Learning and Teaching

Learning and teaching in music have taken place for as long as music has been made, of which there is evidence stretching as far back as some of the earliest records of Homo sapiens. Thinking in the area goes back (in the West) at least to Plato and his ideas about the functions of music and music learning in ancient Greek society.

For centuries in western Europe, formalized music education was largely the preserve of the Christian Church, with monasteries and cathedrals playing leading roles in passing on music traditions. Secular, less formal music-making has also always taken place, but the vast majority of research in learning and teaching in music—until around the turn of the millennium—has been undertaken in formal, institutional contexts. Since education became compulsory in industrialized countries around the 19th century, music has more often than not been part of a mandatory or recommended school curriculum. The majority of research in learning and teaching music (published in English) has come from the United Kingdom (UK), United States, Australia, and Scandinavia.

Two significant current trends in music learning and teaching are a shift in emphasis from teaching to learning, from focusing on teachers to empowering [Page 649]students; and a hybridization of approaches that incorporates valuable practices and attitudes from “other” traditions such as popular music, “world” music, and community music.

A common paradigm in music learning and teaching in many traditions is the master-and-apprentice model, where pupils take individual lessons with a master of the art (i.e., of singing, composition, or playing the drum kit). This “transmission” mode of learning and teaching is used to pass traditions down from one generation to another, and has been the staple of the music conservatoire and “training” in the Western classical and (more recently) jazz traditions for centuries. It has been challenged more recently because of perceived inherent limitations, but is also upheld as the ideal mode of developing expertise and mastery in an instrumental or vocal discipline (in much the same way as the supervision of an individual's thesis or dissertation is usually undertaken by one or two tutors).

Although concepts of and research on learning and teaching in music are steeped in Euro-American traditions of music, education, and research, the paradigms and assumptions of these fields are constantly challenged within the professions. Especially since the beginning of the new millennium, there has been a move in these increasingly self-conscious circles toward global and pluri-cultural inclusivity, and a general broadening of horizons to include culturally and conceptually diverse practices.

Other less mainstream modes of learning and teaching include traditions from around the world that have been studied less by the music education profession (which has tended to focus on honing and perpetuating what it already does), and more by ethnomusicologists. The music education profession is beginning to look more to ethnomusicology, through such approaches as applied ethnomusicology and areas of community music, where the focus is not on transmitting knowledge to advance a tradition or way of musicking, but instead on facilitating meaningful and valuable musical experiences for participants. While the mainstream, homogenized music education profession is aware of—and in an increasing number of cases, incorporates—“outside” musical traditions such as Mariachi, Western popular music (rock, hip-hop), folk, and Gamelan traditions, methods of learning and teaching in these contexts are seen as alternative or supplementary to established norms.

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