Creative and Critical Projects in Classroom Music

Fifty Years of Sound and Silence

John Finney, Chris Philpott, Gary Spruce

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000204186
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Theory & Practice

Creative and Critical Projects in Classroom Music is both a celebration and extension of John Paynter and Peter Aston's groundbreaking work on creative classroom music, Sound and Silence, first published in 1970.

Building on the central themes of the original work – the child as artist, the role of musical imagination and creativity, and the process of making music – the authors and contributors provide a contemporary response to the spirit and style of Sound and Silence. They offer reflections on the ideas and convictions underpinning Paynter and Aston's work in light of scholarship developed during the intervening years. This critical work is accompanied by 16 creative classroom projects designed and enacted by contemporary practitioners, raising questions about the nature and function of music in education and society. In summary, this book aims to:

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• Celebrate seminal work on musical creativity in the classroom.

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• Promote the integration of practical, critical and analytical writing and thinking around this key theme for music education.

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• Contribute to initiating the next 50 years of thought in relation to music creativity in the classroom.

Offering a unique combination of critical scholarship and practical application, and published on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of Sound and Silence, themes from Paynter and Aston's work are here given fresh context that aims to inspire a new generation of innovative classroom practice and to challenge current ways of thinking about the music classroom.

Part 1

Introductions

Chapter 1.1

Purposes and parameters

Still encumbered with bags and not all instruments are ready. A quiet word to move bags to their place and they are into a round-the-circle warm-up. “Remember to keep it flowing”: the teacher sets the round in motion with a simple four-beat rhythm clapped, class copy, then the first solo from Abi, all copy, and so on, yielding 23 rhythmic ideas, ever more intricate and calling for ever more attentive listening.

And that’s how the session moves forward – everybody learning to listen, having ideas, making suggestions, having thoughts; everybody with a part to play in what is made together today, with the teacher ready to offer stimuli, gently attentive to fresh thinking and new possibilities. First to be transmitted are a group of Samba grooves and these become the rhythmic basis for the session. Then comes the making of pentatonic melodic patterns, facilitated by five spaced objects representing D E G A B set out in the centre of the circle. E has a big box, for E is to be the tonal centre. The class is shown how, by stepping between the tones, the melody is made and how a repertoire of signals calling for variation in durations and dynamics can be used. And before long the class are rehearsing how to make notes really short, notes that grow louder and then, as players volunteer to lead, more possibilities emerge to be thought about.

“Any suggestions, thoughts, ideas?” asks the teacher. Some suggestions come fully-formed, some convoluted, some tongue-tied, inviting others to articulate more clearly before reaching their final form in the music. What a long way words can be from music.

An important part of the process is the assembling of the material into a work in progress, and then more thoughts, ideas, suggestions.

The class are relaxed about all this. They are learning to be still, thoughtful, circumspect, wondering, some just being, barely becoming so it seems. Time is not rushing on, rather staying with the moment, indwelling the music. Rapid progress is a stranger here, slow learning a virtue.

Ibrahim takes a lead and tells us that we can think of the music as being like a journey. Ideas are flowing faster now with contributions from Peace, Oscar, Neoma, Jo and Jessie. More leaders in turn take centre stage and confirm this way of working, expand tonal and rhythmic possibilities calling for music made with intention as well as deliberation.

The rhythm section is strong; they rarely lose their groove. Frederick takes time out to teach Joe how his cabasa part should go, and this is in the middle of a six-minute playing. Now Oscar suggests combining four ideas to add to the advancing sophistication of what is not actually a piece of music, but rather a series of sketches that might become one. The teacher, for the first time mindful of the time – for there is a time to end the lesson – says, “Seven minutes to go”, and Oscar leads the final excursion. “It’s a journey to an unexpected island”, says Naomi.

