We learn all the time merely by living our
lives. This is incidental learning and it occurs in most
of life's situations; our environments, including the people
around us, shape the ways we approach other, less familiar,
environments. Humans study, on the other hand, with the
assumption that they are capable of shaping themselves in some
predictable way—intentionally and mindfully to broaden
the experience upon which they live in the future or to deepen
it, usually both. Study is deliberate, planned learning. The
distinction is in the planning, predicting, and goal setting,
not in the results. We learn a great deal of unplanned content
through incidental learning. Planning not only allows us to
guide our learning, but also gives us the potential to accelerate
our learning processes, to learn more quickly and efficiently.
In this paper, study refers to what
individuals do to learn deliberately, in self-guided musical
growth as well as in "formal" and "informal"
settings for study, in and out of schools. The orientation of
this paper is the person because, regardless of the setting,
it is the person who learns; this paper attempts to describe
the process "from the inside out." Learning is always
personal; one does not learn for someone else. This is true
in study as well as in incidental learning. But a person can
learn something in order to guide the learning of others—a
common occurrence, in music teaching as well as in music making.1
Regardless of what one does with what one has learned, learning
is an individual process and, as we shall see below, study is
the way we deliberately change ourselves. Learning is the necessary
condition and foundational assumption of study.
When someone studies music, she or he intentionally
engages music and music-related materials and ideas to reconstruct
and improve some of the skills, knowledge, evaluative insights,
and cognitive capacities used in musical experiences. The learner
then arrives at new encounters with music as a changed person,
more capable than before. Study, then, consists of actions designed
to produce personal learning. Incidental learning lacks the
focused intentionality of study. Because this paper's principal
audience consists of music teachers in educational institutions,
much will be said about schooling. However, a proper understanding
of musical study ignores barriers between the sources of learning;
the reader should not assume that the setting for music study
is confined to or focused primarily on schools.
Four interactive and overlapping types of change
occur in music study.
Study depends upon a person's capacity to construct
and recall information, but cognitive capacity is not confined
to this. With music, the source of the information disappears
after the sound dies away, but we are equipped to deal with
this well. Perception is the neurophysiological process that
both enables and is shaped by cognition. But, perception is
not a passive process. We construct what we perceive, and our
prior experience shapes what we notice about a situation. cognitive
capacity expands when we do this. With mindful, alert repetition,
we notice more; our experience becomes richer. As an ever-expanding
result of music study, then, there should be noticeable increases
in the amount of information one can construct during a musical
experience. Alas, we cannot yet measure this capacity directly.
Intuition is perhaps the most closely related indicator of human
cognitive capacity, and music study increases the range and
improves the validity of one's musical intuitions.
Repeated experience and intuition can also
be limiting if we become comfortable with their current state,
for such comfort is the foundation of bias. Since perception
is an active process and shapes what we notice, it takes some
effort to keep expanding one's perceptual field with new musical
experience so that mere habit or, worse, boredom does not result
from repeated experience with music. Not only does study depend
on expanded perceptual capacity, but the effort to expand it
pays off in richer information, better intuition, and greater
cognitive capacities.
Everybody has experiences that repel, attract,
or leave them unmoved. Expanding our cognitive capacities, chiefly
through repetition with the same or similar experiences, leaves
us with the sense that some of these experiences are better
than others, even though they might be similar in general. Five
performances of the same music vary enough that our inclination
is to rank them, or at least rate their effectiveness. Rarely
are they equivalent.
Through music study, there should be noticeable
increases in the personal development and use of criteria related
to musical and human value. These can be noted and shared through
one's estimates of goodness or fit between musical events and
human capacities, needs and wants. The person, through music
study, should explore the potential and actual results of musical
actions at deeper and deeper levels of subtlety and import.
This much-maligned term always needs to be
defined in analytical contexts. I will use the term to mean
analytical abilities and the precision of the terms that support
them. In this context, knowledge includes things such as musical
terminology, analytical strategies and principles, even "rules"
for tone production. Knowledge has been gained when there are
observable increases in the precision, communicability, and
usefulness (really, validity) of terms, strategies, and
principles; and an improved speed and accuracy in recalling
such things. One can increasingly use memory as a reliable source
of schemes useful in analysis.
