Music is an organized, sensory-based phenomenon that is experienced for the purposes of shaping meanings, identities, and connections. From the discovery of 30,000-year-old musical instruments, to songs that shape the policies of today, music continues to be an expression of cultures that connects people’s past, present, and future.[1] The study of music has shaped an infinite number of experiences, such as perceptions of sound, personal understandings, cultural development, systems of power, and our potential for future learning.
Many cultures have a variety of definitions for music. Humans act, interact, and react musically at all ages, weaving together understandings of music without ever constructing a global definition of music. Ani Casimir, Nwakego, and Umezinwa likewise describe music as ineffable, stating, “The elements of music are universal, but their modes of organization are not, as well as, meanings they are held to convey.”[2] Therefore, to create and study a rich variety of meanings through music is to engage in music learning. Furthermore, musicianship is the ability to express narratives and ideas through music, and it is important to expand and challenge our musicianship.
To educate is to carefully facilitate meaningful human interactions in which a learner mindfully travels from previous assumptions to new understandings. Education is the continuous movement from the desire for simplicity to a yearning for complexity. Likewise, in a world that seeks to define balance through the use of binaries, music making has the potential to disrupt systems of power both within us and around us that seek to define sound and silence. Yet, to do so requires collaboration so that new ideas can be continuously transmitted from one to another. Therefore, music educators should be less concerned with knowing a set of musical structures, and more concerned with learning their students from whom old and new structures can emerge.
Because music shapes meaning and identity, a music education curriculum should affirm students’ experiences and connect them with the world. To develop such a curriculum, music educators must acknowledge the systems of bias that impact our students today and seek alternative directions for navigating many dichotomies such as theory and practice, instrumental and aesthetic, intrinsic and extrinsic, nationalist and globalist, and product and process.[3]
To develop a music education curriculum is to accept that former constructs need to be updated or replaced. Therefore, a music education curriculum should be disruptive of systems, caring of students, and relevant for collaboration. For example, in an age of technology where discourses of talent permeate throughout societies, we must be careful to learn how students engage musically beyond performance and provide opportunities accordingly.[4] If we hear strict definitions of what is considered a musical person, we should exercise care to disrupt master-apprentice models of learning and acknowledge our students as collaborative purveyors of musicianship throughout their journey of music learning.[5] When music educators see their students as the rhizomatic learners of music, and encourage creativity, collaboration, and musicianship in tandem with a music education curriculum that fosters continuous exploration, then teachers and students become, as Ogunrinade puts it, “in tune with emergent ideas.”[6]
While music education can (and should) take an infinite number of forms, the act of engaging with music is constant throughout humanity. Therefore, a few things should remain consistent in music education:
- Students should be allowed to have such an intense experience with music that opens their minds to thoughts of identity, why we are here, and where we are going.
- Students should be encouraged to both reflect on the forms of musics and engage in the practice of musics.
- Students should see the music classroom as a laboratory to engage in creative musicianship, and be encouraged to consider new, unchartered musical dimensions.
- Students should be affirmed in their development of comprehensive musicianship through engagement with many musical roles, both identifiable and ineffable.
- Students should develop and redevelop their own meanings and informed opinions of various musics, as well as reasoning for such judgment throughout the educational process and beyond.
- Students should understand how music has been used to impact the social constructs of society and how music can be used as a tool for changing the world.
If music education is used to challenge homogeneous norms and affirm diverse communities, both locally and globally, we may find ourselves in a world where people find their humanity not through separation and ignorance, but by connection and inquiry. Living in such a world would in essence be the definition of global musicianship.
References
[1] Nicholas J. Conard, Maria Malina, and Susanne C. Münzel, “New Flutes Document the Earliest Musical Tradition in Southwestern Germany,” Nature, 460, no. 7256 (2009): 737—740. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature08169.
[2] Kingston Chukwunonyelum Ani Casimir, Orajaka Sussan Nwakego, and Emmanuel Umezinwa, “The Need for a Paradigm Shift in Philosophy, Music and African Studies: A Trilogical Identification of Three Conceptual Relevancies in State Tertiary Education,” Open Journal of Political Science 5, no. 2 (2015): 145. https://doi.org/10.4236/ojps.2015.52016.
[3] Bennett Reimer, Seeking the Significance of Music Education: Essays and Reflections (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Education, 2009).
[4] Ibid.
[5] Randall Everett Allsup, Remixing the Classroom: Toward an Open Philosophy of Music Education, Book, Whole (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2016).
[6] D. O. A. Ogunrinade, “Content Analysis of Music Curriculum for the Nigeria Certificate in Education (NCE),” Muziki 10, no. 1 (2013): 91. https://doi.org/10.1080/18125980.2013.852746.