Music, Mind and Education

Keith Swanwick

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781134980451
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Keith Swanwick explores the psychological and sociological dimensions of musical experience and the implications of these for children's development and music education in schools and colleges. Music is seen, with the other arts, as contributing to the growth of mind, with deep psychological roots in play. Swanwick examines the ways in which children make their own music, and confirms that there is an observable sequence of development. His insights into musical experience help to draw together and interpret fragmented psychological work that has been done in the field and make it possible to plan music education in schools, colleges and studios in a more purposeful way. His analysis of the nature of musical experience and music education has consequences both for curriculum development and the assessment of students' work, with special reference given to the National Curriculum and GCSE.

1
In praise of theory—does it matter what we think?

I am convinced that music is too powerful a subject to compromise its individuality to educational theory.

(Peter Fletcher, Education and Music Preface, v)

It is sometimes tempting and often fashionable to take up an antiintellectual stance and complain of theorizing, an activity which can be seen as remote from practicalities, in our case classrooms and living musical experience. Indeed, it is just as easy to find examples of dull and irrelevant theories, as it is possible to find instances of boring and trivial musical compositions or performances. There can also be tedious practical work, unilluminated by any sense of perspective and lacking any sense of purpose, sadly in need of a theoretical context. Doing things without thinking can be profitless, even hazardous.

I shall argue for the necessity, for the inevitability of theorizing, against the view quoted at the head of this chapter. Having said that music should not ‘compromise its individuality to educational theory’, Peter Fletcher goes on to develop what is, in reality, a detailed theory of music education. In a fairly prescriptive manner, he puts forward a theory based on what he calls ‘musical intuition’. This is interesting and challenging, although we do not get to learn very much about the stuff of ‘musical intuition’. I want to be more explicit than this and penetrate further into the nature of musical thought and behaviour. As it stands, I am not sure whether Fletcher really means musical intuition or just his personal intuition about music and music education.

The essential point here is that no human mind is free from the impulse towards theorizing, any more than human physiology can get by for long without breathing. If I am sent on a shopping expedition to buy vegetables and return with potatoes, carrots and cakes, I have either failed to understand the theoretical implications of the term ‘vegetables’, or I am deliberately going beyond instructions, perhaps determined to break some rule on diet. At another level, a teacher who believes that music education should be performance-orientated, or one who affirms that composing in small groups is the best way towards musical understanding, or another who emphasizes the importance of giving students individual instrumental instruction; all of these are implicitly working to theories about music and educational processes, whether or not they declare them publicly. Theories are not the opposite of practice but its basis.

A persuasive voice urging us to take theorizing seriously is that of the philosopher and scientist, Karl Popper, to whom I referred earlier. What he says seems as important for musicians and teachers as for scientists and philosophers, and, since I want to return later to the direct implications of his thinking for music education, it seems important here to at least hint at the essence of his work.

In an influential and powerful picture of the processes of human knowing, Popper conceives of three distinct ‘worlds’. The first of these is the world of physical states, of objects and observable events, the world we experience as ‘out there’; the second is the world of mental states, the world we tend to regard as subjective experience; the third world is the world ‘of theories in themselves, and their logical relations; of arguments in themselves; and of problem situations in themselves’ (Popper, 1972, 1979:154). This last, ‘World Three’, is an autonomous world; it is a world of ideas, a world to which everyone contributes something but from which we all take much more. These ideas may take the form of scientific theories, philosophical reasonings, musical works, paintings, novels, poems, and so on.

All of the inhabitants of ‘World Three’ are the inevitable products of human thinking and imaginative speculation, inevitable in the same sense that spiders must make webs or birds must make nests. So you and I make theories, seeking explanations, looking for organizing principles by which to have, to hold and to interpret experience, trying to formulate concepts that may have predictive power. If we did not, we would hardly survive from day to day.

For Popper, a theory is not a system of unshakeable beliefs. Celebration and refutation of theories is the central activity of both the sciences and the humanities. It is, says Popper, ‘from our boldest theories, including those which are erroneous, that we learn most’.

