XV Colloquium: June 10 - 12, 2004:
The University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA
"Music for Life: Re-visioning Music Education as a Part of General/Comprehensive Schooling"

Fluency in general music and arts technologies:
Is the future of music a garage band mentality?
Peter Gouzouasis

Gouzouasis presented a socio-historical narrative that portrays the arts as fundamental to the content of all forms of new media, including learning and teaching technologies. He embraced a notion of "fluency," which is defined by creative expression, to describe the ability that all humans possess to create (e.g., compose, produce, perform) arts media. While the National Research Council's Committee on Information Technology Literacy has chosen to promote a notion of "fluency within information technology," or FITness, Peter has chosen to promote a notion of FATness, i.e., "fluency within arts technologies," as a label for the arts-based, broad understandings that are necessary in the use of emerging arts technologies. He compares and contrasts various aspects of FITness and FATness in a variety of teaching and learning contexts. Also, Gouzouasis explores JP Guilford's notions of ingenuity, inventiveness, and originality (i.e., IIO) in thinking. Fluency of thinking and of originality are pillars of Guilford's model; fluency, facility, and originality are considered as abilities. Guilford proposed four constructs of fluency, and Peter deconstructs them in a variety of arts technology contexts.

Music technologies seem to be pushing the traditional boundaries and challenging our notions of what constitutes music composition as well as notions of the abilities and skills humans need to learn to compose and perform music. One such example may be found in the recently released software called GarageBand (Apple, 2003), which is analogically touted as the "Movie of music software." Given the post-modernist, relativist distortions of commonly used music vocabulary (e.g., music, musician, guitarist, composer, arranger, music education) over the past 50 years, Gouzouasis questions the future of music teaching and learning in the 21st century on a number of levels. First and foremost, traditional notions of music literacy for the masses as proposed by Zoltan Kodaly and other music education icons are rapidly becoming irrelevant with the advent of emerging technologies. Second, the teaching and learning of music notation has become an even more specialized endeavor than it has ever been, even in historical terms. Peter proposes that notation will become a more exclusive techno (i.e., technological device), relegated to learning and teaching in conservatories, the music monasteries of the 21st century. He proposes that with the tools we have today, all forms of music can be both related to and relative to what children and adolescents are able to compose on their own, without "music educational" direction, and Gouzouasis wonders if our profession will take the challenge. Moreover, he wonders what will happen if we do not turn the attentions of our profession to what is happening in the broad landscape of educational technology/technology education, and argues that we will lose yet another opportunity to demonstrate the empirical, praxial values (i.e., performatively, monetarily and qualitatively) of music, and all the arts, in general education. For him, it seems that the only thing holding us back is the traditionalist mentality that has been prevalent in our profession for the past 100 years.