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III. Personal Empowerment - Social Complications

There are ethical problems with the personal-power argument for music study, however. If we turn for guidance to tolerance and understanding, rather than to competition and dominance, we soon realize that in the personal-power argument we are setting up a scenario in which we are "reacting" against others who are, themselves, merely exercising their rights to create personal musical environments. Musical space is as important for others as it is for ourselves. We devalue other people's interest in expanding their cognitive capacities, evaluative insights, knowledge, and skill in music at the risk of losing their tolerance for ours. We must learn to value musical commitment in ourselves and in others. A music study program that motivates musical expansion and personal choice accompanied by tolerance and creativity produces diversity of the richest kind.

What Personal and Social Benefits are Unique to Music Study?

Personal motivations for music study do not explain what we know about musical life, however. If personal music cognition were all there were to the phenomenon, few traditions would emerge and we could not explain the power of music to become treasured and to unify whole societies. Music study, then, includes not only our own meaning making but also a study of the meanings that others find and create in their music. Patterns emerge and habits form from this, usually through incidental learning. As Howard Gardner points out about learning to read:

By the age of third grade almost every kid in America can read....The question is Why don't kids read? The answer is because their parents don't read, and that includes many teachers. . . . So, kids are going to like music and be involved in it if their families and the people around them are involved in music.17

If music is learned through living, then, what about schooling? Is institutionalized music study—school music—merely a neo-liberal attempt to wrest control of students' musical lives away from their families and friends, and shape their preferences for them "for their own good"? After all, guiding the music learning of others requires that the guide, not the learner, make decisions about musical experiences, and these decisions are based on the defendable and well-considered belief that the musical experience selected for the learner was appropriate.

Is there a personal corollary to this; If we insist on our personal prerogatives, isn't that enough? Why study music that lies outside of the music found meaningful by our family, our friends, and ourselves? The short answer is not a liberal one, but a libertarian one: We should reserve the right to exercise musical options, even when these options seem to compete with the collective taste. And, we cannot exercise options that we do not know are there. We should also reserve the option not to exercise our independence but to connect musically with a social group. This, too, is a natural process, but some seek belonging through music systematically. Poignantly, many teenagers go to extremes to learn the dances and purchase the recordings and videos that some desired group of their peers finds fashionable, whether or not they are personally meaningful as music to the teenager. People make sacrifices of money, time, and personal freedom for the purpose of belonging, and music is part of this picture. This is familiar to anyone who joins a religious or spiritual group, school, club, or organization that uses music in its rituals. Expanded to whole societies, belonging through music is the reason we teach children in America our repertoire of songs. We should continue this process, but that is not all.

E Pluribus Unum

Partially to promote community, we plan music study for others not only so that their musical experience is similar—so that they have the option of belonging through music—but also so that their musical options increase beyond those easily available in their personal surroundings. Music study contributes to what some call the ecology of schoolin, or the complex "landscape" that the school presents to learners. Unity and diversity are both important parts of this landscape in compulsory schooling, and music makes both unity and diversity audible in ways that language does not. Planned well, music study can uniquely give reinforcement to the many person-group relationships that the school is designed to build. If competition is held up as the primary motivator for music study, unity and diversity are lost. Competition reinforces conformity. Conformity is not the same as unity, and diversity is seldom valued in musical competition. Unity, on the other hand, is an important quality, felt rather than directed, and music can be part of it. There is not a good English word for the German word gemütlich, the good quality of community that people experience during events that promote unity rather than conformity.

In the ecology of schooling there is much use made of competition. The same students who study music compete in other arenas of their school lives, and, to be sure, there are competitions in music. On the whole, for most students, however, the competition values of these other school experiences are set aside in good music study. The emphasis is on creativity and sharing knowledge, insight, and skill. Out of the diverse contributions of musical students in a good music program comes an especially vibrant unity that reinforces their certainty of belonging, and this certainty increases their tolerance for diversity.

Music study, then, models an ecological approach to schooling through its infinite variety of worthy traditions and its real-time integration of process with product, a feature common to all music. Physical knowing (skill) in music contributes to and is supported by other forms of knowing in good musical practice. Through music study, however, we learn to separate the forms of knowing from each other, to improve on them, and then to re-integrate the result in a musical whole again. In this way, music study is a metaphor for the ways of knowing found scattered and largely separate throughout the student's day.

Not only in the social sense, then, but also in the curricular sense, diversity of ways of knowing and varieties of creative contributions become unity in music study. E pluribus unum.

Why Should All People in the United States Study Music?

No society lasts for long that fails to maintain a complex and diverse culture and neglects to use it in the general education of its young. The value that we call "free speech" lies at the core of America's strength, and we interpret this now to include all forms of symbolic expression, artistic behavior, and communication. Though this value protects disturbing expression, sometimes, it also permits an open flow of insights. People who sense that change is needed communicate something about their views. Music and the other arts participate in this "landscape of insight." People who are in touch with this landscape, but whose feelings aren't so well formed, can sense when someone else is expressing similar needs. There is communion. Sensitive people can connect, participate, reject, revise, communicate, and advance the insight for themselves and others. They can avoid the feeling of being alone with their inchoate perceptions.

This cultural process and the exercise of free expression are critical to the health of our society. The larger, industrialized twentieth-century societies that attempted to control and limit their people's cultural resources by the censorship, repression, and politicization of music, the other arts, and religion have collapsed.

However much people often express regret that "things aren't as they used to be" in today's musical participation, we must recognize that culture—music— remains stagnant at the risk of losing its meaning and importance as a social and cultural resource. In fact, school music programs should emphasize musical change and personal creativity. Doing so will go further to strengthen our society and preserve the importance of music in schools than the mindless preservation of bygone skills and repertoires.

