“More Uncovered”

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            In my last post, I brought up the issue of coverage – how much? How little? – and mentioned an interesting article by Shelley Reid from writing pedagogy studies (“Uncoverage in Composition Pedagogy,” Composition Studies 32/1 (2004):15-34). Reid uses the term “problem-based uncoverage” and this concept overlaps significantly with Melanie Lowe’s arguments in her Journal of Music History Pedagogy article, "Teaching Music History Today". Lowe says, “Coming to terms with my inability to survey Western music history and literature was the most liberating experience of my teaching career. To be sure, I still teach the usual assortment of music major survey courses, and I still use A History of Western Music and the Norton Anthology as my required textbooks. But when facing the task of taking my students on a mythical journey from Euripides to Bright Sheng, I have thrown up my hands and surrendered. I have given up.” (46) Instead, Lowe has made the decision to jettison supporting composers and condense the coverage of certain topics in order to gain space in her syllabus for projects that unfold over several class meetings and which focus on a particular problem or issue that will allow students to experience group and/or writing-based assignments that will allow for moments of reflection and experimentation.

            The rationale for this leads directly into the second of Lowe’s challenges: that of presenting music history in a way that allows for the subjectivities of our students to engage with the material in meaningful and enriching ways. “The real challenge for teachers of music history is to put this history in direct dialogue with our contemporary, everyday lives—to make music history not just musically relevant, but intellectually relevant, politically relevant, sexually relevant, spiritually relevant, psychologically relevant, even ecologically relevant not just in the ‘there and then’ of history but in the ‘here and now’ of today”.(46) These projects take the form of using small writing assignments, group and full class discussion, and peer review to allow students to investigate how their own current ideas of music’s function and meaning in society are determined by the music of the past and yet also differ significantly, highlighting the historical divide between “us” and “them.”

For Lowe, the sacrifice of coverage and teaching of detail is well worth it. Students may not study a Haydn piano sonata, but they can, “articulate how and why such issues, concepts, and ideas as those encountered in the history of Western European music have value in their everyday lives today—as musicians, students, responsible citizens, and thinking and sensitive human beings. Is this not more valuable than mastering a plethora of musical-historical facts? The question, of course, is one of quantity: how much information—how many facts per se—do our undergraduate students need to have at their fingertips to be able to think intelligently, meaningfully, and humanely about music? Perhaps far fewer than we may think.”(55)

To elucidate her ideas, Lowe describes three assignments that she uses during her unit on the Enlightenment and the First Viennese School that unfold over several class meetings. For example, the first of these assignments asks students to reflect in depth on what it means for a piece to be considered “high art” and whether light, entertaining music can fit into this category. Students write a short answer by answering several questions around this issue.  Lowe then uses students’ writing to fuel a class discussion, which she then steers into channels that allow students, through debate and disagreement, to become aware of their own “musical-historical prejudices and to think about how such prejudices inform their broader aesthetic worldviews. Only by becoming aware of these kinds of biases can they avoid anachronistic thinking in the music history classroom or elsewhere,” a necessary attitude for the music history student that Lowe argues cannot be easily taught through lecture.(48) This assignment opens students to a greater understanding of Haydn as both an important, canonic composer, and yet one who also realized the opportunities inherent in the composition and publication of accessibly, easy music designed for new kinds of late 18^th century audiences to both hear and play.

Of course, the “how much” is an extremely debatable variable in these discussions, and I’m hoping many of my readers voice their opinions in the comment section. Another blog post is in order, absolutely – what is essential material in the teaching of music history? How much can we jettison in order to make room for deeper encounters? What needs to stay, at all costs? This will be a question at the forefront of my mind as I sit down to tackle the semester’s course schedules. Will you be thinking about the same?

