Flow Chart of the Development of the Music Education Program

To assist readers in following the development of the Program, a stand-along flow chart has been added and is attached to the inside back cover. Readers are encouraged to remove the chart to place alongside the document as they read.

This chart represents the significant developments in the Program as discussed in the text below. While it gives a pictorial representation of different sizes of populations and also represents whole school populations of teachers and/or students, it is not designed to show actual numbers of either students, teachers or schools involved.

Section Two, below, develops a conceptualisation of current music education practices through a critical review of the literature.

Section Two: THE TRADITIONAL PARADIGM

One of the recognised problems in music education is separating the perceived needs of the many from the perceived needs of the few. It is generally believed that, in order to ‘make it’ as a high-level professional performance musician, a potential candidate has to start young (Sloboda et al,1996). One estimate is that it takes around 10,000 hours of practice to reach ‘expert’ level on an instrument (Ericsson et al, 1993).However, it is likely that only a small percentage of those who take up instruments will want to play professionally and an even smaller number who will succeed in earning a living that way.Despite this, much of the system for all students has developed around the model of musical excellence which can be seen as a Virtuosic Mountain.

A representation of the Virtuosic Mountain actually exists, indicating that the conceptualisation of musical endeavour in this way is not a new idea. A woodcut by Aubertine Woodward Moor,

entitled From Mechanical Foundation to Artistic Triumph (Muir, 2002) that appeared in a

mainstream American Music Journal in 1918, represents the model that still affects music education today. It is a serious image, not a cartoon. The picture, colouring and titles on the way up the mountain all illustrate the need for work and technical application in order to reach a place at the top of the hill. The top of the hill is where the artistry lives and it is no coincidence that the summit is described in competitive terms as ‘Artistic Triumph’. There is, we note, only one path: and it is constantly ascending with fewer people on the path as it winds to the top.

There are many possible antecedents for such an attitude towards music-making, but it is certainly not a new phenomenon. In Ancient Greece where cultured men were also musical men, Timotheus pioneered the virtuosic model (Fletcher 1991, p.6). He developed a particularly ornate style of lute playing that was copied by his followers but not reproducible by the musical populace at large. ‘Audiences’, instead of being part of the action, came to listen and, more importantly in terms of current attitudes to virtuosity, to admire the technical feats involved. Covell (1977) and Barenboim (1977) allude to the late 18th and early 19th centuries’ specialisation, and notion of the

‘Great Performer’ and ‘Great Composer’.

The virtuosic model of this period was represented by the likes of Liszt, who combined the Great Performer and the Great Composer in one, and had a huge (for the time) celebrity following. In the 19th century, performers such as Paganini and Jenny Lind, amongst others, were able to

exhibit their skills on several continents and acquired a cult following as methods of transport improved and broadened horizons for both performer and audience. Such performers increased not only their celebrity but their bank balances, not to mention the bank balances of their backers and managers. Such marketing became necessary as the patronage system, which had previously employed and supported many musicians, declined. These performers may not, at the time, have prevented ordinary citizens from engaging in music, given the lack of other entertainment. They did, however, present a higher standard of achievement to larger numbers of ordinary people than had previously been the case.

The problem of specialist technical expertise compared to the skills of ‘an average citizen’ is widely acknowledged in the literature. In the 1970s Lev Barenboim discussed the differentiation between the activities of ‘professional’ and ‘amateur’ and asked ‘has the process of specialisation perhaps gone too far and begun to exert a harmful influence on music education and instruction?’ (Barenboim 1977, p.43). Covell (1977, p.3) writes about the view of music as ‘a race to be won only by the chosen few’ and the idea that ‘excellence is the only permissible standard in musical performance or creation’.

Schafer makes a similar point about the cult of virtuosity saying that ‘the fantastic demands made to achieve virtuosity in any of the art forms have resulted in abstract accomplishments to which we can rightly apply the label “unnatural”’ (Schafer 1972, p.5). Nearly twenty years later Fletcher makes a similar point, claiming that ‘performing virtuosity has played an increasingly important part in shaping the musical culture of the twentieth century’ (1991, p.64).

