como os músicos populares aprendem

British Forum for Ethnomusicology

How Popular Musicians Learn: A Way Ahead for Music Education by Lucy GreenReview by: Vic GammonBritish Journal of Ethnomusicology, Vol. 11, No. 1, Red Ritual: Ritual Music and Communism(2002), pp. 159-163Published by: British Forum for EthnomusicologyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4149890 .Accessed: 04/01/2014 05:00

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

British Forum for Ethnomusicology is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access toBritish Journal of Ethnomusicology.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 128.240.225.122 on Sat, 4 Jan 2014 05:00:24 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Reviews

Books

LUCY GREEN, How popular musicians learn: a way ahead for music education. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2001. xii + 238pp., index. ISBN 0- 7546-0338-5 (hb. ?42.50)

Lucy Green has written an interesting and original book. It is about the attitudes, values and practices of popular musicians. It is also about learning and teaching styles and about whether a fruitful interaction can take place between formal methods of teaching and informal modes of learning. It is descriptive, analytic and prescriptive, wanting to suggest "a way ahead for music education".

Green is a classically trained musician, a teacher, piano teacher and academic. In recent years she has run the highly esteemed and successful MA in Music Education at the Institute of Education in London. (Why she did not get the recent professorship at the Institute I have no idea, but the strange and unfathomable ways of universities should not continue to amaze me). She is a productive writer. Her first book, Music on deaf ears, is in my view a profound and fascinating work, although many deemed it too theoretical for the audi- ence of teachers and educators who could most benefit from it. Her second book, Gender and music education, is the most significant work on the subject yet produced in this country. She has always shown a talent for qualitative, empirical research, and How popular musicians learn could well prove to be her most accessible book to date. She brings to her empirical work wide

reading, developed understanding and a formidable power to draw on a wide range of materials. Her work is informed by some ethnomusicology and she speaks to some central concerns of the discipline.

I have recently heard Music in Higher Education described as a "Cinderella subject", and Music Education as a "Cinderella subject of a Cinderella subject". I have seen colleagues' eyes glaze over when I have tried to interest them in problems created by the Music National Curriculum. Yet surely the way in which any society tries to intro- duce and develop music among its young people ought to be of interest to a wider musical community. The questions that Green asks are important and profound.

Her basic material for the study is a set of interviews with fourteen musicians ranging in age from 50 to 15, all performers of "Anglo-American guitar-based pop and rock music". The interview material is lively and informative and it is obvious that those interviewed have responded positively and given rich responses. In a pleasing touch the book is dedicated to them.

I come to this book having spent most of the last ten years involved in trying to help music graduates prepare themselves to be successful classroom practitioners in pri- mary and secondary schools. Thus the question title of Green's first chapter "What is it to be musically educated?" is a crucial one. The reality is that our society and its higher education institutions have no consensus on this question. Graduates who present themselves for PGCE courses have a wide range of skills, knowledge and understanding but few present anything like an adequate breadth to cope well with the challenges of

BRITISH JOURNAL OF ETHNOMUSICOLOGY VOL. 11/i 2002 pp. 159-80


160 BRITISH JOURNAL OF ETHNOMUSICOLOGY VOL.1 1/i 2002

British secondary school music classrooms. We wait with interest to see whether the advent of "benchmarking" in higher education will do much to change this situation. From the cynical words of some HE music teachers (not in my own institution I hasten to add), I doubt that it will have much effect other than the commissioning of paper (or rather electronic) exercises to "prove" that the benchmarks are being addressed. Green believes that musical success in music education should not be measured in terms of the achievement of a professional musical life as an outcome but in wider, lifelong benefits (17).

Green accepts Everitt's rather gloomy finding that in contemporary Britain only about one per cent of the adult population is an amateur music-maker (Everitt, 1997). I am a little suspicious of this finding, par- ticularly when the notion of "participatory" seems to imply some sort of public participation or exhibition. Comparisons with the past are extremely difficult, and much of the music-making Green cites from the past was of a domestic nature. My own work on church bands is cited - these were fascinating institutions, but a church band of instru- mentalists and singers may well have constituted one per cent or less of the population of an English parish. Some writers, often basing their arguments on instrument sales, have estimated that there has been more musical activity in recent decades than ever in the past, although buying an instrument is not playing it and does not necessarily imply "participation". Formal amateur musical institutions such as choral societies and brass bands tend to report a long-term decline, which would tend to support Everitt's and Green's views.

