is Senior Lecturer in Music Education in the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge and leads the secondary postgraduate course as well as teaching on higher degree courses.
Sounding Off:
"Should student-teachers be exposed to the wisdom of Kodaly, Orff and Dalcroze, not to mention Curwen?"
It would be possible to design a whole course of initial teacher education in music underpinned by such wisdom. But a first response might be that this would be irresponsible, for these wisdoms, if they are indeed wisdoms, appear to exclude others. And in any case they have come to be seen as methods that reduce, constrain and limit the ways in which music might be taught. They so easily spawn 'methodolatory'.
However, what if we made the distinction between method and principle and sought out the underlying principles developed by these 'great music educators'? Well, we would find a number of interesting matters.
Some possible wisdoms:
Take the hand signs of Curwen and Kodaly. These are not at all arbitrary and to feel doh and dohness you need a firm hand for the tonic has authority and power in the hierarchy of the tonal system. Of course you may not like the idea of hierarchies and you may see the tonal system as hegemonic! But Doh is an action image embodying an aural image vocally produced or silently heard and ready to find meaning on a stave. The wisdom at work here foreshadowed Jerome Bruner's three representational modes: the enactive, iconic and symbolic. So the musical mind can be built in such way that these three modes of representation work together with the first two feeding the third, the symbolic. Here symbolic is meaning the world of shared conventions and understandings, those generalizations that take us away from personally felt meanings to public and shared meanings. [We note that conventional notation(s), for example, are by no means faithful to what they represent unlike the iconic nature of the hand sign. They are arbitrary, well not entirely.]
Curwen and Kodaly offer a way of building a bridge between the enactive-iconic and the symbolic, a shift which remains for many a great mystery. But, even if we do not want our students to learn to read notation(s) in this way, perhaps it would be useful to evaluate the psychological principles in play. How else would you teach children to read music so that the sound made was felt? This understanding could come in useful.
Then what about those mnemonics, the taas and the ta-tes? Would it be of any interest to point out that these French rhythm names faithfully represent unlike the many mnemonics that don't and that are in use. Does it matter?
Orff and the interpenetration of voice, movement and instruments as well as the use of the vernacular. Would we wish to nurture this wisdom as students 'integrate practice' in their informal learning?
And Dalcroze, does it matter whether the body knows the music being made? Does the body need to know the music before it is projected through a sonic medium (instrument/voice)?
And isn't the body and the physical knowing of music fundamental to the principles of Curwen, Kodaly, Orff and Dalcroze? Or if you prefer the kinaesthetic-tactile component of being musical? Ah, that hand sign integrating the visual, auditory and kinaesthetic...ah, kinaesthetic-tactile: somebody said that the voice was the most kinaesthetic-tactile of all musical instruments...I think Curwen, Kodaly, Dalcroze and Orff knew about this.
Ok, so as methods these lose their claim to wisdom, agreed! Searching out psychological principles, perhaps enduring ones, might be worth a little time in a course of music ITE.
So, how shall student-teachers know them? No, not as methods and exclusive pedagogies but as wellsprings that come to explain fluent and expressive music making. Oh, and perhaps we should examine our own ‘methodolatories’.
