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The Teaching Artist

(This is a portion of a paper I submitted for a course this semester at UM.)

This semester has been challenging for me. Not only in terms of course work and the demands of being a teaching assistant, but on a personal front as well. It’s never easy to uproot a family to move across the country in an attempt to earn an advanced degree. The time away from home that is required to be successful is substantial; and while I have the upmost support of those closest to me, I still feel the weight of high expectations.

Because of these expectations I’ve made attempts this semester to better myself as an educator and a student. These efforts have been supported by the material that we’ve covered in this class, The Teaching Artist. Below are some of my biggest takeaways from each book we explored this semester, and while no means all-encompassing, these are some of the ideas I find myself reflect-ing on as the semester draws to a close.

Palmer – The Courage to Teach

I’m thankful that Parker Palmer’s book The Courage to Teach was the first that we read this semester. I found myself returning to the principles and ideas that Palmer discusses throughout my semester as both ways of refocusing my teaching and reassuring myself of my own aspirations. I had the opportunity to explore different teaching philosophies in Dr. Abril’s course this semester; and while many of the writings I explored with Dr. Abril were interesting (and challenging), I didn’t always feel like I extracted tangible ideas that I could use. Palmer’s book was differ-ent. I feel like Palmer was able to maintain a philosophical slant to his writing, while still sharing more practical ways of implementing his suggested teaching ideas. The fact that Palmer seemed more rooted in real-world examples allowed me to better grasp his messages and see ways I could implement the ideas myself.

Technique

One of the first points Palmer makes is, “good teaching cannot be reduced to technique; good teaching comes from the identity and integrity of the teacher.”1 This rather simple idea caused be to reconsider how I’ve experienced music education training throughout my life. As we dis-cussed in class, most music education training is focused on technique. Thinking back to my own experience as a student, I have had a lot of opportunities to practice my craft, but little class time as been devoted to discussions on what my personal identity as an educator is. Even this morning, I was reviewing video from recent performances and critiquing my conducting technique. Of course, technique is important, but I need to start finding time to think and reflect more on what my identity of a teacher is. As I start to better understand what that is, I can use things like conducting technique to express that to my students. I need to remember that “good teaching cannot be reduced to technique.” 2

Fear

“As a young teacher, I yearned for the day when I would know my craft so well, be so competent, so experienced, and so powerful, that I could walk into any classroom without feeling afraid. But now… I know that day will never come.”3

Fear is crippling. It fogs the mind and paralyzes action. Personally, fear manifests itself as self-doubt, and feelings of worthlessness. I picked a career in music because throughout my life it has given me joy, it’s been an outlet for my emotions (both good and bad), it’s connected me with people, and it’s provided a way for me to give back to others, through teaching.

Unfortunately, throughout the process of becoming a better artist and educator, feelings of fear and self-doubt have been entering my mind and it has severely impacted my ability to trust myself and led me to call into question what I’m doing with my life. At the present time it’s impossible to know if I’ve made the right career choice and honestly, at this point it’s probably too late to turn back and select another profession or career path. I’ve made my bed, as they say, and now I have to lie in it.

Being in academia is hard. Being a musician is hard. Fearing for your future is crushing. If I’m to continue to grow and, in the future, have a positive impact on my students it’s crucial that I find ways of dealing with my fears. One way is to consider the on-stage and backstage lives of musicians (and educators). “By looking backstage and seeing how human, how klutzy, how ordinary the mechanics of performance really are… I could ask myself ‘If they can do it, why not me?’ This backstage knowledge gave me the comfort of knowing that all heroes have feet of clay…”4 At the core of this passage is the realization that many of the fears I have are shared with my col-leagues and my teachers. Even Palmer feels this, “Driven by fear that my backstage ineptitude will be exposed, I strive to make my on-stage performance slicker and smoother… I conceal my own heart and am unable to weave the fabric of connectedness that teaching, and learning require.”5 To some extent, we all fear being found out as being less than we’re perceived to be; but we have to overcome that fear if we hope to be great educators. I’ll discuss ways I hope to deal with my fears when I discuss Eric Booth’s book The Music Teaching Artist’s Bible.

Brown – Make It Stick

Peter Brown’s book Make It Stick is going to be another great resource that I will return to throughout my life. At the moment I see Brown’s book to be more applicable to my student life than my teaching life. The information on how we learn will be very helpful in my own studying in my next two years in Miami. That being said, any academic classes I teach in the future will no doubt be influenced by Make It Stick.

Below are some of the key claims made in Make It Stick and how I used them as strategies this semester to help make myself a better learner and student.

