Explain concisely (2-300 words) how you think the issues explored in this module can be balanced (or whether they should be balanced at all!). Refer to the content of at least one of the videos. Refer to a reading – a set reading from this module, or some further reading that you’ve done («readings» can include videos).
Consider the importance of teaching not just popular music, but the popular music which is your students’ own musical culture against teaching traditional music skills, literacy, and western art music.
I fully support the opinion of Professor Lucy Green from UCL that improvisation and playing by ear are usually major shortcomings in most classically trained musicians and that those are essential skills that must be integrated in music learning. Yet, I would feel rather nervous as a teacher to give students so much freedom on every decision in the music classroom, from the choice of repertoire to self-learning of whatever instruments they chose. Every student has different natural talents, some are great at singing, others are great rhythm, others at memorising songs, but also some struggle with different or even all aspects of music. How to prevent that a classroom with many musically inexperienced kids to spiral quickly into chaos? Although I see the positives of letting students learn by themselves, I’m not sure how would this method work with so little guidance from a teacher, so I would be interested and would like to find out more on how her lessons are conducted.
My favourite video of the second week of the course and the one that I feel show the best balance in the integration of technology and tradition in a music classroom, was the interview with Professor Richard Gill. I completely concur with his statement that we as teachers need to «get to kids through stuff they know, and not imposing what we think is good». This is a strategy that I have applied in my own practice as a teacher. For example, when teaching Western art music I like to associate different pieces with the traits of the styles of music that students listen to. I know that students who love heavy metal will appreciate immensely powerful, vibrant and virtuosistic classical music such as Tchaikovsky’s Slavic March, Mahler’s Symphonies 1, 5, 6, Paganini’s Caprices, the ones who like jazz have a tendency to connect with more modern and abstract music, such as Bártok, Stravinsky and Gershwin. Telling interesting stories about the pieces, as the dream that inspired Tartini’s ‘Devil’s Trill Sonata’, the fights that were triggered by Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, the many pieces with ‘dirty’ lyrics by Mozart, and anecdotes of the composer’s lives that are interesting, embarrassing or funny makes composers of classical music and their works seem much more human to my students and closer to their own experience, despite having lived centuries ago. In this way, they can relate to their motivations, inspiration and lives much more than if I only read a dry standard biography of the composers.
I also find myself in complete agreement with Professor Gill when he says that teaching just one style of music, ie. only Pop song or only Baroque repertoire is an utterly «stupid idea». In the globalised, multicultural world in which we live in the XXI century, influences from all over the world are flowing in and out all the time, everywhere. I consider that making students experience a wide range of music, trying to pick the examples that may be the most exciting for them, being aware when students don’t like are excellent guidelines for a thrilling and enlightening music lesson. There’s too much music in the world, and too much music within any given style and genre for a teacher to be trying to force his own interests only to his students, which would offer them a very limited perspective and become quickly discouraged about music lessons.
Diego Galárraga Sugoniaev 