Why is music significant in life and education? What shall we teach? How? To whom? Where and when?
The praxial philosophy espoused in Music Matters: A Philosophy of Music Education offers an integrated sociocultural, artistic, participatory, and ethics-based concept of the natures and values of musics, education, musicing and listening, community music, musical understanding, musical emotions, creativity, and more.
Embodied-enactive concepts of action, perception, and personhood weave through the book's proposals. Practical principles for curriculum and instruction emerge from the authors' praxial themes.
Thank you for your voice. A song is much more than a song. And Franklin tapped into tone, texture, lyrics, and more for all sorts of messages and meanings. As Simon Frith notes, it’s not just what singers sing, “but the way they sing it.” And Franklin’s voice–her Respect–isn’t just a voice, but a voice that embodies self-respect, and therefore demands and commands self-other respect.
Thank you for your spirit. Franklin’s regal-ness shown through each and every appearance, performance, and recording. Yet, her overwhelming joy in life, as expressed through her appearances, performances, and recordings, helped listeners experience the thrill of the moment and beyond; helped listeners understand and appreciate a sense of freedom; helped listeners engage with the values of feminism; helped listeners tap into their sexuality; and helped listeners feel love.
Thank you for your activism. Whether it was to lend support or a song to a cause, you were there.
Music educators, as you start to plan out your school year: How will you celebrate Franklin’s voice, her passion, and her ability to stand up for each and all?
Tomorrow is Mother’s Day. And that’s reason enough to consider some connections between music, mothers, and their children.
By the last trimester, an unborn child has fully functioning hearing. An unborn can recognize a mother’s voice, and can differentiate this voice from any other. As Ruth Fridman explains, singing to an unborn child establishes “a prenatal bond which contains tenderness on the part of the parents to be, a promise of protection, and the wish to see and hold the baby in their arms . . . It is of great significance for babies to hear music . . . during the gestation period. The mother’s emotional expressions benefit both herself and her baby.”
Moreover, parents and other adult caregivers are predisposed to interact with their infants by means of emotionally charged proto-musical vocalizations, or “motherese” (sometimes called baby talk, parentese, and so on). Motherese combines variations of pitch (melodic-type contours), timbre, rhythm, and accents that are the sonic building blocks of more sophisticated adult singing (such as lullabies). Because humans acquire the ability to distinguish changes in pitch and loudness in utero, it’s not surprising that infants learn to match some proto-musical elements after repeated parent-infant interactions.
Caregivers use motherese to sooth, arouse, communicate, and play in caring and loving ways with their pre-linguistic infants. The musical-affective characteristics of adult-infant interactions establish and strengthen emotional bonds between caregivers and infants. Motherese also includes proto-musical play, and proto-musical play gives infants a way of engaging in and acquiring the foundations of social competence and confidence in a safe, risk-free, enjoyable, and participatory context that is fundamental to the development of their social cognition and “domain-general cultural competence.” If such emotional bonding or “primary intersubjectivity” fails to occur via early motherese and proto-musical interactions, infants may suffer.
The values of motherese are clear. In a highly social species like ours, an infant’s chances of surviving depend on “fitness” beyond physical fitness, namely, “cultural fitness” and social-emotional fitness. These qualities follow from parent-infant bonding and primary intersubjectivity and anchor an individual’s ability to interact cooperatively with others and contribute to group cohesion.
Lullabies Matter
There are numerous projects around the world that support the above. For example, in a women’s prison near Oporto, Portugal, early childhood music specialists help incarcerated mothers learn lullabies they can sing to their infants to promote mother-infant bonding.
The Lullaby Project pairs pregnant women and new mothers with professional artists to write and sing personal lullabies for their babies, supporting maternal health, aiding child development, and strengthening the bond between parent and child. In New York City, the project reaches mothers in hospitals, homeless shelters, schools, and at Rikers Island Correctional Facility. Extending across the country and through several international pilot programs, the Lullaby Project enables partner organizations to support families in their own communities.
Hear Rhiannon Giddens performing one of the lullabies, “Mansell’s Waltz,” from the new album, released April 20, 2018 for Decca Records.
Meet the Killard House School. Located in Donaghadee, North Ireland, the Killiard House School’s motto is: “Together We Can.” The school is dedicated to providing for special needs students with moderate learning difficulties, speech language difficulties, and those on the autistic spectrum. The teachers, staff, administrators, and community work together as a team—or “family,” as the school states—to meet the diverse needs of their students.
Music Education
In December, 2016, the school’s choir programmed Leonard Coen’s “Hallelujah” with Christmas-themed lyrics. The soloist, then 10-year old Kaylee Rogers, is a Killard House School student and a member of the school’s choir. About her performance, the Principal of Killard House School Collin Miller stated: “For a child who came in and wouldn’t really talk, wouldn’t really read out in class, to stand and perform in front of an audience is amazing.” Music education can transform lives. This performance is just one example.
On August 16, 1967 Martin Luther King, Jr. stated these prophetic words:
What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive, and that love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is love correcting everything that stands against love. And this is what we must see as we move on.
