Western Enculturation

5.3.1

Differences in our approach to music and sport

A large-scale study from the US conducted by the National Endowment for the Arts, American Canvas (1997, p.61) looks at a range of issues in the arts in that country. This report emphasises the curious lack of connection between the different levels of the musical mountain, compared to attitudes towards sport. The report claims, for example:

…we tend to draw no…distinctions in the world of athletics, in which a direct connection is made between shooting baskets in the driveway and the professional exploits of a Michael Jordan, between jogging through the park and the world-class competition of the Olympic Games (p.61).

American Canvas goes on to say: ‘Shift from athletics to aesthetics, though, and the lines between participant and spectator are attenuated, if not severed altogether.’ The report gives figures that show a high level of sports involvement as well as sports fixture attendance, not to mention viewing of TV sports. Figures for arts participation are difficult to compare because arts, in the definition applied here, can include needlework. The report notes that, on the one hand, ‘many more Americans attend arts activities than professional sporting activities every year’, but on the other ‘it cannot be claimed that the arts are in any meaningful sense integrated into our daily lives in quite the same way that sports are’. This problem is the one alluded to above and not always recognised or commented on by the sector: that consumption of arts becomes the norm in a way that seems not to apply to sport.

While sports like swimming may be run on a competitive basis, the skills developed have an obvious on-going benefit. Individuals use the skills learned at the beach or as part of an on-going lifestyle of exercise and fitness without making regular comparisons between themselves and an Ian Thorpe. While it seems perfectly reasonable to us to claim that a life of music listening is a fair transition from youthful music-making we are less likely to agree that a fair transition from

youthful swimming lessons is watching Ian Thorpe win another gold medal. Swimming skills continue to be used by most, even if only to prevent ourselves drowning when playing in the surf.

5.3.2

Music as passive consumption

It is widely recognised that Western enculturation processes support the passive consumption of all forms of art, rather than the active engagement that characterised earlier periods, or other societies. A range of writers point to the increasingly passive nature of musical involvement (Woodward 1994, Wood 1985, Cross & Morley 2002), and the aforementioned American Canvas makes explicit the link between the passive direction of arts involvement and the degree of specialisation that is both a symptom of this social direction and an on-going disincentive to participate:

In enshrining art within the temples of culture…we may have lost touch with the spirit of art: its direct relevance to our lives…we may have stressed the specialized, professional aspects of the arts at the expense of their more pervasive, participatory nature (p.59).

One US commentator in American Canvas goes further, suggesting that it is ‘our fascination with the role of institutions within the cultural ecology’ that has ‘ripped off the very grass roots support that we need now’. Art as ‘something that we watch other people do’ is our predominant form of engagement, thus explaining the propensity to lump listening/watching with music-making as a worthy goal of childhood participation. Passive consumption is our predominant enculturation process.

This trend in our enculturation processes appears to affect not only what we do but also how we conceptualise what we do. In the recent book The Social Psychology of Music the editors, Hargreaves and North, pay tribute to the two editions of a previous work with the same title by Paul R. Farnsworth, published in 1954 and 1969 respectively. More than 40 years separates the appearance of the first publication from the appearance of Hargreaves and North’s version. The latter are quick to point out that ‘surprisingly little attention has been paid to this aspect of music psychology’ and that of the three domains in the field – the cognitive, the emotional and the social,

‘the social functions of music in the lives of individuals have been seriously neglected is psychological research’ even though the social can be said to ‘subsume the cognitive and emotional functions in certain respects’ (Hargreaves & North 1999, p.71).

That is not to say that no writers discuss the social nature of music. Besides Hargreaves and North, MacDonald and Miell (2000, p.58) believe that music education research must consider the wider social context of music, with reference to ‘peer groups, the family, the relationships between teacher and pupil and between pupils themselves’ in order to see what impact these variables have on ‘a child’s interest in music and knowledge about music and indeed on their developing personal identity as “musical” (O’Neill, 1997; Taebel, 1994)’. Legette (2000) likewise feels that the social context of music learning is important.

While further study of music from a social perspective might be helpful, it is important that this idea does not become part of another prescribed system. The social nature of music implies a spontaneity and informality that is at odds with the idea of research and reporting. As John Blacking (1976) writes: ‘Music is too deeply concerned with human feelings and experiences in society…for it to be subject to arbitrary rules like the rules of a game’.

5.3.3

Differences in other cultures

Some cultures still show elements of musical engagement that seem to relate more closely to our origins. John Finney (1999, p.242) discusses the original proposer of ‘musicking,’ Christopher Small, who described the cultures of societies who maintained more social and informal music- making processes:

Small, on the other hand, thinks of music as a humanising social action. It is through what he calls ‘musicking’ that ‘participants not only learn about, but directly experience, their concepts of how they relate, and how they ought to relate, to other human beings and the rest of the world’ (Small 1999:9).

Burger et al (2000, p.2) quote the two African authors of the article as saying: ‘from time immemorial, music and an African person were two inseparable entities’, and continue:

Furthermore, in African music a basic musical aesthetic is ‘the presence of the group.’ Making music together, ‘singing together’, is in a sense a symbol of solidarity, of belonging. Part of what is experienced as aesthetically pleasing in African music is the opportunity and ability to share a musical experience with a group.

Aesthetics, in this model of music-making, is not reliant on excellence and individual endeavour perfected in isolation. Neither ‘quality’ nor ‘performance’ has a meaning here such as applied in our society.

Small, before Burger, indicated that technique and vocal quality were not significant issues in African music-making, but rather ‘the artistic use he makes of what he has’. The African approach as described by Small, includes the idea that music-making at all levels can include artistry; that rather than attach our ‘expression’ after we have mastered our technique (the ‘once more with feeling’ model) the expression is fundamental to our music-making whatever our level of technique.The implication of this attitude is completely at odds with our own Virtuosic Mountain, where artistry is at the peak, after an intense and rigorous technical climb.

Small refers to other societal groups, like the Australian Aborigines and the Balinese, as having similar attitudes to Africans. For example, he shows that the performance paradigm is not always of central concern when discussing music in Bali where ‘the music is almost never played in concert performance’. James O’Brien (1994) makes a similar point about the music of Native Americans: ‘…in general there is little systematic development of musical abilities…Music education occurs as a natural acculturation to tribal ways’.

Sloboda, as we have seen earlier, is another modern researcher who compares our approaches with other social groups. He talks about some native groups where ‘musician and non-musician children learned in the same way, through imitation and participation, in what one might describe as a course of “self-paced instruction”’. He describes the various types of musical engagement that used to be common, like ‘music sung and played in the home…sing-songs at the local pub…where

all and sundry could join in at their own level… At a slightly more formal level…a church choir or a brass band’ (Sloboda 1999, p.455).

Sloboda, one the few researchers who has looked at the precursors of long-term commitment to instrumental learning and playing, found those precursors in situations that do not resemble the formal educational, practice-drive model. Such precursors were in the ‘experience of intense, aesthetic, emotional reactions to music…most often experienced in non-threatening environments, e.g., the home, the concert hall, alone or with friends where there were no performance expectations’ (Hallam 2002, p.236). In other words, in situations that relate most closely to the sort of experiences associated with musical enculturation in more primitive societies or earlier manifestations of our own culture. Sloboda (1990, p.39) found, further, that only 17% of a varied cohort of adults surveyed had memories of performance that were positive.

The similarities in these accounts of non-Westernized societies suggests that Western enculturation processes have provided certain types of technological gains that are matched by certain types of social losses.