Sharing musical experiences when the causes
for them (the musical situations) have disappeared requires
language and many other symbol systems, even conductors' gestures.
As our musical experiences grow in variety and complexity, and
as we communicate with each other about them, the validity of
the terms, strategies, and principles about music becomes tested
against that of others.
I will use a narrow definition of the term
skills. In this analysis the term skill is not analogous
to more inclusive or general uses of the term, such as expertise,
or (as used in schools) library skills, or writing
skills. Expertise involves more than psychomotor or manipulative
abilities.
Here are some analogous terms used in educational
and psychological writing and discussions: techniques, psychomotor
learning, manipulative abilities, executive functions, or execution.
These terms mean about the same thing as skill, and it would
not be necessary here to analyze the variations. Skill is an
important result of music study.
Expanding or increasing one's musical skills
results in changes in human characteristics useful for musical
purposes. These include characteristics such as strength, accuracy,
predictability, endurance, flexibility, control, and speed in
one's use of a musical instrument, including the human voice,
as well as computers and any other means of producing sounds
used in music.
At its best, music study occurs during and
through authentic participation in music. In this way, then,
music study differs little from practical music making and listening.
Skilled music teachers, however, design musical settings that
create a patterned, efficient, sequenced, and thorough development
of musical abilities in learners. To the student, learning music
and doing music differ little. The pedagogical process that
is promoted here is similar in general to good teaching in mathematics,
social studies, or language arts instruction; i.e., the instructional
and learning strategies have an authentic quality. However,
musical experience is not equivalent to these others. It is
unique and important. Bennett Reimer's
paper develops the idea that musical knowing is not only
different from mathematical knowing and the rest, but also equals
their importance to living a human life well.
The best reason to study music is that it gives
people a reliable, thorough, and efficient way of becoming expert
at creating, communicating, and deriving meaning musically in
the world of humans. Musical expertise "matures"—
becomes embodied—when a person naturally and effectively
mobilizes his or her best musical resources in musical situations
without prodding from someone else. It is important to understand
that this need not be institutionally related to age.
As noted above, however, it is too common for
people in the United States to abandon active music making or
excuse away their nonparticipation. A major cause for this is
that many musicians have made a wall out of expertise, and some
have set themselves up as gatekeepers. We must now lead people
to define expertise dynamically and personally, not as some
sort of barrier to a musical life. The gap between school music
and what I call "life music" can be narrowed by redefining
expertise as an action one initiates mindfully that synergizes
one's skills, knowledge, evaluative insight, and cognitive capacities
in practical, authentic musical situations.
There is no need to certify expertise any more
than we do now, but there is a need to help people to diagnose
their musical expertise and motivate them to expand it. National
and state standards help music teachers to identify and diagnose
some aspects of musical expertise, but standards should not
be used to "evaluate musicianship." Musicianship is
much broader, more fluid, more varied in its expression among
people than any list of competencies suggests. This does not
negate the value of standards. Music teachers can learn how
to use standards diagnostically, and use these diagnoses with
other data to support their critical leadership function in
the musical and educational health of our society.2
The distinction between an expert and
a novice, in music or in anything else, cannot be based
on the identification of a threshold that separates people.
The terms novice and expert merely represent ends of a continuum
that can be abstracted from life when we bring our learning
to bear on a problem. We find ourselves somewhere along the
novice/expert continuum in just about everything we do. Musical
expertise, then, is the term I will use to refer to a characteristic
of all persons that represents the aim of music study—the
embodiment of musical skills, knowledge, evaluative insight,
and cognitive capacities, coupled with the capacity to self-diagnose
them, to expand them effectively and efficiently, and to use
them synergistically in musical situations of all kinds.
Most people have musical profiles that describe
their levels of expertise in the several "components"
identified by whatever assessment of expertise is being used.
Such assessments, by definition, limit the diagnosis of expertise
to the components designed into the assessment tools. All such
tools are like stencils, letting information flow only through
whatever "windows" were put there.
Moreover, people expect reports of the results
of the assessment. In K-12 music performance assessment, it
is common to locate six levels on the novice/expert continuum,
generally defined by the artistic difficulty of a large body
of musical literature. Music performance competitions and other
third-person evaluations produce ratings or rankings. When required
to do so, music teachers give grades.
