A CENTRAL PHILOSOPHY OF MUSIC AND MUSIC TEACHING:
Musical
Knowledge, Musical Works and Curriculum
Development: A Praxial or Aesthetic Approach?
Sometimes
the best teacher teaches only once to a single child or to a grownup past hope.
--Anonymous
Over the past thirty years music education theorists and teachers have investigated the nature of musical knowledge and the concept of a musical work. The ways these concepts apply to curriculum development in music education has been a matter of some controversy. Music Education researchers and curriculum developers agree that music is an essential element of our human nature and that it should be a foundational subject in our school curriculum, but they have drawn quite different conclusions in addressing the following questions: (1) What is musical knowledge? (2) Should we think of music as a product (musical work) or a process? (3) To what extent is an aesthetic approach sufficient for music educators (4) How does a praxial approach to music education bear on our classroom practice? This article will detail the author's view of the relationship between "musical knowledge" and "musical works" and how these two concepts relate to the human significance of music and music education. Embedded in this exploration will also be an investigation into the aesthetic education and praxial approaches to music curriculum development.
The question, "what is knowledge" bears enormously on our teaching philosophy and whether we are teaching only facts, on the one side, or the development of critical thinking skills on the other. There are many ways learning theorists have characterized a shortsighted approach involving "fact-based" teaching. David Perkins (1986) characterizes disconnected thinking as "knowledge disconnected from purposes, models, structure or argument (p. 21) and illuminates ways of restoring the connections to purposes, models, structures and argument. He illustrates a fundamental problem in educational practice: "first you learn the facts. Then you learn to reason with them" (p. 29). Perkins develops the idea that we can teach facts and the ability to use them at the same time. This thinking is in direct contrast to educators like E.D. Hirsch (1985) who set up a list of factual knowledge he feels should be taught to every individual in order for them to be "culturally literate." While factual knowledge is essential, it alone becomes what Perkins calls "inactive knowledge' or others have called "inert knowledge" when it is not applied to critical, reflective problem solving. Paul Friere (1970) investigates what he terms a "banking concept of education" where educators are 'depositing' knowledge into students' brains without thought to how that knowledge will be used. It is a great trap into which many educators have fallen. Gardner (1999) calls it the "dipstick" theory of intelligence. "If you want to know how much oil you have in your car, you stick in your dipstick, and you pull it up, and you say 'Oh, I need another quart'. Most of us, think that if you had the right cortical dipstick, you could shove it into your cortex, pull it out and see how smart you are" (p. 11). All of these perspectives on knowledge demonstrate how important it is to move beyond a purely "fact-based" curricular design.
The way we think about the concept of knowledge in the general sense lays the groundwork for the more specific question "what is musical knowledge?" Too often it is thought of as either the ability to perform certain skills or to recite certain facts. Many curriculums reflect this. The challenge for music educators is to teach our students to think critically in addition to develop their musical skills (Bower, 2001, p. 36). In a choral rehearsal, for example, it is possible to structure learning experiences in which the director is asking the choir members to identify problems, critically evaluate them, and work together to solve them. Hillary Apfelstadt (1989) writes about the dangers of a choral rehearsal where the choir members are expected to blindly follow their director; "If, however, the teacher is always solely responsible for decision-making in the choral rehearsal, the students act as mere automatons with little independent thought" (p. 74). The thinking involved in a choral rehearsal designed to teach critical thinking leads the student into a more direct encounter with music and the problem-solving challenges it presents. But this argument goes deeper than that. When we are getting at the essence of musical knowledge we need to consider the larger issue of how that knowledge is used, what future ends it is intended to achieve, and where it manifests itself. David Elliott (1995) makes an important distinction between education versus schooling and develops the idea that our education system needs to focus on developing the whole child (p. 295).
A pivotal figure in the field of cognitive psychology is Howard Gardner. His theory of multiple intelligences has transformed our understanding of students and the intelligences they posses. The implications of his theory for music education reaches to the core of our profession because he shows that all people are musical, each in their own way, a point that is enormously important as we explore ways to advocate our profession. Each individual has some degree of what Gardner (1999) calls, "musical intelligence." But what is also important is that when doing music, we use many of the other intelligences Gardner identifies: bodily kinesthetic, interpersonal, intrapersonal, logical/mathematical, spatial, naturalist, and existential (p. 12).
Recognizing that our students all learn differently is particularly important for music educators. But recognizing that Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences is a theory, not a curriculum, is also essential. Gardner (1999) himself notes how his multiple intelligence theory is often misused. Just because a teacher observes some children crawling across the floor does not necessarily mean that they are engaged in bodily/kinesthetic intelligence; it simply means some children are crawling across the floor (p. 11).