Preservation need not be mindless. Our heritage contains monuments of human thought that some call the canon of western civilization, a cultural store that is deemed valuable enough that it ought to be preserved by teaching. Through music study, students gain access to the musical minds of geniuses such as Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven. If music teachers emphasize musical processes that challenge all students to share their musical thoughts—including their musical recreations of the masterworks—through their skills, knowledge and evaluative insights, then music study, even study of the masters, can have a new, stronger focus.

There is an important view that schools should transmit the complex mix of values that define the cultures within our borders, including those values reflected in their musics. At the same time, we expect schools to deliberately model and teach social conventions such as waiting in line, staying to the right, neatness, punctuality, "walk, don't run," polite speech, personal space, empathy for someone hurt, patriotism, individual contributions to group outcomes, and many more. If part of the school's function is to promote a civil society, then these are laudable habits for children to form, whether or not they know why they are forming them. Perhaps music programs reflect a mindless approach to learning social conventions when they emphasize technique over critical insight in learning to perform the musical canon. For example, reinforcing correct, accurate performance and ensemble conformity and discipline at the expense of musical insight, or emphasizing slick public performance as the principal focus of music study for all children may reflect the broader "school values" listed earlier in this paragraph. Alas, in doing so, such programs model for children a disdain for valued musical actions that go beyond correct, prepared performance. Lost are the social and personal values growing out of improvisation, composition and revision, experimentation with musical ideas, and pushing the envelope of one's cognitive and perceptual capacities through music. People who promote correctness and uniformity are disturbed that students can challenge social conventions through the arts. To people disturbed by the authentic music produced by students—much of it exploratory—individual expression is not what these school values and social conventions support. There are good, practical reasons and functions for social conventions; teaching social conventions mindlessly miseducates children on such points.

Musical actions are metaphors of this problem, and music study helps children and young people negotiate the issues that arise from it. Through a good music program, one that emphasizes both individual and group accomplishment, both personal insight and recreative skill, all students can grow in that special value that supports our group preservation of individual "free speech" or, in its more contemporary formulation, "freedom of expression." Music study requires and reinforces individual action that alternatively creates and recreates, expresses and replicates. People who study music for extended periods learn how and when to be themselves and when to be a good group member.

This encourages children to form the dual habit of individual expression and group accomplishment. These interact. Neither trumps the other in our culture. All should study music because there are few other places in their early life experiences where personal sensitivity and contributions to the group are in such consistent, close, and powerful synergy.

At its best, then, music study is both an individual and a communal process. There are many valued musicians (people call them "self-taught") whose study is largely one of individual exploration not only to increase their skills, but also to increase their knowledge of other musicians whose music making they admire. Individual taste guides their study, and some of these musicians contribute significantly to the musical monuments of our culture. Indeed, all active musicians, regardless of the external sources of their expertise, contribute to the society's "landscape of insight" to which I referred earlier.

Far from denigrating the contributions of self-taught musicians, our society values these models and marvels at them. It is instructive that they are held up against the kind of "musical training" that stereotypes many school programs. The fact that self-taught musicians are contrasted with institution taught musicians should be a warning that music education institutions are losing credibility to the degree that individual musical impulses of children are subjugated to some mistaken notion of group values. We must know more than we do about the music learning strategies of self-taught musicians and bring such strategies into our pedagogy rather than reject them. After all, once we leave "formal" instructional settings, we become self-taught. Musical expertise is oriented to self-guided musical study and music making.

For these and other reasons explored here, all persons should study music in a program that challenges both individual musical initiative and communal (group) achievement. In this way, the cultural value that marks our special brand of individual/group integration is modeled for children and practiced by them, and is therefore preserved in the schools.

Should Every Person Travel a Similar Music-Study Path?

Music is ubiquitous, and it is part of being human. Being identified with our culture through music study requires that we start any episode of study wherever we "are" musically. Teachers who intervene in this process can take the student from there to levels of musical expertise that provide lifelong avenues for individual growth. Music teachers can provide efficient learning of the essentials of the music currently being created and used, and thereby help individuals to compress the time it takes to act effectively on their musical impulses. Building multiple paths to reaching a mature, self-generated expansion of musical expertise is critical if all are to contribute, and the corollary values of respect, tolerance, and empathy for others' insights are built by sensitive teachers along the way. The diagram on page 74 shows graphically how this can be modeled.

If music study is to be efficient and effective both for the person and for the group, then there is a path. There are music-study patterns that the profession has found effective. The "content" of music study can be outlined as it is below,18 and there are sequences for study within the various parts of the outline that the profession has found efficacious.

Elements of music learning that are common to all paths:

Tonal development

• deliberately produce and discriminate pitch changes

• derive meaning from pitch/loudness/timbre

• create and decode notation for pitch/loudness/timbre

Rhythmic development

• maintain and respond to steady beat

• derive meaning from rhythm

• create and decode notation for rhythm

Interpretive/expressive development

• compose and improvise meaningful music

• derive meaning from gestures of conductors, performers

• gain insight from multiple musics

• evaluate musical validity of compositions and performances by self and others

• move musically (dance)

Process

• experience music

• practice for mastery and enjoyment

• orient skill increases to tonal, rhythmic, and expressive expertise

• analyze, evaluate, and produce music

• study music's many social, cultural, ethnic contexts

• find and use multiple sources and settings for musical learning

• recognize and use varied instructional sources

The music teacher will be able to guide and accelerate learning for the twenty-first century by emphasizing the following characteristics of teachers: motivator, facilitator, diagnostician, critic, evaluator, organizer, questioner, researcher, scholar, and (most important) active musician. The teacher's contribution to music study is to accelerate and guide learning. The teacher's musical expertise gives guidance to students, and the teacher's pedagogical expertise accelerates their learning.

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