What's So Important About Music Education?

J. Scott Goble

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781136988158
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

What's So Important About Music Education? presents a new philosophy of music education for the United States, rooted in history and current perspectives from ethnomusicology. J. Scott Goble explores the societal effects of the nation's foundations in democracy and capitalism, the constitutional separation of church and state, and the rise of recording, broadcast, and computer technologies. He shows how these and other factors have brought about changes in the ways music teachers and concerned others have conceptualized music and its importance in education. In demonstrating how many of the personal and societal benefits of musical engagement have come to be obscured in the nation's increasingly diverse public forum, Goble argues for the importance of musical engagement in human life and for the importance of music in education. An ideal text for courses in music education foundations, the book concludes with recommendations for teaching the musical practices of the nation's cultural communities in schools in terms of their respective cultural meanings.

1
Music as an Academic Subject in the Public Schools of the United States

An Inherent Cultural Tension

The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem… . Here is not merely a nation but a teeming nation of nations.¹

Walt Whitman

During the summer of 1967, fifty musicians, educators, scientists, philosophers, theologians, heads of labor organizations, representatives from corporations, foundations, communications, government, and other concerned leaders from throughout the United States participated in a symposium at Tanglewood, the annual summer concert venue of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. They met for the purpose of appraising the future roles of music professionals, particularly music educators, in the United States, a nation they characterized as “an emerging post-industrial society.”² They collectively recognized that the purposes and practices of the music education profession at that time were rapidly becoming outmoded as the social and cultural characteristics, technological orientation, and musical predilections of the nation were changing. In a document they produced at the end of this conference, the “Tanglewood Declaration,” they affirmed their collective belief in the importance of the study of music to public education in the U.S., and they advocated a change in the curricular focus of the subject, asserting that school music programs should be global in scope:

Music of all periods, styles, forms, and cultures belongs in the curriculum. The musical repertory should be expanded to involve music of our time in its rich variety, including currently popular teen-age music and avantgarde music, American folk music and the music of other cultures.³

Since the time of the Tanglewood Symposium, many music educators have expanded their curricula to include not only the art music and sacred music of Europe and the U.S., as they had in the past, but also popular, folk, and contemporary music as well as the music of numerous world cultures. Recent years have seen the introduction of African drumming ensembles, Caribbean steel bands, and Javanese gamelan ensembles into the schools, as well as other musical groups not previously associated with America’s dominant musical traditions. Some of the music published for the “traditional” school music ensembles—bands, orchestras, and choruses—now utilizes sounds, melodies, and principles of construction drawn from the musical traditions of different world peoples. The leading organization of U.S. music educators, the Music Educators National Conference (MENC), has published increasing numbers of books, audio- and videotapes, and journal articles for the purpose of supporting teachers in their introduction of these various musical traditions into the schools.

At the same time, school populations have become more ethnically and culturally diverse, reflecting the increasing variation in the ancestries of the nation’s citizenry due to changes in immigration patterns. The first immigrants to arrive upon the North American continent were primarily white Europeans,⁴ but by the time of the 2000 census the more than 281 million citizens of the U.S. included approximately 34.7 million Blacks or African Americans, 35.3 million Hispanics, and 10.2 million Asians.⁵ The ethnicity of the nation’s population continues to diversify; of the 974,000 people who immigrated to the U.S. in 1992, nearly 44 percent came from Mexico, Central-, and South America, 37 percent were from Asia, and only 15 percent arrived from Europe.⁶ Not surprisingly, some of the nation’s music educators now utilize music of cultural groups of different ethnicities and from different geographical areas in their instruction, in an effort to make their programs more culturally inclusive. However, the increasing ethnic and cultural diversity of the U.S. and its public schools and the introduction of non-Western musical traditions into the music education curriculum have combined to create two difficult problems for music educators: One problem concerns the instructional content of music courses; the other, public questioning of the very inclusion of music classes in schools.

THE CURRICULUM CONTENT PROBLEM

Stated in the simplest terms, the first problem U.S. music educators are presently facing concerns this question: Whose music should be included in the curriculum? Some teachers presently working in the public schools have been disinclined or slow to introduce music from non-Western traditions into their classes, despite the increase in the ethnic and cultural diversity of the students comprising them. With regard to first-generation immigrant students, these teachers hold the opinion that “Since they have come to our country, they should learn our musical traditions,” and, given the international ubiquity of American popular music and the attractiveness it holds for people—especially young people—in many countries, many recent immigrants may prefer to go along with them and leave their past traditions behind. Other teachers have pointed out that they personally don’t know how to teach music from non-Western traditions, since they have little knowledge of the vocal styles or the instruments involved, and there is no way that they could develop adequate knowledge about all cultural traditions. Still others hold that introducing music from non-Western traditions falls more appropriately into the domain of social studies classes than that of music classes. They stress that educating students about the diverse musical traditions of the world may indeed make them knowledgeable listeners, but that the primary purpose and value of music education lies in bringing students into the traditions of music in the U.S. that have historically been important to the nation by teaching them to perform vocally or instrumentally within these traditions. Furthermore, they maintain, since the time students spend in music classes is quite limited, learning about the music of “other cultures” should not be a priority.

