Teaching Portfolio:
My Philosophy of Music Education:
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In order to become an effective teacher, one must clearly develop a philosophy on which to base their teaching. A philosophy is not meant just to be a cognitive proposal, but rather a written personal reflection of what one believes should be incorporated into their teaching. It is in the philosophy where we, as teachers, find direction in leading students toward the goal of achieving the skill of critical thinking. When students successfully score on standardized tests, which require recitation of learned facts, some would think them knowledgeable. However, while those learned facts may be important, the ability to comprehend those facts with in a greater context is equally, if not more important. When students have the ability to make connections from within a discipline to outside that discipline’s context, it is evidence that the student has successfully acquired the skill of critical thinking. To be able to aid students in acquiring the skill of critical thinking takes good teaching and the formation, as well as implementation, of a directing personal philosophy.
More people listen to music now more than ever before in the history of the world. The audience has increased enormously since recordings, radio and television have made music available to a wide range of the population. Music, for those who enjoy it, is so important that to be deprived of it would seem to be a cruel type of punishment. However, the idea of music as an essential part of life is not an idea that only professionally trained musicians have. It is true that those who have had musical history and theory training can appreciate the form and harmonic structure of musical compositions more than those who have not. But it is also true that people who play instruments in instrumental ensembles or sing in vocal ensembles enrich their understanding of music while engaging in life-enhancing activities and find these activities irreplaceable. Furthermore, it is also possible to appreciate music empathetically by identifying with its expressive aspects and allowing ourselves to be absorbed into the music emotionally, without paying much attention to its formal characteristics. even listeners who cannot read musical notation or who have never attempted to learn an instrument may be so deeply affected by music that, even for them, any day that passes without being involved with music in one way or another is a day wasted.
In our information-age world, the idea that music is a vital part in everyday life is puzzling to some people. There are numerous people who assume that the arts are luxuries instead of necessities, and that words and pictures are the only ways to influence the human mind. People who do not appreciate music assume that music has no greater significance other than providing temporary pleasure. Some people also consider music to be gloss upon the surface of life or a harmless indulgence rather than a necessity. It is perhaps for this reason why politicians of the present day hardly ever place music in a major place for their educational plans. Today, when education is becoming predominantly directed towards obtaining profitable employment rather than toward enriching personal experience, music is likely to be, however wrongfully, seen as an “extra” in the school curriculum and as a subject that does not need to be provided for students who are obviously not ‘musical’ by nature since the significance of music, in recent years, has been highly underestimated.
Musicians, as well as advocates of music, know that music brings us more than sensuous pleasure. If music were just a series of artificial constructs comparable with decorative visual patterns, it would bring about mild aesthetic pleasure, but nothing more. Yet music can penetrate the heart of our physical being. It can move our emotions to make us weep, or give intense pleasure by temporarily transforming our whole existence into another world.
The mnemonic power of music is evident in nearly everyone. Many of us are able to remember the words of songs and poems more precisely than we are able to remember prose. The idea that music facilitates memory has been objectively confirmed by the study of cognitively disabled children who can recall more material after it is given to them in a song rather than after it is read to them in a story. People identify with music in a variety of ways. One of these ways is through empathic identification. With this, the person may be so involved with a musical work that critical judgment becomes impossible. On the other hand, someone who is more abstract may not be able to fully appreciate the musical work’s emotional significance.
In Allan Bloom’s book, The Closing of the American Mind, he expresses his anxiety about the effect that rock music had upon his students. Bloom recognized that music is powerful and can be used in an educational setting, but also fears that rock music has diminished people’s interests in, or feeling of need for any other kind of music. During Stalin’s reign in Russia, contemporary European music was nearly banned and Russian composers were subjected to numerous guidelines. This censorship implies that the power and importance of music in the lives of people is recognizable. Music is a powerful instrument of education and is seldom taken seriously by politicians and educationalists who are not themselves musicians. We should ensure that everyone in our society is given the opportunity of participating in a wide range of different kinds of music.
