To study music, we must learn the rules. To create music, we must break them.

Nadia Boulanger
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Study: Jazz Improv Cranks Up Brain's Creativity

This is really interesting and brings up a few questions for music education: how do we (and can we even try to?) go about teaching this? There’s the straightforward, mostly academic “instruments, important figures, significant songs and albums, swing feel, groove, blues scales, syncopation, etc. etc.” kind of approach that I’ve experienced in my own education, but is that all that it really takes to get your brain to start working in this way? For the sake of facilitating education I think it’s probably important to try and focus on this, see if the study and its results can be replicated consistently in order to see if a teaching method can be derived that can best scaffold the student towards this kind of behavior, but at the same time I feel like that’d take away a lot of the fun of playing jazz. Wouldn’t it be more serendipitous if we just arrived there accidentally-on-purpose?

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MENC's poll on singing in television

I didn’t contribute to this poll, but it seems that my thoughts were well-represented regardless. While I agree with the majority of the common themes, I have a problem with the following:

No educational value presented.

Granted, the poll is about all television shows that feature singing, & I could definitely see that statement being applied to American Idol, but is this really the case in Glee?

I would argue no, personally, at least not in any explicit “this is what the students are learning, musically” kind of way. We may never actually see it explicitly depicted and a lot of situations are pretty contrived, but the suspension of disbelief required to believe that the characters can do all that they musically do without us actually seeing it kind of necessitates the belief that these students are really learning something. There’s definitely been a visible pattern of growth that’s been depicted in the show. I personally find that to be a positive depiction of learning, regardless of whether it’s explicit or not and based on art music or not.

Perhaps I’ve become more optimistic, seeing as previously I described the show’s content as the following:

We never see the students working for their accomplishments; instead, their educational process can often be described as instant gratification.

I still think it can be described that way. However, in the context of the overall plot, especially when comparing the ensemble and its capabilities in the first episode and last, there’s clearly some sort of musical progress that has been taken place.

Finally, I just really enjoyed this comment:

To keep these students interested, it’s important to choose repertoire that caters to their interests. I always try to arrange or order some popular music for the students to sing at the end of the year concert. This is one of the main reasons I have so many students involved or seeking to join the following year.

As always, I am all about the inclusion of popular music in the classroom.

Overall, I think this is a really important topic to pursue because it’s what our students are being exposed to. It does affect the way they think about music. It might even lead to creating a stronger differentiation between “school music” and “my music,” which is certainly not what we want, if not addressed properly by the music educator.

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Originally Posted By stopdrop

“The arts teach children to exercise that most exquisite of capacities, the ability to make judgments in the absence of rules

Elliot W. Eisner
http://artsedge.kennedy-center.org/content/3789/ (via stopdrop)
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Originally Posted By researchnews

Setting pupils harms school performance

(reblogged from researchnews)

This is an interesting look in educational practices outside of the US — in this case, the UK, and it seems to reinforce the attitudes present in this op-ed from The Guardian. Here are some definitions for US visitors like me who were a bit confused—

Streaming meant splitting pupils into several different hierarchical groups which would stay together for all lessons.

Setting meant putting pupils of similar ability together just for certain lessons. So, for example, it would be possible to be in a top set for French and a lower set for mathematics. (BBC)

I’m pretty interested in the benefits of collaborative peer learning and how it can be positively used in the formal educational setting so this kind of research interests me.

I’m curious, though, about the implication that this has for education in the US. After all, what are Honors and AP classes if not a form of setting? The same BBC article describes the current state of education in UK schools as follows: “three-quarters of maths lessons observed by inspectors used ability sets and it was used in well over half of all lessons in science and foreign languages.” Indeed, my middle & high schools used setting for these subjects and I personally found them pretty beneficial. I actually have a hard time imagining mixed-ability classes in these subjects in the higher levels of K-12 education (this is probably because I’ve only read literature that looks at peer collaborative learning in the elementary setting) or even in other subjects.

On the other hand, most music classrooms in K-12 education can likely be described as mixed-ability classrooms. Band, orchestra, and choral ensembles are frequently mixed-age and, by extension, pretty mixed-ability, and students bring a varied background of pre-existing musical knowledge to the general music classroom at every grade level. What implications does the research on setting/streaming/etc in other subjects hold for music education?

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If you want to be sexist and perpetuate gender stereotypes for musical instruments at the same time, I would suggest buying a t-shirt with this print from Lemur Music. I’m having a hard time putting into words everything that is wrong with this image. However, the main things that come to mind are 1) the objectification of the feminine form & 2) the implicit idea that all bassists are men. His form’s not even very good. Plus, the play on bass (with emphasis on the last 3 letters) is just tacky. When things like these are sold from otherwise-reputable musicians’ businesses & I continue to overhear statements like “you can’t play that, that’s a girl’s instrument” and vice versa at observations, I am reminded that we still have a long way to go in music education. Where do we begin? How do we fix the problem?

If you want to be sexist and perpetuate gender stereotypes for musical instruments at the same time, I would suggest buying a t-shirt with this print from Lemur Music.