There are other grounds for a diagnosis of
musical expertise than musical difficulty. Based on a series
of studies in England and other countries, Keith Swanwick and
his associates described an eight-level diagnostic scheme for
assessing expertise in music composition, performance, and listening,
the synergy of which Swanwick calls musical knowledge or musical
understanding.3 David Elliott suggested
a five component orientation to analyzing musicianship and assessing
musical growth.
There is still another view. Thomas Regelski
sees musical expertise as a life process undefined by stages
or types, but defined instead by the person living and participating
musically in his or her world.4
Expertise is a term not applicable in this formulation,
except as each person becomes interested in defining it; and
one does not "study music" in the sense normally used
to refer to the deliberate development of one's skills, knowledge,
evaluative insight, and cognitive capacities in relative isolation
from each other. Rather, notes Regelski, "In music, then,
this comprehensive, functional, and basically tacit 'know how'
is what is called artistry, functional musicianship, musicality,
virtuosity, or creativity—usually all are implied"
(p. 47).
Such know how develops naturally through
action. Levels of know how can be described at any given point.
However, descriptions vary with the person, the assessment instrument,
the level of know how, and the musical task of the moment.
An important distinction arises here between
assessing musical expertise diagnostically and evaluating it
against some standard described in advance, regardless whether
such standards were defined by others or by oneself. Doing curriculum
or making predictions about levels of expertise depends upon
some generalized view of how humans study and learn music. Programmatic
(or even curricular) efficiency comes from grouping people with
similar know how together, predicting how the diagnosis might
go at various stages or making some other accommodation to diversity
among developmental profiles. The term efficiency again
rises to the surface.5 Programmatic
efficiency, however, is a weak personal motivator at best.
Unfortunately, the discussion of various musicianship
patterns of growth above slights the personal nature of music
study. People test their expertise in ways unique to their musical
interests. Personal motivation and study are intertwined, of
course. When a person confronts a musical situation that is
interesting enough to motivate attention and, at the same time,
is challenging or disturbing, baffling, too difficult to manage
easily, etc., one studies. The person is not likely to be motivated
to study if he or she does not value a better outcome enough
to do what it takes to meet the difficulty with better personal
tools—to determine a way to make things better and to
learn how to do it.
People challenged in this way attempt to analyze
the difficulty in order to focus the learning, to make the learning
efficient as well as effective. The most lasting and liberating
motivations come from within the musical situation. As a result
of the analysis of the musical difficulty, one forms plans,
gathers materials, and takes action, usually to change one's
current profile of skills, knowledge, standards of quality (evaluative
insight) and what one notices (cognitive capacities). One studies.
Then, people enter (create) the musical situation again mindfully,
aware of an improved capacity to have the musical benefits at
a higher level. The person diagnoses and assesses learning,
a marker of expertise.
In incidental learning, all of this happens
intuitively and often instantaneously, without much deliberation.
We can thank our pedagogues, philosophers, and psychologists
for the current state of our ability to slow the process down
enough to find out how it can be improved. To the learner, however,
in music study or not, musical curiosity is a natural motivator:
"What would happen if I . . . ?" Curiosity, as well
as our growth as people, motivates music study. What we valued
and sought to experience as children no longer satisfies when
we are older because we have changed as people. Music rewards
study because there is always music to meet the needs of persons
of any age or stage in life. Music teachers should intervene
in this process only if they can make it better.
By now, nearly everyone interested in children
has heard of the "Mozart Effect" and the findings
from research that support it.6
Symposiums,7 books, recordings,
workshops, governors' gifts to new mothers, and convention sessions
are devoted to its promise. It is good that musical behavior
and its human effects are being seriously studied by psychologists
and neurologists, and, as Clifford K. Madsen told the American
Music Therapy Association in 1998, "We hope that further
investigation confirms these preliminary investigations."8
All music teachers share that hope. Bennett Reimer (most recently,
1999) and his philosophical predecessors such as Charles Leonhard,
Harry Broudy, and James Mursell argue for a music-based rationale
for music study, rather than a justification based on extramusical
benefits. This, also, is a value that music teachers share.
These are not competing values if we are clear what we mean
by the term music.
Because music is fascinatingly complex, its
study is rewarded, but research into music learning mechanisms
moves slowly. This is becoming apparent not only in music but
in other disciplines. Although researchers have increasingly
better equipment and better research designs, work in music
research is still in its early stages, and it will take time
for definitive answers to musically human questions to emerge.
