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children’s perceptions or encouraging serious study of any art form. I will refer in detail to this later. It is essential, however, to remember that these documents are in the public domain and must come under scrutiny as anything does which is published, including my own work and I will continue to attack what I perceive to be a selling-out of music as a stand-alone subject.
We need every child in this country to have access to first-rate teaching of music by properly trained teachers who:
know something about music
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understand that music is worth teaching for its own sake
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understand that music is worth teaching because it is
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intrinsically good
understand that music is unique within the arts
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understand that music is quintessentially aural, comprehended
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aurally and best taught when sounds precede symbols will teach a broad range of repertoire at an appropriate depth
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will understand that the reason for teaching music is so that
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children can improvise and subsequently write their own music in conjunction with their vocal and instrumental studies understand that sequential learning is vital to comprehension
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understand that music is a stand-alone subject which does not
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need to be supported by the other so-called creative arts but can peacefully co-exist without having to co-habit
understand that the best music program is one which is vocally
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based and when properly taught, provides the necessary musical information on which to build all other aspects of the music program
understand that there is a body of teachable factual musical
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phenomena which can be named, described and classified know how to arouse musical curiosity in children and
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encourage them to think and to learn how to learn and are not intimidated by fashion, gimmick, relevancy or political
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correctness and will teach substantial, worthwhile and balanced repertoire which offers an ever-increasing source of revelation by virtue of its being studied
We are in deep trouble; very deep trouble and part of that trouble is that many don’t recognize the nature of the trouble.
The trouble is that entertainment and education are frequently confused and many administrators feel that the efficacy and subsequent success of the school’s music program are determined only by the public performance aspects of the program and not in conjunction with the all-important class-room work. Witness the arena events which have children mimicking adults and performing as mini-cabaret, RSL singers gyrating exhaustingly to a very loud accompaniment amplified to a dangerous level.
I have heard several bureaucrats comment on such an event saying that this was really what education was all about and weren’t the children lucky.
Another manifestation of the trouble is that many teachers simply do not have any deep knowledge of any serious repertoire and tend to teach only music which children might like. Often, teachers fail to understand the notion that we don’t teach for children to like it or dislike it; we teach music so that children might think about the ways in which music works and subsequently might emulate in their own work some of those ways.
Just because a child likes a piece of music doesn’t make that music good and conversely just because a child dislikes a piece of music doesn’t mean that the music is bad.
I frequently tell high school children that I am not interested in how they feel about a piece of music or their emotional responses to the music. I am interested in how they think, how they might describe the identifiable phenomena used by the composer such as the notation, the harmony and the like. How a child feels about a piece of music is none of a teacher’s business and is certainly, for my money not interesting in the slightest. How a child thinks about a piece of music begins to define a teacher professionally: in other words, it is the teacher’s professional business to provide through example, the necessary wherewithal so that his or her students have the greatest possible chance to enter the complex world of sound and subsequently symbol on a journey of discovery which will lead to composition.
We are further in trouble because we have admitted to the curriculum, in the names of inclusiveness and political correctness, all manner of material which simply should not be there. This material is not worthy of being taught because it requires no special musical intelligence to grasp and frequently does not deal with real musical concepts.
It is not challenging for the children, it is insulting to the teacher (if the teacher can recognize when he or she is being insulted) and is essentially a waste of precious teaching time. I referred earlier to the New South Wales curriculum and it is now time to cite an example. CITE EXAMPLE ZUM GALLEE GALLEE/SOUNDSCAPE FOR BABY.
We are in further trouble because huge numbers of children are constantly exposed to music which is expediently commercial, highly transient in nature with a very short shelf-life.
While there is nothing intrinsically wrong with this music, its very commercial nature means that it lacks certain complexities which exist in other music and which lend themselves so well to the serious study of music and consequently become exemplars for students to copy. A popular song, or transient piece of music, will reveal most of what it has to offer after one or two playings and any student who has a good grasp of musical principles as a result of a structured and sequential study of music will be able to assess the real calibre and substance of this music and move on as we say now.
It is just over four years almost to the day, April 27th, 2003, since Senator Rod Kemp and I had a significant chat about the parlous state of music education in Australian schools based on comments I had made publicly from a stage of a theatre at The Malthouse prior to a performance of The Little Sweep.
