VI Colloquium: October 22 - 25, 1998: Toronto, ON
"Cultural and Social Influences on Music Teaching and Learning"


Is there a world standard of musicianship?
J Terry Gates

"You can do anything you want, as long as it is in good taste."
Suzanne Sawa, reporting in the Toronto Colloquium, on advice she received from
her Egyptian drumming teacher on the occasion of her first public appearance
as an improvising drummer in an Egyptian ensemble.

Question no 2(b) is problematic, since it attaches subsequent answers to "traditions associated with aesthetic theories" rather than to let musicianship find its own level. The question biases the answer. As it emerged from the Toronto colloquium, this question may be better asked as follows: What meanings do people give to the term 'standards of musicianship'? What relationships, if any, do such meanings have to standards of musicianship preserved by musical traditions that aesthetic theories attempt to illuminate? What does it mean to "...do anything you want as long as it is in good taste"?

Kathy Armstrong, reporting on her attempt to learn one song from two west African singers, noted that she judged a singer to be more skilled whose vocal production was clearest in pitch and tone quality, even though both singers were considered musically knowledgeable within their societies. In probing this response to these singers, Kathy admitted that she learned more easily from the clearer singer. Clarity, in Kathy's view, may be a musicianship attribute "guided by traditions associated with aesthetic theories," where the music is an object to be made clear to perceivers, rather than an event through which the event's makers intend to pull those nearby into participation. "You're trying," as she noted, is high praise from west African musical experts, and Kenyan musicians with whom I came in contact in July 1998 expressed through interpreters that they were shamed by the fact that the "audience" listened rather than danced or sang along. They felt that their musical standards were not up to the relevant task: our participation. "You're trying" in the western musical tradition accompanies the usually unspoken evaluation that one has failed to reach acceptable musicianship standards. These contrasting systems provide the motivation for Ideal 2(b).

The bedrock musicianship standard

If a "world standard" of musicianship is to be sought, then the human body is a good place to start looking. If one starts with the human, Roberta Lamb pointed out, a theory of musicianship must grapple early on with issues of gender, sexuality and a rejection of the mind-body dualism. Considering the body and its socio-biological consequences for the moment, however, Timothy Rice reported on his study of music in rural Bulgaria at the Wesleyan Symposium in 1984, noting that the men played instruments and the women sang. Searching for an explanation led him to realize that the women worked with their hands all day long, but could sing while they worked, and the men tended the flocks and had their hands free all day long. Rural Bulgarian men, in general, could play instruments while they worked. Gender, power relationships, economics, divisions of labor, and more enter this understanding and an observation confined to traditional issues of musicology would have missed this determining point.

In Toronto, David Elliott showed a portion of a video in which two expert Irish fiddlers performed traditional fiddling tunes. Throughout, they used first position, a bodily action associated with violin technique in the European-American aesthetic-theory tradition. This would be unremarkable, except that they played the whole tune in first position, largely alternating back and forth between the Ionian (major diatonic) scale of the open string and the Dorian (minor) scale that results from starting a scale with the first finger but leaving the others formed as for the Ionian scale. The most parsimonious explanation for the tonal materials in this case (scales, harmonic schemes) was not the application of some western-civilization theory of harmony, but the human body and how it produces music when it is used in that way. Timothy Rice reported that much Bulgarian music for the guiton (a type of bagpipe) is derived from the actions of the fingers when the guiton is played with the fingers, not deliberately "with the head."

David Elliott argued for a fluid musicianship, one that includes the capacity to hear musical structure in permeable, massively parallel but interactive layers. Such a model can be used to analyze musicality as the layers are revealed. But musicianship flows. Musicianship standards must include hearing musically, but the kind of participatory flow that forms the bedrock musicianship standard in most places cannot be reduced to hearing-then-performing linearity. Wayne Bowman argued for "corporeal cognition" as a preferred model for understanding musicianship.

George Sawa agreed. He reported (and showed) that expert Egyptian musicians espouse an aural/oral musicianship, one that keeps participants "connected" with complex musical events neither through analysis nor synthesis alone, but through synergy -- keeping one's place "by ear" and by intuition, even when keeping one's place can be done through analysis. Brian Katz and Kathy Armstrong extended this intuitive sense to "keeping one's place" with other performers and with the rhythmic pulse -- blues and African dancing had characteristic synergies of downward weight the musical contribution of which grew in importance to the extent that participants felt that weight together.

