Tanglewood II: Summoning the Future of Music Education

1967).

—Chapter 1—

a magical aura

Anthony J. Palmer and André de Quadros

Tanglewood assumed a magical aura when Serge Koussevitzky established the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s permanent summer home in 1937 in rural western Massachusetts. Its luster was enhanced in music education when a singular symposium, convened by the Music Educators National Conference in cooperation with the Berkshire Music Center, the Theodore Presser Foundation, and the School of Fine and Applied Arts of Boston University, was held from July 23 to August 2, 1967.¹ The Symposium, Music in American Society brought together musicians, sociologists, scientists, labor leaders, educators, representatives of corporations, foundations, communications, government, and others concerned with the many facets of music assembled for this purpose.²

Boston University, a driving force behind the 1967 symposium, fittingly played a principal role in its fortieth anniversary celebration. Tanglewood II—Charting the Future is, in effect, its spiritual descendant and natural offspring. In addition, it was decided to meet close to, if not exactly on the Tanglewood site, to ensure sufficient isolation from urban distractions and to build intellectual intimacy.

On completion of the Symposium, two major strategic initiatives were planned. The first was a declaration to resonate with the 1967 event and with that Declaration’s impact on music education. The creation and development of the 2007 Declaration is discussed in chapter seven. The second initiative was to publish a book that addresses the future of learning music and teaching over the next few decades. The chapter authors have had at least two experiences on which to base their expectations for the future: the eight pre-symposium events that were held (see afterwords three), and the experience of the Symposium, where all the themes were brought together.

Defining the future is, at best, a risky attempt at predicting how the world will evolve and what paths will be taken. Nevertheless, anticipating the future based upon reasonable expectations is an activity typical of the teaching profession. At the beginning of each year, we make plans. What repertoire will my students be able to achieve? What kinds of experiences will best instill the love of music that we hold dear? What programs will ensure that the students will gain a deeper understanding of the performance medium? These and many others are the fundamental questions we face each year. The difference between the book and this set of inquiries: the issues considered by the Symposium were deeper, more broadly conceived, and for decades rather than a year. To extend and to challenge the principal authors, we sought recognized scholars and practitioners to comment on the visions advanced, or to use the general subject area as a basis for their own commentaries.

Especially in view of the intensely rapid changes in demographics, technology, and various new discoveries in learning, psychology, and brain research, all the authors aimed to project a future for music learning and practice in an unstable world. Thus, this book is aimed at summoning the future, to stimulate the profession to examine where this great adventure of music learning is going. Moreover, its purpose is to provoke reevaluation of present programs and philosophies, tired methodologies, and to reinvigorate the role we play in the lives of our students. Although the present circumstances in education are somewhat chaotic, and, in America, have been so at least since A Nation at Risk was published in 1983,³ restless times also offer opportunity. At issue, then, is how we can map the future sufficiently to take advantage of new configurations of educational organization: technology that enables new paths of learning; cognitive science research that allows the black box to be opened to view; demographics that bring the widest variety of ethnic and cultural backgrounds into the classroom; and insights into the human condition as never before imagined.

We present this book in three sections following a foreword by Wynton Marsalis, introductory chapters by the editors, one of which includes a presentation of the Declaration by the Symposium with commentary by the editors. The chapters of varying lengths resulted from those of greater length being written by pre-symposium event authors, followed by critiques from selected responders. Three of eight scholars selected from graduate students in the music education program at Boston University to assist at the symposium also submitted critiques of chapters in this book.

The first is state of affairs. J. Mark Scearce explores the value of music in society in chapter 8. He poses the question of why music, and he talks of elephants. What elephants have to do with music learning is not necessarily revelatory, but to those who have forgotten what the life cycle is about, the story will be enlightening. Betty Ann Younker comments in chapter 9 that a role of music has been to communicate, but the age-old question remains: what does music communicate? Multi-faceted as it is, we have yet to plumb the depths of such a unique human expression.