Like Paynter and Aston’s Sound and Silence from 1970, we begin our book with a vignette. It comes from an actual observation of classroom music making of the present time. The children are of lower secondary age (11–14 years) and engaged in creative experiment led by a teacher with a quiet presence, and one whose practice is dialogic. Rather than a music lesson, this is a workshop where the teacher and pupils together initiate and guide the music making and thinking. As a music lesson, it is distinctly at odds with the orthodoxy of its time. The lesson is without learning objectives. There are no prescribed outcomes. It places a high premium on the children’s imaginative responses to what transpires, and which the teacher accepts as part of an ongoing musical conversation. It is, as Naomi remarks, “A journey to an unexpected island”.

The conviction that classroom music making could be open rather than closed and determinate had been asserted by English composer-educators of the 1960s, causing a rupture with established ways of thinking. It was the publication of Sound and Silence in 1970 that provided music teachers with a consolidated and extended version of such thinking, replete with rationale and practical guidance to the 36 exemplar projects.

In their introduction, Paynter and Aston say that they have written the book as ‘practising teachers and musicians who are concerned with general rather than a specialist education’, and that young people deserve an education that is ‘alive with the excitement of discovery’ (1970: 3). Their recognition of the importance of music as part of a liberal education for all lies at the heart of Sound and Silence. It is a vision which recognises the importance that music plays as part of human discourse, ‘a profound response to life itself’ – and for the individual, a ‘rich means of expression’ (ibid.: 3).

The book’s originality lies not only in the way in which it opens new ways of thinking about creative music making, but in how it addresses the fundamental nature and function of music. It thus plays a significant part in reorientating the locus of learning from the authority of the past towards the individual’s responses to the present. It exemplifies the creative spirit of the time and the impulse to break with practices that left the majority of pupils without meaningful classroom experiences. In doing this, the book asks fundamental questions about the nature and function of music in society and in education, setting itself in opposition to a music education founded on received knowledge and skill acquisition through rule-directed learning. There is another side to a music education – and here it is.

Writing in the preface to Sound and Structure in 1992, Paynter looks back on the 1970 publication noting that

we set out to show why we believed creativity was important in the school music curriculum, and why musical composition was as viable for the majority of school students as any of the other imaginative and expressive activities that were so widely accepted in education.

(1992: 5)

Sound and Silence was in print for nearly 20 years and was translated, in whole or part, into many languages including German, Japanese and Portuguese. It played a significant part in establishing composing as a mandatory and examinable component of the music curriculum in the UK.

The year 2020 marks 50 years since the book’s publication, a time when it has largely faded from memory and is little known to the classroom music teachers of the present. Unlike 1970, it would seem that now there is little space in which to ask the questions that were in the minds of Paynter and Aston: ‘Why do we teach music anyway? How do we fit into the pattern of education today?’ (1970: 2). New agendas have emerged.

In providing a contemporary response to the spirit, style and, to some extent, the format of the original work, Creative and Critical Projects in Classroom Music: Fifty Years of Sound and Silence offers scholarly reflections on the ideas and convictions underpinning Paynter and Aston’s work in the light of music and music educational scholarship developed during the intervening years. These are accompanied by a series of classroom projects designed and enacted by contemporary practitioners and their students. These, like the original projects, raise questions about the nature and function of music, while offering gateways inviting teachers to devise work appropriate to their own situations and as a means of evolving their own practice.

Creative and Critical Projects in Classroom Music is both a celebration of creativity in the music classroom and a critical analysis of its future. This book sets out to critique, develop and sustain the thoughts and practices initiated by Paynter and Aston in their work of 1970. The central themes of that work – the child as artist, the role of the musical imagination, the processes of creative music making – are given fresh context that aims to inspire a new phase of innovative classroom practice and to challenge current orthodoxies.

This book is in three main parts: an introductory section, a set of critical chapters and a series of creative projects for the music classroom, with a short epilogue to conclude.

The central chapters and projects have not been written with any close or intentional link between them. One is not a specific exemplification of the other. Rather, chapters can be seen as a critical lens through which to view the projects and vice versa. It is through this process that we can arrive at understanding something of the journey of creative music making in the classroom since the publication of Sound and Silence, and also to understand possibilities for the future.