Poor Judges of Learning

As Brown points out, “We are poor judges of when we are learning well and when we’re not. When the going is harder and slower, and it doesn’t feel productive, we are drawn to strategies that feel more fruitful, unaware that the gains from these strategies are often temporary.”6 I have never been a good “studier.” Throughout most of my schooling I was lucky enough to naturally be able to retain much of what I was being taught. If I focused my attention in class, took notes, and completed the required assignments I would rarely need to review before a test. The information would just stick (at least as long as the course unit lasted.) So, in college when I felt myself challenged by coursework I struggled to find ways to study efficiently. At the core of that struggle was this idea of being able to tell if my study methods were actually leading to any real success. Com-ing into this semester I still had these same questions. How can I insure that the time I set aside to study is actually going to pay off in tangible results? Like Brown says, “Learning is deeper and more durable when it’s effortful. Learning that’s easy is like writing in sand, here today and gone tomorrow.”7 Most of my personal study time is focused on scores. Not being blessed with the greatest inner ear I rely on outside sound sources to help me hear the music that I’m seeing. My best results come when I take the time to sit in front of a piano and play the different lines. Over time I’m able to internalize the different melodies and harmonies to the point where I can audiate or sing the various parts. An easier way to approach score study would be to listen to a recording. Recordings allow me to hear every line and harmony immediately and, since I’m not handicapped by my own (lack of) piano skills, I can cover much more material at a given time. In practice though, recordings don’t allow me truly to connect with the material. At the basis of this is the amount of effort it’s requiring of me. Specifically, listening to a recording doesn’t require me to actually read the notation. Later, when I return to the score without a recording I might be able to recall how a melody goes or perhaps some harmonic movement; but most of the inner voices and details of the piece will still be foreign to me. Recordings leave me with a false sense of under-standing. The pieces that I’ve take the time to really internalize are the ones that I’ve been most successful at teaching. They are also the ones that will require the least amount of re-learning in the future. That’s a great benefit of the more effortful study strategies; while they make take more time in the present moment they end up saving you time in the long run from not having to re-learn material.

Rereading

“Rereading text and massed practice of a skill or new knowledge are by far the preferred study strategies of learners of all stripes, but they’re also among the least productive… Rereading and massed practice give rise to feelings of fluency that are taken to be signs of mastery, but for true mastery or durability these strategies are largely a waste of time.”8 In Dr. Abril’s class, The Philosophy of Music Education, we were required to read a lot of books and articles, and I found most of the prose bordering on impenetrable. As Brown would have predicted, my default way of studying the material was often to reread the text, or worse highlight passages that I thought were important. After rereading sections I would begin to feel like I was understanding what I was read-ing, but as Brown notes, “Rising familiarity with a text and fluency in reading it can create an illusion of mastery”9 I was mistaking familiarity with the words with understanding the message. I could recognize the painting on the wall but had no insight as to what the artist was expressing. As the semester went on I started reading with a notepad next to me. After each paragraph or so I would try to summarize the thought or argument being presented. I would also create flow charts to try and visualize the author’s thought process as they reached their conclusions. When I found I couldn’t summarize or follow the author’s thought process I would resist the urge to claim that the author hadn’t made their point and instead go back to the gap in my outline. Where do I think the hole in the argument is? Does my summary of that part truly match what the author is saying? Most of the time I would find that I didn’t have a good grasp of what was being said. At that point I would need to reread the material, but it wasn’t done blindly; I had a specific goal in returning to that material. Once I started implementing this new study method I was much better at understand-ing the readings in class, which then lead to me being better prepared to participate in the class discussions.

Testing

Keeping on the subject of Dr. Abril’s class for a moment, I think I would have been more successful in the course if we had some sort of quiz or test at the beginning of each class. “In virtu-ally all areas of learning, you build better mastery when you use testing as a tool to identify and bring up your areas of weakness.”10 There’s of course the added incentive to read all the material knowing that not doing so will be reflected in a poor quiz grade; but more importantly is feedback that the quiz could have provided. Even though we have class discussions on the readings, it was impossible to touch on every aspect of the writer’s arguments. Undoubtedly, there were parts of the readings that I didn’t understand and there was no way for me to know as there was no vehicle for feedback. Short quizzes, asking me to use the material in the readings could have helped high-light any gaps in my knowledge.