John Kratus explores the implications for education in music in the context of a democratic society in chapter 10. Going over some familiar ground is nevertheless an important reminder that too frequently we ignore the valuable contributions that students make to the equation of learning and teaching. Do we question ourselves sufficiently to ensure that all voices and backgrounds are heard and considered? Kratus challenges us to answer. In chapter 11, Caroline Levine takes a slightly different view of the relationship between music education and democracy. She asks: Can the political and artistic share a common bed?

The global picture is ever present in our lives and Terese Volk Tuohey examines in chapter 12 what considerations are paramount in the context of a world of music. She opines that adding more courses of music from the world may not be the most advantageous path for music learning. Timothy Taylor answers in chapter 13 that perhaps we misunderstand how music works in society, especially when we consider what it is we know when we know music. Chapter 14 features Lise Vaugeois traveling a similar route and challenges us to think about our views toward other musics. Especially when rooted in a Western view, do we denigrate values of other cultures or honor their contributions toward a deeper understanding of the human species, whatever their culture? Vaugeois expresses concern that the personal may be lost in practical considerations of policy.

The second major section considers persons of value. Chapter 15, by Margaret Schmidt, continues the discussion about nature and nurture, a dilemma that is inherent in human existence. Dichotomies die hard in our mentality, but she clarifies some issues that assist our understanding. Sandra Trehub responds from her wealth of research principally with infants and children. We are yet in the early stages of truly understanding human propensities, and she sheds light on specific research achievements in chapter 16.

Chapter 17, by Randall Allsup and Heidi Westerlund, is an investigation of the advantages and problems of education from a child-centered orientation. They ask, why is it so difficult to see the child and the teacher as engaged in a mutual journey, not in opposition? And, what about maps and the planning of the journey? Sandra Stauffer comments in chapter 18 based upon her experience with the problems confronting this area. She enhances the discussion of location of learning and other dimensions of the child/teacher relationship. One scholar⁴ who assisted at the Symposium, Joseph Pignato, tenders his response in chapter 19 with his view of the child-centered dilemma. He delivers a potent question: how can student-centered learning and a progressive idea thrive in a culture opposed to progressivism? All three efforts bring us back to the founder of progressive education, John Dewey, with his proposals to guide education.

A potent and incisive chapter 20 by Scott Lipscomb lays out the future of technology and student learning. He has been at the forefront of technology in music education and gives us a comprehensive overview of this topic area. Gena Greher comments in chapter 21 about the benefits and cautions of the rapid changes in technology. Are we, she asks on another issue, continually at the perpetual crossroads in educating only a small proportion of the students in a school? And, what of the role of the university that prepares future teachers? Because no method, approach, or means is neutral, a second scholar, Herbert Tsang, comments about the dangers of technology in chapter 22. And, although technology may appeal to the many students currently not enrolling in music courses, Tsang wonders if technology, as an answer, is inflated?

The final section of the book is who we are. Frank Heuser and David R. Sears tackle a difficult subject in looking at the obstacles to improvement within the profession in chapter 23. A fundamental question about whom the profession recruits and accepts as teachers requires discussion, and this chapter informs the reader of what constitutes the parameters of the issue. In chapter 24, Janet Barrett responds and broadens our appreciation of the difficulties inherent in rerouting an entrenched society. Where are the areas within the profession that are amenable to change, she queries? In chapter 25, Thomas Malone, a third scholar, lends his view of how we may go about renewal through a systems approach. Quoting Fritjof Capra, Malone reminds us that our profession is a living system and requires change simultaneously with our function as an active organism.

Chapter 26 concludes the third segment with David Woods and Linda Neelly showing how we must transcend boundaries, if we are to make the necessary improvements. Are the boundaries we build insurmountable? Marie McCarthy is our final responder on these issues in chapter 27 with a perceptive critique based upon her long experience with these issues. She believes that using boundaries as a metaphor is a useful tool for understanding the complexities of our need to go beyond the barriers.

The editors have their final say in chapter 28 in the summing up of our summoning the future for music education. The title, in the hands of fate, may suggest giving up and trusting to destiny. Rest assured that no member of the Tanglewood Symposium pays homage to the Moriae.

—Notes—

1 Music in American Society, Documentary Report of the Tanglewood Symposium, Robert A. Choate, editor. (Washington, D.C.: MENC, 1968), iii.