Schafer and Covell are two of the writers who make a connection between this virtuosic model and its effect on the educative process of others. Schafer (1973, p.4) says that ‘the genius syndrome in music education often leads to debilitation of confidence for more modest achievements.’ Covell (1977, p.4) elaborates on how this ‘debilitation of confidence’ may occur:

There is certainly something aggressive in the way that many elders respond to their juniors’ music-making, almost as if they wish to perpetuate a similar kind of wrong done to them in the past.

A teacher quoted by Davidson and Scutt (1999, p.84) illustrates the dilemma from the professional point of view:

I don’t like pushing people into exams because then you’re going to kill what they like doing about music. The trouble with children is that you don’t know which ones are going to turn into total “I’m going into the music business” people or those who are not…so you’ve got to teach them all according to the proper syllabus, in case they turn around at fifteen and say “I want to go to music colleges.” If you’ve got someone who doesn’t work at all at ten, you don’t know what to do.

My contention is that despite greater access to music education for more children and, indeed, adults; despite the rhetoric of equity and access of modern times, the problem inherent in the virtuosic mountain is still with us. The base of the mountain has become broader but the peak has not lowered: those at the summit breathe the rarefied air of a Mount Everest, and probably need artificial help to do so. Further, I am suggesting that this approach to music education, built on the virtuosic mountain, has an effect on the engagement rates of individuals, particularly after they leave the formal school system. Engagement rates are low even within the school system but drop dramatically at school-leaving age while rates of attendance at musical events are significantly

higher. While the latter fact is encouraging, the emphasis placed on engagement during the school years does not seem to transfer to on-going engagement in later years. Indeed, as we shall see, there seems to be some indication that listening to or otherwise ‘consuming’ music may be considered an equal level of engagement to actual music-making which is rather like accepting that watching a football match is the equal of playing in one.5

The teacher quoted above expresses the problem, caught between feeling the need to prepare young children for a possible professional career while not destroying their love of music. Caught between these two extremes, music educators often exhibit signs of what one writer calls an ‘identity crisis’ (Austin 1990, p.45). Enoch (1977), for example, writes that ‘an enormous number of children throughout the world stop learning the piano’ and she hypothesises that ‘it is…possible that the average lesson is geared too much towards the talented pupil, requiring an early discipline that is too remote from the ordinary child’s vision of its own future ability’. However, later in the article, Enoch asks the question, ‘How can piano pupils best use their music?’ She answers:

They should, of course, learn to play the pieces to the highest possible standard for their own satisfaction, understand their musical content and be able to memorize them but,

alongside this, it will be most useful if they can become good and sensitive accompanists

for choirs and dancing classes, and sensitive chamber music players. This, in turn, will necessitate their being really good sight readers, and it will be an asset if they are able to transpose at sight as well. They should be able to play by ear so that they can pick out a tune on the keyboard that they have heard to which they can add a simple bass part so as to be of use in a friendly singsong. They should be able to improvise and create music for their own pleasure (Enoch 1977, p.34) [my italics].

This catalogue, we must remind ourselves, is in contrast to what would be expected of a talented pupil.

I have already described how the introduction of a simple, social/altruistic model for music- making in the Music Program allowed the development of a different mode of thinking that transformed the way I make music with children and adults. Through this journey, I

reconceptualised the current system in terms of the virtuosic mountain that, as noted above, is not a new idea. The mountain has a range of elements that can be summarised by ‘the three Ps’: Perfection, Practice and Performance. The system is driven by a need for increasing levels of perfection, attained through exhaustive and unpleasant practice and evidenced through competitive and judged performance, accompanied, as an accepted incidental, by various levels of anxiety. In this review, I will analyse the literature from the point of view of this virtuosic triad: Perfection, Practice and Performance to show how it imbues the system and, even where recognised, how difficult it is to escape what has become a standard way of thinking about music-making.

CHAPTER 3: PERFECTION