden of musical knowing, without following a pre-ordained signposted route that is determined by received traditions of horticultural discourse or the technical labelling of flora and fauna. My intention just now is to intuitively savour the problem, not start in at once with pre-sets, prior controversies and ‘isms’— the analytical ‘defaults’. Some of these ‘authoritative’ voices will be heard later on—should they seem to have earned a place—but I am making no claim to be comprehensive or encyclopedic and I shall certainly not cite every text I happen to have read.

From the outset we ought to notice that drawing attention to certain features of music is inevitably a form of analysis. Analysis is by no means a dull or trivial occupation, diverting us from whole-hearted attention to music— though it can become so. It is simply a way of picking out patterns from an overall impression, for instance by focusing on such things as melodic development, harmony or instrumentation. These analytical patterns or cross-sections may (or may not) deepen our understanding of the work and they certainly have limitations. My own analysis above has the tone of voice and manner of a kind of narrative; it is a subjective impression, a description of the forward velocity and sonorous impact of the composition and is as valid in analytical terms as listing harmonic changes or modulations of key.

It is perfectly possible to approach the music from several quite different angles, for instance, as illustrating the working processes of the composer or from the perspective of the technique of orchestration. Any analytical slice is only a part of any cake; it is less than the total experience. But analysis does invite us to see the work from the inside; our overall impression may become modified by a new slant. Furthermore, in setting out my impression of this passage of music, there is a dimension of personal interpretation which may or may not coincide with any particular reader’s response to the work. As Bernard Shaw says through the character of Undershaft in his play Major Barbara, ‘You have learnt something. That always feels at first as if you had lost something.’ Thus, we lose and gain by knowing more—by being confronted with a different perspective. Analysis not only reinforces what is already intuitively known but can also challenge the security that lies in existing knowledge, disturbing the comfort of the familiar, inviting us to reconstitute our perception.

At risk of disturbing those who regard music as beyond the reach of other than poetical words, my first foray is to map out an outline, an overview of musical knowledge—though starting from the intuitive reality of particular pieces. Can we even begin to understand what anyone might be hearing in this or any music and decide whether it is of any conceivable value to take the time and trouble to listen carefully? Is In the South or any music fundamentally a set of private experiences, incommunicable and varying from listener to listener depending on individual perceptions and responses, perhaps a sensory pleasure or an opportunity for a personal reverie but little more? This is an important question for those who work with music and especially for music educators. If musical experience were both private and transient—leaving behind in us no trace of its passing—it would be logically impossible to say that these encounters resulted in us gaining any kind of knowledge at all. Music might be thought only to temporarily distract us or to alter the mood of the moment. If this is so, then nothing of consequence is taken away when the music is over, no change of understanding, perspective or attitude, for some kind of change is implicit in any concept of ‘knowledge’.

Knowledge is more than just undergoing experience. Even if we put on one side any idea of informational transmission, there is an implicit notion of enduring change; not necessarily a residue of facts but perhaps an unspoken change of disposition—an adjustment of mind or ‘mind-set’. If music is to be thought of as entirely subjective and irrevocably private, then responsive teaching is unthinkable. We should forget education; those of us who can should just enjoy the fleeting pleasure we may happen to get out of music and let others make of it what they can. There would be little point in talking about it and no reason for trying to teach anything.

As an educator I am tempted not to take this view very seriously, and there are grounds for this. Of course, and to some extent, each person does indeed hear music somewhat differently, indeed uniquely. But response to music is not entirely exclusive to the individual, unshareable, idiosyncratic. If it were so then there would be little point in discussing, analysing or putting forward views about music and certainly no sense in making the study of music a compulsory element in schools and colleges or running courses of study—except to train performers to function in the same way that we might train dogs or doves. And we do tend to share a belief that there are mutual starting points for conversations about particular musical experiences, a possibility of connoisseurship or criticism. From an educational point of view, we do try to assess the development of students’ musical understanding and therefore assume that not all of consequence is hidden from view and so inaccessible to interpersonal interaction.

Are we justified in making these assumptions? Look at our test case. Just as performers’ interpretations of musical works can accommodate differing inflections of emphasis and musical judgement, so the interpretations of listeners may also vary. But there are limits beyond which we would have to say that people are not really comprehending the music that they may be playing or to which they might be listening. For instance, if the opening two minutes of In the South were to be described by someone as being emotionally constricted and generally pessimistic in character, made up of timid gestures and lacking variety, this might tell us something about the listener, but it says nothing about the music as conceived by the composer and understood within the traditions from which it springs and to which it contributes. Of course, the person might be finding it difficult to report experience within the limits of verbal explication—and there is certainly no requirement do so. But even making allowance for this—on the surface at least—there does seem to be ‘objective’ knowledge lurking here somewhere which can either be apprehended or ‘mis-taken’.

What then is the form this knowledge takes, knowledge which we suspect may be gained through musical experience but find so hard to explicate? From the start we have to recognise that musical knowledge is multi-layered, it has several strands, often woven together in our actual experience though they are separable for the purpose of closer analysis and understanding. The most obvious and easily recognised category of knowledge is generally called ‘prepositional’, informational, factual, knowing that. For example we may know that two plus seven makes nine or that Manchester is 200 miles from London or that avoir is the French verb corresponding with the English ‘to have’, that Beethoven wrote nine symphonies, or from where samba, bangra, opera or rap originated. It is a mistake to think that this is all there is to knowing and in the case of music this error is especially obvious and if perpetuated can cause educational distortion.