Other teachers feel strongly that teaching the music of different cultural groups is indeed important. Some believe that if young people are to develop an understanding of music and its place in human life, then music education classes must include all music, not just music of one or a small number of cultural traditions. Some argue that if they continue the practice of teaching only Western music to classes that include increasing numbers of students whose cultural origins are in countries outside of Europe, they will effectively be communicating to those students that their own musical heritages are comparatively unimportant. Furthermore, these teachers say, instruction in the music of different cultural traditions is likely to raise students’ awareness and knowledge of the people with whom they originated and is thus likely to diminish students’ potential resistance to and hostility toward them. Most citizens would agree that any enterprise that has the effect of promoting ethnic and cultural harmony and thereby encouraging domestic peace is in itself a highly desirable undertaking.

But the problem of including the music of different cultural traditions is even more complex than it may seem at first glance. Many U.S. citizens— including music teachers—are likely unaware of the degree to which the conceptions of different world peoples of what most Americans would call “music” differ from their own. In some of the world’s cultural communities, musical practices are highly personal, they are closely related to spiritual or religious beliefs, and the social customs with which they are involved are an important, even sacred part of the community’s collective identity. As a result, recent immigrant students’ participation in U.S. music classes— in which all music is typically treated as “art” or “entertainment”—may require that they suspend, if not surrender, their past beliefs about music as they become socialized into the American way of life. Indeed, most school-aged children do not have sufficient perspective to evaluate whether the musical values held tacitly in school music classes might be somehow superior or inferior to the unique cultural beliefs and values concerning music that they held before entering the class. Spiritual concerns are not usually even discussed in the secular, rationalist context of U.S. public schools. A small sampling of some of the widely differing beliefs about music held by various cultural groups will provide some indication of the great differences in the ways the world’s peoples conceptualize “music.” Social concerns arising from the coming together of people with such differences in beliefs will likely become more evident as the nation continues to increase in ethnic and cultural diversity.

• For some of the cultural groups grounded in Islam, considerable reservation surrounds performances of all music (or al-musiqi) due to the potential they believe it has for sensually distracting and thereby misleading believers. Notably, however, members of these groups do not regard as “music” the melodious vocalizing of passages from the Qur’an and Islamic religious poetry that is a part of their worship, although it would most probably be regarded as “musical” by a non-Muslim European or American observer. Not surprisingly, members of these Islamic groups would likely object to any attempt to formulate a pan-cultural, “neutral,” or “objective” definition of music that included the audible, vocal dimension of their sacred practices. Their attitude is not, however, shared by all Muslims; Islamic mystics (Sufis), for instance, typically value music making very highly, believing that musical experience can contribute to one’s spiritual fulfillment.⁷

• For some cultural groups of Indonesia, such as the Balinese, collective life is permeated by activities that most Americans would call “musical,” yet until recently the Balinese language included no word directly equivalent in meaning to the English-language term “music.” Those Americans who have studied the language, musical practices, and other cultural traditions of Indonesia describe a radical difference between Indonesian ways of conceptualizing “reality” and those that predominate in the U.S.; naturally, these groups also conceive of their “musical” activities in a very different way.⁸

• Native American peoples typically make music in their collective ritualized activities. Certain communities believe that some of their songs are not to be shared with people who are not members of their community, and that it is wrong to sing these songs at times and in places other than those for which they were intended.⁹ It is important to realize that, unlike a number of Americans of European origin, they make no distinction between secular and sacred (or “spiritual”) life.

