Someone recently asked me what methodology I used to teach music. I’m pretty sure they awaited a definitive response to support and ‘validate’ their own methodological worldview…

“The best bits of each”, I replied.

There are a variety of methodologies out there, and I’ve met some hardcore advocates who maintain that their way is the only way to teach music. Fortunately, they have been few in number.

Whilst pride in and for a specific methodology is fine, I think that there are potential challenges in an exclusive subscription to one alone. These challenges have grown from changes in the ways students can engage in and with music outside of school – we are not, despite what we sometimes think, the only ‘music teachers’ in our students’ lives! There is a potentially rich tapestry of educative experiences students can engage with, and if they don’t like us or ‘our ways’ – irrespective of how ‘helpful’ we perceive them to be – they can and will go elsewhere. We need to make sure that what we do matters in their musical lives, just as much as we need to acknowledge their own experiences. In doing the later we may even learn something ourselves.

Taking up the conversation from earlier…

“I just try to teach music in a way that best fits the situation and the students.”

By ‘situation’, I include my educative intent in the classroom as a music teacher. Fundamentally, this intent is essentially to develop students’ musicianship – that unique set of knowledge, understandings, skills, attitudes and dispositions that underpins how they engage in music to communicate their musical ideas.[1]

Musicianship is the ultimate goal, and it underpins what ‘good’ musicians do, irrespective of style. It is something that is a challenge to define, but we know when someone has ‘good’ musicianship; perhaps my best attempt is to say that it exists within a synergy between intuitive and analytical understandings of music… music is known and felt.

Do our methodologies get at this?

Swanwick talks about engaging with music intuitively – he places it “at the heart of musical experience”, and crucial for all knowing.[2] We must feel before we know. He proposes that the only justifiable position for selecting a musical activity within a classroom is that it has the potential for significant engagement at the intuitive level.

I think that this is quite central to each of the main methodologies of music education, such as Kodály, Orff and Dalcroze; however, the rates at which this is taken up into the symbolic realm is where the problems can begin. I feel some that purport newer methodologies can fall into to not pushing students into this symbolic realm, though this is the teacher enacting the methodology rather that the methodology itself. Initiation into this symbolic world is what education is all about, as Swanwick continues, analytical understandings feed the imaginative workings with data, yielding more and more understanding:

In essence, intuitive knowledge is the bridge of imagination between (musical) sensation and analysis. It is pre-analytical. But left to itself, untended, not taken up into symbolic forms, intuition cannot thrive.[3]

I am experiencing somewhat of a late romance with the Kodály methodology. I find it genuinely supports the development of intuitive and analytical knowledge of music though music. For me, it attends well to connecting this bridge between the intuitive and analytical. We come to know what we internalise. I have started to adopt many Kodaly principles and ‘mannerisms’ into my teaching in aim of better developing my students’ musicianship.

This take-up of Kodály principles adds to, rather than replaces, elements of my current approaches. I have extended my repertoire of strategies for connecting with students, and connecting their musical ‘sensations’ with a symbolic world. The Kodály method sits well with my educative intentions – it doesn’t change them, rather it further informs them. At the end of the day, I teach students to internalise music – there are numerous ways to get there, and it just so happens that recently I have found the Kodály path.

Rather than drawing a single methodology bow, perhaps we should be asking ourself the following question: “how am I teaching students to internalise music and understand it symbolically?” Informed methodological approaches all attend to this, but are they equal? Do our approaches and familiarity with them afford them to be equal? How do students understand these approaches in relation to our educative intentions? How do they ‘sit’ in relation to their other musical experiences?

There are plenty of ‘colours and shades’ here, and perhaps if we take a few colours from a few different pallets, we might allow out students to paint more vivid musical understandings?

To teach music well is an incredibly challenging task, and one has to constantly ‘reinvent’ themselves and keep abreast of what is happening in their classroom with their learners. Perhaps investigate another way of doing the same thing – I am sure you will feel professionally engaged, and you may even further engage the learners in your classroom.

[1] I have kindly borrowed part of this definition from  Music: Senior Syllabus (QCCA, 2013)

[2] Swanwick, K. (1994). Musical knowledge: Intuition, analysis and music education – p. 26.

[3] ibid. – p. 42.