Music students and maker culture

For Alex Ruthmann’s class, we’re reading Music, Meaning and Transformation: Meaningful Music Making for Life by the late Steve Dillon. If you can get past the academic verbiage, there’s some valuable technomusicology here, and some tremendous advocacy resources too.

Spongebob has imagination

The purpose of music education is flow

 Why even teach music at all? What good is it? People enjoy music, for sure, but there are plenty of other things we enjoy that don’t get taught in school. What makes music so special that it’s worth spending finite educational resources on?

Dillon has a good answer: flow. The purpose of music (one purpose, anyway) is to balance predictability and complexity so as to optimize flow, for both performer and listener. The specific means by which the music does this is less important than the fact that it does it at all. It doesn’t matter what kind of music you play on what instruments; if it induces flow, then it’s worthwhile. There are many roads up the proverbial mountain, and the right road for a given student is going to be totally contextual, depending on their inner life and their social context.

Flow

Dillon sees more at stake than just pleasure. He makes the argument that flow is a matter of public health. He calls it “a powerful weapon against depression.” Music-induced flow unifies the individual with the social. It draws out troubled, antisocial and developmentally disabled kids and helps them integrate into the group. It gives voice to those who might find it difficult to express themselves otherwise. And flow is physiologically beneficial as well. In flow states, you have less brain activity than usual, because you’re highly focused on the task at hand, without a lot of extraneous processing happening around the fringes. No wonder flow is so relaxing, even when you’re hard at work.

So, flow is terrific, and music is a potential tool for creating it. How do we optimize music class for flow? The main thing is to create intrinsic motivation in the kids. You can’t get into the groove if you’re under the gun. You have to want to be there.

Autotelicism and motivation

Csikszentmihalyi observes that people with an “autotelic” personality type have a predisposition to flow — an ability to seek and can construct their own challenges. You may be lucky enough to have been born autotelic, but it’s a trait that can also be learned, and taught. Autotelic people are better equipped for positive thinking and resilience. Flow experiences themselves encourage autotelicism, a state that reinforces through pleasure. If you learn the ability to take satisfaction from self-challenge in the music context, it’s a tool you can carry with you into any other context.

Dillon’s example of autotelicism is Spongebob Squarepants, specifically in the episode where he and Patrick get a giant TV delivered. They immediately toss the TV in the trash and excitedly begin playing with the box it came in. Spongebob’s dull neighbor Squidward is stunned, and grabs the TV for himself. But to his exasperation, Spongebob and Patrick are clearly having more fun with the box than he is with the TV. He demands to know how they’re conjuring such vividly realistic cartoon sound effects from the box, and Spongebob answers,  “imaginaaation,” conjuring a sparkling rainbow with his hands.

Dillon observes that young kids are especially autotelic. I can attest to that. Milo is more interested in any ordinary plastic cup or spoon than I am in just about anything, and he finds musical instruments spellbinding.

Any teacher can tell you that fear of discipline is a blunt and ineffective instrument for focusing a kid’s attention. Discipline can make a kid pretend to pay attention, but that isn’t the same thing. By contrast, when you get a kid intrinsically motivated in learning something, you can’t tear them away. Dillon lists some effective motivators for music students:

  • the image of playing and the achievement of playing
  • encouragement from immediate cultural setting
  • internal and personal satisfaction
  • social relations and the reciprocal response of family and community
  • sharing in the teacher’s love of music
  • social meaning

Music has an analytic aspect and an intuitive one. The analytical side of music includes technique, accuracy and clarity. The intuitive side covers the expressive, aesthetic aspects. To induce flow, the two sides have to be balanced. You want a productive tension between the analytical (repetitive practice, studying theory) and the intuitive (playful experimentation and improvisation.)

For kids, musical meaning lives in the affective, intuitive, and embodied parts of experience. They aren’t much given to reflection or analysis. Dillon finds that kids give music a “wordless meaning that is experienced as feelings rather than understandings and as intuitive embodied understanding rather than declarative knowledge.”

No matter how much a kid loves music, they aren’t always going to be intrinsically motivated by it. The fantasy of rocking a guitar solo or blowing away Carnegie Hall with virtuoso piano playing doesn’t usually include imagining the hours of solitary, tedious practice. There’s a hump you have to climb over, and a lot of music students never make it. Performance is also a substantial barrier for a lot of kids. Even those of us who enjoy it, as I do, initially found it quite terrifying. A bad performance experience can be a self-esteem crusher. So how do you get kids over the hump? Dillon recommends: living through the experience of others and sharing in the triumphs and failures alike. The student/teacher relationship is critical. So is reflection — failure and frustration are teachable moments.