2 Documentary Report of the Tanglewood Symposium, iii.

3 A Nation at Risk, The Imperative for Educational Reform. The National Commission on Excellence in Education (Washington, D. C.: United States Department of Education, April 1983).

4 Eight scholars were selected from interested graduate students in the Boston University music education program to assist in the operation of the symposium and recording the deliberations in written notes, audio recordings, and video recordings. Some were asked to respond to the main chapters and three were accepted for publication.

—Chapter 2—

designing a different future

Anthony J. Palmer and André de Quadros

Tanglewood II had one major purpose propelling its planning and implementation. As indicated by its title, Charting the Future, it was a call to action for all engaged in music instruction, in and out of institutions. This is a time for dreaming, for imagining a different kind of music engagement, a time to call on our deepest convictions in fashioning an exciting, socially responsible, and vibrant era in music learning and teaching in the contemporary world. Recent scientific research, sociopolitical realities, and interdisciplinary inquiry have compelled us to broaden our considerations of the educational enterprise. The title of this book, Tanglewood II: Summoning the Future for Music Education, affirms the mission of the symposium.

Although the future is uncertain on practical and specific levels, there are signposts that can guide our thinking and planning not only for tomorrow, but also for decades. Rather than being paralyzed by fear of the unknown, the music teaching profession must move forward. Of course there are dangers, and Dan Gardner tells us why we accept predictions, assured or not.

[T]he answer lies ultimately in our hardwired aversion to uncertainty. People want to know what’s happening now and what will happen in the future, and admitting we don’t know can be profoundly disturbing. So we try to eliminate uncertainty however we can. We see patterns where there are none. We treat random results as if they are meaningful. And, we treasure stories that replace the complexity and uncertainty of reality with simple narratives about what’s happening and what will happen.¹

These current times are more precarious than what we have previously experienced over the last few decades, creating a desire for certainty. As with the metamorphosis of the caterpillar into the butterfly, learning and teaching music can emerge from this wide-ranging and demanding transformative period in beautiful and colorful form.

Typical of radical transitions, we are beset at every level of society with problems that resist simple diagnoses and straightforward solutions.² The world may well be on the threshold of a new epoch,³ which presages whole new ways of thinking and acting heretofore unimaginable. Robert Jay Lifton describes the quandary:

The protean self [defined below] emerges from confusion, from the widespread feeling that we are losing our psychological moorings. We feel ourselves buffeted about by unmanageable historical forces and social uncertainties…. Whether dealing with world problems or child rearing, our behavior tends to be ad hoc, more or less decided upon as we go along. We are beset by a contradiction: schooled in the virtues of constancy and stability—whether as individuals, groups, or nations—our world and our lives seem inconstant and utterly unpredictable. We readily come to view ourselves as unsteady, neurotic, or worse.⁴

Lifton, on the other hand, offers a saving grace:

We are becoming fluid and many-sided. Without quite realizing it, we have been evolving a sense of self, appropriate to the restlessness and flux of our time. This mode of being differs radically from that of the past, and enables us to engage in continuous exploration and personal experiment. I have named it the ‘protean self’ after Proteus, the Greek sea god of many forms.⁵

Daniel Pink, in a similar vein, suggests that, despite genuine opportunities, the world faces peril in the immediate future as the move to the now developing Conceptual Age occurs.

[T]he keys to the kingdom are changing hands…. This book describes a seismic—though as yet undetected—shift now under way in much of the advanced world. We are moving from an economy and a society built on the logical, linear computerlike [sic] capabilities of the Information Age to an economy and a society built on the inventive, empathic, big-picture capabilities of what’s rising in its place, the Conceptual Age."⁶

He explains further the consequences of being too slow to respond.

The first group of people who develop a whole new mind, who master high-concept and high-touch abilities,⁷ will do extremely well. The rest—those who move slowly or not at all—may miss out or, worse, suffer…. This new age fairly glitters with opportunity, but it is as unkind to the slow of foot as it is to the rigid of mind.⁸

What we take from Pink is the need to be inventive, empathic, and to understand that success in any field requires an open mind. Certainly, it is not about being first.

