Mus. Ed. 2001
Gradually, over the past few years, I have become aware of a situation in music education which is new to our society. When we were a more homogenous group, children in the towns and cities came to school out of the same kind of backgrounds, and with similar families, living situations and ideals. But now, with the breaking up of communities, with the wild and wonderful variety of cultures come together in schools, and with the popular entertainment industry exerting such a powerful influence on our lives, there seems to be no common commitment to the arts. People -- committees -- keep talking about it, setting goals that they wish were attainable, or offering solutions from the sublime to the ridiculous.
But the people bearing the brunt of this radical shift in our schools are the music teachers -- those whom Music Education courses prepared to teach in the older kind of society. Now, those situations where a music teacher has a reasonable number of classrooms to visit, with good support from administration and parents, seem to be few and far between. Much more common is the teacher overwhelmed with an impossible number of students/classrooms, trained in chorus but conducting band or teaching "general music" (what is that?) in a hallway because the music room was requisitioned for computers. Let me detail the problems conveyed to me by well-trained and highly motivated teachers who have taught for twenty years and more.
Children come to school at all levels with no musical background whatsoever except what they have gleaned from the TV -- much of that advertisements and videos. They have never heard an adult they know well sing for pure pleasure; have never sung around the house while doing chores or in a car on a long journey. Their idea of music is founded on electronics, at a high level of volume, and sales techniques which promise immediate gratification with no effort. What does this mean at the primary level? Children cannot match pitches; singing with their own age group without accompaniment is unheard-of; a folk or community repertoire is entirely foreign to them; the idea that music is an "extra", not important, is preserved by before-school or after-school rehearsals and a congenital lack of community support. It takes superhuman effort and much time to get these youngsters far enough into the process so that they can begin to join mainstream educational thinking and musical enjoyment.
At junior high and high school ages, the young people come with no firm background to build on. Again, they can't sing, and the elements of reading music have never been presented to them, or have been discussed in such a brief time-frame that no mastery follows. What is the teacher to do? He or she wants to get these students to experience some of our great choral/vocal music, but with their lack of skills has to fall back on lesser literature, spoon-fed.
And at college, we see the inevitable result. A good friend teaches at a community college, where students come with many backgrounds, ages, levels of ability and experience. They stay for only two years; they are a transient population with none of the opportunities for extended time together that the traditional, live-in, four-year institutions enjoy. What is the teacher to do? They not only have no training -- they don't know that they have none! "We had a great chorus in high school, and I learned a lot of songs" -- but in many cases it was pop songs taught by rote and sung in a manner injurious to the vocal chords.
So these intelligent, hard-working, responsible teachers are having to design an entirely new curriculum, based on their needs and the facilities available to them. How can we teach basic musicianship during a high-school choral rehearsal, two periods a week, in addition to learning some music to perform? What techniques will pull those grade-schoolers into the world of song? It's not five-color textbooks with hard covers, illustrations, and histories of the great composers, or, in the inner city, a lip-service to music that makes the teacher a baby sitter of a group with no classroom, no supplies and no influence.. What to do with those college kids who want to sing but have no realization that reading music is a skill that takes practice? And how about those post-graduate composition students who can write music only for the academic community on the computer?
I am extremely interested in these problems because they are basic to the continuation of our art. Melodious Accord has had for several years a Symposium devoted to various aspects of music. We began by bringing together lyric poets and composers, and continued through a rather lengthy series looking at sacred music in our church services. Now it is education's turn: the next Symposium will present several of these teachers working at different levels, who will discuss their problems and the means they are developing to solve, or at least ameliorate them. If you have something to say on this subject, do let us know. Details on the Symposium: Sound Teaching will be found in the Fall Newsletter; meanwhile, save the date: April 30 to May 3, 1998, in Hadley, Massachusetts. I'll hope to see you there.
Alice Parker