Teachers and policymakers must stay in touch with such research
and put what is learned into the musical and educational perspectives
arising from their professional situations.
The distinction between incidental learning
and deliberate musical study is important in such research.
Above, I asserted that music study involves planned increases
in musical skill, knowledge, evaluative insight, and cognitive
capacities. Incidental learning— learning by participating
in the musical traditions in one's life-space—may result
in these increases, but such things are seldom planned. For
research, assessment tools must be sensitive to one or the other.
Studies of music achievement most often test the efficacy of
teaching-learning procedures. Incidental learning can complicate
the conclusions if it is not "controlled for" in some
way. Conversely, studies of incidental learning are seldom "uncontaminated
by" deliberate attempts of subjects to grow musically.
However, for general assessment purposes in
music education, it is increasingly important that assessment
instruments be sensitive to both. That is, music teachers must
base instructional plans on what people actually know and can
do in music, not on what the teacher thinks she or he taught
them. Once a clear diagnosis of the student's musical characteristics
is made, the teacher can determine how to guide further musical
studies.
This paper is about music study, but we must
continually emphasize that planned music study and incidental
music learning accumulate and support each other in the development
of musical expertise. Some hypotheses about music study are
supportable:
• The ability to organize acoustic events
into patterns (construct schemata, derive meaning from sound)
grows with music study.
• Learning time compresses with skilled
management of the learning process as well as with age and
experience. That is, learning how to learn improves naturally,
but teachers can accelerate the process even more.
• Music study, used as a contingency,
". . . is an effective reinforcer for academic behaviors
like math [sic] or verbal learning, as well as social
behaviors like attentiveness."9
Newer theories of human functioning integrate
factors that once were separated. For example, mind and brain
are no longer seen as separate entities, studied by putting
one or the other in the foreground. Subject and object (subjective
"vs." objective) are no longer viable divisions of
reality. Even the right brain-left brain metaphors have lost
their power to organize our thinking about how we use our capacities.
Mental processes (mind) are no longer separated from physical
processes (body) since their synergy is a much more powerful
way of thinking about human beings. The nature-nurture question
is no longer asked seriously; we now know "it's both."
In general, the "or" and the "versus" are
disappearing from the way we explore human ecology. Things are
not either this or that; they are "both," in some
form of integration. Moreover, theories of music are emerging
that view music as a unique and liberating form of embodiment.10
When researchers looked at musical behavior
in these integrative, "both-and" ways, they found
some interesting things.
• More of the brain is engaged during
musical experiences than during rest or linguistic communication.11
Musical participation, including listening, seems to arouse
other brain functions, such as spatial reasoning, attention,
and perception. Music can, as a result, carry other information,
such as the letters of the alphabet, the steps to a dance,
the procedures in an industrial assembly line, the brand names
of manufactured products in jingles, and the place names in
popular songs.
• There are more developmental patterns
in music besides the changing voice and certain kinds of music
aptitude.12 Composition and improvisation,
listening abilities, and the ways musical performance is integrated
with the rest of one's life also exhibit developmental patterns.13
Music study, then, changes people.14
It expands the brain's electro-chemical activity in the presence
of music and since the brain is an active part of perception,
and because perception and cognition are integrated processes,
what one notices in music expands. Our understanding of the
extent to which this affects other human functions is increasing,
and there are few simple answers.15
The following are some ways that music study
can support various abilities useful to the student in reaching
several important educational goals:16
analyzing documents, analyzing performances and other actions,
brainstorming, classifying, comparing and contrasting, creating
a product, decision-making, defining context, developing and
applying craftsmanship, developing personal commitment, discovering/generating
patterns, evaluating, sequencing, synthesizing, valuing uniqueness
and diversity.
As a result of our growing knowledge, we have
a more thorough appreciation of the complexity of our capacity
to make sense out of our world. This is liberating because unwarranted
beliefs lead more often to division between people than to understanding,
tolerance, and collaboration. Music study and learning provide
independent, personal, expanded ways to experience life. This
is empowering because, with study, we are each able to construct
an acoustical environment that includes an ever-expanding store
of personally meaningful music, rather than an environment limited
by the musical taste of other people.