Roberta Lamb and Eleanor Stubley emphasized that by acknowledging the body's role in musicianship we cannot limit the explanation to body mechanics, even when such explanations rely on or use descriptions of technique or, more appropriately, "techne" -- for which, see Tom Regelski's paper elsewhere in this web site. They insisted that we search deeper. Roberta pointed out that "being a good drum" (William Malm) is a musicianship standard that refers to expert drumming and that this standard transcends physical explanations of musical materials. John Shepherd agreed, noting that bodily awareness is a primary construct underlying musical meaning, therefore of meaningful standards of musicianship. And, as John Searle points out, the mind is in the brain and the brain is a bodily organ.

Aesthetic-theory standards of musicianship depend upon a mind-body dualism that no longer explains what we know about human functioning, musical or otherwise.

So what's a musician to do?

Real people, really doing music, creates a cyclical shape to musicianship (Eleanor Stubley) and this has what Eleanor is beginning to call "spin." Being musical "spins off" musical ideas and actions (including performing techniques) that others pull in by reason of their own musical intentions. Spin creates shared events by the centrifugal force of its action, and it depends on centripetal force to keep things integrated; one would not exist, at least for long, without the other.

This extends to musical traditions, since musical traditions live in people and their actions. Traditions "spin off" musical ideas and actions, not in the abstract but in the phenomenological. As Keith Swanwick pointed out in his anchor paper for this Ideal:

There is a constant trade in the marketplace of musical ideas. In this limited sense at least musical ideas transcend their origin. Although musical processes arise within specific social contexts they are not trapped within them.

This should not surprise us if we remember that experiences are mediated by interpreting minds. These "interpreting minds" include the mind/brain/bodies of our students.

Roberta Lamb proposed that music educators make renewed efforts to connect learning, thinking and doing music seamlessly with body, gender and sexuality, and become very good at teaching others to negotiate the power relationships in musical discourse. These power relationships often arise from the damaging insistence both on reducing human diversity to stereotypes and on ill-advised attempts to ignore uniqueness. Analysts should not confuse ensemble members' willingness to join together (create good blend, balance, etc.) for a generalized desire for uniformity and consistency. Everyone in an ensemble is there for his/her own purposes and negotiates its demands uniquely, individually and personally confronted not only with the musical requirements but also with often-competing social and cultural values. The other participants alternatively demean or exalt an individual's efforts on the basis of biological facts such as sex and socio-cultural factors such as gender. "Good teachers," suggested Joan Russell, "know what cultural and social baggage comes in the door with each student." Standards of musicianship cannot ignore such baggage.

In "singing societies" such as found in Fiji the very term "standards of musicianship" is all but meaningless, for, as Joan Russell reported, the standard is merely that one expresses one's connection with others through musical (and other) means. Kathy Armstrong reported the same standard in western African societies, and I reported that Kenyan musicians expressed consternation that we westerners didn't join them but watched instead.

Knowing and singing/dancing the culture's repertoire provide a social standard of musicianship, and the members of the societies that preserve this standard recognize participation as the only standard of musicianship worth being concerned about. One can infer that other standards of musicianship are based on the participation standard but both Joan Russell and Kathy Armstrong (and others) reported that the Fijian and west African musicians with whom they studied were not interested in elaborate standards. Even in Fijian choirs, where new music is learned through the tonic sol-fa system, the rehearsal technique exemplified personal standards rather than evaluations from a conductor. In these rehearsals, Joan reported, a piece of music would be sung, at the end of which there would be silence while participants kept their own counsel, presumably reviewing their own performance and deciding how it could be improved. Inferring general standards of musicianship from such actions would be very problematic, except on praxial grounds, since subsequent performances seemed to "improve" with little overt goal-setting as would be common in the European-American types of rehearsal. There would be even better "good time" (Thomas Regelski) after each person made whatever changes in their contribution were necessary.

Participation as a basic musicianship standard engages participants with the musical syntax of any musical tradition and this sets personal standards of musical appropriateness. Using this standard, even though it is unspeakable and unanalyzed by the person in which it becomes embedded, allows the person to detect immediately both diversions from and creativity within the "home" syntactical framework. Diversion and creation constitute the border check point of musical actions that expand the musical culture, especially within oral musical traditions. The "space between" (Keith Swanwick) is almost nil at the place where diversion from tradition meets creation within it. Diversion is "other" -- "outside" -- while creation is "new" -- "original."