Part 1 aims to provide ongoing context to the rest of the book. The present chapter is followed by an account dedicated to John Paynter’s teaching and thinking over a lifetime: for although Sound and Silence is the joint work of Paynter and Aston, it was the former who alone proceeded to create a sustained music educational narrative given birth through Sound and Silence. In conclusion to this part, some of the voices are heard of those who have lived and breathed the philosophy of Sound and Silence in their work into the twenty-first century, and in many cases with remembrance in particular of John Paynter and his way of being and thinking in the classroom. These voices are not without critical comment.

Part 2 offers critical reflections on the ideas promoted by Paynter and Aston’s work in the light of scholarship that has emerged during the intervening years. It also aims to provide new perspectives on creative music making in the classroom that has developed during the same time.

In Chapter 2.1, ‘Recontextualising Sound and Silence’, John Finney develops three previously unexplored currents running through this groundbreaking work: the construction of the child as so-called primitive; the natural correspondence of the primitive child with the primitive-inspired techniques of twentieth-century music; and an embryonic expressivist theory of art supporting the construction of the child as artist and creative. This analysis leads to a dialogue between these underlying currents and more recent scholarship.

In Chapter 2.2, ‘Conceptions of the creative process in music and arts education’, Chris Philpott picks up the critical and contextual theme through an examination of four ideal types of the creative process that have emerged in the theory and practice of music and arts education since the publication of Sound and Silence. As a result of this analysis, and by way of identifying a more socially just conception, a fifth type is proposed.

Given the contested nature of creativity, the creative process and the outcomes of creativity in the music classroom, assessment has always presented many challenges. In Chapter 2.3, ‘Giving value to musical creativity’, Victoria Kinsella and Martin Fautley problematise the values that underpin the assessment of musical creativity.

Key to the problematics of the theory and practice of musical creativity are the ideologies that are braided through various conceptions.

In Chapter 2.4, ‘Creativity as ideology’, Gary Spruce examines and analyses the ideologies of creativity from both historical and contemporary perspectives, arguing how dominant, Romantic ideologies of creativity have had, and continue to have, a significant impact on the epistemological and ontological foundations of music education, and hence on its pedagogies, curricula and assessment processes.

In Chapter 2.5, ‘Being and becoming musically creative: A view from early childhood’, Susan Young draws important lessons for a concept of musical creativity from a study of early childhood. Through focusing on a scenario of a three-year-old’s improvised singing, we are prompted to think carefully about fundamental ideas of what it is to improvise; to make music; to be musically inventive; and what it means to develop our musical creativity.

Crucial to the practice of musical creativity in the classroom is how teachers engage their students in the music classroom. In Chapter 2.6, ‘The pedagogies of the creative classroom: Towards a socially just music education’, Gary Spruce adopts a social justice perspective to explore key themes such as pedagogical relationships (e.g. the locus of control, dialogic space) and participatory creativities when facilitating the creative classroom.

In Chapter 2.7, ‘Music and the making of meaning’, Chris Philpott argues that creative acts are acts of making meaning, and that the making of meaning should be central to music and arts education. Such an approach requires us to engage with musicological discourses on musical meaning as we strive for a theory that facilitates understanding the nature of music itself.

In the final chapter of this part, ‘The role of community in defining 21st-century creative practice: A design-led approach’, Ambrose Field argues that enabling multicultural access to creative musical education requires rethinking composition from the ground up as a design opportunity within a cultural context, rather than a technical problem referenced to a pre-existing discourse and vocabulary. New ways in which creativity can be stimulated within a plural and technologically aware societal landscape are identified.

Together these chapters review, critique and propose innovative ways of thinking about creative music making in the classroom.

In Part 3, the critical work of Part 2 is given a practical context through a series of creative classroom projects designed and enacted by contemporary practitioners. These, like the original projects from Sound and Silence, raise questions about the nature and function of music in education and society. The projects, as with those of 1970, offer gateways for teachers to devise work appropriate to their own context, and as a means of evolving their own practice in the music classroom.

[The projects] represent ways of thinking about creative music making, and we see them as only g...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Part 1 Introductions
• Part 2 Critical issues in creative music making
• Part 3 The projects
• Epilogue
• Index