Extract
The introduction of a ‘Points for Debate’ section in BJME is a welcome innovation. It provides a context in which important aspects of music education can be discussed in a friendly and temperate manner. It is in this spirit that I offer this response to Vic Gammon’s interesting article concerning the subject knowledge of intending PGCE music students and how such knowledge might be identified.
There are, perhaps, two issues here: firstly, the appropriateness of the ‘quiz’ as a tool for identifying subject knowledge, and secondly, and more importantly, the message that such a tool implicitly sends (particularly to potential new entrants to the profession) about what is understood as valued and legitimate music subject knowledge. There are clearly limitations in the quiz format as a tool for identifying and measuring subject knowledge.
The questions are essentially arbitrary – the old adage about the questions being easy if you know the answers springs to mind – and the closed questions that inevitably characterise quizzes do not give an opportunity for applicants to demonstrate the breadth of their knowledge. However, clearly the quiz is just one of a range of tools used in the selection process and to subject it to too detailed scrutiny would be to take the proverbial sledgehammer to crack the nut. Of much more interest is the opportunity given to us by Gammon’s quiz and article to explore what we mean by music subject knowledge.
Gammon argues that the kind of knowledge enshrined within his quiz – which is based primarily on a knowledge of categorisations of nationality, place, genre or instrumental group – is necessary because humans have a basic need to categorise and ‘make sense of our experiences of an inchoate world’ (Gammon, 2003: 84). This may well be true, but knowledge of such categorisations, if it exists as knowledge separate from musical experience and activity, does not seem to me to help make sense of the musical world in any meaningful way. Gammon acknowledges that knowledge is acquired ‘in various and sometimes indirect ways . . . we acquire it through our interaction with things, be they books, recordings, instruments, concerts or other people’ (ibid.: 86).
As I shall argue later, the way in which knowledge is gained – indeed, the context in which it comes into existence – is critical to whether it can truly be considered knowledge and, particularly, musical knowledge. One of the weaknesses of the quiz format is that it does not satisfactorily identify the way in which knowledge has been acquired and the context in which it is understood. To take one of Gammon’s questions as an example: to know a shakuhachi through the experience of playing it, hearing it or recreating its sound electronically is an entirely different kind of knowledge from simply entering the name into an Internet search engine and finding out that it is a Japanese end-blown flute. The first paradigm of knowledge acquisition helps make sense of the world; the latter does not – at least, not in any musical way.
End of extract