Thanks to Senator Kemp and his colleague the then Minister for Education, Dr. Brendan Nelson, the National Review into School Music Education was conducted and the not altogether surprising results made public.
In short, the National Review revealed that we are in deep trouble, notwithstanding pockets of outstanding teaching scattered here and there in state and private schools.
In recent days the subject of education has been in every newspaper in the country.
I cannot remember a time when education has had so much press. Not since the Dawkins reforms of the 1980s has education been so strongly in the forefront of the news and so hotly pursued by the general public and often with astounding ignorance especially from some parents who seem to feel they have a divine right to evaluate teachers and reward them accordingly; but that’s a subject for another day and I do have views about it.
I am hugely encouraged, nonetheless, by the attention of the press because they are united by the concept of education irrespective of the issues.
It is obviously then time to strike in the original sense of the word. It is obviously time for peripatetic teachers, class-room teachers, instrumental teachers, heads of departments and the like to unite at the state and national levels and inform the respective governments that the current circumstance surrounding music education is intolerably bad and in urgent need of change. It is imperative that governments be informed of the fact that most children in Australia are being deprived of quality music education and are receiving sub-standard teaching or no teaching at all. Every child in this country has the right to have a serious music education notwithstanding their social, economic or geographic circumstances.
Not only should that music education take place for all children but it should be taught by properly trained teachers (and here I will reiterate emphatically points I have made earlier) teachers who actually know something about the nature of music in which I include art music, folk music, jazz, and some aspects of so-called popular music, who actually know how music works, who understand how to teach composition and the related skills necessary for composition, who know music’s place in society, know something of the history of music, its worth and value and its relative importance to the lives and in the lives of children of all ages.
In other words music, irrespective of the level at which it is being taught, should be taught by highly-trained specialists with the
most brilliant and gifted teachers working at the elementary or Kindergarten level.
Serious teaching of music (please notice my use of the word teaching which in some quarters has now become a dirty word) requires highly specialized teaching or it becomes, in the wrong hands, third-rate entertainment not quite up to level a child can get from an iPod or one of the hundreds of radio stations playing music for young people twenty-four hours a day.
I know from first-hand observations that there are numbers of teachers who genuinely believe that by playing popular music to their charges who, throughout the course of the so-called lesson, shout the lyrics very loudly, also think that the children are having a wonderful musical experience, are enjoying themselves immensely and learning lots about music.
The learning comes at the end of the song when the questions are asked …well what did you think of that song? Hands up those who liked it!
Great: Who liked the drums? Terrific!! Who liked the guitars? Now let’s sing Dancing Queen. Let’s not, I thought privately. Warm, fuzzy, cuddly music lessons, (I use the expression music lessons in its loosest sense) where the rest of the world goes by while the musical brains and minds of the young are dulled, blunted and led into a type of musical oblivion from which there is no recovery. These children’s tastes are being thwarted by teachers whose own musical tastes leave an enormous amount to be desired and whose own knowledge of music is sub-standard, inadequate and impoverished.
Or there is another type of lesson where an attempt is made to integrate a number of arts subjects together or even non- arts subjects (physics, chemistry) and God help us, media, so that children might have a holistic experience in the arts. What happens is, of course, nothing. How, in the name of everything that’s sacred, does media get a guernsey?
What part of history have the bureaucrats not understood? Do they not realize that greater minds than mine or theirs have been dealing with artistic notions since the dawn of time and guess what? Shakespeare doesn’t need their help; Rembrandt’s doing fine and the works of art, literature and music are not on trial. Furthermore, to take the notion of the inclusion of media it at its face value I have never considered The Age to be a work of art. This pretentious tom-foolery teaches nothing and simply confuses children who are led to believe that all arts function in the same way and that there is no real distinction or distinctiveness worthy of being made.
Education is about observation, analysis, thinking and the subsequent application of any wisdom gathered along the way. That any serious teacher practising in the profession could actually believe that all arts function the same way and that there might be a subject called performing arts (rather like that strange subject called language arts) is a cause for real concern.
