Facing the Music

1. Facing the Music Understanding, learning and teaching music across actual, conditioned and imagined borders Huib Schippers, Director and Curator Smithsonian Folkways Recordings

2. Experience 1 While learning North Indian classical music on sitar for over twenty years, I received very little explanation on how this very complex aural tradition actually ‘works’ As years went by, I found that my analytical skills got more and more attuned to this holistic way of learning, and discovered how it sharpened my learning abilities

3. Experience 2 While learning and working with musicians from Africa, I found they prioritised very different aspects of musicianship than the ones I had been taught to look for They judged excellence in their own performances by criteria like finding new variations in age-old rhythms, achieving a sense of togetherness (ubuntu), and their ability to make the women dance

4. Experience 3 Witnessing a ceremony for the dead in a village in North Bali, I was the only breathing audience member (in the presence of over 100 urns) at a virtuoso gong kebyar orchestra performance These musicians claimed they never learned music, and formed a close knit community that made music for the worlds beyond

5. Quest These and other, similar experiences untaught me everything I thought I knew about how people make and learn music. It became part of a four-decade long search into practices and the history of learning and teaching music across cultures and the underlying approaches, values and beliefs , which in fact starts almost 100 years ago.

6. Why bother? There are good reasons to dig deep into the why, what and how of people learn and teach music across cultures: The study of music education is like observing makingmusic in slow motion: it reveals intricacies, intentions and value systems that are usually difficult or impossible to gauge in actual performance (similar to composing in some ways)

7. 95 years ago “When that great convention can sit together - Chinese, Hindu, Japanese, Celt, German, Czech, Italian, Hawaiian, Scandinavian, and Pole - all singing the national songs of each land, the home songs of each people, and listen as one mind and heart to great world music common to all and loved by all, then shall real world goodwill be felt and realized.” (Frances Elliot Clark, quoted in Volk 1998)

8. 85 years ago

9. 65 years ago Although his teacher JaapKunst had never actually played a gamelan, Mantle Hood began developing bi-musicality in his US students (Hood, 1959) In this way, he laid the foundation for a significant tradition of ‘performing ethnomusicology’ (Solis, 2004) in US music departments, where all students now participate in actual music making

10. 50 years ago “Music of all periods, styles, forms, and cultures belongs in the curriculum. The musical repertory should be expanded to involve music of our time in its rich variety, including currently popular teen-age music and avant-garde music, American folk music, and the music of other cultures.” (Tanglewood Declaration, 1967)

11. 35 years ago In the 1980s, the phenomenon of world music received major boosts from • Developing scholarly discourse • Government policies and funding influencing the arts and education • A highly successful ‘world music campaign’ launched by a number of independent labels in the UK in 1987

12. 25 years ago In June 1992, about thirty practitioners of ‘Teaching world music’ gathered in Amsterdam. Some had private practices, some worked in schools, others in community organisations, in teacher training colleges, or in university music departments. This was the beginning of an integrated international platform for discussion (which will gather for the 13th time in Kathmandu in July 2017).

13. 15 years ago In the aftermath of 9/11, there was a growing sense of the ‘failure of multiculturalism’ (rather than a recognition that some approaches to cultural diversity may have been ill-directed or ill-informed) This sense of a perceived threat from other cultures to the West has caused insidious withdrawal of support from initiatives that embrace many cultures

14. Key challenges • A failure to recognise the profoundly culture-specific (read: Western classical) nature of our approaches to learning and teaching music • Being unprepared for the conceptual and practical challenges associated with cultural diversity, and their impact on music education at large

15. A conceptual journey Over the years, music learning and teaching has witnessed a number of important conceptual developments, many of which are increasingly and importantly becoming part of global thinking on cultural diversity These can be represented as shifts of focus in discussions and practices:

16. Foci and concepts - 1 From individual traditions ‘in context’, ethnomusicology programs, and world music in the classroom to dedicated practical degree courses,teacher training courses, community settings (within and outside cultures of origin), and popular world musics in contemporary urban environments

17. Foci and concepts - 2 From ‘world music as material’ to appropriate ‘world music pedagogies’ Reappraisal of (primitive or hi-tech?) transmission through aurality, emphasis on intangible elements, and holistic learning. Confusion as a pedagogical tool (applying cognitive dissonance to the learning process)

18. Foci and concepts - 3 From mono-directional instructional didactics to acknowledging complex relationships between learner and teacher (or facilitator), including power distance, individuality/ collectiveness, short/long term orientation, and varying degrees of tolerating uncertainty (Hofstede)

19. Foci and concepts - 4 From static views of traditions to acknowledging living traditions From a single sense of (reconstructed) authenticity to multiple authenticities and ‘strategic inauthenticity’ From striving to recreate contexts to acknowledging recontextualisation as a reality of most music practices today

20. Foci and concepts - 5 From socially constructed cultural identities to individually constructed ones, acknowledging that the relationship between ethnicity and musical tastes, skills and activities is increasingly fluid (with interesting differences between first, second and third generation immigrants)

