Colleagues reflect

The notions of developmental progression and spiral curriculum resonated strongly with our colleagues but mainly in relation to the work of Piaget and Bruner. It is interesting to note that while the ‘new’ 1989 music curriculum documents reference a seemingly Piagetian developmental series of stages, its conceptual frame (create, recreate and appreciate as an artistic spiral) appears to reflect Bruner’s concepts and there is no reference to the ST model. Could it be that the model, underpinned as it is by Bruner and Piaget, paralleled rather than directly influenced our colleagues’ thinking?

When asked what he recalls of the model, Roger Buckton reflects ‘the concept of the “spiral curriculum” was reasonably well known and taught, but I am not sure that it was attributed solely to Swanwick and Tillman. It was one of a number of stimulating ideas in education on the scene at the time’ (Personal communication). Roger published a ‘survey of research literature’ with Stuart Manins in 1987 (Buckton & Manins, Reference Buckton and Manins1987). Entitled ‘Optimal ages and stages in developing musical activities and concepts; affective response to music; and instrumental and vocal training’, it provides an extensive review of over 130 publications. The review reflects an upsurge of interest in music education research at the time. There are brief references to Swanwick’s work from the 1970s, but the model is not included. New Zealand is geographically isolated and in those pre-digital times, academics and music educators often had to wait months for periodicals to be shipped from the northern hemisphere. While the ST model had been published the year before, it may not have made its way to New Zealand by the time the review was completed. We think it more likely however, that Buckton and Manin’s review reflects thinking ‘in parallel with’ rather than ‘influenced by’ Swanwick and Tillman’s work. It includes, for example, a comparison of Piagetan stages of intellectual development with Giblin’s stages of affective development (pp. 34-36) and focuses on children’s development of singing, playing instruments, concept formation and affective responses to music. Where it differs is that there is scant reference to creativity or composing.

Helen Willberg, also present at the 1989 conference, reflects that ‘I don’t think I took much notice of the ST model. We were very busy doing our own thing in Early Childhood. It was a very rich time with a lot of teachers engaging in a lot of interesting, creative things’ (personal communication).

Jan Bolton expressed reservations about how she perceived the model as placing students in a series of predetermined stages.

For some it seems, the ST model was viewed, albeit mistakenly, as an attempt to quantify creativity, perhaps running counter to several decades of radical progressivism in the New Zealand education system. At this point, it is helpful to place these remarks in a socio-historical context.

New Zealand music education in context

The influence of Dewey and the progressive movement in the development of the New Zealand primary and junior secondary school system between 1920 and 1960 was profound. Creative pedagogies and approaches were adopted early in the 20^th century. For example, the 1923 Music Syllabus encouraged primary schoolteachers to foster ‘musical invention’ and ‘experimentation’ (Braatvedt, Reference Braatvedt2002, p. 156-158). By the 1940s, as noted by Mutch (Reference Mutch2013):

There was strong public support for the radical, Dewey-influenced educational reforms of Labour Prime Minister Peter Fraser and Director of Education Clarence Beeby. Town Hall meetings discussing progressive educational ideals were very popular, with citizens queuing around the block to attend (Couch, Reference Couch2012). By the end of the 1940s progressive educational ideals had become orthodox, at least in the primary school sector, and were characterised by openness to teacher experimentation and variation in teaching and learning (Renwick, Reference Renwick2000; Mutch, Reference Mutch2013). For the next 30 years, under Beeby’s leadership, there was a sustained focus upon innovation and creativity in New Zealand primary schools (Richardson, Reference Richardson2012; Jones & Middleton, Reference Jones and Middleton2009). Inevitably perhaps, in harder economic times in the 1970s, and subsequently with the onset of national neoliberal reform in the late 1980s, a narrowing of the curriculum to measurable literacy and numeracy outcomes marginalised the arts almost to the point of extinction in primary schools (Webb, Reference Webb2016).

Nevertheless, a strong undercurrent of liberal progressivism remains, kept alive by teachers’ passion, decades of accepted and established practice, and a strong ethos of volunteerism (Mutch, Reference Mutch2013; Thorpe, Gain & Wise, Reference Thorpe, Gain, Wise, Ziegenmeyer, Fautley, Daveney and Growin-press). It seems likely that notions of creative freedom and the right to experiment in natural ways ran counter to what might have been perceived as an established model of development in the Western music tradition.