He gives as an example Beethoven ‘theorizing’ in the Ninth Symphony, problem-solving his way towards the novel Finale. In the same way, those of us who perform music can become aware that, for example, choice of a tempo can be seen as a form of theorizing. ‘How might this passage work if the speed were to be fractionally slower or faster?’ Setting a speed is surely the declaration of an organizing principle. The ‘data’, the musical gestures, have to be heard to ‘fit’, to make sense, to be expressively and structurally cohesive. If they aren’t and if we are musically sensitive, then we abandon our tempo theory and try another.

Let us then resist theories that complain about theorizing as though it were an unnecessary waste of time. Secretaries of State for Education, Inspectors, Music Advisers, supervisors, and teachers all theorize, well or badly as the case may be, and like everyone else, they depend on ‘World Three’, on the thinking of others, though this may not always be acknowledged. Take the present preoccupation with testing and examinations as an example. The terms criterion referencing, and summative assessment, now so widely used in education, were not generated by politicians, or in Departments of Education at state or county level, but in universities and colleges.

In music education, the influential definitions of composition, performance, and audition (which some call ‘listening’) and the concepts of expressive character and structural elements did not materialize out of thin air but were given substance by the research of academics, the present writer for one. Although much work needs to be done to further realize the practical consequences of these ideas, indeed to understand them properly, it is undeniable that they have filtered into policy and curriculum practice, a process identified in music education by Marion Metcalfe (Abbs, 1987:97–118).

Lively and critical theorizing is one defence we have against the arbitrary, the subjective, the dogmatic, and the doctrinaire; it is the way in which, as Popper says, we transcend ourselves.

As it happens with our children, so it does with our theories: we may gain from them a greater amount of knowledge than we originally imparted to them.

(Popper, 1972, 1979:148)

This beautifully captures the sense of an autonomous realm of ideas. It is only when we begin to take seriously what our intellectual ‘children’ say, that we can begin to think and to talk productively with one another. Only then can any wisdom won by practical experience be formulated, shared and refined. Reflections on practice can only be exchanged through a mutually shared network of ideas, in the same way that conversations by telephone require an integrated system of wires, connections, amplifying and transmitting instruments. Anything else is non-communication and, although we may believe that we are holding professional conversations, we shall merely be uttering a miscellany of dogma. We can all recall ‘discussions’ of that kind! No profession can develop without debating key ideas or theories, bringing its assumptions out on to the table for public scrutiny. Music education is not exempt from this professional obligation.

Theories of music education

What kinds of theories of music education can we see at work around us? There is some evidence to suggest that, for good or ill, divergent practice and correspondingly diverse theories of music education are a feature of British music education.

From 1985 to 1987 I directed a research study, funded by the Gulbenkian Foundation at London University Institute of Education, where we looked carefully at the resource context and curriculum of 60 schools, 32 of them in some considerable detail (Institute of Education, University of London 1988). We found wide variation of classroom activity, sometimes influenced by the age of the pupils, or the type and location of the school. Quite commonly though, the curriculum seemed largely determined by the ‘philosophy’, that is to say, the theoretical perspective of individual teachers. For example, in one school, staff regarded themselves primarily as musicians rather than teachers and their view of the curriculum was indeed predicated on the standards and practices of the professional musical world of the western ‘serious’ tradition. In another school, staff saw their starting point as the pupils’ motivation towards pop music. For a third school, the major activity was composing in small groups. As it happens, these were all secondary schools.

When we looked at what was excluded from curriculum practice, we found one school where pupils were ‘never’ asked to actually play any music and two schools in which it was estimated by the teachers that pupils ‘rarely’ sang. Fifteen of the sixty teachers said that they did not expect children ever to sing at sight. Sixteen did not ask pupils to compose, either with or without notation. Ten teachers ‘rarely’ had children listen to recorded music and six reported that they had no regular access to equipment on which to play recordings.