Imagine a young pianist struggling to play the Sarabande from the Bach D Minor suite in the Anna Magdalena book. As teachers we are obviously trying to impart more than just propositional knowledge, perhaps telling the student what a Sarabande is or on which instrument the piece might originally have been played. Such knowledge could indeed have an effect on the way the piece is played, perhaps helping to determine the speed that is chosen or whether or not to use the sustaining pedal or not, even suggesting levels of touch. If this were indeed so we could regard this as musically useful knowledge, in the sense that it informs our interpretation of the music.

Music Example 2
The start of Sarabande in D Minor by J.S.Bach (1725)

Notice though, that knowledge about things can so easily be acquired in non-musical ways. We could find out what a Sarabande is simply by being given a definition or by reading about it in a book and never actually play or listen to one, thus acquiring knowledge that may have some kind of historical value but is musically inert: second-hand knowledge. For this reason musicians and teachers have to be especially careful to relate factual or prepositional knowledge—knowing ‘that’—with other strands of musical knowledge. It is possible to have a precise knowledge about music but this is not the kind of knowledge that musicians and music lovers see as being crucially important. Edward Elgar once heard someone describe a phrase of Wagner’s in terms of the chord of the supertonic. He responded with ‘What is the supertonic? I never heard of it’ (Shaw in Laurence 1981 III: 725). This is not to say that Elgar—though largely self-taught—was ignorant of the use and harmonic effect of supertonic chords, only that it had not been important for him to talk about them or label them in this particular propositional way. He already knew supertonic chords perfectly well as aural phenomena in the context of his own and other pieces.

This is an important distinction to which I shall return: the difference between indirect propositional knowledge by description and that which is acquired and associated directly through musical experience. If the reader is unfamiliar with In the South, then my description is an inadequate substitute for the overture; if this work is already known then my account becomes an attempt to share and compare by analysis. In neither case can the music be replaced by the verbal description.

Gaining propositional information is obviously not the sum of musical experience and is certainly not the essence of musical knowledge. Although knowing music is clearly much more than knowing ‘that’, there is a danger that factual knowledge may be seen as central to musical knowing. Such knowledge is relatively uncomplicated to manage in classrooms, cheap to resource and reasonably easy to assess, and this is very seductive. The possibility of such knowledge becoming detached from a genuine musical context, learned verbally at one remove, at second hand—I shall argue—has always to be resisted. I therefore propose to concentrate not on knowing about music but rather on how knowledge of music is acquired, on first-hand or personal knowledge and its significance (Polanyi and Prosch 1975). In this exploration there are serviceable guides who have already mapped out some of the terrain, making useful distinctions between ‘knowing that’ and ‘knowing how’ (Ryle 1949) and between these and knowledge by ‘acquaintance’ (Russell 1912). A useful overview of these important distinctions can be found in Hamlyn (1970:103–11). I shall try to articulate these concepts in the particular context of musical knowledge.

FIRST-HAND KNOWLEDGE

We might notice that our young pianist is intent on deciphering the notation: sorting out the chords, organising fingers. The ability to decode notation (or to write it) is certainly a musical skill which is of importance in some musical traditions, though by no means in all. There are also essential aural judgements to be made, deciding whether or not what is being played matches the notation, the ability to sort out, match, identify and classify the sound materials that are the basis of music. And most obvious to other people, there is also the facility to manage the instrument, to coordinate muscles and articulate keys in a dependable controlled way. I would put these various ‘knowings’ in this order of importance; aural discriminations, manipulative control and notational proficiency. Together they form a strand or layer of knowledge we can call ‘knowing how’, coming to grips with the materials of music. ‘Knowing how’ is a type of knowledge that we display in action every day. It is necessary for us to know how to do things, to operate a lathe, to spell a word, to translate a passage, to ride a bike or drive a car, to use a computer. Unlike prepositional or factual knowledge, most knowing ‘how’ cannot be learned or displayed verbally, though workshop conversations and sensitive technical analysis can be helpful. Skills allow us to find our way into music but they can also divert us from further musical understanding if they become ends in themselves. We soon tire of empty ‘virtuoso’ performances. There are other important ingredients for musical nourishment.

The absolutely central core involved in knowing music can be appropriately called ‘knowledge by acquaintance’. This particular way of putting it draws our attention to the kind of knowledge we have of a specific entity, something like knowing a person. For instance, we could say that we know Renoir’s painting, The Rowers’ Lunch, or know a particular friend, a student or a city. Knowing a person by acquaintance is very different from knowing things about a person. It is not just a question of being able to give their shoe size, height or weight—knowing that such and such is so. We might call acquaintance knowledge knowing ‘this’; knowing this person, this place, this symphony, this song.

Acquaintance knowledge might to some very limited extent be demonstrated by prepositional statements. If we are able to specify someone’s size of shirt or waistline measurement the odds are that we might know the person pretty well, though not necessarily so. The sales-person working in a shoe shop soon gets to know my shoe size but may not get much further in knowing me as a person with all my ‘thisness’. In addition, most acquaintance knowing is indeed likely to be tacit, unanalysed, unarticulated. We may not even have thought to catalogue the actual colour of our friend’s eyes, let alone his shoe size, yet we undoubtedly have knowledge of that person and would—as we say—recognise him anywhere. Many writers on aesthetics have stressed acquaintance knowledge as being absolutely fundamental in the arts.

My dispositional knowledge of music is not merely general knowledge of fact, knowledge-that. It is concrete knowledge-of, of individuals, and added to in fresh experiences, occurrent experiences. There is no way of acquiring dispositional knowledge of music except by repeated occurr...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I: Musical knowledge and value
• Part II: Researching musical experience
• Part III: Musical learning and musical teaching