Swanwick’s influence upon teaching and curriculum development

Graham Parsons, a pre-service lecturer in music education at Palmerston North Teachers College, recalls returning to New Zealand in 1979 after studying with Swanwick and teaching in the UK:

Aligned with the prevailing creative orthodoxy, Parsons notes that under Swanwick’s influence, he began to champion a primarily ‘hands-on’ approach:

Into the next decade there is some evidence that Swanwick’s visit and the model left their mark on the next iteration of the school arts curriculum. Trevor Thwaites attended the 1989 conference as a secondary schoolteacher and went on to teach secondary pre-service teacher education at Auckland University. Trevor was also lead writer for music in the ‘new new’ arts curriculum developed in the late 1990s and mandated in 2000 (Ministry of Education, 2000)Footnote ² . Trevor recalls being impressed by what Swanwick had to say in 1989 and was familiar with and maintained an interest in his work. He suggests Swanwick ‘had an influence on the development of that curriculum document’ [MoE, 2000) (personal communication). The underlying concept of a spiral of development is present as well as the transition from sensory, manipulative and personal expressiveness stages towards the systematic. For example, within two of the four strands of the 2000 curriculum Developing Ideas in Music and Developing Practical Knowledge in Music, we see movement through the eight curriculum levels (which span the 13 years of schooling) from explore, respond, experiment, select and organise sounds towards express, represent, identify, describe, and later transcribe, improvise, arrange, and compose.

In 2002, the model and Swanwick’s subsequent ideas were brought to the attention of New Zealand secondary music teachers. Thwaites published an article on the model in the magazine MusicTeach which he and Maree Ferens edited and published for secondary music teachers (Thwaites, Reference Thwaites2002). Trevor outlined the central concepts of the original model along with Swanwick’s 1996 comments: ‘Swanwick has urged us to think of the spiral more as layers rather than as stages of phases of learning’ (Thwaites, Reference Thwaites2002, p. 4). Trevor also recalls ‘I used to use the Tillman Swanwick spiral of development model with my secondary grads’.

In the next section, former secondary schoolteacher and university music education lecturer Stuart Wise reflects on the influence of the ST model on the development of his music education thinking.

Reflection: Stuart Wise

Swanwick and Tillman’s sequence of musical development was not something that I was aware of until later in my career. While the notion of recurring spirals has underpinned my professional and pedagogical learning, like my colleagues above, I believe I was more influenced by Dewey, Piaget and Bruner. However, over time I can trace the model’s underlying conceptual frame in parallel with my music pedagogies and philosophies.

Like many beginning music teachers in the early 1980s, I embarked on my teaching career with scant knowledge of educational theory. I travelled to the UK for my ‘OE’ (Overseas Experience) and was teaching secondary music when the GCSE curriculum was introduced in the late 1980s. The prescribed music content for the new GCSE was a revelation! While in England I attended every available professional learning course and could speculate that I absorbed Swanwick’s pluralistic vision ‘second hand’ as it were. I returned to New Zealand determined to introduce something similar. Central to my thoughts was the inclusion of solo and/or group performance and providing opportunities for teaching composition in a way that had some relevance for students. As we have explained in a recent publication (Thorpe, Gain, & Wise, Reference Thorpe, Gain, Wise, Ziegenmeyer, Fautley, Daveney and Growin-press), this was largely achieved in the late 1980s and early 1990s through a grass roots, NZSME-led revolt by secondary and tertiary music educators against the status quo.

I now return to ST model to explore the developmental modes (p. 332). I will compare their descriptions of the idiomatic, symbolic and systematic modes to my classroom pedagogy as it developed over four decades.

Swanwick and Tillman describe the idiomatic mode as a stage where students tend to move towards a more mature musical style or idiom (p. 333) and they point out that popular music can be especially influential. When preparing composition activities for Year 9 students (aged 12–13 years) it became clear to me that they were most interested in writing songs in a pop/rock idiom. At this level, students tended to use simple chord progressions such as 12 bar blues or I, VI, IV and V progressions but could introduce 7^th chords and suspensions. Rhythmic patterns tended to be relatively conventional and stylistic, but at times more sophisticated syncopated patterns were evident.