The point where I would totally agree with Green is that the great increase in formal music education has not resulted in a concomitant increase in publicly visible amateur music-making. There is an element of fashion here, and the characteristic musical activities of nineteenth-century urban society may not be the most appropriate for

a post-modern society. I live in Hudders- field, reputedly one of the most musical towns in England: the music-making is there, yet one has to seek it out. I interpret Ruth Finnegan's work in a more positive way than Green is able to.

Where I find myself even more enthusi- astically in agreement with Green is the sense that something is wrong with formal music education - something is missing. She explores what this might be through an analytical contrast between formal music education and "informal music learning practices". She believes that formal music education can be improved by the incorpo- ration of some elements from "informal learning practices".

Again, my own past experience as a teacher trainer would support this view. There were always exceptions, but some of best trainee teachers I have worked with, those who demonstrated a larger number of the practical skills needed to succeed in the classroom, came out of undergraduate courses on jazz and popular music. Some- times they lacked knowledge of the Western art music tradition, but in terms of practical work with kids they often had the edge.

Early in the secondary PGCE course I ran an improvisation session in order to explore the ways in which improvisation could be taught to 11-14 year olds (these skills featuring in the requirements of the National Curriculum). My idea behind the session was not to frighten people, though it terrified some. I thought it such a pity that people who had spent thousands of hours developing their instrumental skills could not make a coherent musical articulation without written music in front of them. Such a thing would be unthinkable to trained actors, and artists would only need a stimulus and a sketchpad to start to create something. It should not be surprising that some of the most creative British rock musicians were educated at art colleges.

It is not that Green is arguing that all is perfect in the learning of popular musicians. Some of this is quite haphazard, and no


BRITISH JOURNAL OF ETHNOMUSICOLOGY VOL. 11/i 2002 161

doubt much time and effort is wasted in blind alleys. Some learners fall by the way- side, among them those who could have been encouraged to continue with a timely intervention by someone who could under- stand the problem they were experiencing. On the other hand, the attrition rate in terms of formal instrumental lessons is high; many pupils do not respond to them positively and give up (including, interestingly, some of the interviewees who went on to become successful popular musicians). Similarly, in spite of the changes that have been made in the school music curriculum which have tried to make the subject "music for all", GCSE Music only attracts a small percentage of the numbers who take GCSE Art and Design courses. I think Green might be a little over-generous in her estimate of the wide-ranging nature of the GCSE (introduced in 1988). It certainly did free composing and performing from stylistic constraints (where teachers let this happen), but in the listening section of the papers the position of western classical music is still dominant, with popular and world music styles seemingly a token presence. The reluctance of successful GCSE students interested in popular music to take up A Level is to be expected as this emphasis on the western classical tradition increases at A Level (166).

Green, however, notices a significant change in the way school music was experienced by her older and younger inform- ants. Those who experienced what she describes as "traditional music education" gained little from it and generally felt alien- ated during class lessons. The popular music skills these pupils acquired were not recognized and encouraged by teachers. In contrast, the younger interviewees' responses to "the new music education" were far more appreciative as post-National Curriculum teachers developed more inclu- sive attitudes and practices to the range of music supported and encouraged by the school. While casting no doubt on these findings at all, the small size of Green's

group of interviewees might mean that the full range of students' experiences is not reflected. In a recent survey that I myself carried out, of 50 first-year music undergrad- uates (popular and "unpopular" students - the words fail us!). I found a complete range of assessment of the value of their school experiences to their musical development. There still seem to be plenty of schools where pupils are not getting a positive experience of Music in spite of the National Curriculum, OFSTED and the Qualifica- tions and Curriculum Authority.