Retrieval

Returning to my personal study habits, retrieval is an aspect of my score studying that I struggle to practice. Of course, there’s rereading the score but, “retrieval practice—recalling facts or concepts or events from memory— is a more effective learning strategy than review by reread-ing… Periodic practice arrests forgetting, strengthens retrieval routes, and is essential for hanging onto the knowledge you want to gain.”11 A recent way I’ve been trying to retrieve information is by singing through large portions of, or even the entirety of, a piece of music. I’m often surprised at how little I can get through before forgetting what comes next. Like I mentioned earlier, I can recognize the piece when I hear, I know how the major themes sound, but linking together each phrase is more challenging. As I sing, attempting to recall material I’ve learned, I make note of places I make mistakes. Sometimes this is simply not knowing what comes next but more often than not it’s misremembering. I might skip a phrase or forget a phrase extension that happens. To review my errors, I’ll sing into a recorder. Later, I can playback my attempt with the score in front of me to see how I did. This helps me highlight the portions of the score that I need to spend more time on, in front of the piano of course. An even greater challenge is trying to sing through some of the inner voices. Honestly, I often find myself completely at a loss to remember how the 3rd clarinet part goes. It might be impossible to accomplish this goal for every piece and every part but at least this gives me a foundation for my study habits. No longer am I staring at the page, hoping that some of it will sink in.

Duke – Intelligent Music Teaching

This was the first opportunity I’ve had to reread Robert Duke’s book Intelligent Music Teaching since my undergraduate studies at The University of Texas. This book served as our text for two different music education courses and it has served as a backbone of my teaching strategies ever since. It was interesting to have a chance to reexamine some of the arguments Duke makes and to see how my thoughts on education have changed in the ten years since. The portions of the book that deal with What to Teach and Assessment were the most impactful for me on this reading of the book.

Skills vs. Content

“Expertise is predicted not on content but on skills. This is not to say that content is unimportant. Of course, content is the stuff about which experts think, but it’s the thinking and not the content that forms the basis of expertise.”12 If music classes were only focused on content we would require that every beginner clarinet student take classes in the history of the clarinet. Only by doing, actually playing the clarinet can you start to build skills. Of course, as Duke points out, that’s not as simple as it may sound. It’s not enough to simply define skills as, “play a major scale” or “turn a beautiful phrase.” Educators have to take these “constellations of individual component behaviors”13 and clearly define all the composite skills that are necessary. Teaching then becomes focused on instructions that help students build on these component skills. I believe this is where most young teachers fail; assuming they have learned a sufficient level of musicianship in their studies, they likely don’t have a firm grasp on what all the necessary skills are to produce that musicianship. They end up falling back on broad phrases like “make that more legato” or “balance to the melody”. On the surface those aren’t bad things to tell a student, but unless they understand all the skills to make that happen they will ultimately be unsuccessful.

Course Planning

I imagine myself in my first year of collegiate teaching, preparing my syllabus. Prior to Duke, I would have considered the material I want to cover – let’s say a certain number of chapters in a textbook. I would then spread that out over the number of class meetings in a semester and voila a planned course.

This isn’t unlike how the Norton History of Western Music approaches their teacher’s guide. It offers different breakdowns of the material based on the number of weeks you have to cover it, be it a semester or an entire year. Each class meeting is assigned certain readings and recordings for you to help guide your students through the material. This is perfectly fine if your hope is to ex-pose your students to people and pieces from the past; but it doesn’t encourage the students to think the musicologist. A musicologist doesn’t focus on the what or how so much as they focus on the why.

I think back to back to a class I took in 7th grade that always puzzled me as to why anyone would want to study it; geography. It was one of the most horrible learning experiences in my life. Along with all the maps I was forced to color; I learned the major exports of Chile, the height of Mt. Everest, how many cattle there are in Texas, and that was Geography. I had no idea what geographers actually think about. Years later I was at an art exhibit and I saw maps that used different projections to show the Earth. The artist was trying to shed light on the ways our everyday maps are bias towards Western culture, but I couldn’t help but to think back to my geography class. Why is it that the most common type of map uses the Mercator projection? What are some other map projections and why might we use them? What even is cartography? I had never conceptualized that cartography (and geography) as a set of problems to be solved. How do you represent a spherical shape on a flat surface in a way that’s actually useful to the user? What a fascinating thing. Why didn’t we study that in 7th grade? I imagine part of the reason is that it’s hard to test for those things. It’s much easier to test students on the height of Mt. Everest and the exports of Chile and so that’s what goes on the test. If you asked a teacher what they wanted their students to leave their class with they would likely say things like, “problem solving”, or “a willingness to explore new ideas”, but if we don’t find ways to work towards those goals (including the creation of assessments that allow the students opportunities to try) we’re likely to end up with a class that is simply based on facts and figures instead of one that’s based in the why. By staring with the end in mind, with asking yourself “what do you expect your students to be like,”14 you can better design a curriculum that will engage and impact your students.