21. Foci and concepts - 6 From apologetic about being the ‘odd one out’ to confident of being able to contribute significantly to the world of music education From western educational environments and concepts to ‘world settings’ From personal passions to global concerns (cf UNESCO/IMC policies on sustaining Intangible Cultural Heritage)

22. Areas of exploration While there is a vast body of profound thinking and writing on learning and teaching music, it rarely transcends the boundaries of western folk and art music A more global perspective adds depth on: • Issues of tradition, authenticity & context • Modes and foci of transmission processes • Interaction between learner and teacher

23. Modes of teaching and learning • Analytical – holistic: explaining and presenting material step by step, or maintaining integrity of whole piece • Notation-based – aural (oral): writing down core material, or developing the musical memory of the learner • Tangible – intangible: concentrating on technique and repertoire, or focussing more on creativity and values

24. Tradition, authenticity, context Tradition, authenticity and context are multi-layered ideas, with ambiguous and even contradictory meanings. They are value-laden: traditional, authentic and ‘in context’ are deemed to be ‘good’. While western mainstream thinking about music has tended to consider these concepts static, contemporary musical realities inspire a much more dynamic view of tradition, authenticity and context.

25. Model for approaching CDIME Dimensions of Transmission Issues of Context

26. Patterns of interaction In a study of constructs in corporations across nations, Hofstede identified a) small versus large power distance; b) individualism versus collectivism; c) strongly gendered vs gender neutral; d) avoiding versus tolerating uncertainty; e) long term versus short term orientation These are eminently relevant to the study of musical transmission across cultures

27. Approaches to diversity • Monocultural – having a single culture as the frame of reference • Multicultural – accepting a variety of cultural expressions as existing apart • Intercultural – exploring meeting grounds between various cultures (non-committal) • Transcultural – profoundly embracing and mixing cultural expressions and values

28. Model for aproaching CDIME - ctd Patterns of interaction Approaches to Cultural Diversity

29. Key properties and applications • The model can be viewed from four perspectives: the tradition, the institution, the teacher, and the learner • There are no right or wrong positions on each continuum; the model is essentially non-prescriptive and unjudgmental • The model is primarily descriptive, but can also be used as an analytical tool, and for predictive and prescriptive applications

30. Relation to formal music education • A general tendency to the left (analytical, notation, tangible, static concepts, hierarchical, monocultural) points towards formal settings; a tendency to the right towards a more informal community base • When a ‘right-oriented’ tradition finds itself in a ‘left-oriented’ environment, practice showns increased risk of friction and unsuccessful transmission processes

31. Implications for Atlas Learning and teaching music have numerous underlying dimensions, which, when considered, can improve programs that aim at excellent experiences for learners While there are no absolute answers, there is now a well-identified suite of questions that can aid awareness and choices across the range of continuums that define intercultural music learning experiences

32. … and what about world music?

33. Musical meetings For as long as people have made music, they have generated and benefitted from an astounding diversity of approaches, genres, and musical artefacts, with interaction as a key driver for creativity However, the past hundred years have seen this process speeding up, broadening and intensifying to levels like never before

34. The term world music Over the past fifty years (and especially since 1987), the term ‘world music’ has been used to refer to the richness of music outside of one’s own culture The term is both eminently useful (in being non-judgmental) and all-encompassing to the point of being meaningless Much more enlightening than terminology are the underlying values and approaches

35. Range of terminology The Grove handbook Ethnomusicology – An introductionmentions “traditional,” which has been current for decades, and continues to distinguish “labels condemned as pejorative: the old-timers, ‘savage’, ‘primitive’, ‘exotic’, ‘Oriental’, ‘Far Eastern’; some newcomers: ‘folk’, ‘non-Western’, ‘non-literate’, ‘pre-literate’; and recently ‘world’” (Myers, 1992, p. 11).

36. Range of terminology - ctd Facing the Music (Schippers, 2010) found some additional terms used to refer to what we now tend to call world music, including ‘strange music’ (BBC), of course ‘ethnic music’, the idealistic ‘one world music’, and even ‘non-Indian music’ In the end, each of these say more about the users of the terms than about the specifics musics they refer to

37. The nine sentiments • Sense of wonder (exotic, oriental) • Sense of superiority (primitive) • Sense of (other) place (non-western) • Sense of origin (roots, gypsy) • Sense of use or status (classical, art, folk) • Sense of non-musical qualities (migrant) • Sense of music as a meeting ground (fusion) • Sense of music as a universal language

38. Three approaches 1) World music as a philosophical concept, ranging from strongly idealistic concepts of ‘one music’ for the entire world to more pluralist ideas 2) World music as a result of musical interaction between cultures, cross-over or fusion, either organic or as a preconceived intervention 3) World music as the total sum of musical forms that exist on earth, which, as said before, renders the term gloriously useless

39. Four underlying approaches • Monocultural – single culture dominant and principal frame of reference • Multicultural – cultures exist next to and separate from each other • Intercultural – there is a dialogue and exchange between cultures • Transcultural – cultures connect at the level of norms and values

40. Working definition “World music is the phenomenon of musical concepts, genres, styles, repertoires and instruments traveling, establishing themselves, or mixing in new cultural environments”