Throughout my musical career, I have noticed that it seems like appreciating music other that what one grew up with is difficult. This could explain why most people enjoy music from around 1600 until the 1950s. Anything earlier or later seems to need an acquired taste for enjoyment. While it is beneficial to students to be given the opportunity to participate in and experience a variety of music, there is discrepancy on how to go about providing that experience. There are a few major philosophical foundations that are at odds with each other. These would include formalism, praxialism, and contextualism.
Formalists experience music in a predominantly intellectual manner through the recognition and appreciation of form for its own value. Formalists do not disagree that many compositions may contain references to the world outside the piece, but they deny that all references of this nature are completely irrelevant to the compositions meaning and do not contribute anything of significance to the music or the experience of it.
On the polar opposite of formalism is praxialism and contextualism. Praxialism concentrates on the process (rather than the product, like formalism) and claims the best way to learn and understand music is to observe what people do and how they do it. Praxialism becomes problematic in that composers, like writers, tend to compose in isolation and there is not much one can learn from watching a composer compose. The best way, then, to observe music as process is to observe performance musicians. Although their job is to perform, it is only done so after rehearsing, usually in isolation. Nonetheless, we are observing what they do (perform) and how they do it and can learn from this observation.
Contextualism is another opposite of formalism in that the focus is on the social and political significance behind the music. Contextualists see music as being intimately interwoven to politics, religion, commerce, nationhood, history, science, etc and all of these worlds interact and intermesh while being mutually dependent on each other. To understand music through contextualism is to understand its intimate connections with all of human experience. This is unlike formalism where the understanding of music comes from understanding the cognitive processes of music.
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While all the preceding ideologies are all important, I believe that it is far more important to find some synergistic way to combine all three of them. The most logical way that I have come across through my educational endeavors is what is called absolute expressionism. Absolute expressionism is an attempt to take the best of all ideologies and combine them in such a way that as a music educator, I will educate my students in musicality and interpretations of music that are consistently based in the cognitive understandings of composition, form, theory, history, pedagogy. This combination can also be called comprehensive musicianship. Through comprehensive music education, the student can utilize the absolute expressionist in them and a true musical experience that will have impact in their life will be created.
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Comprehensive music education is not limited to the learning of pitches and rhythms, but includes the provision of aesthetic experiences, the refinement of critical thinking skills, and development of a fuller understanding of the self. Music is an excellent way to develop affective and aesthetic experiences. This domain focuses on feelings or emotions. Music, perhaps to a degree greater than any other subject, facilitates the education of feelings through student response to the qualities of great music in rehearsal and performance. In a comprehensive music program, the student is not limited to being taught selections for a concert, but wishes to develop a student’s understanding in the areas of music reading, languages, and the historical, theoretical, and stylistic context of music. While the technical excellence and the highest musical standards are important to a comprehensive music program, fostering the student’s growth should be foremost in the educational process. Some may see a fine concert performance as the ultimate product of a music program, but with a comprehensive music program the concert is only one aspect of the learning process.
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The educational model of a comprehensive music program is more of a spiral model rather than a linear one. From the start of the rehearsal process to the end of a concert is a linear model that always begins at square one after each concert. But the spiral model revisits the same and/or similar issues during each rehearsal process, but each time they are visited with greater understanding, depth and insight than the time before. Performance, then, does not become the culmination of the process but a stepping-stone along the path of which there is always room to learn, grow, and improve.
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It is not enough for students to be able to sing/play their part with accuracy. A comprehensive music education should provide a vehicle for students to learn about all aspects of music, such as styles, periods, melody, harmony, rhythm, and expression in any piece of music under consideration. Each person’s ability is different and as students learn more about their individual instruments (vocal or otherwise), they also learn about themselves intrinsically. As students participate in rehearsals and concerts, they gain an understanding of their own strengths and weaknesses and insights into their interactions with individuals in the ensemble. Abraham Maslow proposed that after fulfilling certain basic needs such as food, shelter, and safety, humans seek aesthetic fulfillment in order to meet higher-level psychological and aesthetic needs and also to become fully self-aware. Maslow indicated that music provides an important avenue for self-awareness to develop. It is through this development of self-awareness that each student realizes that he/she is an important, valued, contributing member to the ensemble and every member needs to put forth their best effort to make the group successful.