Booth – The Music Teaching Artist’s Bible

Inside the Liminal Zone

As I mentioned earlier, fear has a power effect on me. As I come to the end of my first year in Miami and reflect back on this year and look ahead to the two remaining, I ask myself how to best move ahead.

“The liminal zone is the inner place where we create the connections that make our experiences of art, where we come to love new music, becoming active participants, or we choose to direct our scare free time, attention, and discretionary dollars in other ways.”15 I think my greatest chance at success lies at turning my fears into acceptance. To find my own liminal zone where I can em-brace my unknowns, allow myself to feel uncomfortable, and hopefully start to free myself from the belief that I must know everything in order to be successful. Palmer says that, “teaching is a daily exercise in vulnerability,” 16 but I believe that being a student is also an exercise in vulnerability. It’s ok to not have all the answers, and it’s ok to be vulnerable, live in that liminal space and enjoy it for what it is. I’m lucky to have chosen a professional where I’ll always be surrounded by fellow learners and as we circle around our “great thing”17 we can learn from and encourage each other.

To close, I’d like to share one of my favorite quotes from Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet.

You are so young, so much before all beginning, and I would like to beg you, dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and two to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live every-thing. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer. 18

Bibliograhy

Booth, Eric. The Music Teaching Artist’s Bible: Becoming a Virtuoso Educator. Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.

Brown, Peter C., Henry L. Roediger III, and Mark A. McDaniel. Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning.Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press: An Imprint of Harvard Univer-sity Press, 2014.

Duke, Robert A. Intelligent Music Teaching: Essays on the Core Principles of Effective Instruc-tion. Learning and Behavior Resources, 2009.

Palmer, Parker J. The Courage to Teach: Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher’s Life. 20th edition. Hoboken, NJ: Jossey-Bass, 2017.

Rilke, Rainer Maria. Letters to a Young Poet. Translated by Stephen Mitchell. New York: Modern Library, 2001.

 

Footnotes

  1. Parker J. Palmer, The Courage to Teach: Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher’s Life (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2017), 10. ↩
  2. Palmer, 10. ↩
  3. Palmer, 58. ↩
  4. Palmer, 28. ↩
  5. Palmer, 30. ↩
  6. Peter C. Brown, Henry L Roediger III, and Mark A. McDaniel, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2014), 3. ↩
  7. Brown, 3. ↩
  8. Brown, 3. ↩
  9. Brown, 15. ↩
  10. Brown, 5. ↩
  11. Brown, 3-4. ↩
  12. Robert A. Duke, Intelligent Music Teaching: Essays on the Core Principles of Effective Instruction. Learning and Behavior Resources, 2009, 32. ↩
  13. Duke, 35. ↩
  14. Duke, 73. ↩
  15. Eric Booth, The Music Teaching Artist’s Bible: Becoming a Virtuoso Educator. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2009, 61. ↩
  16. Palmer, 17. ↩
  17. Palmer, 110. ↩
  18. Rainer Maria Rikle, Letters to a Young Poet. New York: Modern Library, 2001, 34-35. ↩
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Learning in Laboratories (Allsup)

In Chapter 3, Learning in Laboratories, Randall Allsup talks at length about the balance between laboratories and museums in educational settings. Allsup’s ideas are centered around the writings of John Dewey, especially The School and Society. Allsup describes Dewey’s ideal school setting as one “that houses a museum at the center of the building with openings on four sides leading to chemistry, biology, art, and music labs.” Dewey also says that information should be flowing in both directions, “the art work might be considered to be that of the shops laboratories, studios, and work spaces, passed through the alembic of library and museum into action again.” Allsup concludes this thought by saying, “the museum is not a building where dead objects go but a living space of invention and reinvention, a vital heart, a text. The laboratory is a place of patience and action, where knowledge is sent in arterial fashion into the world and back. The school, like life, is alive with its pulse.”

Turning now to the subject of marching band, how does the activity live up to Dewey’s ideal? No one can argue at the advancements made in the last 20 years in marching band show design.

In some schools, directors are still creating everything in house. Either spending their weekends and summers writing their own charts and drill or purchasing pre-made, stock arrangements and shows. However, many schools are now outsourcing their design needs to industry experts with many years of experience, usually in both high school marching band as well as drum corps. These design teams, consisting of music arrangers, drill writers, set designers, and costume designers, work together to design one-of-a-kind, original shows for the marching band to perform. The resulting products are much more intricate, complex, stimulating and demanding on the performers than shows from the last few decades of the 20th-century. From this view, there’s little doubt that the laboratory is alive and well in marching band.

But is it?