One of the really fascinating findings of the book is that when those who have mainly acquired their skills through informal learning become teachers themselves, the positive aspects of their own informal learning are not reflected in their teaching. In short, they tend to teach popular music skills in a very traditional instrumental teacher way. As Green notes, "It is one thing to experience a way of leaming and another thing to recognise its feasibility as a teaching method ... it is reasonable to hypothe- sise that formal popular music instrumental tuition methods have much in common with formal classical instrumental tuition and relatively little in common with informal music learning practices" (178).

Green is clear what the benefits of informal learning are, and these include the enjoyment the popular musicians derive from their practice and learning. A key finding in Green's book is that, because they enjoyed and valued what they play, the motivation of popular music learners is high. They like the music they play so they persevere with it. Interestingly, they demon- strate a tendency to consider that they had not learnt anything unless it had been taught to them formally - a sad reflection on contemporary attitudes and values.

A central learning practice of the popular musicians studied is attentive learning and close copying of recordings. This goes along with a disposition to make the written always secondary to the aural (a great deal of commercially published popular music is


162 BRITISH JOURNAL OF ETHNOMUSICOLOGY VOL. 11/i 2002

inaccurate anyway - so it is good that the musicians can use their aural skills well) (96). A great deal of popular music learning is "by feel, ear, trial and error" (92). In addition, peer learning goes on though the copying and exchanging of ideas and tech- niques (97). Learning practices are akin to the ways young children pick up language (100), which begins with a jumble of relatively unconscious processes out of which greater levels of conscious systematization develop (103).

Earlier in the book Green comes up with the rather startling hypothesis, yet to be fully tested, that "Young musicians who acquire their skills and knowledge more through informal learning practices than through formal music education may be more likely to continue playing music, alone or with others, for enjoyment in later life" (56). If this is true, and my own research and observations suggest that it might well be, it is a considerable indict- ment of formal music education. If the main achievement of any form of education is to show people that ultimately they are failures and to so demotivate them that they do not wish to continue with that activity, that hardly rates as a significant educational achievement.

Formal music education "neglects" these informal learning practices, Green argues, and is impoverished as a result. Formal music education cannot attempt an exact emulation of informal music learning practices but it can incorporate some of the valu- able practices into its repertory of methods (184). Of these, crucial would be listening, watching and copying, including "solitary, close attention to recordings of music they like and identify with" (185, 189).

Defying the aural nature of music, it is common with some teachers in classical instrumental tuition for students to work at a piece that they have never heard performed. (I would go further than Green and say that I have known teachers who felt that to listen to a piece that was being studied was a type

of cheating - the test of the student should be whether they could get the music "off the page".) Green would have instrumental teachers incorporate listening as part of their preparation and practice routines (188) and have pupils learn by listening and closely copying recordings - ironically a replication of "a highly traditional and formal pedagogic method in that it involves obedience to the authority of a master" (189). I totally agree with this: I have long felt that aural copying is a great stimulant to the development of musicianship and so much more rewarding than arid aural exercises.

The other important area that instrumental pedagogy could incorporate would be stimulating "interacting with their friends and peers". In classroom teaching I have long felt that too often far too much time is taken up with explanation and instruction and not enough with actually playing. Dex- terity and facility come through practice and use, and thus lessons I have observed where most of the time is spent performing and interacting musically (as in a West African percussion ensemble) have, I would say, resulted in the best learning experiences for pupils. Western instrumental teachers have long been wedded to the idea of the solo instrumental lesson and have only tended to move away from it with reluctance under the pressure of economic necessity. As a number of educationalists have argued and as is the practice in other countries, it is per- haps time to see the positive advantages of group instrumental teaching.

