The decline in New Zealand’s education system: XX: Doing Music When you remark on the decline in New Zealand’s education system, people roll their eyes. Sometimes they say, “Where’s your evidence?” before switching off. So here is a personal anecdote. Of course it would never do as evidence. Music is something that you do. How is it that we now think of it as something that you listen to, a bit like television? There is something called “background music.” It used to be played in restaurants, I think. It wasn’t quite the category of “elevator music,” that is designed for you not to notice: a bit like automatic air freshener in a public lavatory to disguise the farts, and you notice neither, elevator music clanked so that you didn’t hear the clanking of the lift as the ropes shredded. Or perhaps I have it wrong. But in restaurants, the background music was just perceptible as music. It made the food taste better, since it was posher with music. But improved cooking would have done the same. Now background music is played in other places for similarly dishonest reasons, and even played at home, for no reason at all. Or because we hate ourselves so much that we have to drown our thoughts out with some rhythmic murmuring so that we can’t see who we are. Towards the end of June 2013, Radio New Zealand Concert Programme had an advertisement regarding a broadcast of early Beethoven string quartets. Published before there had ever been a concert of string quartets anywhere. Published for players, for real musicians. If you searched for an audience, the audience was the quartet. As Radio New Zealand said, anyone else was an eavesdropper. Much real music participates in this quality. Once upon a time I was in two choirs at the same time: the Hagley Singers under Rosemary Turnbull, which gave top-quality concerts, one or two a year, and mastered a performable repertoire of about two hours of singing every year; and the choir of the parish of Christchurch, S. Michael and All Angels under Grant Hutchinson, which was a working choir, a cog in the liturgy of the church, which never gave concerts as such, and managed a performable repertoire of perhaps twenty hours of singing (excluding repeats) a year, a very heavy load only achievable by fluent sight-singers or people who did much private practice in addition to rehearsals. Obviously the Hagley Singers did its best when performing, and the tension of having an audience seemed to bring the best out of people. The pleasure of this choir was, however, also in the rehearsals, with the insights of the conductor, and coming to an understanding of the music. And just doing the singing. The church choir also had its tensions, especially when its role in the liturgy was exposed and difficult. But again the pleasure was in the doing. Music was very rapidly brought from impossible to singable, and then shelved until next performed at that liturgical season one or several years in the future. The pleasure of getting a difficult piece going, say an eight-part piece with only one voice each on some of the parts (tenors for example), and listening to the other parts and how they worked in with your own was sometimes perilous, since you could lose concentration and lose your part; or perhaps mastering the fourths in the melody of a motet by Poulenc—this sort of pleasure might be lessened in the actual doing of the liturgy, since you focussed on non-musical matters as well. In religious liturgy, it is hard for me to imagine what might motivate a person who turned up to church but did not participate. In a Hagley Singers concert, I don’t like to imagine the reaction if you turned up as a member of the audience and then decided to sing along (badly). The two contexts are radically different. While I can enjoy listening to a concert, and I can enjoy a concert that contains errors, and I especially enjoy concerts that seem to embody an understanding of the music by the performers (for which I hold the conductor responsible), nevertheless I still think that the pleasure is in the doing. I think there is some sense in which I would rather participate in a piece of music myself, even making imperfections, than merely listen to a perfect performance. Times have changed. When I go to buy music, I am buying printed music. Recently the language has changed so that a person can go to buy music, and mean recordings of other people’s performances. When I use what I have bought I am in the middle of it, doing it. When someone uses recorded music, at best they are on the outside, listening to something quite apart from the listener. Worse, the recorded music could be used merely to obliterate aspects of reality, perhaps unpleasant aspects of yourself. Education? In the 1940s all New Zealanders were taught to sing in the New Zealand education system. Primary school teachers all had to be able to play the piano to some extent, even if it was one finger only, and read music to that extent, so that they could satisfy the music component of the curriculum. Some had to work hard to attain that: the decline in musical ability since 1900 meant that many could no longer sing from musical notation. The curriculum focussed on doing, which I suppose is a minimum. Music theory has been seen as esoteric, but without an understanding of it you only hear noise. If you can’t play an instrument or sing, you can get someone else (or a recording) to do it for you. But you can’t get someone to hear music for you. You have to do it yourself, and you can’t do it without music theory. But we had slipped far enough by the 1940s for the curriculum to be focussed on doing, and no doubt that is better than not doing. So, the most recent grinding slippage in our educational standards with respect to music is seeing it as a competitive sport. Rather than do it yourself, you watch others doing it. If you can’t play Rugby like the All Blacks, the only alternative is to sit in front of the television and skoal a couple of dozen of beer while the All Blacks do it on television for you; you can’t go and play for fun. If you can’t sing, you put on a recording, or go to a concert. Or if you haven’t studied music theory and, as well as not being able to do music, you can’t hear it either, you put a recording of some rap on. You put on some rap. You daren’t think of doing something yourself: not something that people would pay to hear, but doing something genuine nevertheless. I remember my mother and me, amateurishly playing through the Beethoven and Brahms violin sonatas. Well, perhaps we didn’t do all the Beethoven ones. Never did we get a work to performable standard, and rarely did we get even a single movement that we could play without a hitch, but we did have a lot of enjoyment. And not only that, we found we heard more when we listened to competent players of the works we had stuttered our way through. But if you can’t do it and can’t hear it, you still know you ought to admire those who play many notes in few minutes and are reverentially reviewed. It is a competitive sport. Or worse, it is the preserve of the “gifted.” If you haven’t got the gift, you are stupid to even try, and are worthy of ridicule if you do try. And if you are stupid to try, then it is stupid for a school to teach; and if it is stupid for the subject to be taught, then you don’t need teachers who can teach it, and you can pay teachers for a lesser conspectus of skills. Hmm, I wonder if this is some of the motivation.
Posted on: Tue, 09 Jul 2013 08:28:26 +0000
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