Turning to a different metaphor, how would Dewey (or Allsup) feel about the elementary school music teacher who, one summer, goes out a buys a new class set of music books. These books include the latest songs from popular culture and are written to be played on recorders. The songs in this new book sound very different from the class’s earlier book, that was made up of simple arrangements of Mozart melodies. The students, upon opening the new books, are thrilled to be playing music they recognize. There’s a renewed since of energy in the music classroom as they begin the new school year.

Obviously, some change is happening in both setting described above, but is it the laboratories of change that Dewey and Allsup describe? Unless the actual instruction changes or the manner in which the students are allowed to interact with the art form changes, then I would argue no.

What’s missing is the “tension” that Allsup describes in his book. School should be “a location that serves society through the preservation of past accomplishment and agreed-on cultural standards, as well as through the expectation of new discoveries and reimagined practice.” Those new discoveries and reimagined practices need to take place in school and with the students. Just because marching band show design advances, composers write in new styles, or a pop-musicians drop new albums isn’t enough. We need to open these doors with our students and help them explore the changing world of music. Experienced music students can tell the difference between a good and bad marching band. They have a grasp on the “agreed-on cultural standards.” Few take the time, however, to consider how a certain show concept could be “reimagined.” Even fewer are actually given opportunities to explore those ideas and put them into practice. Marching band is one of the most popular aspects of the high school music curriculum. It’s time for us to start using it in ways that actually better our students.

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Allsup – Remixing the Classroom

Randall Allsup opens his book Remixing the Classroom with three stories that point toward the differences between open and closed forms of education. In a style similar to Jorgensen’s Pictures of Music Education, these stories help Allsup lay the foundation of his argument of an open philosophy of music education. These ideas are similar to ones that Jorgensen discussed at various times in Pictures. Jorgensen cautioned us with her metaphors, attempting to show that while there are obvious benefits to certain teaching styles, they are not without their consequences.

Near the beginning of Chapter 1 Allsup is describing Dapper Dan’s Boutique and how his fashion designed was marked with innovation and a lack of conformity. Allsup continued, “And unlike today’s schools, measurement and assessment, essential aspects of the creative process, were reached through qualitative, idiosyncratically defined means.” My take away from this paragraph is a strong disapproval of assessment (epically summative assessment) in lieu of a flexible, artistic, and unpredictable experience.

My mind immediately went to band programs in this country, where contests and assessment are highly emphasized. But what if there was more gray area in those assessments than we realize? What if the problem wasn’t whether or not we should have assessment? Perhaps the problem lies is who those assessments are really for.

As a teacher, I was usually highly stressed in October, and again in April, as the annual UIL contests for Marching Band and Concert & Sightreading approached. My stress was rooted in my desire for my students to have a positive experience, a culminating event where they could showcase the work they had put in up to that point. The ratings mattered to them, but they mattered more for me.

What was more important and valuable to my students was the formative assessments they received each day in rehearsals, sectionals, and private lessons. I had the inside knowledge of where each student’s abilities laid at the beginning of the school year or rehearsal cycle, and I could assess how those abilities grew.

Where those summative assessments had a small, momentary impact on my students, they were my lifeblood. To outsiders, to people teaching in other schools in my region, to Fine Arts Directors at those districts I wished to one day work at, the summative assessments that we received at those contests determined my worth as an educator. That’s not to say that they don’t understand the difference between formative and summative assessment or that they don’t value to growth a student makes, but when looking through stacks of hundreds of applications it’s an easy way to start categorizing. Over the course of several years, my students make some wonderful advancements in their musical abilities. Growth that I was extremely proud of. But we never reached what the UIL considered “superior” and my worth as an educator was deemed lower.

To me, systems that rob teachers of their confidence and is more of a detriment to a student’s education.

Zooming our lens out a little further, the problem with closed vs open systems and ideas of master-apprentice style teaching only becomes a problem if a teacher begins to change their teaching in a way that puts those summative assessments and the opinions of others ahead of the growth and education of their students. You see this a lot, where the only goal of a music program is to win a certain contest or achieve a certain mark. That’s when a closed system is used for power, control, and the fulfillment of a teacher’s goals rather than the student’s.

I think that we can make a bigger impact on the quality of music education in this country by finding ways of better supporting our teachers. As the public becomes increasingly critical of teachers and more education “experts” write about what’s wrong with classroom dynamics and its hierarchy, we are slowly losing our educators. People who have a gift for impacting the lives of young people find themselves perusing other careers. Assuming we didn’t hire already broken teachers, perhaps a better question to be asking is – what are we doing that’s breaking them?