• A perspective similar in certain respects to that held by some Muslims exists among Jehovah’s Witnesses, a Christian group present in the U.S. While many parents who are Jehovah’s Witnesses are glad to allow their children to participate in school musical activities, they stipulate specifically that their children must be exempted from participating in those activities that involve sacred music of any kind. The children are not to be exposed to music that might lead to their worshipping of “false gods.”¹⁰

By contrast with the perspectives of these groups, a majority of citizens in the U.S. experience music primarily through broadcast communications, recordings, and concerts, so they typically conceptualize music much differently. Because of the ways they have collectively learned to think about it, most citizens would define music either as an “art”—a manifestation of someone’s personal self-expression—or perhaps as “entertainment”— something done just for the pleasure of an audience and a performer, not necessarily having any wider social significance. Citizens who have not had much experience making music of their own are especially likely to include notions of music as a purchasable product (e.g., MP3 files, or CDs) or a hirable service (e.g., entertainment at wedding receptions) in their overall conception of “music.” A smaller group regards music as consequential religious activity, while still others regard such activity as something they should take steps to avoid. Indeed, discussion of beliefs about music that are associated with concepts of the “sacred” held by different cultural groups have been minimized throughout the history of the nation in the science-based, “secular,” and thus ostensibly value-free context of the public schools. Notably, most U.S. citizens are generally accepting of the musical practices and beliefs of people whose cultural backgrounds are different from their own, although they may have little knowledge of them. What has largely gone without consideration until recently, however, is that the beliefs about music that predominate in the popular culture of the U.S. and the beliefs upon which the enterprise of public school music education is based are themselves culturally and historically unique conceptions. Since music teachers could thus be said to be teaching something that they do not openly intend (or that they are not even aware of), they could be said to be implementing a hidden curriculum in their teaching.

Problems concerning the differences in beliefs that surround musical practices are most evident in U.S. public-school music classes in which the music of different cultural traditions are included without an accompanying presentation of information describing their social context and cultural meanings. Displacing a song, chant, or other musical practice from its usual social context and the people to whom it belongs and into a public school classroom can obscure the intended meaning of the music for students who are expected to learn it—and perhaps perform it—for the first time, just as isolating a sentence in a “foreign” language from the paragraph of which it is a part and introducing it in a different context may have the effect of severing it from the original personal and social import of its deployment. Instead of coming to understand the music on its own terms, class members may misinterpret the meaning of a lyric or find something about the music to be objectionable, distasteful, boring, or even ridiculous because it seems contrary to their own values.

Also, the focused consideration or analysis of certain formal, technical, or aesthetic qualities of music that generally takes place in music education classes but does not reflect the interests of the originating cultural group may represent a reduction in or lack of concern with the originally intended meaning of the music or the purposes it was first intended to serve. In this sense, music educators and their students may be “missing the point” for which the music was created. In addition, including such music in a class rehearsal or public concert with music of numerous other traditions may represent an appropriation of the music for purposes much different from those for which it was originally intended. This may, in some cases, constitute exploitation of the cultural group involved. Indeed, the practice adopted by some U.S. musicians of making arrangements of “sacred” or socially important music of different cultural groups to be sold for use in school classrooms (without accompanying materials explaining their social meanings) raises issues concerning the appropriation of the musical products of these cultural groups for the personal, financial gain of opportunists in the U.S. marketplace.

In those classroom situations in which music educators do strive to illuminate cultural traditions and the social meanings of music, problems similar to those described previously may arise due to limitations of the teachers’ knowledge about and experience with these disparate traditions, many of which are relatively unknown in the mainstream of American society. The musical traditions of some cultural groups are very elaborate and intricate, some involving notation systems wholly different from that of European and American music—or no notation at all. No teacher is adequately familiar with the languages, social and religious customs, and political dimensions of the musical traditions of all world cultures, let alone their complex technical aspects, to teach them all with comprehensive understanding. In fact, rather than receiving a culturally diversified music education that might modestly prepare them to begin such an undertaking, most U.S. music teachers instead complete a college or university degree program that requires them to focus on becoming Western art musicians, at least in some measure. The study of “world” or “non-Western” musics is only a minute part of most of these degree programs. Inevitably, time constraints on degree completion seem to ensure that nascent music educators will study non-Western musical traditions only superficially prior to their being certified as teachers.

Increasing recognition of music education’s curriculum content problem has motivated university music professors charged with the preparation of school music teachers to focus increasingly on the philosophical foundations of their profession in recent years. The questions “What should be the societal role of music education in the United States?,” “What is the value of music education in the development of children?,” and even “What is music?” are...

Table of contents

• Routledge Research in Education
• Contents
• Figures
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Music as an Academic Subject in the Public Schools of the United States
• 2 “Culture,” “Worldview,” and Pragmatism
• 3 A Pragmatic Conception of Musical Practices
• 4 Conceptions of Music in the United States
• 5 A Brief Historical Survey of Concepts of Music in Music Education in the United States
• 6 Community, Autonomy, and Music Education in the Postmodern United States
• Notes
• References
• Index