Pragmatic vs aesthetic considerations

We in the western tradition like to think of music as an abstraction that transcends context, function and culture. Not everyone agrees with us. There are cultures where music has a specific job to do: it’s a container for and communicator of knowledge, or it’s inextricably tied up in ceremonial or festive occasions. We in America have some ceremonial songs of our own. Think of the way we use “We Will Rock You” in sports games. It’s always weird to hear that song in any other context. And think about how odd it is to hear “Pomp and Circumstance” outside the context of a graduation.

For the most part, we’ve relegated music to the role of a rarified art form at best, a frivolous amusement and a commodity more normally, a distraction from more serious or moral behaviors at worst. But if your culture uses music functionally, you’re likely to take it quite a bit more seriously. Dillon gives the example of Australian Aborigines, for whom music is a tool for preserving and communicating knowledge, for conveying laws and narratives, and mythologically, for singing the world into existence. Naturally, they regard music more like the way we regard libraries, museums and the internet.

Before the advent of print and widespread literacy, most world music was probably a lot closer to the Aboriginal model than the modern western one. Dillon points out: “We must be aware that print as a technology conceals and filters much that is important in musical experience. So to use common practice notation in the teaching of embodied aural/oral knowledge will by its nature conceal the essence of its meaning.” Preach!

Dillon sees music making as both pragmatic and aesthetic. I wonder whether there’s even a difference between the two. Even the most “pure” art music has a function, which is to evoke feelings in the listener. That might be a diffuse and open-ended function, but it’s still a function. And the beauty of music is the attraction to the experience, the hook for entering into learning.

Many roads up the mountain

Taking a flow-centric view of music education takes a lot of pressure off the question of what kinds of music should be taught. There’s social and aesthetic value in the experience of being part of an orchestra playing classical repertoire, having your ego subsumed into the giant machine under the conductor’s control. There’s also social and aesthetic value in being in a rock trio and having to figure out all of the music by ear and by consensus. Dillon thinks the right answer is “all of the above.” Discussion, listening and reflection are just as important as practicing and performing — that can be the role of the general music classroom.

There’s no more effective morale killer than to be told, “you like the wrong music.” Does any kid respond well to that? I didn’t. It’s fine to want to broaden students’ minds, but invalidating their musical identity is not a good enticement to do that. There is no single best way to learn music. Any playing or listening experience is a proverbial teachable moment. It’s not necessary to impose cultural hegemony. You tend to find the really good musical ideas popping up everywhere; people discover them convergently the same way that disparate cultures independently invented pottery and the wheel. Diversity is crucial because, while all music contains flow-inducing wisdom, different genres, styles and cultures put different amounts of focus on different forms of wisdom. Dillon cites the complexity of rhythm in African music, the complexity of harmony and form in western classical, and the complexity of timbre and space in pop.

Making as music education

Traditional music pedagogy takes an extremely narrow view of what musicianship is: instrumental technique, music reading, some common-practice tonal theory. It’s a rare school music class that will so much as glance on composing, improvising, transcribing, recording, producing, publishing, reviewing or applying metadata to music. You won’t hear about DJs, sound designers, electronic composers, producers or engineers. Nor, for the most part, will you see waveforms, the MIDI piano roll, graphic visualization, event lists or computer code.

Even when schools do talk about music technology, they tend to focus on the nuts and bolts of the technology itself, rather than its creative applications. They don’t often ask what a technology enables or discourages. We can do better. After all, common practice notation and instrument design are forms of technology. Dillon again:

The violin bow and the saxophone mouthpiece are perhaps the most expressive pieces of music technology in Western history yet composers and virtuoso performers did not undertake courses in these technologies. To understand them they actively explore what the expressive capabilities of these technology enable, what they revealed and concealed to us as musicians.

So it should be with the computer.

Music students need to feel like they’re making something of value. Schools are full of opportunities for student ensembles as makers. First of all, student bands and choirs are themselves rich soil for community to grow. I can attest to this; I’m writing this on my way home from my first rehearsal with the NYU Chorale. I joined it out of obligation, to fulfill a graduation requirement, but I left feeling a warm tribal unity with my classmates. Student groups can also take part in the larger school community. Schools will have rituals and ceremonies, graduations and dances and homecomings and such. Student bands can breathe life into these rituals, and get life breathed back into them. The kids might even start feeling some pride, in the school and in themselves.

There is no single ideal ensemble for music learning. Different contexts create different experiences. An orchestra can move you just through its sheer size. Feeling your ego subsumed into the group can create a sense of belonging. Smaller ensembles with one person per part place more responsibility on the individual — weak players have nowhere to hide. Rock bands are less challenging musically, but they’re the most challenging socially, since the players have to work out their own parts and decisions are made by consensus. Ideally, students will get to experience all of the above.

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