If the world faces peril, then peril be damned! In a positive sense and with highly propitious timing, we have choices. At one extreme, that choice is to be mired in the past, adhering to old ways of doing things and hanging on to behaviors that are no longer appropriate. Or, we can choose to recognize that change is upon us and we can either be carried by the decisions of others or be actively constructing a more beneficial future. We do not advocate the simple acceptance of the status quo; for example, how could we possibly accept a change that has the U.S. budget spending twenty-two percent less on children than it did in 1960?⁹ This is in sharp contrast to the continuing increase in U.S. military expenditures, which, in 2009, reached as high as 4.7 percent of the GDP.¹⁰

Tanglewood II—Charting the Future was exactly about a fresh conceptualization that music learning could take to reenergize and reconceptualize our musical and teaching lives to the betterment of our students and ourselves. The contents of this chapter support the notion of conceptualization, that whole new mind that Pink talks about and the protean self so eloquently expressed by Lifton.

A Brief Discussion of Issues

To begin, we must acknowledge that learning music does not exist in a vacuum. In fact, the very nature of learning must be strongly contextual, if it is to have value for the participants. Without a sense of how the curriculum has meaning and value either for the outside world, or the student’s interiority, learning experiences become meaningless. Students come to the educational process with unverbalized comfort zones. By establishing trust, the valid currency of human interaction, we can lead them from their serenity, apathy, or resistance to confront worlds previously unknown and undreamed and show them an unlimited horizon of artistry and creativity, which we must also inculcate within ourselves.

As we contemplate the future, we need to reexamine values that we might have dismissed as a child’s view of the world, and therefore not pertinent to adulthood. Pink tells the story of Dr. Madan Kataria, a physician who developed laugh clubs in India, now exceeding 2500, to benefit from the joys of laughter. Kataria stated that [T]he whole purpose of the laughter club is to be more playful…. When you are playful, you are activating the right side of your brain. The logical brain is a limited brain. The right side is unlimited. You can be anything you want.¹¹

Not only is play indispensible to good health, but also it is at the core of the creative process. Stephen Nachmanovitch writes that creativity exists only as a form of play. Improvisation, composition, writing, painting, theater, invention, all creative acts are forms of play, the starting place of creativity in the human growth cycle, and one of the great primal life functions. Without play, learning and evolution are impossible.¹²

A voice teacher once explained: Artistry is the play of the child grown into the responsibilities of the adult.¹³ If we, as musicians and teachers, do not inculcate the quality of play within our students—and in ourselves—we lose the joy of study, learning, and the root of musical expression.

The symposium’s emphasis on learning was deliberate, for in all reality, if Galileo’s famous maxim is accepted,¹⁴ no one can teach anything to anyone else. With that in mind, teachers have heavy responsibilities that go beyond the dissemination of information. Linda Darling-Hammond describes the limitations of transmission. "When a teacher has transmitted information, it is easy to say ‘I taught that’—even when students have not learned it (italics added)."¹⁵ Rather, a principal function of a teacher is to guide for factual and experiential self-discovery. Later, she describes learning as a foundational process that requires special treatment.

When a student is building her own understanding through a research project, for example, the teacher needs to construct a careful scaffolding to guide the learning process and have well-designed strategies for eliciting the student’s thinking in order to assess what is being learned.¹⁶

If what is being learned is limited to existing knowledge, Paulo Freire suggests that only half the goal is being achieved. Among the most critical of twentieth-century education, Freire maintained that education disempowered students by converting them into receptacles to be filled, with what he described as the banking system of education, where the teacher makes deposits of knowledge. He contends that,

[K]nowledge is produced in a place far from the students, who are asked only to memorize what the teacher says. Consequently, we reduce the act of knowing the existing knowledge into a mere transference of the existing knowledge. And, the teacher becomes just the specialist in transferring knowledge (italics in original).¹⁷

To complete the act of learning, we must be concerned about the production of knowledge and experience. That involves action, critical reflection, curiosity, demanding inquiry, uneasiness, uncertainty—all these virtues are indispensable to the cognitive subject, to the person who learns!¹⁸

The teacher is the critical link between these important aspects of learning. Beyond the intricate and detailed presentations and classroom aura that teachers create, including specific motivations they might engender, are a brain, mind, and spirit that must be unreservedly open-minded. In other words, absent the desire by students to absorb experience and make it part of their mental-physical-emotional-make-up, nothing of substance can occur. Under these circumstances, honest and authentic motivation becomes a primary responsibility of the teacher.

