Reason, order and creativity

The Ministry of Education's Pamphlet No. 27 noted that at the nursery and infant stage ‘the conventional ‘percussion band lesson’ might well give place to a more flexible treatment in which small groups of players form only part of a varied pattern that can include singing and movement’ (HMSO, 1960, p. 14). Despite this cautious reference to providing scope for creativity, the need for ‘children being seen as children and not adults in miniature’ as well as recognition of the vitality of young people's personal engagement in music, there remained throughout the pamphlet a persistent commitment to a music education as a course of musical training, the need for rigorous early aural training, and the building of a musical mind as a precursor to finding cultural and general enhancement. The evolution of music education in England is reviewed sympathetically. There exists an impressive music educational heritage and it was the wanton rejection and wilful disregard of this that the traditional camp was so concerned about. Kenneth Simpson writes in one of the Black PapersFootnote ² of the time.

Here there is acknowledgement that it is only some who have submitted to its discipline and in submission achieved those characteristics associated with an educated person. If not yet entirely successful for the majority of pupils, in this view, the pursuit of discipline through the training of ear, eye and mind remain a non-negotiable basis for a music education. But here there was a problem. The ambition to achieve this general enhancement sufficient to become in Simpson's terms an educated person with its liberating potential as a necessary entitlement for all children, had not been how schooling in England had been conceived of or how it had evolved. It was by no means accepted that all children should be in Simpson's sense ‘educated’. Official reports prior to the Second World War had wrestled with the question: which children were entitled to a liberal education?

By 1938 the Report of the Consultative Committee on Secondary Education with special reference to Grammar Schools and Technical High Schools declared the impracticability of a ‘single liberal or general education for all’ (Aldrich, Reference ALDRICH2002, p. 195). Children were viewed as having vastly differing intellectual capacities and this meant that different purposes needed to be assigned to different categories of child. Not all pupils could benefit from a general or liberal education. However, this way of thinking ill-fitted the growing egalitarian mood of the 1950s and 60s and the urgent need to better educate those of average and lower abilities by raising the school leaving age to 16. In considering the education of what was a majority of young people it was thought that music and the arts had great educational potential and significance. It was the wider educative value of music that had been insufficiently focused upon. The Hadow Report of 1931 and again the Newsome Report of 1963 had emphasised the untapped potential of the Arts and Music to educate those in the final years of compulsory schooling. They were, as the subtitle of the Newsom Report declared, Half our Future. And now, with mounting evidence that music in schools was failing to engage secondary-aged students (Schools Council Enquiry 1, 1968; Schools Council, 1971), the ground was fertile for different ways of thinking. It was in 1973 that a Schools Council ProjectFootnote ³ dedicated to Music in the Secondary School was launched. Its director was to be John Paynter. But what did John bring to a project intending to transform the place of music in the secondary school?

Sybil Marshall

A short distance from John's teaching of teachers in West Sussex was Sybil Marshall at Sussex University, also teaching teachers. It was Sybil who, following her time as a Cambridgeshire village school teacher, had published a remarkable book, An Experiment in Education (Reference MARSHALL1963), that was to become both required and compelling reading for at least one generation of new primary school teachers. Sybil showed how children could be free to create, express ideas and feelings through paint, puppetry, poetry and a myriad of other materials, and in writing, to write ‘creatively’. Sybil had famously devoted the whole of a summer term to the study of Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony involving the children experiencing each movement of the work in the countryside surrounding the village school. It was from the children's responses to playing in the brook, dancing wildly on the village green and so on that came creative outpourings through artistic media chosen by the children. For Sybil these were ‘acts of symbolisation’ (Reference MARSHALL1971). The arts, which now could be referred to as the ‘creative arts’, provided a mode of experience serving to bring together and unify, on the child's terms, all that had been learnt and previously impressed upon the child. The role of artistic expression was to re-order experience and knowledge in such a way as to ensure the child's full comprehension of the world in which they lived and into which they were growing.Footnote ⁴ In this way Sybil was champion of the project method in which the teacher had a responsibility to place something of great value and potential before her pupils and with the intention of recognising individual interests through what might be subsequently brought to light (Marshall, Reference MARSHALL1968). Both Sybil and John had a common admiration for the work of another teacher.

