It has been quite a number of years now since I became acquainted with the work of Christopher Small. His works Music, Society and Education (1977), Music of the Common Tongue (1987) and Musicking (1998) were intelligently combative to the institution of music education in Australia at the time – in fact, they still are… Reading them today, one could be forgiven if they thought these works were new additions to the literature!

Small coined the term ‘musicking’ – that music is a verb, not a noun; a process and not simply the product of a score or recording. In Musicking, he states, that “the fundamental nature and meaning of music lie not in objects, not in musical works at all, but in action, in what people do” (italics mine, p. 8). Through action we encounter meaning in ways that talking and reading can never fully reach; when we are active within musical processes, we ‘music’:

The act of musicking establishes in the place where it is happening a set of relationships, and it is in those relationships that the meaning of the act lies. They are to be found not only between those organised sounds which are conventionally thought of as being the stuff of musical meaning but also between the people who are taking part, in whatever capacity, in the performance; and they model, or stand as metaphor for, ideal relationships as the participants in the performance imagine them to be: relationships between person and person, between individual and society, between humanity and the natural world and even perhaps the supernatural world. (p. 18)

Small saw music as much more than simply relationships between organised sounds; it was also an instrument of socialisation – a way through which one could explore, affirm and celebrate culture. Of his experiences at a music festival, Small once wrote of musical

“signals … everywhere being given and received”.[i] To engage with these ‘signals’ on some level is ‘to music’.

To meaningfully use and manipulate musical signals and come to an understanding of musical cultures is ultimately central to our endeavours as music teachers.

There are some parallels here with another influential voice in music education…

Keith Swanwick speaks of music as a discourse. He uses the word in a “non-technical sense … close in meaning to ‘conversation’, the expression of ideas, meaningful interchange.”[ii] Swanwick argues that promotion of musical fluency[iii] is the aim of music education; fluency allows us to share, produce and collaborate in the production of discourse – a discourse, importantly, in music and not about it. He continues, saying:

the good-enough music teacher is able to facilitate students’ immersion in this environment of the symbolic world and promote the growth of their musical autonomy.[iv]

An immersion in such a world rests upon students experiencing, doing… being part of the action… I would like to think that a larger social element of these interactions is present too, just as Christopher Small and Keith Swanwick also advocate.

Though there are a few ideas within this commentary so far, I keep returning to music being all about the verb. Perhaps it is because I am becoming increasingly aware of parallels between learnings from my day-to-day life and the music classroom? I will try to articulate these in relation to my daughter’s language acquisition and my own language learning.

My four year-old daughter is surrounded by a world of language. She uses and manipulates it with ever-increasing degrees of fluency to express herself and her ideas. We have never sat her down and ‘taught’ her words; rather, she has come to know them and their meaning through using and experimenting with them in context. Over her four years, dialogue and discourse have surrounded her – she has been immersed in language, and she has grown in her autonomy because of it… she has been central to the action. She is active in a process of using language – ‘languaging’, perhaps? Only now are we beginning to attach the ‘labels’ – and this ‘we’ very much includes her – she is actively seeking connections between spoken and written language. Action, first-hand experience, doing… this has come first and formed the bedrock for her growing understanding of language and her fluency in use.

It’s all about the verb…

Recently, I returned from a holiday in Europe with my wife and daughter. Over two weeks of our time away was spent living in central Paris. I have been learning French for a little while now, and though I am not fluent, I know enough to get by. Our ‘survival’[v] demanded that I engaged with language reception and use in the present moment. Meaningful social engagement through ‘sense-making’ and questioning needed to be responsive to contexts that weren’t contained within my textbooks. Through immersion in an active process of discourse I picked up a great deal of knowledge of (and about) the French language. I found I could almost always understand what was being said – often supported by cues from the context acting as prompts – and respond with something meaningful. Learning in action and in context not only made the experience more meaningful, but more educatively powerful.

The best moment was when my ‘tongues’ blended:

je voudrais un billet de retour à Versailles pour my daughter who has four years, s’il vous plait…

… evidence I had assimilated language to a point of true knowing? Maybe.

It’s all about the verb…

My daughter and I learnt much from our encounters, much more than from a textbook or context-less experience. Music education shouldn’t really be any different should it? Why is music often not treated as a verb in the classroom? As Small said, the “fundamental nature and meaning of music lie[s] … in action, in what people do” (italics mine, p. 8).

Understanding is all about the verb…

[i] Small, C. (1998). Musicking: The meanings of performing and listening. Wesleyan University Press.

[ii] Swanwick, K. (2008). The good-enough music teacher. British Journal of Music Education. 25(1), 9-22.

[iii] I really do like the notion of musical fluency, quite separate to musical literacy. I feel you can be completely literate musically but convey no meaning… maybe more on that later.

[iv] Swanwick, K. (2008). The good-enough music teacher. British Journal of Music Education. 25(1), 9-22.

[v] ‘Survival’ seems like such a dramatic word. Many of the people we encountered spoke English very well, but I wanted to respect their language and proud culture. The ability to read a great deal of written French text was also very valuable!