Lazy brain part deux

In my first blog post, I wrote about how human brains are lazy. This week's readings forced me to confront my own lazy brain. I like checklists, and I like order. So I read the readings in the order they were presented in the reader on Blackboard. Had I even glanced at the content I would have realized I should have started with Nettl and moved backwards to Kant. But I didn't, so I spent two hours struggling with the first ten or so pages of Kant while my brain is screaming "I hate reading translations. I hate 19th century flowery writing!" Or early 20th century. Whatever.

In any case, all of the readings kept bringing up memories of a class I taught at a community college a couple of years ago. The title was "World Beat" and it was meant to be an introductory survey class of ethnomusicology. It was a very popular class because it was a dual credit fulfillment of both Fine Arts and Social Sciences. And since I was given free reign to create whatever lessons I wanted, I structured it this way:
Week-----> Region or Area of the world ---------> Musical concept------->Social Studies concept

So in Week 1, we studied West Africa, rhythms, and the African diaspora/slave trade and how that affected music development.  In Week 2, it was the Middle East, and we talked about pitch and modes and scales and the explosion of music produced during the Arab Spring was used for protest and how protest music can be a powerful tool. Another week we discussed Native Americans (specifically Salish Coast), how music and visual art are connected, and the function of music as a storytelling device that can capture the oral history of a people. It was the most fun I've ever had teaching music and I hope someday I get to do it again because of course there are a thousand little things I'd adjust and change and refine.

The readings brought me back to this class because one of the first topics we discussed in class is "what is music?" because listening to unfamiliar sounds without any warning or prior experience with music education can result in a student reacting negatively and closing off without further examination of what they're actually hearing.  Both quarters that I taught this class they came up with a working definition of "organized noise and silences for the purpose of communication." But communicating what? And to whom? Is it a noun or a verb? Small gives us some answers in Musicking. He argues that music is a verb, something we do, and that any participation in any capacity means you are musicking. Of course with any verb there are passive and active ways of doing. He also says "not so much about music as it is about people" and the ways they use music to interact with one another. I realize now THAT is the real lesson I was teaching my World Beat class.

However, this goes back to Kant, in that if music is about people, then when we make judgments about art, we are also making judgments on people, and preconceived notions and biases about the people and their intentions may color our view of the art (some of my readings from Sociology of Race might also be sneaking into my head here). So what we perceive to be beautiful will always be affected by our own experiences and knowledge, which Small and Nettl both say is problematic because we, as experts in Western Classical Art Music will always have a tendency to use that as the default to compare everything else, even when being mindful of that bias.

We must also then, be mindful of how we present "other" musics to our students. For instance, to explain didgeridoo as it relates to European brass instruments. Or comparing banda to polka. Again, this brings me back to my World Beat students, because many of them were immigrants with no American school music experience, and Western Art Music was just as foreign to them as everything else. It forced me to be more objective in my presentation, pointing out similarities to other things we had listened to but analogies to my "standard" were useless.

However, I think the most salient point is made by Small when he says "the fundamental nature and meaning of music lie not in objects, not in musical works at all, but in action, in what people do." And this is fundamental to music education because we do this thing as a group, interactively. Even in a lecture style college class, the interaction IS the thing. The connection IS the thing.