This post is public-facing note taking on Music Matters by David Elliott and Marissa Silverman for my Philosophy of Music Education class.
The book begins with a series of rhetorical questions that I will now answer non-rhetorically.
Am I comfortable mainly teaching music with software? I sure am! Software enables music composition and recording that sounds professional with not much effort. It rewards naive exploration and rigorous experimentation alike. It gives instant multisensory feedback, including visualization schemes undreamt of in traditional notation. It enables the endless manipulation of existing recordings to the point of being able to play them like instruments. And it enables the creation of entirely new instruments. Software is great. I even developed some software.
Controversial song lyrics in school: Music teachers who want to engage with the culture are going to encounter objectionable song lyrics. We’re forced to either disconnect from pop music entirely, or find a way to process and contextualize it. If we’re going to bring explicit or offensive lyrics into the classroom, we face a lot of questions: about age-appropriateness, about checking with parents and administrators, about race and class and gender.
School music vs community music: I agree with the sociologists of education and others who argue that school is a community.The participatory values of community music are good ones to apply in school as well.
Does knowing about musical form and elements deepen your aesthetic appreciation of Haydn? Speaking for myself, learning classical music theory, history and form did not heighten my appreciation, though it did give me more vocabulary for articulating why I like James Brown better than Haydn.
Are we in the postperformance age? Large ensembles are wonderful to listen to and perform in, but the music they make is increasingly remote from the broader culture. Everybody should have the opportunity to play in an orchestra, but we maybe shouldn’t consider it to be a cornerstone of musical enculturation. (If enculturation is, indeed, our aim.)
Should music educators align their teaching with corporate media platforms and properties like YouTube? Yes, for several reasons. If all of the kids are glued to YouTube, educators should be familiar with it. Also, the commercial world tends to do a better job with usability and licensing than the education world. There are some counterarguments. Bringing YouTube into the classroom means bringing advertising along with it. It’s a balancing act, like everything.
Should a choral teacher stop a rehearsal to talk race and gender? Most certainly. Music is the site of some of our most basic assertions of tribal identity; there’s no avoiding race and gender issues.
Pros and cons of unlicensed practitioners of non-classical musics teaching? It’s true that not all musicians know how to teach. But then, neither do all music teachers. In future chapters we’ll deal with the definition of the verb “to teach,” it’s a complex one.
Should special needs kids have access to music class and music therapy? Yes! Music is a powerfully effective mental health measure; why restrict it to just neurotypical kids?
Do music teachers have an obligation to resist Taylorized education with “teacher-proof” curriculum design? We can’t not resist it. Music learning is difficult to meaningfully quantify, and musical creativity is impossible.
Pros and cons of MOOCs? As a MOOC creator, I feel that they’re a mixed bag. Education is a social process and nothing beats face to face interaction. That said, face to face interaction can be impractical or impossible.
Should music educators be concerned with social justice? We have no choice. We reproduce social power structures by transmitting the norms and values through music. We can only teach ethically if we’re reflective and self-critical of that fact.
Why do we need theories of music education? As per Paolo Freire, theory and practice are effectively the same thing. More specifically: practice is actual doing, while theory is thinking about doing Practice uninformed by theory is fumbling in the dark. Elliott and Silverman use theory to argue for a praxial philosophy of music education. Their main premises:
- The natures of music education and community music depend on the natures of music and the natures of education. (Also on the natures of community.)
- The values of music education and community music depend on the values of music and the values of education. (Also on the values of community.)
- The natures and values of music, education, and school music and community music depend on the nature of human personhood (15).
The word praxis descends from the Greek for “practice.” Elliott and Silverman use the word to mean “doing music, not just learning about music.” Aristotle’s sense of the word: “active reflection and reflective action for the positive transformation of people’s everyday lives and situations” (43, emphasis in original). Praxis is a way to foster human development in an ethical way. (Social is not enough – torture is a social practice, but it’s not praxis because it’s not ethical. See Bowman and Regelski.) Praxial music education conceives musical actions as:
- critically reflective and informed
- embedded in and creatively responsive to both traditional and ever-changing musical/cultural/social values
- understood, taught, guided and applied ethically and democratically for the positive improvement of students’ personal and musical-social-community lives (17).
It’s hard to argue with any of that. But even at a progressive school like NYU, I had some music education experiences that were totally culturally unresponsive and minimally critical. (Looking at you, Eurocentric music theory and music history.)
There are four senses of the term “music education”:
- Education in music–teaching and learning of music making and music listening.
- Education about music–teaching and learning of formal knowledge about music making, listening, history, theory etc
- Education for music–training for musicians, teachers, historians, critics, researchers etc
- Education through music–using any of the above for extramusical goals like improving people’s health or happiness. Or, I guess, using music to teach nonmusical things like history and social studies.
Educative teaching, the good kind of teaching, values caretaking of students above all pedagogical considerations. In Dungeons & Dragons terms, we need to value wisdom over intelligence.
I will freely confess to being vague on the distinction between ethics and morals. Is it that morals come from on high, and ethics come from within? No, Elliott says that morals are inflexible and universal, while ethics are contextual. “Thou shalt not kill” is a moral statement. But a criminal attorney who defends a murderer is working from a code of professional ethics.
As for the applications of all of these ideas to my own teaching? I teach music technology, so I have to do a lot of critical reflection. There is no canon, no standard curriculum, no clear set of standards or expectations. No one even knows what “music technology” is, beyond a vague sense that it involves computers. The term could mean: audio recording and production, electronic music composition and production, synthesis, electronic engineering, electroacoustic music, signal theory, film music, game music, and much else.
I choose to interpret “music technology” as the technical and creative processes behind hip-hop, electronic dance music, and related pop styles. I need to continually justify and refine that framing to myself, to my students, and to other educators. We don’t teach classes in Microsoft Word; we teach English. Teaching “music technology” is like teaching “writing technology.” The technology is easy. It’s the writing that’s hard. So it is with music. My ulterior motive is to help music school kids connect to the broader musical culture. I want them to competent in the styles and idioms that audiences want to hear, that students want to learn. I see the point of music as connecting people emotionally, and I want my students to be able to meet the world where it lives, aesthetically and emotionally.
Putting hip-hop first in my classes has benefits beyond the practical ones. There’s a social justice component, putting the cultural contributions of young African-Americans front and center academically and taking them seriously [plus all the other kids for whom it matters, white, Latino, Asian et al]. There’s an aspect of emotional caretaking of my students, too. [Balance between validating/affirming a kid’s existing culture and broadening their horizons] Many of the kids hold hip-hop and related musics to be core to their personal and cultural identify. I want to help them give voice to that identity. For kids who don’t relate to hip-hop, I want to help them find ways to at least appreciate it, because that helps them connect to their peers, and to the larger culture they inhabit. Elliott mentions that Puerto Rican kids identify their indigenous music as a form of resistance to American identity. Sounds right.
Are there really any neurotypical kids?