Teachers usually target the brain and mind for cultivation. The idea of spirit,¹⁹ however, is also an important and necessary awareness, that humans are more than a deterministic reduction of atoms, distilled into a pre-destined mode of activity according to our genetic makeup.²⁰ We have an innate desire to move beyond the mundane and experience the ineffable. Joseph Chilton Pearce understands how nurturing each step of the way to maturity is essential in spiritual growth.

If we have the appropriate nurturing and supportive models as infant, child, adolescent, and young adult, we will move into ever higher stages of conscious awareness and possibility as a matter of course, experiencing each new unfolding as discovery of a whole new world of delight and possibility—a time of breathless excitement.²¹

Spirituality²² cannot be a forced episode of experience. Rather, moments of transcendence occur when least expected, but require certain conditions of abandonment to the task at hand. It would be rare to find a musician who has not had this extraordinary experience i.e., one where the self is lost in the reverie of musical engagement. What is true for the teacher must be true for the student.

What is also true for the teacher is that the educational setting can be a sacred space where extraordinary events of the spirit can occur. Although we cannot include a transcendent happening in lesson plans, we can approach and construct musical experience to enable exceptional episodes to develop out of highly focused music learning and making.²³ The principal device the teacher can rely on in creating constructive experiences and their transcendent dimensions is what Fritjof Capra says that we are fundamentally learning machines.²⁴ Unless inhibited by impairment, poverty, developmental disorders, or various distractions, we want to understand the world around us, including our fellow humans. We do that with alacrity because it enhances our wellbeing and presence in the world. Understanding the world is the basis for a sense of connectedness to all life. Students are frequently even more excited by these kinds of experiences than are their parents.

In the exploration of these types of new paths, the world at times may appear chaotic and ungovernable; forces of seeming nebulous origin impinge on the solitary classroom. Nevertheless, in forging ahead, notwithstanding difficulties in the unknown, there are many opportunities that await an alert and eager teacher. Only when music teachers understand the constantly changing dynamics in such a journey will they be able to navigate the future successfully to the great benefit of their students. After all, life offers opportunities, not guarantees.

In consideration of the foregoing, there is a compelling need for clarity of the larger context in which our lives as music teachers are situated. The more specific issues of music learning are contained in chapters 8 through 27. There, the reader will find each author dealing with specific areas that the student and teacher will face in the everyday challenges of learning music.

As we examine the field of education, we see three areas that shape a new path for learning music. In the ensuing chapters, we will discuss three major issues that are considered to require fundamental understanding. These areas of discourse, frequently overlapping, lead to a discussion of potential successes and possible failures.

The scope of this series of chapters does not permit a discussion of informal, community, and deinstitutionalized education, although we recognize all these as valid and strategic to cultural life of any community. Although Tanglewood II was an international symposium, it is impractical for us to take into account music education practice, and social and political contexts worldwide; we place our analysis and recommendations in an American context, knowing that many of the issues have worldwide implications, while others are more applicable to the American context. And, now to the future and a new dreaming.

—notes—

1 Dan Gardner, Future Babble, Why Expert Predictions Are Next to Worthless, and You Can Do Better. (NY: Dutton, 2011), 15.

2 In discussing the challenges of the twenty-first century, Fritjof Capra describes how difficult change is because of the human element involved in all transactions. Fritjof Capra. The Hidden Connections, Integrating the Biological, Cognitive, and Social Dimensions of Life into a Science of Sustainability. (NY: Doubleday, 2002, chapter 4, specifically Complexity and Change.), 98-101.

3 Knoke was one of the first to describe the current conditions more than fifteen years earlier. We know our society will change because the foundations of the world around us are shifting. Our society—which encompasses our governments and cities, our laws, customs, beliefs, religions, clubs, and schools—is based on some fundamental assumptions. If one of these assumptions collapses, the walls built on it crack too. William Knoke. Bold New World The Essential Road Map to the Twenty-First Century. (NY: Kodansha International, 1996), 6 – 7. Knoke believes we are now in a fourth dimension, where we are completely placeless because of a worldwide communication capability.