David Holbrook

For the young John, David Holbrook, like that of Sybil Marshall, was ‘a name to conjure with’ and an exemplar of seeing children as individual sources of artistic expression. It was during the late 1950s that Holbrook had presented a subtle way of balancing the interests of the child with the discipline of a subject. Here was inspiration for secondary school English teachers and in particular those who were teaching in the secondary modern school. Holbrook had been a student of F. R. Leavis at Cambridge, who had established ‘the canon’ that was declared to be the Great Tradition of English Literature.Footnote ⁵ Leavis had made a case for the redemptive power of literature. Great literature offered moral authority and a bastion against the demeaning influence of industrialization and the progressive commercialization of the public sphere. While sustaining the spirit of Leavis, and in particular seeing in the arts protection from the rise of commercial interests, for Holbrook there was good reason to differentiate the canon and bring a wide range of sources to the minds of not only the examination childFootnote ⁶ but all children, and not least to those thought less capable of engaging with such an expansive repertoire of reading. In an influential text, English for the Rejected (Reference HOLBROOK1964), Holbrook writes with deep sympathy for those feeling rejected by school and society for lacking academic gifts and for being considered ‘un-examinable’. Holbrook shows how the capacity of such young people for imaginative and creative writing is vastly underestimated. The third chapter of the book, Sparks from a different element is a vivid ethnographic account of Holbrook's work with a class of 19 children. These are to be seen as ‘sensitive, perceptive, and full of deep feelings, ambitious and with capacities for making contributions to human life and culture’ (Reference HOLBROOK1964, p. 44). Holbrook proceeds to unveil the mind of each child in turn, revealing the ways in which each sees the world through their creative outpourings. For Holbrook this is a process of working on their ‘inner worlds’ as they come to express feelings and ideas and at the same time make relationships with the minds of poets and writers never before encountered. Together, Sybil Marshall and David Holbrook provided a powerful template for John to work upon. The idea that the child's insights derived from their lived experience could yield to the authority of conventions and formal devices found in the work of other artists was attractive, as was the idea that the arts could bring order and coherence to material worked with as to the creative life of the individual. Beyond this there was the exemplar of teacher as artist and researcher of children's creative thought and expression. All this suited well. But if Sybil Marshall and David Holbrook were to influence there was a longer established source of inspiration.

Wilfrid Mellers and York

Like Holbrook, Wilfrid Mellers had studied English under Leavis before completing his doctoral study as a musicologist. Mellers was a composer, visual artist and poet who had collaborated with Holbrook and with Sybil Marshall and Mellers together. Mellers came to the new University of York in 1964 to teach in the English department with a brief to encourage music. In a short time he had become Professor of Music. In this Mellers had a clear mind about the kind of staff to appoint, not musicologists as was the norm in university music departments of the time, but composers – Peter Aston, David Blake, Bernard Rands and Robert Sherlaw Johnson. Composition and musical performance were to be given high priority in the curriculum. For Meller's until music was heard it wasn't music and this meant that any separation of theory and practice was inadmissible. As a sixth form student John had read Meller's contributions to the Listener, Scrutiny and the New Statesman and it was now that John invited him to talk to his students in Sussex. For Meller's part considerable interest was shown in the work John had been doing in schools and there was encouragement for John to establish research schemes in Yorkshire schools. Over the next two years an association with the University of York grew, and in 1969 John was appointed to a lectureship in the Department of Music.

The innovatory approach of Mellers at York was quick to be noticed and in the 1966 March/April volume of the journal Music in Education, Mellers is introduced as ‘musician, musicologist and lecturer’. There is a description of the Department's three courses offered at undergraduate level. One includes composition; another combines music with English and a third brings together music with education. On this course students go into schools engaging in ‘Creative Experiment’ lessons and, in preparation for work in senior schools, students ‘will also be taught to improvise so that they and their pupils may express themselves through improvisation and by the children writing their own popular songs’ (Eames, Reference EAMES1966, p. 83). In the context of this commitment to creative experiment, improvisation, composition, inter-disciplinarity, education and music as a living art, and a belief that ‘in a healthy society all men should be artists to some extent and in some way, in proportion to their capacity to live creatively’ (Mellers, Reference MELLERS1946/2008, p. 18), John was now to make a significant move in the making of his life and his contribution to music education.

