Public-facing note taking on Music Matters by David Elliott and Marissa Silverman for my Philosophy of Music Education class.
It seems obvious that the point of music education is to foster musical understanding. But what is musical understanding, exactly? Where and how do we learn and teach it?
On an emotional level, people seem to understand music just fine without being taught how to. My son, at age three and a half, recently heard “And She Was” by Talking Heads for the first time, and within ten seconds was commenting on how happy it sounds. He might not be able to explain why it sounds happy, but he understands just fine what he’s hearing.
Implicit understanding, the kind that enables you to make and enjoy music, is common. Explicit understanding, the kind that you are conscious of and can verbalize, is rare. The same is true for a lot of the things we know how to do. Plenty of us can catch a frisbee, but few of us can write out all the differential equations describing the frisbee’s flight.
Conventionally, musical understanding falls into two categories: performance skill, or knowledge of music theory and history.
NAfME’s national standards list the skills that they believe kids in school music should have:
- Singing alone and with others
- Performing on instruments
- Improvising melodies, variations, and accompaniments
- Composing and arranging music within specified guidelines
- Reading and notating scores
- Listening to, analyzing and describing music
- Evaluating music and performances
- Understanding the relationship between music and other art forms, and non-arts disciplines
- Understanding music in relation to history and culture
Traditional concepts of musical understanding, like “basic musicianship” in the Western classical sense, are brain-centric. They don’t account for the holistic idea of the mind-brain-body in an enactive social context.
Bullet point lists of skills and factual knowledge are surface-level descriptions of musical understanding, not explanations of what musical understand is. If musical skills are the flowers, musical understanding is the plant. It’s not enough to describe the flower; you have to know how to grow and nurture the plant.
The word “understanding” has a cognitive sense, but also an emotional one, as a synonym for empathy. Real musical understanding encompasses both senses of the word. Musical understanding is embodied, situated, context-dependent combination of doing, knowing, and thinking. We can’t impart it by teaching reductive elements of music. Students need to be dealing with complete musical products. They need not just to learn about music, but also to learn in and through music.
Musical understanding is not valuable in and of itself. You can’t separate musical understanding from musical product any more than you can separate an actor from the character they’re playing. Musical understanding is valuable insofar as you can put it to work through performing, improvising, arranging, conducting, leading, producing recordings, and engaging in all those activities encompassed by the terms musicing, dancing, worshipping and celebrating. Not only that, but as Elliott and Silverman argue, you need to make music with joy (203).
Do we count listening to music as the kind of praxis that activates musical understanding? Marc Sabatella says that there are listening musicians and performing musicians, and that all performing musicians need to be listening musicians as well. Sabatella uses “musicians” in the broadest sense to include musicians at all levels of proficiency, including beginner students. The point here isn’t that any time you hear music, you’re engaged in a creative act; but when you listen attentively and participate in your imagination, that is every bit as much a form of musical practice as playing an instrument.
The experience of music-making and listening is like consciousness itself: a process, not a thing. Musical experience, like all experience, is a metastable pattern in a flow of activity, like a rainbow or an eddy in a stream.
Elliott and Silverman list four basic dimensions of musical praxis:
- Person(s) or “musical doers”–performers, listeners, engineers, roadies, stagehands, lighting techs, and everyone else in the building.
- Musical processes or “doings”–performing, listening, evaluating, describing.
- Musical products or “outcomes”–using the broadest possible sense of the word “products” to include not just pieces and recordings, but also memories of experiences.
- Musical contexts–spaces and places, social/historical/political contexts.
Elliott and Silverman then list the types of musical thinking and knowing that contribute to the praxial forms of musical understanding listed above, both for musicianship and listenership:
- Procedural musical thinking and knowing–practical knowledge, know-how, all those skills and intuitions that are not reducible to propositional knowledge. We tend to teach as if declarative intention must precede action, but that is rarely true.
- Verbal musical thinking and knowing–facts, concepts, descriptions, theories. Once again, this kind of declarative knowledge to be converted into procedural knowledge to reach its full potential. Teachers should filter verbal knowledge into the classroom parenthetically as needed, as a supplement, not the main course.
- Experiential musical thinking and knowing–not just doing things, but thinking critically about doing things. Effective selection and deployment of musical knowledge. Strategic musical judgment. Knowing when not to play. Contextual and social knowledge.
- Situated musical thinking and knowing–relationships among the people engaged in an activity, plus their instruments and other equipment, plus the social, political, gendered, racial, and physical environment. Being in the concert hall creates a different kind of situated thinking and knowing than watching a concert on TV.
- Intuitive musical thinking and knowing–Automatic, subconscious embodied knowings, knowledgeable feelings, or judgments (224). There’s a direct comparison here to the intuition of a surgeon or mechanic. Note that while intuition is fast and powerful, it is also sometimes wrong.
- Appreciative musical thinking and knowing–the ability to view challenges as possibilities rather than obstacles, for example in the context of arranging and adapting. Appreciative musical thinking and knowing is not a fixed personality trait; it can be taught and learned.
- Ethical musical thinking and knowing–using your powers for good. This is not just overt protest singing, but also Ellington’s more subtle and coded celebrations of black culture and pride. Ethical thinking and knowing about Ellington requires contemporary performers and listeners to be aware of his cultural and political context, not just his delightful tunes.
- Supervisory musical thinking and knowing–i.e. metacognition, thinking about thinking, knowing about knowing.
So, how do we teach for genuine musical understanding? We need to design congenial teaching-learning contexts, with attention to their nonverbal and situational aspects, since that’s where so much of the understanding happens. Enactive and embodied forms of understanding can’t be separated from contexts in which they’re learned and used. Because learning music and learning about music are not the same thing, we need to assess students’ making and listening, not their ability to verbalize their making and listening.
We can build understanding by engaging students in musical problem solving that gets progressively broader and deeper. This is what I try to do with my music tech assignments: they start constrained (make a piece of music only using the loops that come with GarageBand) and become more open-ended and challenging (remix a peer’s GarageBand loop song in whatever way you see fit.)
When we teach, we need to target surplus attention; to create opportunities for problem-finding and problem reduction; and above all, to help kids learn to see and feel themselves as expressive and creative music makers. If a kid says, “I’m not a musician,” then we as educators are not doing our job. This is why we should consider the concept of “musical talent” to be harmful. Musical understanding is educable. Even congenital amusia can probably be overcome by learning.