4 Robert Jay Lifton, The Protean Self, Human Resilience in an Age of Fragmentation. (NY: BasicBooks, 1993), 1.

5 Lifton (1993), 1.

6 Both ages were preceded by the Agriculture and Industrial Ages. Daniel H. Pink. A Whole New Mind, Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future. (NY: Riverhead Books, 2005), 1-2, 49.

7 [H]igh concept involves the ability to create artistic and emotional beauty, to detect patterns and opportunities, to craft a satisfying narrative, and to combine seemingly unrelated ideas into a novel invention. High touch involves the ability to empathize, to understand the subtleties of human interaction to find joy in one’s self and to elicit it in others, and to stretch beyond the quotidian in pursuit of purpose and meaning. Pink (2005), 51 – 52.

8 Pink (2005), 247.

9 David Kirp, Kids First: Five Big Ideas for Transforming Children’s Lives and America’s Future. (NY: Public Affairs, Peruses Books Group, 2011).

10 Accessed 4/10/2012, http://www.sipri.org/research/armaments/milex/resultoutput/milex_gdp.

11 Pink (2005), 186.

12 Stephen Nachmanovitch, Free Play, Improvisation in Life and Art. (NY: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam, 1990), 42.

13 Esther Andreas, professor of music at California State University, Los Angeles, author of The Voice of Singing. (NY: Carl Fisher, 1970), and teacher of the editor, Anthony J. Palmer. Quote is from an oral statement.

14 Galileo’s famous words certainly apply here: You cannot teach a man anything; you can only help him find it within himself. Also, this is a fundamental tenet of John Dewey who believed that teachers must guide students to experiences through which they can acquire knowledge and insight. It must also be noted that mirror neurons are an integral part of the brain’s operation and imitation is a normal process that allows much of cultural practice to be absorbed by progeny. Without that capability, we would not be such learning machines, although there are critical periods in the life of the neonate when certain inborn capabilities must be activated, else they are lost. See, e.g., Michael S. Gazzaniga, Human, The Science Behind What Makes Us Unique. (NY: HarperCollins, 2008), 222 ff. Also see Daniel J. Levitin. This Is Your Brain on Music, The Science of a Human Obsession. (NY: Dutton, 2006), 259 ff.

15 Linda Darling-Hammond, The Right to Learn, A Blueprint for Creating Schools That Work. (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1997), 13.

16 Darling-Hammond (1997), 13.

17 Ira Shor and Paulo Freire, A Pedagogy for Liberation, Dialogues on Transforming Education. (Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey, 1987), 8.

18 Shor and Freire (1987), 8.

19 A body of work is beginning to develop. A session on spirituality was held in Bologna for the 2008 International Society for Music Education (ISME) meeting; another is being held within the 2012 ISME meeting in Greece. In 2010, the first meeting of Spirituality and Music Education (SAME) was held in Birmingham, UK in 2010. The numbers of scholars working in this area are rapidly growing.

20 Francis Crick calls this issue the Central Dogma of molecular biology, the idea that genes determine behavior. Fritjof Capra discusses the subject extensively in The Hidden Connections, Integrating the Biological, Cognitive, and Social Dimensions of Life Into a Science of Sustainability. (NY: Doubleday, 2002), 168 – 175.

21 Joseph Chilton Pearce, The Death of Religion and the Rebirth of Spirit. (Rochester, VT: Park Street Press, 2007), 106 – 107.

22 Anthony Palmer’s knowledge of this subject is based upon his published articles. See Anthony J. Palmer, Music Education and Spirituality: A Philosophical Exploration, Philosophy of Music Education Review 3 (1) Fall 1995; Music Education and Spirituality: A Philosophical Exploration II, Philosophy of Music Education Review 14 (2) Fall 2006; "Spirituality in Music Education, Transcending Culture, Exploration III, Philosophy of Music Education Review 18 (2) Fall 2010.

