The Origins and Foundations of Music Education

Reviewed by Angela Moran

In their book on compulsory schooling, Gordon Cox and Robin Stevens cover those places across the world where, as Shakespeare’s Jacques puts it “all the men and women are merely players” – that is, those countries where music education finds a welcome, mandated home in the national curriculum. In The Origins and Foundations of Music Education, twenty contributors, spanning fourteen nations on six continents, locate world musics in their individual spaces, places and times, in relation to local compulsory musical teaching systems. Starting from a place of optimism – that music can be a powerful universal learning tool – they critique the shortcomings and strengths of diverse contemporary pedagogies. Robin Stevens and Eric Akrofi’s concluding chapter – differing slightly to those accounts preceding it, with a focus on music beyond, rather than inside, the classroom environment – provides a possible grand thesis to the publication: the top-down employment of the education system, including compulsory schooling, is seen to provide structural support for the coherence of society as a whole. Even more boldly – engaging, indirectly, here with ideas expressed by the ethnomusicologist Martin Stokes in his article “Music and the Global Order” – they suggest that it may be precisely as a result of music that societies arise in the first place, rather than vice versa. Music, when treated properly, is understood as a source of immense potential, with history and individual circumstance determining whether for good or for harm. The collected essays of (The Origins and Foundations of Music Education revolve around such questions, treating both local and global identities.

Singing is the common starting point for the individual case studies. After all, the compulsory pedagogical system has its origin in a religious context, establishing and determining sacred chants and communal prayers, and encouraging young vocations. Wilfried Gruhn takes us back to Germany in the middle-ages, where learning “music” meant the mandatory singing of Gregorian Chant for a few destined to be clerics. The introduction of a formal method by which to educate the masses (in still primarily vocal music) begun in eighteenth-century Europe but extended later elsewhere, affected the systematic cultural application of music from this point. John Curwen’s tonic sol-fa technique of naming note pitches enjoyed its vogue; widely adopted by teachers across Europe and beyond, often to the detriment of indigenous musical traditions. The British Protestant minister’s new method of musical nomenclature grew out of his own religious and social beliefs; a simple method of teaching singing was required for Sunday schools in regional England. Although similar ideas for reading music at sight had been developed in France, a natural consequence of this English take-over was the resurgence of patriotic song in school during political instabilities in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. An inchoate Australian system from the 1850s, Robin Stevens and Jane Southcott tell us, included “vocal music” as a “subject of ordinary instruction”, taught daily by teachers who themselves received singing lessons.

Alongside sentiments of singing as a nationalising force, grew the broader concept of Music as a civilizing force. Governments encouraged the (arguably) social-engineering standardization of defined harmonic intervals, and implemented theory and instrument lessons as justifications for the inclusion of “music” as a school subject. Hence Gruhn journeys to a state-controlled German education where teachers played also organ or violin; a foreseeable trajectory towards instrument tuition that took longer in Norway. There, the medieval subject “Singing” became “Music” only in 1960. Following their 1905 independence, the Norwegian government had intentionally refused European aural and orchestral influences. Tellingly, the four periods of Fred Ola Bjørnstad and Magne Espeland’s account of this setting are arranged according to political history rather than musical development.

Practices and tastes in the classroom have historically been dictated by national curriculums, but, as music carries beyond walls and borders, the influence of geographical (and global) neighbours is inevitable. Although specific to a locality and history, the chapters of The Origins and Foundations of Music Education themselves become microcosms of this broader truth, for better and for worse. Marie McCarthy narrates the colonial implications in 1830s Ireland, for example, where those attending Anglo-Irish schools learnt advanced continental music techniques, whilst most, living in significant poverty, would perhaps have been better aided with lessons on how to “read, write, calculate the price of a load of hay”. In twentieth-century China – which, as Wai-Chung Ho explains, celebrates a longstanding parochial edification based on Confucius’ “Six Arts” – the notation of a French musician working in Japan was accommodated. Japan itself adopted a European and American-centred curriculum after Isawa Shûji, their “father of music education”, produced a document in 1884 extolling the superiority of major keys. His (unsound) evidence was that the music of such “culturally advanced nations” as Germany, Switzerland and Poland, privileged major harmonies of the equal-tempered scale.

History has, of late, come to confirm that old adage that, come hell or high water, we are all Europeans now. Music helps clarify local personality: a vibrant, healthy nation is seen to depend on it. Apparent “Western” practices and tonalities can further this goal if deployed intelligently, and adroitly, according to advanced education practice. These perspectival globalizations bring, however, the very real, very serious threat of cultural colonialism. In her seminal publication, Feminine Endings, Susan McClary introduced ideas of the inherent imperialism of sonata form. The Origins and Foundations of Music Education, extending this argument, conjures the business model of “glocalization”, in which a product or service is distributed on a global scale while – often only superficially – adapted to specific localities where sold. A nation’s peculiar schooling is presented as being subjected to an incessant process of external influence; a certain governmental “keeping up with the Joneses”, where agreed, measurable (again, increasingly often equally-tempered) music is the show of success. For example: for millennia, a native population in South Africa employed musical arts – singing, drumming and dancing – to teach children “both ‘rites of passage’ and more general life skills”. The recent government-directed schooling has, however, prioritised Western tonal theories, leaving pupils without basic appreciation of the matrix of cultures the previous system facilitated and embodied.

A separate, but closely related, issue treated here and by the “New Musicology” is the role of gender in music education. An implicit thread common to the studies in this volume is the impression that, and here I quote the harpist Carl Swanson, “any time a profession was primarily identified as ‘female’, men (at least straight men) would steer away”. We again encounter the issue of government attempts to justify the inclusion of music for its sociologic effects, and their attempts to adapt it to overcome its feared “feminine” guise. François Madurell’s chapter presents music as an optional subject for boys in 1830s France. Jere T. Humphreys discusses contemporary USA, where boys drop out of music classes as they progress through the grades. One prominent social echo of this is the founding of the New York Musicological Society, at which composer Ruth Crawford was prohibited for fear of initiating “women’s work”. The presentation of music as a competitive field was, according to Nancy Vogan, vital to masculinising, and thereby legitimising, the subject in Canada. Every year, at a national display – based on the British model introduced by a Scottish Presbyterian minister – teachers would show off by ranking their student performing groups in relation to each other.

All societies presented in The Origins and Foundations of Music Education are, like Shakespeare’s ultimate age for man, uniformly dependent; on music as a tool and means for self-definition and global participation. That same music is, simultaneously, both a local tradition and an imperial force manipulated by international exchange and hegemonies. Lisa M. Lorenzino writes that “the journey to implement music education in Cuban public schools has paralleled the country’s battle for compulsory education and, in turn, nationhood itself”. The future for musical education is ours to prophesy, yet Lorenzino’s statement chimes with those of her fellow contributors. After centuries of development and maintenance of musical pedagogies, a global forum for their rigorous debate has finally arrived.