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Factory and Production (Jorgensen)

In reading Chapter 6 “Factory and Production” of Estelle Jorgensen’s Pictures of Music Education, I was conflicted with her view of music education as a factory enterprise. More specifically, the undertone that factories, with their “standardized machines, parts processes, and products”, might be great for making potato chips but are awful at producing music students. I believe that these large-scale operations, the large ensembles in the music education sphere, do not, as Jorgensen states, “undermine the power and life of musical traditions,” but instead provide great arenas for the development of students.

In describing her factory metaphor, Jorgensen touches briefly on the idea of specialization. Factory workers specialize on a specific aspect of the assembly process as “multiple repetitions of particular tasks suggest that the quality of a potato chip made by a team of specialists may be more uniform than one made entirely by generalists.” While not stated outright, I believe Jorgensen is insinuating that schools that are setup like a factory result in teacher’s that are unable to teach the whole student and that course curriculum becomes too narrowly focused on a teacher’s skill and thus the students are robbed of a full education. I believe that specialization is a positive power that schools should do a better job of harnessing. The most successful band programs I’ve seen have a team of teachers that are highly skilled, specialized, and most importantly, complementary of each other’s skill sets. Specialization only becomes a problem when you hire a group of teachers that all do the same thing well. A dynamic and diverse group of educators is the best way to provide a quality education.

Factories, over time, have become more efficient, allowing for a greater creation of goods at a lower price. These factory improvements, while perhaps good for the general public (lower cost goods) has had a negative impact on the workers inside the factory. Adding in the idea of the factory manager who is looking to cut costs, I’ve seen first-hand school administrators whose main consideration for determining whether or not a class will exist in the course catalog is the number of students that that class can hold a given time. My former administrators were much more interested in having a general Music History class that could hold 35-plus students at a time, than they were in having an International Baccalaureate Diploma Level course that would serve five students. The result was those five students who were most interested and invested in furthering their music education were pushed aside so that the school could find a place to essentially hold the school’s over-populated student body for 90 minutes. In this case, the factory failed its workers and its customers.

The factory is described as becoming less of a human-intensive operation. Think for a moment about a freshman-level English class in college. You have a large number of students, low levels (if any) of one-on-one interaction between professor and student, department mandated materials/literature, and perhaps automated, uninterested faculty. I’d argue that the music classroom (thinking now about large ensemble in either HS or MS) is similar to the English class only in terms of size. Unlike a large lecture setting, large ensembles allow every member to participate in the class discussion, as it were, at the same time. Like a class discussion, some students might have similar or differing thoughts and opinions, and a quality teacher (director) should be able to direct the conversation/musical performance towards the end goal. Furthermore, I’d argue that there can be (and should be) the flexibility for the teacher to change their opinion of that end (musical) goal based on a student’s thoughts.

At this point the large ensemble begins to look less like a mechanized operation and more like a hive mind. At first glance it could look like the bees of the hive are acting like machines. Caring out these highly specialized and specific tasks that allow the hive to survive. However, with a closer look you’ll notice that working together, in large numbers, does not equate to machinery. Independent organisms are working together, under the watchful eye of the queen, to accomplish their goal. For the bees, it’s survival. For the musicians, it’s art.

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Jorgensen – Pictures of Music Education

In reading the final chapter of Jorgensen’s Pictures of Music Education, I was most drawn to the metaphor of the garden. Especially the part where Jorgensen explained how the cultivating of the garden is accomplished. “It accomplishes these aims through emphasizing aesthetic and artistic values and transforming musical traditions by fostering new and divergent musical expressions.” My final paper, which will center around a reaction against Randall Allsup’s book Remixing the Classroom and his paper The Problems of Band, will attempt to explore the ways that large ensembles (in my case the wind band) is uniquely positioned to provide opportunities for artistic values while being a strong vessel for new music.

Like Jorgensen suggested in the first chapter, it is perhaps better to avoid “one all-encompassing grand narrative” and instead “see the work of music education in ways that defy reduction to a single universal principle or set of principles.” Throughout this semester I haves often times found myself struggling to understand the main arguments that writers such as Elliot or Reimer make it their philosophies of music education. What I’m starting to wonder now is if my struggle to understand is linked to these authors attempting to see music education through a single lens.

It could also be because my own ideas behind why we should be teaching music are too dependent on a single principle. That mixed with a personal philosophy that isn’t entirely fleshed out or understood, results in myself feeling more lost as to why we’re teaching than before I started this course.

I know I enjoy music making, both the process of rehearsal and the public performance that allows for the sharing of the art; and I know that an emphasis on great music is important to me. But beyond that, when considering other aspects of music education – such as Jorgenson’s village, factory, or web – I haven’t yet been able to make a personal connection or establish a specific philosophy.

