Lucy Green is the author of a series of widely respected studies on how and why the ideology, organisation and workings of contemporary music education continue to fail the overwhelming majority of young people. Drawing on what was called in the UK the new sociology of education, Green has theorised musical meaning, knowledge/power, and experience. Moreover she has been in the forefront of seeking pedagogical alternatives to restrictive and still rather elitist practices prevalent in Britain and in much of the industrialised world. This book offers a disarmingly simple yet compelling, well theorised proposal of a music educational alternative grounded in the findings of a large-scale, multi-stage research project. In essence, the project aimed to replicate informal music learning as practised by popular musicians in a formal classroom setting.
In her introduction, Green reviews the developments of the past 40 years in Western (and Westernised) musical education. In response to the critique of educational sociologists, musical curricula have become spiced up with a variety of styles and genres which students encounter in their leisure time. The influx of popular music as well as the introduction of improvisation, composition and other forms of creative, child-centred practices undoubtedly lessened the tension between a classical music-centred educational regime and students' taste and investment in popular music. But, as Green points out, the gap has not disappeared. Many pop and rock performers complain that formal music education did not further their musical skills or stimulate their interests. More disturbingly, underprivileged and minority students perform persistently poorly and are left untouched or alienated by the current pedagogic approaches, despite the diversified music content.
In interpreting this sorry state of affairs, Green introduces the twin concepts of inter-sonic and delineated meaning. The former is derived from the inherent sonic properties of a musical idiom; the latter is the product of sociocultural contexts and associations. For instance, classical music's inter-sonic meaning is inaccessible to most students due to their lack of exposure to it outside school, whereas its delineated meaning is associated negatively, as it is, with old people and plain boredom. Pop and rock music may be more inter-sonically meaningful to them but the manner of its presentation and treatment in the classroom renders its delineated meaning less than positive due to the canonisation within popular music. In other words, for today's 13-year-old, a Pink Floyd song may be only marginally more relevant than a Mozart sonata. In a previous book, Green studied the ways popular musicians learn to sing and play instruments outside formal education. In Music, Informal Learning and the School she explores how positive inter-sonic and delineated meanings can promote the acquisition of practical musical skills and what she terms ‘critical musicality’ once that same informal method of learning is reproduced in the classroom.
Twenty-one secondary schools, 32 music teachers and over 1,500 students participated in the seven-stage project conducted in London and nearby Hertfordshire over a period of four years. The methods included both the collection of quantitative data based on surveys and qualitative data gleaned from observation by teachers, transcripts of recorded learning sessions and interviews with students and teachers. Green asked the teacher participants to turn from instructors into observers, facilitators and, eventually, assessors of their students' learning process. Students, arranged in small friendship-based groups, were virtually left alone with a musical recording (a commercial CD) and the task to ‘aurally copy’ the music they heard with the help of an array of instruments at their disposal, which they were free to choose from but in which, typically, they had had no previous training. They started with music of their own choice, ensuring familiarity with the inter-sonic meaning, and ended up, in the last stages of the project, with classical music pieces, some of which may have been known to them as soundtracks for television commercials. In between, they had a chance to compose, rehearse and perform music and, on another occasion, watch invited amateur musicians model this activity. (Although a minor point, it wasn't clear why the session with the amateur musicians followed rather than preceded the session where students were asked to create original music.)
One particularly compelling observation concerned the successful and resourceful ways students coped with a largely unstructured learning environment where initial chaos and idling gave way to effective collaborative work. No less remarkable was the way this environment proved stimulating for the creative and enthusiastic participation of students known by their teachers as passive, disaffected or rebellious. Yet the rise of these pupils' status did not imply the marginalisation of the ‘good students’, those who fared well in a conventional pedagogical setting. On the contrary, Green reports, this latter group of kids, many of whom were learning to play instruments outside school, stopped feeling shy and unappreciated about it and were able to elicit respect from their mates for their knowledge and skills.
Evidently, grandiose, nationally recognised projects like this one pose methodological challenges that complicate the assessment of the data. Green must be commended for devising a thoughtful and sophisticated plan, checking for several distorting factors (most importantly, the ‘halo’ effect) which, if left unchecked, would have eroded the credibility of some findings. In general, her data is ample and well organised to substantiate her argument. Often, however, the deployment of these data impairs the flow of her text. Young teens are seldom the most eloquent speakers, and Green's abundant use of direct, unedited quotes from them, while justified in a journal article or a dissertation, does not work well in a book.
To summarise, this is a compelling and inspiring account of an important research project meriting the attention of everyone who is interested in how teens of diverse ethnic and sociocultural backgrounds can be stimulated to approach, enjoy and appropriate multiple styles of music with a keen and analytic mind.
