With this post, I begin some public-facing note taking on Music Matters by David Elliott and Marissa Silverman. The goal here is to explain the book to myself, but if this is helpful to you in some way, good.
What is the point of music education? For Elliott and Silverman, the goal is to develop each student as a person. Music engages and emerges from every aspect of your personhood, and so does music education. To talk about music education, then, you first have to define what a person is.
Elliott and Silverman subscribe to aspects of Antonio Damasio’s theory of consciousness: All of our cognition emerges from the electrical and chemical activities of our wet, squishy bodies, and not just our brains, but rather our brains’ complex interactions with all of our other body systems. Your consciousness is not a supernatural entity that resides in the body; it’s the emergent result of various nonconscious systems of systems of systems in the brain trying to coordinate their activities with one another. Reasoning isn’t separable from emotion because reasoning is comprised of interacting emotions.
Personhood emerges out of the inner workings of your body and your interactions with other humans, and the whole group’s interactions with the bigger environment. Personhood is a process, not a thing. It’s a social construction. I’m a different person alone than I am with my wife, or kids, or friends, or students, or colleagues, or strangers, or any combination of the above. Kids haven’t yet attained full personhood, legally or socially. Still, teachers should treat them as ethical idealizations of a person. My kids aren’t fully-formed social beings or rational actors yet. I treat them as if they are, though, and I expect others to treat them that way. In so doing, we help little kids to grow into the role.
Elliott and Silverman take a dim view of trying to quantify educational outcomes in music.
Teaching and learning music for its transformative values requires that we rise above simplistic “aims” defined in terms of “observable behaviors” and empirical measures of student performance. These paralyzing notions have nothing to do with education as a praxis–as a process of empowering people to achieve their musical and educational life goals through critically reflective doing, thinking, and flourishing. (168)
Let’s unpack the word praxis. The simplest translation is “practice.” The next simplest is “doing stuff, not just learning about stuff.” Elliott and Silverman would prefer we use Aristotle’s sense of the word: “active reflection and reflective action for the positive transformation of people’s everyday lives and situations” (43, emphasis in original).
Music Matters is a book-length rejection of the concept of “pure” or “absolute” music, the idea of music as a disembodied and timeless abstraction that transcends our grunting ape bodies. This position has some practical consequences. The bodily activities of music students matter as much as what’s happening between their ears.
The idea that music can exist separately from dance or other social ritual is a peculiarity of European-descended societies. In “A Cross-Cultural Perspective on the Significance of Music and Dance to Culture and Society: Insight from BaYaka Pygmies,”Jerome Lewis writes:
The concepts associated with what English speakers recognize as music and dance are not shared cross-culturally. In some societies there are no general terms for music and dance, but rather specific names for different performances that involve music and dance. When Japanese researchers first began to analyze dance apart from the specific repertoire to which it belonged, they had to invent a word for “dance” (Ohtani 1991). Seeger (1994) describes how the Suyá of the Amazon forest do not distinguish movement from sound since both are required for a correct performance. A single word ngere means to dance and to sing because, as the Suyá say, “They are one.” In Papua New Guinea, anthropologists have struggled to talk with their informants about dance independently of music. As in most of the local languages, the lingua franca, Tok Pisin, has one term singsing that is used interchangeably to refer to singing or dancing, or both. The Blackfoot term saapup rolls music, dance, and ceremony into one (Nettl 2000:466).
Maybe we came to the idea of absolute music through our overvaluing of language at the expense of other forms of expression.
Our focus on speech abstracted from language’s ecological niche is an artifice of writing. Has our ability to write music or to record and listen again to the sounds of a musical performance independently of its production blinkered us to the full context of musical production, and has this led us to focus on the sounds of “music” to the exclusion of other aspects?
The relationship between music and dance parallels that between speech and gesture. Just as speech is composed of linguistic and gestural components, music necessarily includes a gestural component—a rhythmical movement of the body we call “dance,” or “percussion,” or the “playing” an instrument. Music, like language, is multimodal.
American schools ask kids to just park their bodies at desks while attempting to engage their brains in isolation. This doesn’t work very well, because a substantial amount of cognition happens in the motor cortex, and requires you be doing things from the neck down. You can’t completely experience or understand music if you’re motionless in a chair.
Evidence from neuroimaging shows that attentive listening to musical sounds engages, to a certain extent, aspects of the action system in the brain (Brown and Martinez 2007; Grahn and Brett 2007; Janata et al. 2002b). In effect, whenever we attend to music, our bodies prepare to dance.
To understand and appreciate a musical moment, much may be involved: the social relations of the musicians and other participants, the staging of their performance, the choice of venue and songs, the music’s tempo and structural characteristics, the atmosphere of the occasion, the emotional entrainment that occurs between participants, the smells, the colors of costumes or decorations, the moves of the dancers, the resonance of symbolic connections made to myth, religious ideology, environment or ordinary life, and so on. This wealth of information is nonetheless absent in the musical notation that represents the music being performed and is only partially represented in audio or film recordings.
In most parts of the world, and for most of human history, music exists only because of the social relations that enable its performance. Recorded and written music, in conjunction with increased musical specialization in our own society, has made the idea of musical appreciation being separate from its performance seem normal to European or American scientists. From a cross-cultural and historical perspective, this is an anomaly. Extracting “music” from the social context of performance is to miss the point of music.
Asking music teachers to restore the social, ritualistic richness of music that the bigger society that has stripped out is asking a lot. Probably the best we can hope for is that music learning can take on some healthy ritual of its own, and that it can open students’ minds to the possibility of participating in or constructing musical rituals in their own lives.
Elliott and Silverman venture the idea that making or listening to music is akin to what we do “when we constitute others as persons, or when we invest others with personhood” (190). We react to the music we love with the same kind of ethical idealization that we apply to little kids. We treat the music like a person who we need to love and protect. We imagine a personhood for the music, and we try to make that personhood real. In so doing, we learn how to create personhood for each other, and for ourselves. Yes!
Terrific discussion, Ethan!