In the symbolic mode, Swanwick and Tillman describe strong personal identification with particular pieces of music, turns of phrase and harmonic progressions. They describe musical values becoming more idiosyncratic, and a commitment to music based on an intensity of experience that is felt as unique and highly significant (p. 333). These descriptions were consistent with my experience of working with students at Year 10 (aged 14–15 years) students. Students at this level chose to study music as an optional subject. They had an interesting mix of skills and experiences and some were highly skilled performers on traditional orchestral instruments or on electric guitar, bass guitar and drums. Most were passionate about their compositions and, in sometimes there was an interesting ‘cross-pollination’ of skills and knowledge.

At the systematic level Swanwick and Tillman refer to the ‘fully fledged musical person’ (p. 334) who is aware of the stylistic principles underlying chosen idioms. Students can create compositions based on organised groups of musical materials and have a strong value commitment to music which involves expanding musical possibilities. Such description would be consistent with the expectations of composition at Year 11 (aged 15-16 years) as required by the National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA) which was introduced in New Zealand in 2002 (McPhail, Thorpe, & Wise, Reference McPhail, Thorpe and Wise2018). Expectations for composition at this level include awareness of ‘stylistic principles underlying the chosen idioms’ (p. 334) and students would be expected to display consciously organised musical material in their work.

The New Zealand music education context in more recent times

Approaches to secondary music education, particularly school qualifications, broadly followed UK models until the early 1990s. Aotearoa New Zealand then struck out independently on a journey of quite radical educational reforms, strongly influenced by new, complex and often contradictory global forces (McPhail, Thorpe, & Wise, Reference McPhail, Thorpe and Wise2018). Accounts given by Wise, Parsons and Thwaites above indicate how educational ideas were becoming global, but the ideas themselves were also responses to deeper national, cultural, political and economic forces. Chief amongst these were postmodern, neocolonial and neoliberal ways of thinking. The impacts of neoliberalism in education have been well covered in the literature (e.g., Harvey, Reference Harvey2005; Humpage, Reference Humpage2015) and for the New Zealand context more generally and in relation to music education by McPhail and McNeill (Reference McPhail and McNeillin-press). The profound impact of colonisation and responses to its effects in education is also a vast literature (e.g., Smith, Tuck, & Yang, Reference Smith, Tuck and Yang2018; Morgan & Manuel, Reference Morgan and Manuel2020), and the challenges for New Zealand as a country, as well as in music education and the arts, are ongoing (Thorpe, Gain, & Wise, Reference Thorpe, Gain, Wise, Ziegenmeyer, Fautley, Daveney and Growin-press; Hindle et al., Reference Hindle, Hynds, Phillips and Rameka2015). Key ideas from postmodernism are also embedded in educational narratives in New Zealand, epistemological relativism being one of them, particularly in relation to Mātauranga Māori (see below).

A universal model of musical development does not appear then to be a comfortable fit with any of the three dominant discourses nor with progressivism of earlier times. In the case of both postmodernism and neoliberalism, but for different reasons, the concept of universalism is rejected in favour of the local. A neocolonial lens would critique the model as a Eurocentric one. As we have discussed earlier, progressive approaches are deeply embedded in the psyche of New Zealand’s approach to education, particularly in the primary school. Moreover, New Zealand schoolteachers have a very high level of practice autonomy framed by a highly permissive curriculum (Thorpe & Kinsella, Reference Thorpe and Kinsella2020). In such an autonomous space, one can imagine teachers picking up ideas in an eclectic way if they can see any benefits for their students. But where might they come into contact with the ideas of an academic model or are the ideas in a generalised form, already part of the common knowledge of educational practice? For example, it is now generally agreed that music education in the early years will be primarily concerned with ‘sensory exploration and the encouragement of manipulative control’ and ‘by the age of 10 or so we would be looking to further the production and recognition of musical speculation, an awareness of the uniquely contextual nature of contrasts and repetitions essential to musical form’ (Swanwick & Tillman, Reference Swanwick and Tillman1986, pp. 335-336). The ST model certainly has commonalities with Piagetian theories which are still referred to in pre-service teacher courses and the transition of the model through various stages towards abstraction and creative control align with other taxonomies in common use such as Bloom’s (Krathwohl, Reference Krathwohl2002) and the SOLO taxonomy (Biggs & Collis, Reference Biggs and Collis1982).

