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Sustainable development in relation to music? Is this another bandwagon onto which we have to jump? Is it possible to say anything meaningful in relation to music?
Along with other Arts practitioners I have viewed with scepticism the ‘new’ initiatives which come with their own unique acronyms and introduced with a suitable fanfare (usually for the ‘common man’).
First thoughts on this subject were, to be honest, rather flip. Sustainable development sounds like a compositional technique for writing tunes which have development potential.
And yet, that’s not so far fetched, because really we DO want to encourage children and young adults both to be able to create new material which has development potential, and also to know what to do with such material when they have it.
As human beings, but more particularly as musicians, we are used to using analogies and metaphors to describe the processes we want others to understand. Indeed our teaching is littered with such phrases as ‘regular, like a heartbeat’ (of pulse), ‘rippling’ (like water) of arpeggios, ‘fast like a hare, slow like a tortoise’ (of speed – see National Curriculum Unit [7]). So perhaps using ‘Issues’ as analogies for musical processes isn’t so far-fetched.
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