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
21st 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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