I am loath to suggest an area that the book does not tackle and which it was not Green's intention to tackle, so this para- graph is more of a thought sparked by her book than a criticism. Certain social forces in recent years (including both Conservative and New Labour politicians) have made social class a sort of taboo subject. Issues of social class impinge strongly on this area and yet tend not to get discussed. The matter is quite simple. The admission to


BRITISH JOURNAL OF ETHNOMUSICOLOGY VOL.1 1/i 2002 163

university courses of music is often condi- tional on the achievement of a high grade in an ABRSM instrumental examination. This in turn almost always depends on long-term parental moral and financial support in buying instruments and paying for instrumental lessons (whether private or school-based) and supporting and encouraging practice. This therefore depends on having sufficient financial resources and the disposition to see this as a good thing to spend money on. This inevitably leads to a filtering-out process that excludes people from family backgrounds that are unable or not cultur- ally disposed to give the necessary support to musical children. Let us hope that the development of popular music courses, more flexible entry requirements and dif- ferent methods of assessing potential and ability will do something to address the accessibility of university music study. Some of the interviewees were rejected when they tried to enter university. I would have loved to know more about the social and cultural backgrounds of the musicians Green interviewed.

There is much that is rich, challenging and thought-provoking in this book. It is challenging to many established ideas and practices. It is also optimistic and humane. It will be interesting to see the reactions to the book and its proposals. I seriously expect it to be rubbished or ignored in some quarters as it is simply too challenging to existing paradigms. But Green, in her care- ful empirical work, has grounded her study well and her ideas and findings need to be considered seriously.

Reference Everitt, Anthony (1997) Joining in: an investi-

gation into participatory music. London: Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation.

VIC GAMMON School of Music, University of Leeds

v.a.f gammon @ leeds.ac. uk

Y. KOJAMAN, The maqam music tradition of Iraq. London: Y. Kojaman ([email protected]) 2001. 258pp., illustrations, musical exx., tables, compact discs. ISBN 0- 9539752-1-5.

When Rodolphe D'Erlanger wrote his monumental study of the melodic modes, rhythms and forms of modem Arab music, he classified his data according to two main "branches" or traditions: the "hispano- arabe", represented by Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia, and the "orientale", represented by Egypt, Syria and, implicitly, the rest of the Arab world (D'Erlanger 1949: 334ff; 1959:141ff).

D'Erlanger's work was originally pre- sented to the first international congress of Arab music, held in Cairo in 1932. At this landmark event, an unprecedented gather- ing of ensembles from Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt and Iraq performed to leading musicians and scholars from Europe, Turkey and various Arab countries. As Christian Poche has observed, "musicians coming from far afield ... who were thought to practise the same art, far from revealing themselves as homoge- neous, literally astounded observers with their degree of diversity" (Poche 1987:100). The Iraqi urban tradition, al-maqdm al-iraqi, was represented by the celebrated singer from Baghdad, Muhammad al-Qubbanchi, accompanied by the traditional ensemble known as al-chalgi al-baghdadi. Their performances revealed a unique melodic repertory, distinct in its formal procedures, performance practice and terminology from the neighbouring "oriental" traditions of Egypt and Syria.

Since 1932, numerous historical and theoretical studies on the Iraqi maqdm have appeared in Arabic, and several notated ver- sions of the repertory have been published. Yet, with the exception of the important contributions of Scheherazade Qassim Hassan, the European-language literature


Article Contentsp. [159]p. 160p. 161p. 162p. 163

Issue Table of ContentsBritish Journal of Ethnomusicology, Vol. 11, No. 1, Red Ritual: Ritual Music and Communism (2002), pp. 1-180Front MatterIntroduction: Ritual Music and Communism [pp. 1-8]Siren Songs: Ritual and Revolution in the Peruvian Andes [pp. 9-42]Long Day's Journey to Rincn: From Suffering to Resistance in the Procession of San Lzaro/Babal Ay [pp. 43-69]"The Moon Remembers Uncle Ho": The Politics of Music and Mediumship in Northern Vietnam [pp. 71-100]Mazar Festivals of the Uyghurs: Music, Islam and the Chinese State [pp. 101-118]Saving the Soul in Red China: Music and Ideology in the "Gongde" Ritual of Merit in Fujian [pp. 119-140]The Jewish Service in Communist Hungary: A Personal Journey [pp. 141-157]Reviews of BooksReview: untitled [pp. 159-163]Review: untitled [pp. 163-170]

Reviews of RecordingsReview: untitled [pp. 170-177]Review: untitled [pp. 177-178]Review: untitled [pp. 178-179]Review: untitled [p. 180]

Back Matter

como os músicos populares aprendem

Documents