A blog about music
‘If music be the food of love, play on’ – William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night.
With our festive activities approaching, and continuing my theme around creativity, I wanted to write this week about music and its unique place in education. I would also like to share news of an innovative music session we are offering to our parent community as part of the school’s ‘Christmas programme’.
This will be a creative and experiential event led by Bela Emerson and this is what is what she envisages for the session:
“Cellist Bela Emerson invites the audience to become co-creators: a thirty-five minute piece (in the second half of the workshop) connects a series of spontaneous interactions between Emerson and audience, who are invited to play with her for two minutes each. Participants are offered one of three specific approaches (the first part of the workshop) to generate a unique collaborative flow of sound.
The three approaches are:
· creating a drawing (put up on an easel) for her to musically interpret.
· exploring the purple pedal (filter modeller) - turning knobs (cause and effect).
· interacting sonically (using the mic) or visually (a co-created live art/music piece).
There will be instruments available to interact with and it may be possible to bring your own. Drawing together Emerson’s extensive experience as both improviser and community musician, this is an audacious and inclusive work which she has led several times and with a variety of audiences.”
When I studied music education for my PGCE, I was directed to think about how best to support children in developing their musical brain. My philosophy, backed up through classroom observation, was that overall it had to be engaging and mostly fun. This is because the way to reach people musically is really through feeling, as a right-brained response to sound, and also through movement.
I was inspired by the work of George Odam and Christopher Small; Odam advocates teaching ‘sound before symbol’. This can be translocated into ‘feeling before thinking’ or even ‘right-brained activity before left-brained’. Later on, there is the synthesis of these two modes into ‘feeling with thinking’ or ‘feeling-thinking’. This aligns with the integration of right- and left-brain activities through the chord between them, the corpus callosum (mentioned in Sir Ken Robinson’s video a few weeks back). In music education practice, this directs the educator to introduce many different and diverse sounds to children before teaching about bars, notation and the like. You want children to think and move in sound, to imagine sound and experience sound first.
Music, or ‘musicking’, is an action according to Christopher Small and he includes listening as well as performing and composing. It is a commonly held idea that musicians ‘perform’ and the relationship is just one way – towards the audience. Small (and I) contend that it is always a two way or even multiple directioned activity. This is certainly borne out for me in my studies of Hindustani classical music (in Lahore, 1989-1990). In classical Indian raga, the audience’s response can determine the length of the piece and even the nature of the improvisations. I would certainly invite you to entertain this idea in terms of Bela’s offering.
Movement learning is fundamentally important to humans and ‘musicking’ is also making shapes to music – dancing and, for the instrumentalist, the actual repetitive process of learning how to play a piece and committing it to deep memory.
Creativity is an approach to situations, challenges, or events in our lives that is potentially really liberating and joyful. This event will help us discover a little more about how it feels to take risks, in this creatively ‘safe’ environment. As adults, we can get out of practice in regard to this immediate and truly present way of relating to life. Relating in this context can be interpreted as a mindful ‘beginning again’ way of going about things. If we are able to create more joy in our lives, it has a knock-on effect for everyone else that we come into contact with and reduces suffering in our world.