Music to their ears

In this part of the world (Australia) there is a new kind of educational mismanagement by the Federal Government, in the form of a race to make all children literate and numerate. While it is a worthy undertaking in and of itself, it is being achieved through standardised tests. Need I say more? This race has a result which takes the form of school league tables. Anyone can go online and see how a school rates nationally. In most cases, to improve the ratings of a school it will be deemed appropriate by the ill-informed school authorities to spend more time on teaching to the standardised tests. This time will tend to come from music, dance, visual arts and drama, the very subjects which
make children literate in a special way and contribute significantly to numeracy in an equally special way.

Music suffers mightily in this anti-educational push because it often consists of classroom music, instrumental music lessons and ensemble lessons: it is an obvious cut for an ill-informed principal who sees music as a fringe subject and “a bit of a luxury, really”, to quote one such principal. Any system of education designed for young children which minimises contact with music, dance, visual arts and drama, is a system headed for the mire of educational mediocrity. Any system of education which does not provide opportunities for children to explore the worlds of imagination that the arts offer will end up producing a race of dull, ill-informed, unimaginative human beings. Education systems which ignore the mind’s and brain’s capacity to respond to creative drives are deficient and impoverished in all respects.

At a recent performance of a specially reduced version of Mozart’s ‘Magic Flute’, sung in German with dialogue in English, a group of four-year olds, seated in the front two rows, were transfixed for an hour by the singing and the acting. At the end of the Queen of Night’s spectacular first aria, when Tamino says, “Did that really happen or did I imagine it?”, one of the four-year olds called out immediately and very loudly,”Yes, it really happened”. Apart from the orchestra, not one child in the audience laughed at that comment. The point of this story is that the power of Mozart’s music, the force of the drama with the costumes and the scenery, had drawn the children completely into a world of fantasy, so much so that it had become a reality: it had really happened and not only for that child but for every child in the audience.

Of all the arts, it is my considered view that music and dance have the most immediate and most direct appeal to children. Music, in my view, has the prime place based on its essential abstract nature and, of all the art forms, it is only comprehended through listening and is the least descriptive in nature. In short, music cannot describe; it may evoke, suggest, imply, conjure, hint at and insinuate, but it does not describe. These are the very qualities of music, a subject which, when properly taught, has the capacity to alter children’s perceptions of themselves, of others and the world around them.

It is reason enough to teach music in that music plays upon the mind, the heart, the soul, the spirit and the imagination of the child. Beginning with singing, later accompanied by simple percussion instruments, children can be led discover how to manipulate, manage and organise sound, leading to composition – which is the real reason for teaching music. In composing music children are encouraged to think at a very high level. Therefore, to deprive a child of this type of experience is to deny the child entry to a world where problems are solved at an abstract level incorporating imaginative and inventive thinking.

Surely one of the reasons we send children to schools is to teach them how to think, along with the other reason – to teach them how to learn! Why not, then, give them a subject which, in the hands of a competent teacher, is thoroughly enjoyable to take part in, has a multitude of activities associated with skill development, allows interaction with others at a variety of levels, encourages team participation as well as development of individual skills, and ultimately results in the composition and presentation of new work.

Music is unique; again a sufficient enough reason to have it included in a curriculum, and it works in unique ways. Here in Australia, a very simple experiment was done in a number of outlying schools, which involved children being taught music sequentially with a creative end in sight and other children having the bare essential of an occasional song. This very unscientific experiment turned in some very unsurprising results. The children who were being taught sequentially were doing well and improving in all other areas of learning, while the other children simply plodded along. Not ground-breaking, not earth-shattering, but surely the most philistine of school principals could see the difference? For all our sakes, I hope so.