Uncoverage

It’s January, and I’m sure all of us are busily preparing for the Spring 2013 semester, if our semester hasn’t already started. I am teaching courses this Spring I have taught several times before, and so I’m trying to shake things up a little bit, for my sake as well as for my students’. I am excited by the idea of incorporating more writing into my courses, and figuring out assignments that will deepen my students’ involvement with the material we are covering. They may not appreciate the extra writing they will have to do, but I have goals. I want them to “learn the history,” of course, but I also want them to think about how the music we are studying from the past and the broader issues involved in this music can be meaningful for them outside of the music history classroom. I worry about how superficial most of their learning really is!

To address these issues, however, takes time - both my preparation time and actual classroom time - commodities of which I and many other junior faculty members have little. Something needs to give, and it takes an act of faith and even bravery to make the commitment to following a path that is going to require compromises with the standard model of music history teaching. I feel that now is the time to try this out – I’ll write over the semester on what I am trying and how it is all going!

It was refreshing, then, to read Melanie Lowe’s description of her personal struggles to break with her own mentoring models in teaching and come to terms with her own pedagogical voice by realizing that sometimes she needed to do LESS. I find Lowe’s tale of liberation extremely validating to discovering my own pedagogical voice as a “bad” teacher, an ambivalent rebel against long-standing ideas of what it means to be a good musicologist at the expense of being an effective teacher.

In her article "Teaching Music History Today" Lowe defines two fundamental challenges that resonate strongly as I have been thinking through the coming semester’s course schedules. The first is to resist the pressure, implicit and explicit, to “cover it all” in a music history survey – something we might call the “full coverage model of music” history. Instead, we might borrow from E. Shelley Reid, who calls for an “uncoverage model” in her essay “Uncoverage in Composition Pedagogy.” (E. Shelley Reid, “Uncoverage in Composition Pedagogy,” Composition Studies 32/1 (2004):15-34)  While Reid is addressing teachers of introductory courses to the teaching of writing, many of her points are extremely valid for any sort of introductory course, music history included. At one point in her article she says, “As we develop and improve courses …then, I argue that we need—very deliberately, publicly, and collectively—to focus on uncoverage, to emphasize discoveries that lead to long-term learning over immediate competencies. That is… as an intellectual engagement rather than an inoculation, as practice in a way of encountering the world rather than mastery of skills or facts, as preparation for a lifetime of thinking.” (20) She goes on to argue that, “deliberate uncoverage pedagogies help us resist by foregrounding Donald Schön’s reflection-in-action as a goal…this is equally as valuable as the goals of schema and repertoire that a coverage-based (model) provides.” (20) Schemas in this sense are basically learned patterns we use over and over again to help us to understand new experiences and encounters, and repertoires are behaviors that have worked in the past in such situations. The issue is the extent to which these responses become fixed and rigid

             For me, reading Reid validates my idea that doing less might actually have value for my students and might heighten the kinds of learning that might happen in my classroom. Shelley advocates for a classroom situation where the kinds of learning are broad-based, focused not only on the transmission of schema and repertoire (and the dual sense of this word for music history professors is particularly appropriate!), but also the exploration of how aspects explored in the classroom can be brought into the student’s outside world, both critically and ethically.

            More on Melanie Lowe’s article coming up!

Do you ever struggle with the balance between covering the material you feel you need to teach, and the urge to cover less to make time and space for deeper encounters? How do you deal with this juggling act?

First Questions

Teachers look out at the faces of their students in the classroom all the time. Which student will I call upon?  Who has a question? Are they done with their quiz? So often, however, we look without noticing what our students are feeling and thinking as they sit in their often-uncomfortable seats. The bigger the class, the easier it is not to see them and instead sense them as a monolithic “something out there.” Every now and then, though, I look, and while sometimes I see students caught up in the music we are studying and the ideas works of art engender, often I see boredom, I see lack of engagement, or I see occasional panic. Worse, I think, is when I focus on faces while playing a piece of music I find beautiful or exciting, and I see the blankness of students who are obviously  not listening on even a basic level. What possibly could be getting in the way of the human capacity to hear and respond to music?  The music may usually be outside their normal listening habits, but still – Schubert? Josquin? Puccini? Bach? Vaughan Williams? What’s not to love?