I’m having a hard time putting into words everything that is wrong with this image. However, the main things that come to mind are 1) the objectification of the feminine form & 2) the implicit idea that all bassists are men. His form’s not even very good. Plus, the play on bass (with emphasis on the last 3 letters) is just tacky.

When things like these are sold from otherwise-reputable musicians’ businesses & I continue to overhear statements like “you can’t play that, that’s a girl’s instrument” and vice versa at observations, I am reminded that we still have a long way to go in music education. Where do we begin? How do we fix the problem?

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“Glee” and music education: Some issues that may arise

Some quotes to start off:

“‘We knew that once the show started rolling it would be great… But to be honest, I didn’t think it would be this big this quickly. I thought it would take people a moment to catch up, but the reaction has been instant.’” - Billboard

and

“Cory Monteith… was walking down Fifth Avenue when a middle-age man and his wife stopped him. ‘He was more excited than his wife,’ Mr. Monteith said. ‘She is standing off to the side with this “I’m sorry” look on her face.’” - New York Times

both speak to how quickly and pervasively “Glee”, a feel-good jukebox musical in TV form that satirizes high school stereotypes and celebrates the underdog, has entered American culture. When talking to fellow music education students about the show, we frequently end up confirming that the show as a whole (a teacher sets up a glee club and kids find themselves and their place in a community through participating in a musical ensemble, all while having fun) “validates our career choices”. While it’s hard to say without any sort of surveying or research (there, my background as a psychology student comes out) whether “Glee” is inadvertently helping towards goals of musical advocacy and pushing the agenda that the arts (and music, specifically) can and is beneficial, it certainly is putting music education out there in a way that cannot be ignored.

When something as mainstream as “Glee” is out there in popular culture, it seems fair to generalize and say that many of the students in a music classroom have probably heard of and/or seen the show. How does this affect the way they approach learning music?

One big positive, first: music is seen as, well, an incredibly positive force in the lives of the student characters on the show. Characters frequently talk about what a haven the ensemble is for them, the friendships they have made, and the boost in self-esteem they’ve experienced. By noticing that these kinds of messages are out there in pop culture and drawing upon them in the classroom, it’s possible that music educators can connect to and encourage students to participate in music that normally wouldn’t.

One big negative, though, and this blog post says it better than I can:

“All the musical numbers, even songs JUST presented to the group, are polished and highly choreographed. Vocally, the presentation is VERY highly studio edited and the situations are just not realistic. I feel that ‘normal’ high school students may see the show and feel that they need to be able to come up to that level of quality in just a few short hours, rather than the hours of dedicated & focused practice that it does take to come up with elaborate production numbers (both vocally & choreographically).” - Rachel Velarde

When I first read this a month or so ago I partially agreed, partially disagreed; while I could see where she was coming from, I wasn’t sure that this lack of understanding about the learning process could really result from the show. As the show has progressed, though, I find myself turning repeatedly back towards this argument and it seems more and more compelling.

I have no problem, by the way, with the produced nature of the musical numbers and the songs themselves; this is a TV show, after all, and a TV show with a highly talented cast and a production team that loves to market (I’d like to see less of the pitch correction, but I digress). However, what I do think is possibly problematic is, as Ms Velarde points out, the way in which the show presents the learning process. I do realize, of course, that due to time constraints the writers have really had to pick and choose, but rehearsals have rarely, if ever, been touched on. I know the show’s main/manifest purpose is to entertain, but I’m concerned that there may be students who may get frustrated when the learning process doesn’t go as well for them because they’re comparing themselves to the latent messages they’ve picked up from the show’s portrayal of music education.

On “Glee”, students rarely make use of sheet music and seem to know and can perform the  songs instantly. The rehearsals are rarely actually rehearsals. Characters frequently just get up and belt out a polished and professional cover of a familiar song. Now, while all of this sudden singing is familiar ground to fans of conventional musical theatre and, again, while it is a TV show, after all, and a lighthearted comedy to boot (I laughed when Kurt Hummel explained his sudden laying-down of the chord progression to “I’ll Stand By You” by saying he never missed a piano lesson; and how unrealistic was Finn Hudson knowing all the words to that song and singing the melodic line perfectly, by the way?), I can’t help but wonder whether some students might unconsciously compare themselves to the performances they see on their TVs. We never see the students working for their accomplishments; instead, their educational process can often be described as instant gratification. Now, then, the question becomes: how does the music educator, upon acknowledging that this is a pretty pervasive depiction of music education, deal with this in the classroom?

I am not writing this post with the intention of providing answers to this question, but rather, seeking help in finding said answers (and, of course, as a pre-service teacher I have yet to actually deal with this in the field). However, I do already expect that part of my personal teaching philosophy will include stressing the fact that while everyone has the capability to experience, participate in, and enjoy music, becoming a skilled performer takes a lot of work and a lot of time, regardless of how “talented” a performer may be. It may be called “playing music”, but it certainly is work. Like my own educational process through a music education program, the answers to issues like these are still in progress, but I look forward to seeing my own philosophies develop further just as much as I look forward to seeing whether Quinn Fabray and Finn Hudson will stay together (although I’m pretty sure the answer is “no”, they just keep hanging on).

ETA: I also have a few problems with how Will Schuester runs his ensemble, but that’s a whole other topic!

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