In which I worry again about liking ‘classical’ music

There has been a fair bit of twitter activity in the UK recently wherein the status of classical music (yes, I know, but let’s just go with the term for this blog!) is bemoaned, and the solution inevitably posed is more/better music education in schools. Now, I don’t really want to get into the sort of culture wars where we deliberate on the relative worthwhileness of different sorts of music, I’ve written plenty of book chapters and journal papers on that topic, with more in the pipeline. My concern in this blog is the re-emergence of this equation:

Good school music education = making children like classical music

And, by extension:

Bad school music education = not making children like classical music

It’s been a while since I did simultaneous equations, but the rigid dichotomy of this bothers me. Is the sole purpose of classroom music education to “make children like classical music”? Should it be? I know I have written before about this, and compared it with liking food in a blog entry here. What seems to be the case in the latest round of exchanges is something like this:

• Not enough people buy tickets for [my] classical music concerts ➡️
• This is not my fault, it must be someone else’s ➡️
• I know – not enough people seem to like classical music ➡️
• Ah –  blame school music teachers (especially in the state sector), they’re either not there (government’s fault), or incompetent (their own fault), or their degrees are in ‘knit your own synthesizer’, or something else improper (!) ➡️
• If the teachers would do their job properly more people would buy tickets for my concerts 🔝
• (repeat ad lib)

The problem, at least from my perspective, is that we have been here before. Back in what many say were “the good old days”, (spoiler – they weren’t) Enquiry 1 (Schools Council 1968) was published. This was an investigation into school leavers’ attitudes. It observed that many of the students in schools at that time had become disaffected by music in education. Students were asked to list school subjects that they found to be ‘boring’ and ‘useless’, with responses categorised by gender. Music came top of both lists. Those were the days of music appreciation. As Witkin wrote, a few years later:

… pupils are often brought to music as a shrine. It is there to be played or to be listened to but only the ‘Masters’ make it. Such a view would be intolerable to an art teacher … (Witkin 1974: 126)

Now, I’ve got nothing at all against teaching about music from the classical era, heck I’ve done it myself. But if the aim is to ‘make’ children like it, and that is the singular and sole purpose of music education then I think we are both on to a loser, and are destined to repeat the findings of enquiry 1. 

This is not to say that I think everything in the music education garden is rosy, as I don’t. But please, let’s not forget the lessons of the past, let’s also remember Swanwick’s (1999) maxim, and ‘teach music musically’! 

And yes, I know people will write to me with details of their classroom music programme which doesn’t fall into any the traps I’ve outlined, and does indeed foster an interest in classical music in children and young people, but that’s not my point! I bet such programmes do ‘teach music musically’! It’s the unmusical nature of leading children to the “imaginary museum of musical works” (Goehr, 1992) that is troubling me today.

References

Goehr, L. (1992) The imaginary museum of musical works, Oxford, Clarendon Press.

Schools Council (1968) Enquiry 1: Young School Leavers, London, HMSO.

Swanwick, K. (1999) Teaching music musically, London, Routledge.

Witkin, R. (1974) The Intelligence of Feeling, London: Heinemann Educational.