If one were forced to make a list of musicianship standards, what would it be?

Robert Walker's email (24 September 1998) asks: "Is there a problem over culture and music education? If yes, what is its nature?" He went on to suggest that asking questions about the role of culture in music education skews both ". . . our conclusions and the nature of our arguments." The assumption of asking the question is that there is some doubt about the existence of a seamless connection between the two. Either that, or the question begs a trivial answer and therefore isn't worth asking.

The bedrock answer to the question of musicianship standards at Toronto was simple, if not trivial: The general musicianship standard is that the human mind/brain/body either participates or does not participate in events called "musical" by some observers and participants. Why not leave it at that? This would resolve the ". . . problem over culture and music education" with a simple, if not elegant, statement.

This bedrock standard of musicianship is binary: One either does or doesn't participate. But we cannot leave things there because for most participants musical events are not binary. Although many musicians' evaluations of others' participation seem to reflect a binary standard, in reality musical events are complex enough to vary in quality, or "fit," or "goodness" and this variation rises from the synergy of the event's details.

If musicianship standards come from the varied quality of musical events, then we can reframe our original question: Are there standards of musicianship that can appropriately be used to explain individual differences in the amount of participation time, or differences in the number of participants, or differences in the extent to which others depend upon some to cause musical events, or differences in the extent to which some report that musical events caused by some people are "better" -- more engaging, more "good-producing," more "meaning-full" -- than those caused by others? The insistence by Roberta Lamb on avoiding stereotypes and simplistic answers to human involvement with music extends to musicianship standards also and leads us to consider more textured responses to the question.

One characteristic that Keith Swanwick pointed to as a musical standard was musical meaningfulness, and Joan Russell posed a question to Keith Swanwick: "What does it mean to 'generate new meaning' in/through music?" Swanwick answers that himself, in his anchor paper:

In any artistic practice people engage with the materials of their craft - colours, words, sounds and so on: they shape these materials expressively: they create new formal relationships within the object or event. At times they may bring about for themselves and others significant insights, even what has been called a 'eureka' experience.

Musical insight ranges widely in participants -- from a basic willingness to stay engaged with the music, to "Why didn't I think of that?", to commercial success, to general agreement that the musician is a national treasure worth preserving, to monuments erected after the person has died. Opportunities for musical insight in an event can also be at so low a level that the event is forgotten soon after it occurred (even abandoned by participants before the event was finished), and if one were to "code" all the musical events of a single week in the world, this characteristic -- the absence of insight -- would dominate the statistical results. The "slippage" (the loss or random variation in meaning) that John Shepherd noted in the relationships between cultural information and perceivers is another source of variation in the quality of musical events.

Musical events range from being revered at one end of a continuum, to being forgotten at the other end. If one accepts that the participants created these events, it follows that the musical actions of participants must therefore also vary in their effectivenss to engage people in the musical event. Where a musical event is repeated, as many are, this condition provides a basis for more detailed musicianship standards. This condition also grounds more elaborate musical standards on the bedrock musicianship standard of participation.

Not surprisingly, the musicianship standards that emerged in Toronto were bound up in specific traditions and were expressed as skills, or, rather, what I call "skill clusters" since each statement below can be further reduced to subordinate and contributing skills. A few "skill clusters" came up frequently enough in the Toronto meeting to warrant interest.

Musical participants should be able to:

1. embellish basic tonal and rhythmic materials

2. (related to no 1) improvise or otherwise create meaningful music

3. maintain rhythmic pulse in ways that relate to weight and motion, rather than to time

4. sing or play an instrument and dance at the same time, or sing and play at the same time

5. perform the musical materials of a tradition and contribute to its expansion

6. use music in ways that recognize social standards of appropriateness

7. learn new musical skills and repertoires by observation and repetition

8. borrow musical materials from other musicians and traditions

9. (related to no 8) use borrowed materials skillfully in the "home" tradition

These, too, are binary statements -- one either does or doesn't ". . . embellish basic tonal and rhythmic materials." However, to go further would require the creation of multi-level rubrics about each statement, referenced to each tradition. This was not done in Toronto.