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In addition to the musical learning that is taking place, there is also non-musical learning as well. Since the ensemble works together for a common goal, the characteristic of citizenship and pride begins and continues to develop in conjunction with leadership and human relation skills. Good health habits are also promoted through teaching about correct posture and breathing techniques.
Benjamin Bloom, an educational psychologist developed Bloom’s Taxonomy. In this, he describes three learning domains: cognitive (education of intellect), affective (education of feelings), and psychomotor (training in physical movement). Most experiences in the music classroom involve some aspects and facilitate development in all three domains. The ability to understand musical notation is cognitive; the teaching of correct posture for singing/playing is psychomotor; and when a student has developed aesthetic awareness through music, it is affective.
Bloom further continues and develops classification levels of intellectual behavior that are important in learning. He discovered that over 95% of the test questions that students encounter require them to think only at the lowest possible level—the recalling of knowledge. Above knowledge is comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. Music encompasses all seven levels since music students begin with learning knowledge and comprehension of material, and then they apply that knowledge to their instrument of choice by playing or singing, analyze the outcome, create music and then evaluate the final product. A student’s growth cannot be concluded based on performance alone. By engaging students in discussions of their valuing of music and through consideration of their ability to make independent musical judgments can we see the totality of a student’s growth. The students can also evaluate themselves and others, as well as what they have learned and produced (in rehearsal and performance) based on the musical knowledge they have gained through their participation in a comprehensive music education.
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In recent years, our understandings of the working of intellect, intelligence, and emotion have greatly grown. We have seen, and members of the cognitive sciences would agree, that the old idea that emotion is separate and different from human mindful processes has begun to fade away. This idea is being replaced with the new idea that the human mind is a complex combination of dimensions that were previously thought to be separated. These are the dimensions of thinking, feeling, acting, and context, each contributing essentially to what we can know and experience. The implications of these emerging insights for how we understand music and the values of musical experience are insightful. Musical thinking, doing, and feeling, in their necessary interdependence and their exercise of genuine, advanced intelligence, may well be a model of human mindful functioning at its optimal level (Reimer).
There are four dimensions of musical experience: creating, ethical, meaning and contextual. The creating dimension involves individuals, alone or in conjunction with others, creating music. There is a certain way of thinking that underlies musical creating. But no matter which way music is created, music itself makes demands on the creator that cannot be ignored if the result desired to be honest and authentic. Attaining this authenticity requires an attitude of honoring the music, tending to, and feeling its need along with the creator’s. A consequence of engaging in the creation of music is an enhanced sense of one’s self from what one has experienced in creating. It is a type of maturation that is due to an expansion of one’s inner life as a result of the creator’s creative acts. Creativity through composing (creating through exploration and discovery of musical possibilities), performing (the performer has a musical and ethical obligation to the composer and music to give it respect while recreating the composers intentions), improvising (combining original generation of musical idea that are simultaneously done while playing or singing), and listening (which requires the listener to “put together” all the complexities that are bombarding their ears through critical thinking/problem solving).
The ethical dimension of music includes five subcategories. First, trust and competence are two subcategories that are expected. Composers trust that their ideas will be brought to life with performers who trust each other for energy and devotion to bring an honest musical work to the audience. This can only be done through competence on everyone’s part. Competence by the composer is needed for creating a musically sound work; by the performer of bringing historically accurate techniques to the work; and by the audience for responding appropriately to the work.
Cooperation, respect and courage are the remaining three subcategories. Through the cooperation of all members striving to achieve mutual goals, the participants can respect each other since they are all-important and contribute to the shared experience (performance) for which they are cooperating. It takes a courageous person to bring creativity to life since musical creation calls us to know all we can know, do all we can do, and be all we can be no matter what we think our limitations may be. Music has the capacity to take us on a journey of becoming what we truly can be.
The meaning dimension of music is quite simple. Music means whatever a person experiences when involved with music. Music, however, is created and shared through the process of artistic/aesthetic composition, yielding meanings which language cannot represent. Music education exists to nurture students potential in gaining deeper, broader, more significant musical meaning.
