We just had a great discussion in the comments about my post The Objectivity of Musical Quality wherein I argued that there is such a thing as objective musical value which is why we see composers like J. S. Bach and Beethoven as being highly respected and enjoyed over centuries. Mine is a conservative view, but I make no apologies for that. When I started this blog, it was just out of personal enjoyment. But I soon realized that my many years of teaching in conservatories and universities meant that I instinctively took an educational approach. As my work on composition has grown over the years (ten since I started the blog in June 2011) I have focussed more on contemporary music, but, I hope, without losing touch with the main corpus of classical music. While I occasionally wander into world and popular musics I make no claim to much knowledge or experience in those areas.
What I do realize is that perhaps the core purpose of the blog is to appreciate and transmit knowledge of the riches of Western Classical Music--the canon in other words. This has come under increasing criticism in recent years, but to me that is all the more reason to do something like this blog. There are lots of reasons why it might not be easy to become well acquainted with the musical traditions from 11th century Notre Dame up until our time, so I will keep plugging away at it.
Years after I left university I was shocked to realize that in eight years of music history and theory we never took a close look at any Beethoven piano sonatas and only one Haydn String Quartet. We analyzed a lot of Bach chorales, but never the Mass in B minor. The only time I had a course that really dug into a Bach fugue was a doctoral seminar. I'm sure my experience is not unique. It is hard, in a normal bachelor of music degree, to really get to know the Western corpus. You get little fragments only. Part of the reason is time. But another reason is that a lot of professors think of the mainstream canon as being old hat and not worth examining. This is an artifact of their own graduate work when they had to find a new area to examine in their dissertations and had to avoid, for example, standard repertoire.
All this comes down to the problem that a lot of people, audiences and even musicians, don't know the basic repertoire very well. I know I have become far more familiar with it in doing this blog.
This is an "unwoke" blog, meaning that I am not trying, indeed actively avoiding, any political crusades. This was a decision made years ago and it was a happy one. The only time I will mention political issues is if I see them directly impacting on the pursuit and enjoyment of classical music.
Let me hasten to say that I have derived great enjoyment from popular artists such as the Beatles, the English Beat, Talking Heads and Kanye West as well as from world musics all over Asia and Africa. But, as I said, I have no special expertise in those areas to share so I don't talk about them very much.
5 comments:
No one on Earth objects to the enjoyment or teaching of the classical canon. The music education rabble rousers, myself included, are trying to get music education to better reflect the world it inhabits, to meet the emotional and aesthetic needs of more people, to stop systematically exclude entire categories of humanity.
Here's something that disturbs me as a teacher of future music teachers:
Wang, J.-C., & Humphreys, J. T. (2009). Multicultural and popular music content in an American music teacher education program. International Journal of Music Education, 27(1), 19–36.
This study of one of a representative (and very large) music ed program found that 93% of course time was spent on the Western canon, 6% of course time was spent on musical theater and a little jazz, and the remaining 1% on world and "popular" music. These percentages are typical of a US program. This is an absurdly ineffective way to prepare teachers to function in the US school system. They are missing basic and essential skills and cultural knowledge, while overpreparing material that they will rarely if ever use.
Understand: if a student wants to specialize in classical music, I think that's great. As I write this, my eight year old son is listening to Glenn Gould play Beethoven's Fifth, at his own request, and I fully encourage that. (He can only play Für Elise so far, but he has big ears.) But I meet all these young music education majors who don't know how to participate in their own musical culture, or are having to learn how to do it on their own time. This is how we ended up with a music education profession that is much whiter and wealthier on average than the students they serve, one rife with ignorance of the past hundred years of pop, dance, vernacular and art musics of all kinds. You have teachers who can sight-read in alto clef but who can't learn by ear, improvise, or write a song. The only explanation for a system this illogical is ideology, and it's not an ideology I find attractive.
The sad thing is that classical hegemony in music schools doesn't even benefit the canon all that much. I did orchestra in middle school and quit as soon as I could. I got interested in Bach because my jazz and rock heroes kept talking about him. I started learning some violin partitas just to get better at jazz guitar, but ended up loving them in their own right. It isn't enough to expose kids to the canon, you have to make it worth their while. I do believe that learning canonical music can benefit a lot of creative musicians. But schools teach it as if it's some kind of magical skeleton key that unlocks all the world's music, and since that is manifestly untrue, kids reject the whole thing. I found my way back in as an adult, but few people are as obsessed as I am.
If I could just quibble about a few things. Of COURSE there are people who object to the teaching of the classical canon. They object to its very existence. You think it undeservedly takes time and space away from what kids should properly be studying in music, i.e. jazz and pop. As soon as you use the word "hegemony" that is the expression of a desire to break away from that oppression. Less time with Bach, more time with pop. Ok, but forgive me if I will just continue on with what I am doing.
The reason I want to balance out the music curriculum to better reflect the students' cultural and emotional needs is not because I am opposed to the study of classical music. I want that to continue to be available to anyone who wants it. But by not having anything else on the menu in school music, we do real and lasting harm. Not to pop music! Kids will figure out how to make their music one way or the other. But to musics that require institutional support in order to exist. Including classical!
Here's another disturbing bit of music education research: school music participation and funding have been in a steady decline over the past several decades. You might think that the funding cuts are causing the enrollment declines. It turns out to be the other way around: elective band, choir and orchestra programs don't attract kids, so the schools reasonably divert the funding elsewhere.
A story: I got brought into the Fordham School for the Arts because their music program had terrible enrollment numbers. I wondered how that could be possible, given that the Bronx gave rise to the most popular and culturally influential form of music in the world. Then I got there and met their choir director, a nice older white guy, classically trained, who forbade his nearly all-black choir from stomping and clapping out beats while they sang. Versions of this story play out across the US. See the research of Ruth Gustafson and Juliet Hess on how well-meaning white music teachers alienate students with this kind of obsession with bodily comportment.
I don't want to eliminate classical music study in favor of Black music. I just want to stem the tide of young people abandoning musical study entirely. My co-author Will Kuhn runs one of the biggest and most successful high school music technology programs in the country. You might naively think he would be "stealing" all the band, choir and orchestra kids, but the opposite has happened: his program has improved enrollment in the traditional ensembles. It makes sense! You validate the kids' musical identities and light the creative fire, and then they get interested in the broader musical world too.
Yours seems a reasonable response given the context.
I think the difficulty is maintaining standards while changing standards. I appreciate the issues that Mt Hain raises and agree that something needs to be done. However I think he minimizes the likely pitfalls. To take an example from the natural world, birds do not fly because they enjoy flying. They fly because their survival depends on it. The proof is that when birds go to uninhabited or non predatory environments they quickly evolve into non flying animals.
Pop music is more widely appreciated because it is easier to appreciate. So introducing it can start a devolution as students chafe at doing more difficult topics when the easier topics are a bigger part of the schooling. My own suggestion would be to teach the classical precepts but take examples from a wider universe. For example if you are teaching augmented chords take examples not only from the classical literature but also from The Beatles and other pop musicians who often use these chords in their playing. Some pop artists have fairly complex chord progressions also. There aren't many techniques that don't have some examples in the pop, jazz or world music world.
There was a music textbook that tried to do some of the things that Mr Hain advocates by Cogan and Escot titled Sonic Design. It came out in the 79s and failed for the reasons highlighted by Mr Hain. But perhaps that and similar texts could be resurrected and copied.
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