I know children who actually believe that there is a subject called performing arts and beg their parents to have them removed from the class!
Certainly we can refer to music, dance and drama as arts which depend upon performance in order to communicate, but to think that they are essentially the same thing is completely false and shows evidence of woolly, confused thinking. I recall vividly sitting around a table some twenty years ago when these notions of combined arts curricula began to rear their ugly heads and realized after a few minutes that apart from one other person in the room no one else had any serious teaching experience of music, dance or drama and again, apart from my colleague there were no musicians, dancers or actors in the room.
Here, then, were all these people, expressing views and opinions about the teaching of these subjects, subjects of which they had never had any first-hand experience as either teachers or practitioners or had only taught any of the subjects at a very elementary level. In other words no knowledge at any breadth or depth, no knowledge of repertoire and certainly no philosophical understanding of why any subject from the arts field might be taught.
That this type of fraudulent behaviour was tolerated was an indictment on the educational administration of the day. This administration was heading down the road of appointing managers from business and the commercial world into key administrative positions. Curriculum, regrettably, came under the purview of these managers and one authority was appointed as the overseer of all arts subjects. Not this person’s fault of course; but how could I for example, were I to have been in that position, have had any knowledge of the visual arts, dance or drama at any level that would inspire teachers to have confidence in my curriculum decisions?
As a result of these managerial decisions and the world’s
obsession generally with middle-management, teachers have now been pushed further down the educational food-chain until they have arrived at their present status; under-paid, under-valued, subjected to inane commands from central authorities and required to do endless hours of assessment so that the correct boxes can be ticked.
If a visitor from out-of-space came to learn something about our education system
the only conclusion this visitor could possibly reach was that we had lost our senses and that education had become something which happens in a bureaucracy and had little or nothing to do with learning let alone teachers or children.
Recently I re-read the revised edition of the Victorian Essential Learning Standards document, the section called Discipline- based Learning Strand The Arts ... the capitals and syntax are the document’s not mine. It is, regrettably, no better than the New South Wales document. I attacked the VELS document vociferously in a recent address to the Association of Directors
of Music of Independent Schools. I am prepared to do this again as I red the music sections and became angrier and angrier. Let me remind you that we still have free speech in this country and just as I defend any government’s right to produce documents pertaining to education I would hope that you would defend my right to attack them.
My principal gripe is that music is lumped in with all the other arts because it suits some bureaucrats to do so in an effort to re- invent the wheel and frankly I don’t want to be told someone who knows nothing about music how I should go about teaching the subject I know reasonably well and more insultingly telling me how I should try and integrate it with the other art forms. It is difficult enough to teach music itself as an integrated subject let alone with the added burden of unreasonable, external and unrelated requirements; and equally frankly I don’t know enough but the other arts to feel in any way competent to teach them and they have nothing intrinsically to do with music anyway.
It is very interesting to know that composers from the time of the School of Notre Dame, 12th century Paris, to now, have not found it necessary to embrace all the other arts as integral to their compositional work or their teaching. I wonder how many of the bureaucrats who dream up these integrated syllabi have any real experience of any of the arts and to what depth. How many of these bureaucrats regularly attend concerts, operas, chamber music, art galleries, plays, dance and the like and have a genuinely held and well-formed view of contemporary arts practices?
I find it difficult enough to keep up with trends in contemporary music and still continue to research performance practices of earlier times.
It really is time to stop the bluffing and the edu-speak, stop pretending that we are all things to all men, start teaching music for its own sake, re-instate serious vocal programs in the schools, open strong and vigorous dialogue with the tertiary institutions, establish a primary curriculum in this state, lobby politicians for specialist teachers in the primary schools, forget the agendas and wish list of the dozens of small music education societies that exist and unite as one group to try and fix this appalling circumstance which besets us all. The National review of Music Education showed us that we have the ability to turn this situation around and we can. Unless we move now we can look forward to an Australia which is musically sub-standard in every way. The children are already on side.
Ask them what is one of the most important things in their lives and they will tell you music.
We just need to guide them to a world of music that is broader and deeper than they ever dreamed and to let them know that their lives can be richer and more satisfying by a hundredfold if only they had the opportunity to study music properly.