David Elliott (1995) develops the distinction between musical works and musical process in relation to the enlightenment and postmodernism (p. 22). In Europe, from the middle of the eighteenth century until the rise of postmodernism, a mode of thinking evolved in which the ontological notion of music was conceived as a "piece" or a "composition" much like we think of a visual artwork. There was little attention given to the act of music making. It was assumed that in order to ascribe the due honor and adulation given the composer (god-like creator of his work), performers learned how to fulfill those wishes. The act of music making was given little attention insofar as the concept applied to the definition of music. Rather, the idea of music was wrapped up in the concept of a musical work. This thinking extends itself into the realm of music education today. Certain schools of thought subscribe to the aesthetic approach to music education focusing on the product rather than the process. Elliott (1995) says, "To look at or listen to something aesthetically means to focus exclusively on its structural or aesthetic qualities, in abstraction from the object's context of social use and production" (p. 22).
Music teachers who think in terms of the aesthetic approach to music education instill a sense in their students that in order to become a musician, they would need to apply years of practice and drilling in order to reach a level where they might be considered worthy of the title. While this idea certainly works for those in line for a professional career, it leaves the vast majority of students in a general music class out in the cold. It is not hard to imagine the reaction of a student who is told that she needs to practice scales, arpeggios, and boring etudes for several years and then maybe can start to play a piece she loves. On the other hand, we can easily imagine a student who gets into music class for the first time and is taught to start making music right away: he will more likely be excited and want to come back for more immediately. This is the most essential element of praxial philosophy: music making is central rather than as in the aesthetic approach where music as an art object occupied center stage. Other essential values of listening in praxial theory include, as David Elliott (1995) develops: "(1) the intricacies of intramusical designs, (2) musical expressions of emotion, (3) musical representations of people, places, and things, (4) musical expressions of various kinds of beliefs (e.g. personal, political)" (p. 120).
Bennett Reimer's (1970) philosophy of music education raised many questions for me as I set out to apply it to my classroom teaching practice; questions that are far more effectively illuminated by the groundbreaking work of David Elliott (1995). Elliott challenges the assumptions of aesthetic music education theory and brings into question the modernist view that music is an art object (p. 30). He develops a praxial theory of music education, which involves, among many other things, the concept of Musicing (p. 50). While a reflection on the many aspects of praxial theory is beyond the scope of this paper, there are several that seem essential. One is in relation to music listening. Elliott introduces the idea that ̉music listening is a complex form of thinking that can be taught and learned. Music students can achieve competent, proficient, and expert levels of music listening. But teaching and learning this kind of thinking effectively requires that its development be embedded in efforts to develop musicianship through performing, improvising, composing, arranging, and conducting" (p. 106).
The planning and implementing of music classroom or music rehearsal experiences reveals the nature of a praxial approach to music making. Recently the author led a choir rehearsal of an arrangement of a Thomas Tallis canon. One of the tenors raised his hand and asked if a phrase sung by the women was to be immediately connected to a phrase sung by the men, or if there was to be a break between the two. I responded that this was an excellent question and asked several members to take turns coming up to the front to listen to the passage both ways. Based on the reaction of the listeners, it became clear that in an acoustical situation such as ours (relatively dead in the heavily carpeted church) the phrasing was far more pleasing when connecting without the break. In doing a "meta" reflection on the planning and "doing" in relation to my choral rehearsal experience, I recognized how my own philosophy is embedded in the practice in the following ways: (1) the choir members were expected to be critical participants in musical problem-solving (2) active music making was central to the learning experience (rather than inactive listening to a recording), (3) the choir was not becoming so dependant on me (their teacher) that they would go out into the world ill-equipped to face problem-solving situations on their own.
Jerome Bruner (1966) develops a view of constructivist learning theory in which the teacher is aware of structures the student is bringing to the learning experience. Educators then build on those structures in a spiral fashion, revisiting concepts at increasingly higher levels as the student is ready. Embedded in Bruner's theory is the pursuit of excellence and the emotional connection of the child to the learning experience. In Bruner's (1979) words, "How can I know who I am until I feel what I do?" (p. 43) This mode of thinking is closely tied to Elliott's (1995), "we don't hear music as it is, we hear it as we are."
This points to the importance of the student as the center of our planning in curricular development.
Musical knowledge can be easily misconstrued to imply that that nature of music study involves merely learning skills related to performance. The nature of musical knowledge is far deeper than that and must include complex critical and reflective cognitive processes including thinking, knowing, and listening far beyond mere facts and skills. The aesthetic approach to music education is fed by the modernist assumption that music is simply an "art-object" rather than a complex process culturally and socially bound in creative, critical thinking. Aesthetic theory is insufficient to inform a successful practice in music education. A praxial approach, however, as pioneered by David Elliott (1995) assists educators to successfully inform their practice by considering the whole child and placing music making as a central value in their philosophy and subsequent practice.
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