23 It must be noted that learning is multifaceted and includes affect as much as knowledge.

24 Although referring to a higher level of organization, the following statement alludes to all individual organisms as well. This spontaneous emergence of order … is technically known as self-organization and is often referred to simply as ‘emergence.’ It has been recognized as the dynamic origin of development, learning and evolution. In other words, creativity—the generation of new forms—is a key property of all living systems. And, since emergence is an integral part of the dynamics of open systems, we reach the important conclusion that open systems develop and evolve. Life constantly reaches out into novelty. Capra (2002), 14.

—Chapter 3—

a new dreaming

Anthony J. Palmer and André de Quadros

Music learning is subject to an array of influences that have, at times, only minor connections to the educational transaction, although certain areas are integrally related when applied to the process. Technology is one of those that, when called upon as both an end and a means, can affect the outcome significantly. Of three areas that will be discussed throughout the next few chapters, technology may have the largest impact on daily practices in music learning. The advances we have made and continue to do so are at an exponential rate. Although our present capabilities are enhanced, new challenges are created daily.

Technology

Presently, we tend to think of technology as the latest developments in computers, various new applications, the latest electronic gadgets, etcetera. A broader view of technology will enhance our discussion. Matt Ridley, eminent scientist, suggests that in hunter-gatherer societies, tribes were highly technical in their skills and divisions of labor. He refers to the Neolithic man—frozen some 5000 years ago—uncovered in the Tyrolean Alps in 1991 and how he was equipped.

This [Neolithic] was a technological age. People lived their lives steeped in technology. They knew how to work leather, wood bark, fungi, copper, stone, bone and grass into weapons, clothes, ropes, pouches, needles, glues, containers and ornaments…. Archaeologists believe he probably relied upon specialists for the manufacture of much of his equipment and perhaps also for the tattoos that had been applied to his arthritic joints.¹

He believes that similar divisions of labor applied 100,000 years ago. Their brains and bodies were indistinguishable from present-day humans. One man made stone tools, another knew how to find game, a third was especially good at throwing spears, a fourth could be relied upon as a strategist.² The importance of the foregoing is to emphasize that technology, which lies at the core of division of labor, can be a means, a tool, to attain other ends. And, in the music classroom, it can be a creative tool to achieve musical understanding, to develop new compositions, and to aid myriad musical processes in which students and we engage.

Highly complex technological changes envelop the world that we presently inhabit, seemingly too rapid to keep abreast of, even with focused dedication.³ Young people presently grow up with computers similarly to the way that oldsters grew up with manual typewriters. These two polarities order the brain in different paths. The computer is all encompassing and multitasked, while a typewriter is a linear machine, one letter after another to finally form coherent words and sentences, its natural extension being books, newspapers, magazines, and the like.⁴ The computer is primarily a visual medium, although using language extensively, while a typewriter produces a purely verbal medium, the printed page.⁵ The old paradigm established by the Gutenberg printing press in the mid-1400s, the first print being a German poem in 1450, has now given way to digital transmissions that have significantly changed our approach to life.⁶ The ramifications are too deep to list here, but any group of wide-awake adults can extrapolate all the ways in which digitalization is changing our existence.⁷

One profound and cardinal change is how the human community engages in musical experience. For the vast majority, listening is the primary means by which people have access to a global source of musical activity, whether in concert performance or audio reproduction. The various instruments and their digital repositories such as iCloud—computers, streaming, iPods, tablets like iPad, and smartphones—are but a prelude to a future of constant and brisk innovation. The digital world is not limited to entertainment; more important, educational undertakings are available through digital means and are altering our lives and the academic world in unpredictable ways.⁸ Digitalization also offers the ability to create music anew, individually or collaboratively and to send it to a worldwide audience. The expectations appear to be limited only by human imagination. Schools especially can be beneficiaries of some of these advances. A walk through the Arch of Janus⁹ recognizes that simultaneously this new technology could also lead to the disappearance of smaller and defenseless musical cultures. Music educators should be concerned about the effect of technology on the loss of cultural diversity.¹⁰ Just as we should take steps to protect biodiversity, to be engaged in the struggle against species extinction, and to be distressed by the disappearance of languages,¹¹ so too must we be thoughtful about using technology in a cavalier