1/28/11 - Reflections

As I began reading Chapter 1 of Instrumental Music Education, I couldn't help but find it a bit ironic that the same names and ideas are consistently at play, no matter the topic of discussion. The authors referenced Daniel Levitin, Steven Pinker and the whole idea of whether or not music was a "spandrel" of other evolutionary forces, and if music was little else than "auditory cheesecake." Because Instrumental Music Education and This Is Your Brain on Music are such recent publications, I can only surmise that this is one of the "hot topics" debated around the musical world right now. I'm grateful that through technology and through the greatest minds of our time, we can always be up-to-date on the most important issues floating around in music education.

This chapter presents the music learning theories of Gordon, Kodaly, and Suzuki. I was really happy when I came to the section heading, "Eclecticism and Hybridization." This section seemed to say that whether an educator prefers the methods of Gordon, Kodaly, or Suzuki, they are probably going to end up with similar results. I like this thought. It tastes good to me. Because each one of these theories emphasizes the sound-to-symbol principle, they will all basically lead to the same conclusion. What's more is that the teacher who is familiar with all three of the theories will be able to use greater variety in the classroom. They will be able to offer their students a more eclectic music education. Again, I cannot say how much I like this concept. A former class I took introduced the philosophies of Gordon, Kodaly, Orff, Suzuki, Dalcroze, and others one at a time in such a way that the learning was not meant to be cumulative. It seemed as though we had to choose which learning style we liked the best, and then go from there. There was no talk of "Eclecticism and Hybridization." We even went to observe teachers that were specifically "Orff" or "Kodaly" educators. While I understand that this may be standard in certain areas of music, I want to be as eclectic as I can be. I think that this will ultimately give my students a better and more well-rounded education.

It is all too true that most instrumental music education curricula will not have a place for much sound-to-symbol teaching, but just the fact that this concept is introduced in the first chapter of this publication may offer some hope. The book lists many reasons why it is not practical, historical, or economical to teach sound-to-symbol principles in instrumental music education. I know it is not the purpose of this blog for me to enumerate these, but I have some suggestions on how sound-to-symbol teaching applications would highly benefit instrumental music education. This would be in the world of improvisation and composition. Why are we teaching children to compose and improvise in general music and then stopping this practice completely until we emphasize it again sometime later in high school jazz band? This doesn't make any sense. Teaching an instrument from scratch may be difficult, but there are ways to teach instrumental music with the sound-to-symbol idea in mind. For example, once students have mastered five notes, have them go home and use these notes to come up with a song. Maybe they can use these five notes as a foundation for beginning exercises in improvisation and composition. The ideas are endless, but it is the responsibility of all of us as educators to put these theories into practice. The beginning band teacher may spend his entire career trying to implement these teaching strategies into his curriculum, but what good does it do when he/she walks away and these concepts are never mentioned again. There needs to be a greater continuity from general music to beginning band to middle school band to high school band and beyond.