        

As I look more, I begin to question more. Because of this questioning, gradually over the last few years, I have increasingly been challenged to examine whether methods by which I was taught and with which I have continued to teach music history are the best way to reach the kinds of students that I have been encountering in my classes. More and more the canon is an unknown territory for my students, for whom the value of the music of the past needs justification and cannot be assumed. I could bow to the subtle persuasion of their implicit, and sometime explicit, demand to be “let off the hook” from engaging with this history. But I also feel the pressure to be a “good” music history teacher, to pass on knowledge I was given by my teachers/mentors to my students and to act as a conduit of a body of knowledge and aesthetic experience from the past to the future. So I rely on a persona that I have adopted (and adapted) from my own teachers, as a way of shoring up doubts I often have about my teaching methods and the goals I have for what happens in my classroom.

I have a huge respect for my teachers/mentors. But is the comfort zone of adopting the persona of these mentors on my part an adequate justification for often failing my students? I am not so sure anymore.

I wish that my own struggle to define myself as a teacher of music history at the beginning of the 21^st century and to come to terms with students who are less naturally-inclined to respect the canon was a personal struggle only. The issue, though, is a disciplinary-wide one. This isn’t simply a problem of a generational divide, where an older generation clings to out-dated methods of teaching while the younger generation challenge their elders’ pedagogical assumptions much in the same way they do their critical and research stances. In reality, even younger colleagues often boast of their Herculean pedagogical struggles to hold their students to this path, despite themselves. The recounting of their labors often then devolves into a recounting of how unprepared, unresponsive and unwilling to work their students are (unfortunately, sometimes true!). While alternative pedagogical models may come up in conversation, the possibilities are pushed aside as not being rigorous, lowering standards, and not living up to the inheritance passed down to them by our mentors! Is it simply tradition? Is it a reverence and appreciation for a canon in Western art music that is a threatened entity in contemporary society, and so must be protected? Is it laziness and/or overwork? It is probably a combination of all of these things and many others as well.

So again and again, as my colleagues and I discuss our teaching, I hear implicit and explicit suggestions that the field of  music history is a really hard one, and we can’t really make it easier. We have a job to do, and that task is to get these students to know something about classical music. We often feel alone in this, since for many of us we are just one or a few historians fighting to keep the faith in a department that is practically- and technically-oriented, whether that practicality is aimed towards performance, music education, or music therapy. In the face of opposition, we must maintain standards and not dumb it down for students, even if several of them (or more) fail each semester.

I have heard it said many times, and I know I have said it myself to my classes of undergraduates struggling to come to terms with topics such as the complexities of the performance of plainchant and polyphony during the medieval period – “All music students have to go through this. It is a rite of passage. You will survive.” We take on the attitude, in self-defense, that we got through it, and so will they, though of course if I think very hard I can remember students who did not get through it, and my success was due to a decided predilection for the kinds of historical and aesthetic considerations and the academic skills it took to do well in music history courses. I’m not sure I can even remember what it was like not to have the grasp I have now of music history, which is a shocking failure of imagination in reaching out to my students .

From such a pedagogical position riddled with defensiveness and a fear of failing our father and mother mentors, it is no surprise that the dogma of difficulty is frequently unquestioned. Exams must be hard, memorization is the central activity, contextual reading is optional, but make sure that you know every analytical point the anthology’s commentary makes about that score!

From my perspective, however, I feel that when I take on this pedagogical model and its attendant attitudes, I am in some way saying that I am not going to be the “right” kind of musicologist, the right kind of music history teacher.  Yet again, what is “right?” At this stage in my teaching career I would like to find out if I can come up with a way of making the material I teach relevant to my students, and show them that actively engaging with the music of the canon can enrich their lives. As I feel increasingly challenged to question the voice of my teachers and the very conception of the music historical enterprise that they represent, I feel that responding to students and the new ways in which they learn and think about music is incredibly important not just to me but to the future of our discipline.

What are the questions you want to ask?

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