Chris Philpott Chris Philpott is currently Head of the Department of Secondary Education at the University of Greenwich, Chair of the ITE/HEI Focus Group for the National Association of Music Educators and is overseeing Phase Two of the TDA funded Subject Resource Network for Music.

Sounding Off:

"The justification for music in the curriculum: music can be bad for you"

Bad is an adjective used to indicate something as evil, naughty, rotten, ill, distressing, offensive, unpleasant. In slang Bad is used when something is relatively good, excellent or positive. Apparently this is called an antagonym - for all I know an out of date antagonym but it makes my point so please read on!

Most teacher educators in music include some work on the justification for music in schools as part of their programme. I am using my turn as guest blogger to argue that an over reliance on what I call the ‘soft’ justifications for music in the curriculum have ultimately undermined it being taken seriously by pupils and policy makers alike.

What are the ‘soft’ justifications for music in the curriculum? These usually hang around the notion that music is ‘good’ for us and come in the following forms:

• Instrumental justifications: in which the experience and understanding of music uniquely reaches other dimensions of human cognition e.g. developing mathematical skills, spatial skills, language (the Heineken effect). It is also suggested that contact with ‘great’ music can develop intelligence (the Mozart effect) 
• Therapeutic justifications: in which an engagement with music can have cathartic and healing powers; it can promote health, develop self esteem and cure damaged lives 
• Civilising justifications: in which learning in music makes for a better and more rounded human being
• Emotional justifications: in which music making is a means of developing our emotional intelligence

These justifications are predicated on the assumption that suggests, at worst, music servicing other areas of human understanding, and at best as a rather ‘fluffy’ and necessary counterpart to a harder and more rational world. Even some of the more ‘academic’ justifications are touched with ‘softness’. For example:

• rational justifications: in which music is seen as a unique form of human rationality serving different human needs to the sciences
• symbolic justifications: in which music is a type of ‘language’ for our ‘felt world’
• liberal justifications: in which music is seen as an important differentiated component in a well educated person

In short, I will argue, that many of the most popular justifications have helped to undermine the case for music and the arts. I do not deny the importance of these justifications but suggest that they present an over sanitised and romantic vision of musical meaning. While they derive from the best of motives they are based on a partial exposition of the nature of musical expression and understanding. In emphasising the essential difference of music and its special qualities such justifications have ignored areas of meaning which music shares with other symbolic modes. Such justifications underpin the benign smile of current policy, for example, the Music Manifesto, and are not a good long term bet!

What might it mean for us to view music as a ‘hard’ discipline? Firstly, it is not so clear that some of the justifications above are based on anything but a generalised reality. For example, musicians are not always so very psychologically ‘rounded’. Furthermore, certain types of ‘delineated’ musical meanings can induce hatred; ask the loyalist in the presence of a rebel song and vice versa. For music to be taken seriously as a ‘hard’ discipline we should not deny the complex nature of meaning and understanding. Music can be ‘soft’ and civilising but can also be ‘hard’; it can offend, harm, present unsavoury ideas, be ideological. It might be the case that music ‘heals’ or enables us to become more socially adept, but we should also entertain the idea that music might actually cause us to be ill or an outcast!

As part of any reconsideration of justification for music it is important to embrace the full range of expression which is available to all symbolic modes, if it is to be taken really seriously. For example, our spoken and written language can be cathartic and can heal, but it can also be spiteful and cause harm. However, there are no absolutes here - one man’s healing is another man’s pain. I cannot imagine that teachers of English would want to deny such breadth of expression as a creative, comparative and analytical tool in the classroom. Justifications for music in the curriculum need this ‘completion’ of expression, meaning and understanding.

Such completion has the potential to offer important perspectives on musical understanding in the classroom. For example, it might explain how musical meaning contributes to ‘tribalism’ and why there are so few well known women composers in western ‘art’ music. It might help us to understand how to manage misogyny and homophobia when these appear in the delineated meanings of music arising out of children’s ‘interests’. These are not necessarily problems – just the way things are!

Music may well be different and special and yet it also shares a great deal with other symbolic modes in terms of ideas and meaning. Music educators have been quick to promote uniqueness at the expense of unity, and this has been to the detriment of the discipline being taken seriously as a ‘hard’ subject. Furthermore, given that the so called ‘hard’ subjects have been busy adding ‘values and feelings’ to their rationales, it is even more important that musical engagement begins to construct itself as it really is, and not like a soak in a warm soapy bath.

This does not displace the uniqueness of music as a mode of expression and understanding which may or may not be responsible for the celebrated ‘effects’. The proposed project is one of completion through resurrecting the notion of music as a language, which is capable of many diverse and intricate webs of meaning, to settle for less is to consign the language to limited powers of expression. And so, we need to understand, along with John Harvey Kellog (of Cornflakes fame), that music ‘aids circulation through the liver, stomach and other digestive organs, and so promotes digestion’(!). But also to bear in mind Adorno when he sensitively adds:

‘Emotional music...is catharsis for the masses, but catharsis which keeps them all the more in line. One who weeps does not resist any more than one who marches’

Music can be Bad – Bad; music can be Wicked – Wicked. How many antagonyms do you know?