Suzanne Langer and ways of knowing

The idea of epistemological plurality was attractive to arts educators making it possible to speak of the arts as a distinctive way of knowing, as a form of knowledge, a realm of meaning, the arts as epistemologically distinctive and therefore able to make an essential and core contribution to the whole curriculum. In this, as John points out above, the thought of philosopher Suzanne Langer had played a significant part. Langer maintained that human existence is fundamentally sensory and dominated by feeling and that it is through symbol making and symbolic thought that we come to know and understand (Langer, Reference LANGER1953/1982). If symbol making was the mediator between felt-experience, knowing and understanding then a critical distinction between discursive and presentational symbols would need to be made. While discursive symbolization re-organized elements that had stable meanings, presentational symbolization worked in another way. Here meaning could be grasped only in its wholeness and thus music worked not as a discursive symbol but as one that was non-discursive and where ‘. . . the assignment of meanings is a shifting, kaleidoscopic play, probably below the threshold of consciousness, certainly outside the pale of discursive thinking’ (Langer, Reference LANGER1953/1982, p. 244). For John, as for many other arts educators, this proposition opened the door to a positive conception of ‘feeling’ and the process by which it gained form. This was the work of the artist, it was her way of feeling, thinking and knowing. It also supported the proposition that music could be conceptualized as ‘thought in itself’ and that ‘to think music’ was of a different order to ‘thinking about it’. Music had a distinctive epistemological status.

Manifesto

Thus, we might usefully view Sound and Silence as an act of symbolization, a discursive bringing together with the purpose of engaging teachers and their pupils in both non-discursive and discursive symbol making and to find meaning and justification for the place of music in education. John Paynter and Peter Aston's classroom experimentations of the 1960s, separately carried out, Aston with the medium of the voice and Paynter through instrumental means, readily embraced the beliefs of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Herbert Read and others that an education in and through the arts started with the individual. A music education was to be centered on the child's perceptions and insights. This would expect children to create music in response to things about which they felt deeply, about matters that engaged their imaginations and, as Holbrook had maintained, that drew from their inner worlds and, as Langer had proposed, led them to organize feeling, master expression and make form. In all this, examples from the other arts served to challenge music's backward looking stance in the curriculum. Mellers had referred to the work as a Primer and to be seen as an introductory foundational text. Above all else it was a manifesto embodying what Cox (Reference COX2002) points out as a double commitment to child-centredness and artistic modernism. The scope and reach of the discography supporting the 36 projects, some freestanding and some progressive, was revealing. The school music canon relying largely upon the music of pre-1900 had been displaced by the dominating presence of music of the twentieth century. What might be permissible to listen to in the classroom and for what purpose and in what context had been dramatically re-envisioned.

Outreach: the music teacher as extended professional

If all this represented for John a liberal educationFootnote ⁸ there was now opportunity to articulate it further through the Schools Council Project: Music in the Secondary School Curriculum (1973–1980). Here John's credo and articles of faith could be tested, practised, discussed and developed through an intense transaction with and between music teachers, head teachers, music advisers and others in encouraging classroom innovation and the experimentation of teachers.Footnote ⁹ Laurence Stenhouse, leader of the Schools Council's Humanities Project, makes a case for teachers to take a research stance to their own teaching, ‘a disposition to examine one's own practice critically and systematically’ (Reference STENHOUSE1975, p. 156). The Secondary School Music Project provided just this scope for the music teachers to become researchers and to extend their professionalism. If creative music making gave the pupil freedom to devise and develop their own ideas then teachers too were now well placed to find freedom to develop theirs. It was thought that in this way innovation in classroom practice once launched would continue to flourish. It was in this spirit that the project's final report was written. This came in the form of the book Music in the Secondary School Curriculum intended to be a discussion document ‘which, it is hoped will set people thinking and talking, and in particular will help teachers develop their own ideas for musical activities appropriate to the young people they teach’ (Paynter, Reference PAYNTER1982, p. x).

