I wrote this article for the Robert Owen Keynote Magazine several weeks ago. It was published in March. I hope you enjoy.
Decomposers?
‘Bach, Beethoven, Brahms? Children don’t care about these composers or their music.’ ‘Don’t be such an elitist, you need to meet children at their own level!’ ‘Mozart just isn’t relevant anymore – they won’t engage.’ – These are all the imagined accusatory, disdainful remarks which are hurled at me in my dreams, when I dare to suggest to fellow educators that we should teach children about the composers.
First of all, I agree that we should meet children at their own level, talking about the music they are interested in. However, I must say while I have seen a lot of work on popular music and rap music, I don’t ever remember a teacher doing an analysis of a song in the charts, discussing why the music is good or not, and how it works. That is a way in which you could make theory and structure interesting to students. I feel the same could apply to composers and classical music as a whole.
There is a tremendous reverse snobbery towards classical music, whereby teachers think they know best, as if to say ‘you clearly don’t know children – they hate classical music’. Well if we were to take that stance, why teach long division, algebra or logarithms? I quite agree that many children do dislike it, but I believe that is mainly the fault of schools in the way they address classical music. It is through lack of exposure and discussion that this music is often seen by most pupils as something beyond their intellect and even their social status.
It is clear that a great deal of beautiful ‘classical’ music is not as aurally stimulating as popular music, so therefore I would suggest a great amount of focus to be on the composers themselves as people; talking about the personal contexts of the music, rather than broad historical associations. Time should be made available so that children can actually become aware of people like Beethoven, Chopin and unfamiliar composers like Scriabin. They are profoundly interesting figures who may not be referenced in standardised exams, but I am interested in the business of education and broadening of the senses rather than satisfying exclusive test orientated curricular.
The danger is that this reverse snobbery of some teachers leads to many thousands of children having only heard tedious electronic reproductions of the Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony on televised advertisements. I really feel passionately that children can hear the longing for love, companionship and acceptance in the Moonlight Sonata if a lesson could be spent on Beethoven’s tempestuous life, relationships and personality.
Although I am writing specifically, in every other subject there are great number of extraordinary people who have contributed a life’s work to the enquiry of knowledge. Does anyone else wish more time could be spent looking at the figures in history who have shaped our own subjects, from Maths to Geography?
Alexander Nicholson-Ward