Observation of over 100 hours of teaching confirmed this impression of wide divergence: there were schools in which the most common working situation was composing in pairs and small groups, while in others—mainly primary schools—the teachers tended to organize performance or skill practice in whole classes. At least one teacher in each case categorized him- or herself as one who would ‘never’ use classical music or jazz, pop, rock or folk, contemporary or ‘ethnic’ music. As to singing, of the 147 lessons we observed, more than half included no singing at all.

There was then considerable divergence over musical idioms, classroom organization and the proportion of time spent on different activities, although there appeared to be on the surface a fairly broad consensus view of the curriculum. The existence of such a range of practice seemed to depend at least in part on what ‘philosophy’ of music education was held by particular teachers and some gave us an explicit rationale for their curriculum decisions.

It is worth sketching in some music curriculum ‘philosophies’, partly because they to some extent represent these divergent patterns of belief and professional practice that can be found in British schools, and, to some extent, in further and higher education. They are essentially theoretical schemes that arise out of and feed back into educational practice. A more positive reason for this brief examination is that they represent the three central pillars of music education: a concern for musical traditions; sensitivity to students; awareness of social context and community. I want to stress that these are not descriptions of individual teachers at work or even necessarily the ideas of particular writers. They are strands of thought and practice gathered into conceptual bundles to make theoretical harvesting a little easier.

Traditional values

Perhaps the oldest and best established theory of music education is that which emphasizes that pupils are inheritors of a set of cultural values and practices, needing to master relevant skills and information in order to take part in musical affairs. Schools and colleges can be seen to be important agents in this process of transmission. According to this theory, the task of the music educator is primarily to initiate students into recognizable musical traditions. This is a position that was until recently well-established and generally accepted.

Clear signs of the presence of this theory may include commitment to the value of learning to play a musical instrument, to musical literacy and familiarity with a repertoire of ‘masterworks’, or the work of master-musicians. A fine example is the work of Kodály and the extensive materials that form his Choral Method. This highly structured, sequential approach was intended primarily to develop musicianship through singing, especially sight-singing. He was convinced that every child should learn to read music and articulate it vocally, otherwise: ‘Millions are condemned to musical illiteracy, falling prey to the poorest of music’ (Kodály, 1974:119–204). For Kodály, pupils are to be initiated only into music of ‘unquestioned quality’, beginning with (in his case) the folk traditions of Hungary and proceeding eventually to encounter the best music of the European classical tradition.

In the less rigorous atmosphere of many British schools, some teachers still feel that children should at least come into contact with ‘good’ music, should have some idea of how staff notation functions, should acquire some ability to aurally and visually recognize standard instruments and ensembles and should know something about important musicians and their work. Whenever possible, children will be encouraged to take up a musical instrument, thus gaining direct access to a valued tradition. Those secondary teachers and college lecturers who see things in this way may tend to regard themselves as musicians first and teachers second. One of the strongest recent advocates of this theory is Peter Fletcher, and he extends the range of traditions to what he calls ‘ethnic’ music, a policy that is culturally and musically necessary, although difficult to organize and to resource (Fletcher, 1987).

A frequent accompanying characteristic of the traditional theory is a belief in the value of competition and assessment. Of all the arts, music is the most often and rigorously examined. Not only does music find a place among the usual school and college examinations but there are also large independent examining systems throughout the English-speaking world, from Britain to Australia. In 1976 there were over 244,000 examination entrants for the Associated Board alone, more than double the entry of ten years before. In 1986 the figure was in excess of 262,000. The great majority of entrants were pianists, a high proportion were violinists, and clarinettists. All this practical activity, along with the ‘theory’ examination—which is not theory at all but is mainly concerned with the rules of musical notation—bears witness to the strength of the traditional view of music edu...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 In praise of theory—does it matter what we think?
• 2 What makes music musical?
• 3 The arts, mind, and education
• 4 Musical development: the early years
• 5 Musical development beyond infancy
• Interlude: from theory to practice
• 6 The cultural exclusiveness of music
• 7 Music education in a pluralist society
• 8 Instruction and encounter
• 9 Generating a curriculum and assessing students
• References
• Index