There were indeed striking examples of innovatory practice arising from the project. These were presented in the newly established British Journal of Music Education edited by John and Keith Swanwick. The journal had a stated commitment to the thoughtful and considered practice of music teachers. ‘The centre of our focus is the practice of music education. But this also implies a degree of reflection upon this practice, and some analysis of what is involved’ (Paynter & Swanwick, Reference PAYNTER and SWANWICK1984, p. 4). Thus appeared the work of Tom Gamble (Reference GAMBLE1984) arguing for the central importance of composition in the curriculum; Brian Loane (Reference LOANE1984) investigating meaning making in children's composition and the development of self-understanding; Piers Spencer (Reference SPENCER1984) making a case for improvisation through the idioms of Jazz; Coral Davies (Reference DAVIES1986) exploring the spontaneous creativity evidenced in children's song making; and Robert Bunting (Reference BUNTING1987, Reference BUNTING1988) creating richly detailed accounts of teacher–student interactions and progression in the compositional process. Such work went a considerable way to vindicate John's claim that ‘education reform starts in the classroom’ (Paynter, Reference PAYNTER1974, p. 1).

Taking stock

However, by Volume 6, in the July 1989 edition of the journal, in which Rainbow (Reference RAINBOW1989b) raises concerns about the heterodoxy of current classroom practices, John reasserts a commitment to the music teacher as the agent of change and author of innovation. In an epilogue he writes: ‘[Music education] is closer to the centre of educational thinking – we have seen to that; but are there now more words than actions?’ (Paynter, Reference PAYNTER1989, p. 236). Where are the innovative music teachers? Are there now too many fine words? John saw only too clearly the end of a cycle. The mood of the time was changing. A National Curriculum was being formulated and while composition was now recognised as a central component, there was also a call for the definition of standards as part of a full appraisal of the condition of music in schools and this included an evaluation of recent developments in curriculum practice. John was well aware of the dangerous tendency for practice to fall into orthodoxy and in the case of classroom composition for the work of teachers to lack direction and structure. The case needed making afresh.

John could see the swing of the pendulum. The age of teacher autonomy, freedom to think differently, to innovate and to question, was coming to a close. A centrally controlled curriculum now required a restoration of order, the linearity of learning and easily managed models of progression, assessment and accountability. For the teacher as artist-composer the world was turning on its dark side. And beyond the reasonableness of the programmes of study devised for music in the newly formulated National Curriculum there came the age of beauracratic state intervention and the scrutiny of standards in the cause of improving the general effectiveness of the school. What had been a long and sustained ‘breaking out’ had becoming a rapid ‘reining in’ (Simon, Reference SIMON1991; Lowe, Reference LOWE2007; Gerwirtz et al., Reference GERWIRTZ, MAHONY, HEXTALL and CRIBB2009). However, and no matter what form central control might or might not take in the future and how the pendulum might swing, there remains the pedagogy of the artist-composer and the pedagogy of the project in which lives the process of ‘thinking and making’. Herein lies the path to creative teaching, engaging others in the experience of making what at first can only be partially envisioned but which in the course of making becomes not only a possibility but a conception which glimpsed as a whole awaits full articulation and completion.

Towards the mastery of musical thinking and making

And now I can think more clearly about John's reading of Rousseau at age 17. Rousseau, that most celebrated philosopher of freedom, had set in train a dramatic inward turn giving a sense of the human being as having great inner depths from which individual moral purpose and authority could arise. Freedom it was thought could be found through a harmonizing of our deepest beliefs and commitments with our moral actions. This freedom was attractive for it was a ‘freedom from’, a freedom from externally imposed authority. This was the idea taken up by the Romantics in the late 18th and early 19th centuries believing that it was the human being as artist who could know such freedom in its fullness and offer its potentiality to all. And in this a charge was given to those who educate to find and nurture the artistic voice of each child, a truly romantic ideal. Yet there is a profound pragmatism here too, and one that John knew well; for it remains the task of the teacher as artist-craftsman to learn how to assist each child to freely speak his/her musical mind, and at the same time to help the child to know when and how to invite in authority and how to learn and respect its wisdom in the cause of thinking and making more music. This remains the challenge for the teacher seeking a creative response to her teaching and/or in current discourse to promote ‘learner agency’. In the end there remains the ‘. . . capacity to make, do or become something fresh and valuable with respect to others as well as ourselves’ (Pope, Reference POPE2005, p. iv). John has done this in abundance and had no doubt that the process of making and making complete made for a life worth living.