Wider considerations

As Swanwick asked us in 1989, what of our human similarities, which may go deeper than that our enculturation? What might a model of musical development offer in postmodern times? While it is currently unfashionable to promote the concept of universalism, beyond the political, perhaps varied cultural content and musical practices, respectfully and sensitively utilised and linked to a theory of human musical development, might enable a deeper and richer form of intercultural musicianship to emerge. For example, a number of scholars have begun to explore the biological basis of the human capacity for music. These scholars, drawing on genetics, psychology and neuroscience, provide perspectives somewhat different from the prevailing culturalist view. They argue that while music is both ubiquitous and varied, its basis may be found in certain cognitive structures interrelated with human behaviours that are linked to natural selection (Geary, Reference Geary2002; Morley, Reference Morley2014; Peretz, Reference Peretz2006; Jackendoff & Lerdahl, Reference Jackendoff and Lerdahl2006). In other words, music may be in our genes (Peretz, Reference Peretz2006). Ravignani, Delgado, and Kirby (Reference Ravignani, Delgado and Kirby2016), for example, suggest that ‘music exhibits some cross-cultural similarities, despite its variety across the world. Evidence from a broad range of human cultures suggests the existence of musical universals, here defined as strong regularities across cultures above chance’ (p. 1).

The model also notes the transition from personal subjective understandings to social responses that acknowledge ‘external’ musical conventions (from the left to the right side of the model – see p. 331) as well as an upward movement in the spiral model towards meta-cognition. The conventions Swanwick and Tillman no doubt had in mind were Western ones but perhaps, the concept of conventions may be sufficiently abstract to be successfully and authentically interpreted from diverse cultural perspectives. Swanwick (Reference Swanwick2002) also notes that the stages are not rigidly linked with ages and suggests ‘once students have developed beyond early childhood, they may move freely between all or any of the layers, provided the activity is rich enough in musical possibilities’ (p. 241). However, Hentschke (Reference Hentschke1993) argues that ‘in order to reach the higher stages of the spiral, systematic engagement with music is of paramount importance. The more one has access to music in a systematic way, the more one has the chance to develop musical understanding’ (pp. 258-259). Therefore, a teacher’s knowledgeable interventions are pivotal for musical development. We note the tension here between offering learners the freedom to explore open-ended learning and the possible imposition of predetermined learning trajectories in the form of a learning outcome. This is an ever-present tension in the rapid cycles of New Zealand educational debate. Where progressivism is so deeply embedded in the national psyche, a developmental model will always be regarded with some degree of suspicion.

During the 1989 conference in New Zealand, Swanwick attended a workshop by Māori musician and educator the late Hirini (Syd) Melbourne on music, the sounds of the natural world and Te Ao Māori (Māori world). Swanwick later drew direct comparison between the ST model (largely derived from Tillman’s doctoral research into British children’s music making) and what he experienced in the workshop: ‘We found the same sequence……Out of these copies of natural sound grows the element of human expression’ (Swanwick, Reference Swanwick1994, p.23). Nevertheless, there is tension between the universalism implied by a developmental model (for all children, of every culture?) and our recognition that there are other ways to think about knowledge and learning. Indeed, the authors continue to debate the relationship between powerful knowledge, social justice, colonisation, cultural relativism and knowledge equivalence. When considering the ST model, David Lines, current lecturer in music education in the Music School at the University of Auckland suggests that ‘the idea of “ages and stages” is less of interest, with more attention turned to the diversity of children and cultural differences’ (personal communication). In Aotearoa New Zealand, we have an increasingly bicultural focus upon how Te Ao Māori (Māori world view), Toi Māori (Māori Arts) and Mātauranga Māori (Māori knowledge) perspectives, indigenous concepts, philosophies and ways of knowing might be authentically woven into arts curriculum and assessment structures (Hindle et al., Reference Hindle, Hynds, Phillips and Rameka2015; Reihana-Morunga, 2020). The New Zealand school curriculum (Ministry of Education, 2007) is currently undergoing a 5-year-long ‘refresh’ where Mātauranga Māori is explicitly included as ‘foundational learning’ (Ministry of Education, 2021). Our national secondary school qualification, the NCEA, is also currently under major review. New draft music assessments incorporate tikanga (Māori values and practices), traditional instruments (taonga puoro) and Māori music as curriculum content (Ministry of Education, 2020). However, as dance education researcher Reihana-Morunga (2020) observes, ‘If [non-Māori] teachers are not confident with delivering Māori content, students can be faced with cultural representations that lack intrinsic cultural values and processes’ (p. 3). Many New Zealand music teachers do not have this knowledge or experience, yet. These are significant and unique challenges for us.