Yes, power without love IS abusive. As hopeless as things may seem at any given point in time, we should turn, again, to Dr. King who urged: “Our dreams will sometimes be shattered and our ethereal hopes blasted. … Difficult and painful as it is, we must walk on in the days ahead with an audacious faith in the future.”
Can Music Help?
As we state in Music Matters, music making and listening can contribute to a sense of cooperation, bonding, and interrelatedness. The Playing for Change organization knows this well, and takes this even further. By uniting diverse musical communities through song, the group also values and appreciates the integrity and diversity of the musical fabrics of various musical communities.
As the organization states: “Playing For Change is a movement created to inspire and connect the world through music. The idea for this project came from a common belief that music has the power to break down boundaries and overcome distances between people.” The organization travels the globe “filming musicians in their natural environments … spreading peace through music … creating Songs Around the World, and building a global family.”
What might the world look like if we all honored and celebrated each other through song?
We have faith in the future; most of all, we have faith in all the peoples of the world. So, in celebration of each and all, we hope “Gimme Shelter” will further inspire faith.
“It is in the shelter of each other that the people live.” ~ Irish Proverb
Given that it’s the holiday season, we thought it important to ask, again: Why engage in music education? One answer is that music education potentially paves the way to a “good life” — a life of happiness, creativity, fellowship, personal meaningfulness, self-knowledge, care for oneself and others, ethical relationships, and other values that occur at the intersection of music making and human life. In combination, these values make up the ancient Greek concept of “eudaimonia.” Music education philosopher Wayne Bowman puts it this way:
Music, and therefore education in it, is crucial to human flourishing, or eudaimonia as the ancient Greeks called it. Music teaches us things about our common humanity that are worth knowing, and renders us less vulnerable to forces that subvert or compromise human well-being. Studying and making music changes who we are and what we expect from life.
Do we know examples of music education that can lead to eudaimonia for every person? Yes. There are many. Here’s one.
Music and a “Good Life”
Meet music educator Adam Goldberg. Goldberg teaches at PS 177 in Queens, NY, a school that serves exceptional children. The mission of the school is based on its “new core standards” or CARE: Communicating, Applauding, Researching, and Educating. All these “standards” are, frankly, what good teaching-and-learning should do: harness the potential of the entire community to help students be their most complete selves, both now and for the future. Goldberg sees music making as a fundamental means for achieving this important lifelong goal.
Through active music making, Goldberg’s students not only achieve musical understanding. They achieve a pathway to eudaimonia, and a shared engagement with/for others through music.
Thank you, Adam Goldberg!
Thank you to all music educators who care for others and their communities…
Excited to join the Rhode Island Music Education Association at their Conference: Music for Every Child: Diversity and Social Consciousness in Music Education. There, we’ll be speaking on: Advancing Social Justice through Music Education.
Common sense notions of “social justice” imply the uncovering of injustices, imbalances, and untruths in order to support and promote a more equitable social order. Beyond conventional wisdom, what is “social justice” and can we conceive of social justice and “artivism” for music teaching and learning in concrete ways? Our presentation will focus primarily on philosophical underpinnings for advancing social justice through music education. But we will provide practical examples and strategies for justice-ing music teaching and learning.
Come join us!!!!
PROVIDENCE, RI – On Saturday January 13, 2018, the Rhode Island College Department of Music, Theater, and Dance, the Rhode Island College School of Social Work, and the Rhode Island Music Education Association will co-sponsor a conference titled “Music for Every Child: Diversity and Social Consciousness in Music Education” in the John Nazarian Center for the Performing Arts, 600 Mount Pleasant Ave., Providence, Rhode Island. Designed for music educators at all levels, this conference will combine national, regional, and local experts in the fields of music education, social work, and community-driven arts programs to explore how to meet the musical and social needs of the diversity of students in southeast New England.
Topics will include social justice, behavioral supports and resources, and social and emotional learning, among others.
For more information, a detailed list of sessions and speakers, and to register for the event, please visit www.rimea.org/pd. The $40 registration fee includes lunch. College students may register for a reduced price of $15.
Contact
To learn more about this event, please contact: Dr. Robert Franzblau, Professor of Music, Rhode Island College; 600 Mt. Pleasant Ave., Providence, RI 02908; Office: 401-456-9514; rfranzblau@ric.edu
In his recent book, Remixing the Classroom, Professor Randall Allsup offers a postmodern concept of school music education. Unfortunately, his book contains many falsehoods about the praxial philosophy of music education. In our reply to Allsup, we analyze and refute his distortions of the praxial philosophy in Music Matters (2015).
In the midst of today’s tragic social, political, racial, gendered, and other conflicts, can amateur and professional music makers and school and community music programs contribute to positive social and community transformations?
Yes. To demonstrate our solidarity with and support for all those who are suffering we’ll post one example of active music making for positive social transformations every day until the American Labor Day Holiday (09/04/2017), at which point we’ll resume our regular schedule of posts on related topics.
In the midst of today’s tragic social, political, racial, gendered, and other conflicts, can amateur and professional music makers and school and community music programs contribute to positive social and community transformations?
Yes. To demonstrate our solidarity with and support for all those who are suffering we’ll post one example of active music making for positive social transformations every day until the American Labor Day Holiday (09/04/2017), at which point we’ll resume our regular schedule of posts on related topics.
