School Music - Fighting the cuts

[french frank]

Sorry ff. I don’t quite get it. Can you rephrase or expand this?

I can't rephrase it, merely labour it. I mean that if Trump and Putin had learned the 48 Preludes and Fugues, we might well be living in a different world, because if that had changed, why would everything else remain exactly the same? It wouldn't guarantee that we'd be living in a better world just because two world leaders had a deep love for Bach's keyboard music.

[doversoul1]

I can't rephrase it, merely labour it. I mean that if Trump and Putin had learned the 48 Preludes and Fugues, we might well be living in a different world, because if that had changed, why would everything else remain exactly the same? It wouldn't guarantee that we'd be living in a better world just because two world leaders had a deep love for Bach's keyboard music.

Thank you.

[Bryn]

. . . I think my point is that an appreciation of (and even more so, participation in) classical music is a civilising influence. Would we be living in a different world if Trump and Putin had learned the 48 Preludes and Fugues...or maybe had ballet lessons?

The negative examples of Condoleezza Rice, and a certain previous German Chancellor of ill-repute's love for the music of Bruckner and Mahler spring to mind.

[Once Was 4]

I am not a teacher. Neither am I an intellectual. (Mrs A is sniggering in the background.) However I think it is very important to distinguish between 'pop' music and 'classical' music. Both words are inadequate descriptions of their genres. But I'm using them anyway.

Pop music is easily latched onto by its adherents and has a huge amount to do with ephemeral fashions. It often also needs a primeval rhyhmic urge. I am in no way dissing it, and indeed I live in a house with teenagers..and even have to accompany them occasionally, eg in an Ed Sheeran song. My point is that pop music will be there whether or not schoolteachers try to use it in the classroom as a way of 'engaging' kids. In fact most teenagers will covertly or otherwise ridicule such efforts.

Classical music on the other hand arises from a long art-tradition and requires education and immersion in that tradition to appreciate it. As I type I am being enthralled by a piece of John Sheppard, which as it happens, one of my teenage co-dwellers does appreciate as she has long sung in 'proper' choirs. Many people OTOH would wonder what those strange vocal noises were all about. The word 'classical' is perhaps not so inappropriate here. In the West, we look to Ancient Greece as the root of our civilisation and democracy. It is no coincidence that song, dance and drama were a staple of Greek society.

I think my point is that an appreciation of (and even more so, participation in) classical music is a civilising influence. Would we be living in a different world if Trump and Putin had learned the 48 Preludes and Fugues...or maybe had ballet lessons? Nice image there.

When I was a music college student in Manchester (1966-70) some of the lads started a pop group (as we called them then) in their spare time. When the Principal found out she absolutely blew her top and they were forbidden to ever make noises like that on college premises.

Strangely, I was never in to that kind of thing but, back in our digs at Salford (our landlady recently passed away at the age of 98 by the way) the Beatles 'Sargeant Pepper' album was never off the turntable and, when I get mysty-eyed about the days when I had all my teeth, a full head of hair, non-creaky bones etc. it is Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds' etc that comes to mind - not sitting up for the best part of 24 hours listening to Wagner's Ring in one sitting.

I am still not into that stuff (the pop/rock music I mean - not the Ring!) but I have had some dealings with it professionally (including playing on backing tracks for Paul McCartney's 'Wings' group at Strawberry Studios) and am aware that there is rock music and rock music. Some is the result of highly skilled, imaginative musicians. Some, well, isn't.

So to start another discussion: rock music in GCSE Music exams. As an invigilator they keep me away from those due to my reaction in the staff room after doing one once!

[doversoul1]

Not being at all knowledgeable in the area of colonial enculturation, I would be interested to learn how the Western colonists of the 18th and 19th centuries sought to indoctrinate indigenous peoples with any notion of the superiority of our musical culture over their's. Did this actually happen? - because in all honesty I don't know - or did they just rely on Christianity? As well of course on technological superiority when it came to resorting to force?

I am as ignorant as you say you are but this might be of interest;

Latin American Baroque: performance as a post-colonial act?

https://academic.oup.com/em/article/36/3/441/395336

There is also this (only the abstracts) but this is, as the titles suggests, at diplomatic level and not about education of the common people.

https://academic.oup.com/em/issue/40/3

Japan has an interesting history in music education. Whilst the country was never colonised, where culture is concerned, you could say it colonised itself. Five years into the Meiji era (1868 -), the ‘modern’ Japanese government issued the first Education Act and as part of it, commissioned (this may not be the right term) some 100 songs to be taught at school. The songs were to be composed in the Western music theory. Since then, at least up to my generation and I guess until much later, everyone learnt many of these songs at school. Despite the fact that these songs are nothing like any traditional Japanese music, they are unmistakably Japanese. Moreover, theses songs that everyone learned at school are now almost a folk memory and a cultural anchor. When I think about theses songs, I am terribly tempted to say that there is something universal about the Western (traditional art) music.

[subcontrabass]

BBC Young Musicians chip in: https://www.theguardian.com/educatio...-musician-2018

[MrGongGong]

When I think about theses songs, I am terribly tempted to say that there is something universal about the Western (traditional art) music.

I think you need a smaller typeface

These came up in one of Tom Service's programmes a few weeks ago (I think it was there?)

[subcontrabass]

Further evidence of decline: https://www.theguardian.com/educatio...y-gcse-a-level

[Richard Barrett]

Just noticed this thread...

When I think about theses songs, I am terribly tempted to say that there is something universal about the Western (traditional art) music.

I think what you mean is that in the last couple of centuries there's been something universal about Western imperialism! whose political/economic system has replaced local systems all over the world, again on the assumption that there's something inevitable and superior about it. Western music, whatever one's opinion of it, is an outgrowth of that system: Western classical music has traditionally been used to spin a narrative of prestige and "natural order", whether associated with the divine right of kings or the hegemony of churches. Which shouldn't be seen as an attempt to invalidate it, but things like this do I think need to be borne in mind when thinking about the relations between Western music and that of other cultures. Besides which, of course, Western art music has an infinitely smaller presence in the world at large than Western commercial music, and this differential is no doubt increasing just as it is in what remains of music education (to return to the thread topic), at a time when actually the provision for education in music and other cultural subjects really ought to be increasing in line with the increased amount of time people ought to have for such things as a result of automation etc. - but of course so far things haven't been working out like that, as we see forcefully expressed in the writings of David Graeber which I referenced on the forum a little while ago.

[DracoM]

Further evidence of decline: https://www.theguardian.com/educatio...y-gcse-a-level

[Richard Barrett]

a certain previous German Chancellor of ill-repute's love for the music of Bruckner and Mahler spring to mind.

I don't think he was that keen on Mahler actually.

[Bryn]

I don't think he was that keen on Mahler actually.

Thanks. I really do not now how Mahler got in there. Possibly predictive text. I intended Dick W., of course.

[MrGongGong]

https://www.classicfm.com/music-news/music-at-risk-disappearing-in-schools/?cmpid=classic.email.newsletter.11-10-18.-.crm&cmp=EMC-SAIL&cmpid=&cmp=EMC-SAIL

[Serial_Apologist]

https://www.classicfm.com/music-news...=&cmp=EMC-SAIL

Clearly the Taleban faction of the Tory Party has taken over the givernment.

[MrGongGong]

Which hand at the top ?

https://www.theguardian.com/music/shortcuts/2018/oct/31/blown-away-will-we-miss-the-sweet-sound-of-school-recorders