Perhaps the question I need to answer consider is, does the why of music education matter more for the teacher or the student. If the student comes in with their own why, does the teacher need to consider it? We already arrived at the same art form, why not just spend our time creating art instead of trying to rationalize our choice for doing it?

Obviously, I am posing more questions that I’m answering. Hopefully with time (and the looming deadline of a philosophical paper) I’ll be able to arrive at some conclusions.

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(more) Music Matters & Elliott

In Chapter 8 of Music Matters, David Elliott attempts to describe the different parts and aspects of a Musical Product. These Musical Products, or as Elliott later calls them Musical Process-Products, are comprised of performance-interpretation, design-syntax, praxis-specific style characteristics, musical-emotional expressions, musical representations, cultural-ideological dimensions, narrative dimensions, autobiographical dimensions, and ethical dimensions.

All told I feel like Elliott is effective in describing the multiple dimensions of Musical Products and while none of the assertions made in the chapter are especially groundbreaking, it does provide a solid foundation for Elliott to argue against the principles of aesthetic music education.

For me, the most important claim Elliott makes comes at the end of the chapter on page 303.

“For now, it’s important to emphasize that it’s not a teacher’s job to assign emotional descriptions to pieces or passages in music without students’ participation in discussions and musical interpretations. The teacher’s responsibility is to open spaces where students can feel and develop their own emotive descriptors of musical experiences and meanings.”

In this sense, music’s abstract nature (a nature that Elliott seems to run from at times) can provide students a unique opportunity to experience art on an emotional level. Yes, a Elliott points out, these emotional inferences are shaped by society and experience; but it’s important for teachers to remember that their students’ experiences are different from their own and that students are capable of developing unique interpretations of music. This is not something that is easily assessed in classrooms but it is an important and vital part of the arts.

One issue I take with this chapter is how Elliott, through a focus on the process of listening and interpreting music, doesn’t give enough space to discuss composers and composition. Running through most of this chapter is a focus on how listeners gather meaning from music through different means (the dimensions of Musical Products) but what about the composer who truly is composing abstract music? Take for example composer James Syler, a composer who while known for composing pieces with programmatic titles, decided to write a Sinfonietta for Wind Ensemble. The piece opens with a 12-tone fugue at the minor 7th. In talking with James he said it took him several weeks to figure out how to get the fugue to work, mathematically. Here is a composition that is not emotionally based, it’s abstract in the truest sense. That is not to say that it can’t elicit an emotional response from a listener but if Elliott is working to a establish a philosophy of music education that encompasses all aspects of musicing, then he should keep in mind all the ways in which music can be created, not just the ones that align with his argument at the time.

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Elliott – Music Matters

On page 67 of Music Matters, David Elliott is discussing two broad categories of music, “work-centered concept” and “contextual-social” (or “praxial concept”.) His aim is to discredit the work-concept of music in order to later promote his praxial arguments.

According to Elliott, “…the work-concept assumes that music = musical products (e.g., composed works, improvisations)”. Within this view, music is simply a combination of musical elements (melody, harmony, rhythm, etc.) and that any value lies in “how these elements are organized or formed.” Elliott goes on to connect the work-centered concept with the “aesthetic concept” of music, where listeners approach listening by blocking out “extra-musical” considerations and only focus in a “distant” or “disinterested” way.

In my opinion, Elliott misrepresents (or perhaps simply ignores) some of the merits of the work-centered concept by relating the work-centered concept directly to the aesthetic concept and by placing too much emphasis on extra-musical elements. Consider any piece of programmatic, classical music. If you were to listen to it without knowing the program could you still find enjoyment in it? I’d argue yes.

Elliott takes the argument too far – by saying that extra-musical attributes are necessary for understanding undermines the importance of quality music. What I’m not advocating is for a purely aesthetic experience, but a listener can experience feelings that are unrelated to a work’s societal, historical, or political influences. Extra-musical elements are not needed in order to enjoy music. They can help, but they are not required.

With an increased emphasis on music’s context, are students given enough space and opportunities to explore less concrete aspects of music such as what makes a piece of music good? Many pieces of music were created under similar circumstances, be it spiritual, economical, social, etc.; but no one would argue that they’re all equally great. There’s no formula or correct answer when it comes to determining what makes a piece of music great, but if teachers blindly follow Elliott and his idea that “the work-concept of music and its aesthetic corollaries fail to provide a board, open-ended, and logical foundation for understanding the natures and values of musics in the world,” we are going to find ourselves increasingly removed from the art that we originally set out to teach.