In the contextual dimension, cultural and historical contexts of music are significant. Cultural context is a significant factor in forming human consciousness. Each culture and its music contribute greatly to the forming its member’s particular beliefs and values. Since music from different cultures reflects the different conceptions that unique to each culture, the applications to teaching music from other cultures to American students has been in question. It was so greatly concerning that there was a conference, the Tanglewood Symposium of 1967, which called for the inclusion of multicultural music in the music curriculum.
Music offers a wide range of ways to advance intellectually, just like any other subject. This advance in intellect embraces imagination, culture, individuality, opportunity, feelings, and the entire body. By including composing, performing, improvising, listening, music theory, musicology, and music teaching into the music curriculum, the students should achieve whatever potentials they have to fully experience musical satisfactions in whatever way they choose. The U.S. National Content Standard for Music Education can serve as a guide for what a comprehensive music education should include. These content standards are: (1) Singing alone and with others, a varied repertoire of music (performer); (2) Performing alone and with others, a varied repertoire of music (performer); (3) Improvising melodies, variations and accompaniments (improviser); (4) Composing and arranging music within specified guidelines (composer); (5) Reading and notating music (performer/composer); (6) Listening to, analyzing, and describing music (listener); (7) Evaluating music and music performance (critic); (8) Understanding relationships between music, the other arts, and disciplines outside the arts; and (9) Understanding music in relation to history and culture.
Music is an integrated part of everyday life. From turning on the radio during the morning commute to enhancing experience in film, dance, and theatre to ceremonial music for weddings, funerals, etc., music is there. Music can enable brain-damaged people to accomplish tasks, which they could not master without its aid. It can also make life livable for people who are emotionally disturbed or cognitively disabled. Because music is not so obviously necessary to most of us, we tend to underestimate its significance in the lives of “normal” people. Music is often a way of recovering personal feelings from which we have become estranged and we rely on its therapeutic effects (which require more in-depth research during the 21st century) for personal restoration, refreshment and healing. Yet it is difficult to imagine a world without it. Even if playing music were forbidden, and every device for reproducing music destroyed, we should still have tunes running in our heads, still be using music to order our actions and make structured sense out of the world around us. Educationalists and parents expect that teachers will expose their children to great literature that will influence their children. We think that the great poets reveal the inner nature of the world and sharpen our understanding because their perceptions and their gift to metaphorically speak make it possible for us to surpass our own limited vision by sharing theirs.
Since Western society is so predominantly verbal, we fail to recognize that music has similar effects. Participating in music brings us into contact with greatness and leaves traces of that greatness as permanent impressions in our lives. Music not only brings pleasure but also has the ability to deepen appreciation for life. Learning about composers, what influenced them, and their compositions take us on an expedition toward maturity, which can be as important as the personal influence of teachers. Music aids people in their quest for individuality. For with the power of music it is possible to free oneself from the authority of which they were brought up; liberating oneself from convention, from education, class, religious belief, from all social constraints, prejudices, and assumptions that prevent one from giving life to their own nature as a person.
Some students will find an aspect of music so fulfilling that they will seek out the challenges of pursuing it to discover whether it might play into their lives as a hobby or career. The opportunity to do this, and it should be done in every field of study that education offers, allows students to become who they may potentially be and utilize the intelligence, creativity and curiosity they posses. Schooling is a culture’s way to provide the opportunity and resource for every person to fulfill their potential. Since everything studied in school reflects the values and need of a culture and 15% of students elect to become involved in music, it can be concluded that the society and culture is in favor of music education.
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As a music educator grounded in absolute expressionism, it is not enough for myself to be an effective rehearsal technician, proficient director, and a music researcher. It is my duty to combine all of those in my teaching and impart my knowledge to my students without telling them what to think but by showing them how to create, research and think for themselves. Since music has many avenues to follow, it is also my duty to clearly show those avenues to my students and guide them down paths that do, and those that might be of, interest and have value to them at their own pace. It is only the material that is of personal interest and value to us that we remember and carry with us for the rest of our lives. It is the duty of all educators to aid in the development of cognitive, affective and psychomotor learning in each of our students. Our students look to us for guidance and honesty in our teaching, through that guidance and honesty I am determined to give my students a musical experience that they will instill an understanding and interest in music that I hope will last their entire life.
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