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Reimer – Philosophy of Music Education

In A Philosophy of Music Education, Bennett Reimer proposes for a music education system that is rooted in aesthetic education. Reimer’s philosophy uses a synergistic process of bringing in different aspects of musical value (such as music creation, cultural impact, and meaning to name a few) together to give students opportunities to experience music’s aesthetics in a way that a performance based education doesn’t.

In Chapter 3, Reimer goes on to discuss music’s ability to produce feelings (an extension of emotions). Music’s power to make people feel is one of its “most defining characteristic” but is also one that has been suppressed the most in education as it’s the most difficult to explain. Reimer goes on to argue that this unique quality is the very reason we should continue to promote music in educational settings. As he states “Music allows us to create and share experiences available in no other way.”

What would a purely aesthetic education look like in today’s classrooms? Compare students who have the opportunity to perform music in school to those who just take a music appreciation or music history course. Does Reimer suggest that the students who are learning about music aesthetics are more likely to be engaged in the art and therefore more likely to have a lifelong connection to it than the students who spend much of their developmental years actively involved in the creation (performance) of the art?

I believe where these ideas are headed is a philosophy that approaches music education with a “both, and” approach rather than an “either, or.” Reimer’s arguments for an aesthetic based curriculum is valid and important but shouldn’t be used in a vacuum. A praxial philosophy of music education, with its greater emphasis in performance, isn’t itself the solution either.

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Freire – Pedagogy of the Oppressed

In his book Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire compares education with a “banking” model where teachers are responsible for depositing knowledge into the empty vessels that are the students. Freire argues that because knowledge is viewed, by those who give it, as a gift it serves to further separate teachers and students and thus the oppressors from the oppressed. The oppressive nature of this education system discourages students from being creative and self-thinkers which helps the oppressors keep the status quo. A better education model, Freire argues, is one where teachers engage students in critical thinking and “the quest for mutual humanization.” Students in a “problem-posing method” are more likely to be able to view challenges as interrelated to other problems and not just as theoretical exercises. This leads to students who are more committed to their learning.

In my opinion, Freire’s arguments make sense, but only when you remove them what I see as the core argument in his book. Education is not the cause of oppression. Oppression can manifest itself in education but only if poorly trained and uninterested teachers allow it to happen. Plus, the actions of a poor teacher can be felt by all students, not just those who are oppressed or marginalized by society. Even the worst teachers I’ve seen aren’t actively trying to teach in a way that oppresses their students. I think that in order to claim that teachers are oppressing their students Freire needs to cite more concrete examples. (Examples, that in my mind would lead to the termination of a specific teacher, not a educational revolution.)

Learning is a skill and takes time to acquire and hone. Simply blaming poor education results on the teachers and institutions is, what I believe, the biggest problem facing American education today. As Freire points out, education should be a collaborative, joint journey between the teachers and the students. Said another way, and against what I think Freire argues, the students are just as responsible for their education as the teacher; and to place all the blame on the teachers fails to consider the entire narrative. The pedagogy of the oppressed (and un-oppressed) needs to focus on great teaching – that puts the subject in the center of a discussion between teachers and students – but also needs to find ways of teaching the importance of education to students (and adults) at an early age. (Most) everyone wants an education, just not everyone wants to work for it; and in education sometimes the oppressed are themselves the oppressors.

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Small – Musicking

While reading Christopher Small’s book Musicking, I was struck with a similar concept that is woven through Parker Palmer’s book The Courage to Teach. Palmer, in describing various teaching styles, compares “The Objectivist Myth of Knowing” where knowledge flows down from an Object, through an Expert (the teacher) who has spent time studying the object and through that study has become the gatekeeper of knowledge for the students, and “The Community of Truth” where a Subject is placed at the center of attention with Knowers (teachers and students) working together to find a better understand. (See this link for a visual representation – https://www.txprofdev.org/apps/ct/assets/text/images/ParkerDiscussion.jpg) Palmer argues against the top-down approach of “The Objectivist Myth of Knowing” in a similar way that Small argues against the music model of a composer creating a work, having a performer attempt to realize that work, and then having a listener experience the work. Small suggests that we instead examine all the different relationships that are built while musicking. Niether Palmer or Small’s remarks are necessarily brand new but they both offer teachers and musicians new ways to think about music making and music teaching.

If we follow Small and believe that musicking is about these different relationships being formed around music, how can that change what we’re teaching and how we go about explaining it’s values?

I say this as I’m still uneasy about how to best go about music advocacy considering what we read in Music Matters. Small’s book might hold the key to some of those answers. If music teachers are designing curriculums that aren’t focused solely on performance (and especially competition) then we might be able to better understand what hesitations administration/society/parents have with the study of classical music and through these relationships, start the process of changing their stance.