The Contemporary Octogenarion

Not so long ago, a cherished colleague tweeted that he found it nice to see how new music education projects tried to connect to today's music practices.

Of course, I would find that nice, too.

The funny thing was that he was talking about an initiative where pupils from primary schools were given the opportunity to learn to play the electrical guitar in groups. And then my thoughts started to wander.

Humanly Organized Sound?

Recently I was in an international meeting on music education. Many concrete music education practices were shown. One of them started from a definition of music which ethnomusicologists immediately recognize: John Blacking's famous "Music is humanly organized sound".

Although I am an ethnomusicologist and I admire John Blacking (at least the relatively little I know of him), I am not at all a fan of this definition. At a first glance, it looks rather harmless. It is nice that the word 'human' is there. But I don't like he stress on 'sound' - it points too much to the idea that the essence of music is the way it sounds, and it is only a short run then towards the idea that music is, essentially, a 'piece' of sound. I also don't like the stress on 'organized', as it turns our focus towards they-that-organize: composers and musicians. And I miss, for example, the word 'meaning'; meaning is what music is all about.

It is good to remember that defining is not an innocent, neutral or objective activity, and that a definition is not an objective fact or a representation of an abstract truth. Defining is a human act, and an individual act for that: somebody defines. Defining means: stating which of the innumerable characteristics of a phenomenon one considers characteristic of the phenomenon. It is choosing a specific focus on the world, and ignoring other possible focuses. And it is marking boundaries; it is an act of inclusion and of exclusion.

It is maybe good to realize that John Blacking was, apart from being an anthropologist focusing on music, also an accomplished classical pianist who for a time had the ambition of becoming a professional concert pianist. Maybe this background and the doubtless emotionally grounded importance of being a classical pianist shimmers through his definition of music. Mind you: I know that John Blacking is the opposite of the classical musician considering classical music the alpha and omega of music in general, and that his work amongst the Venda in South-Africa made him realize that nearly all his presuppositions about what music might be had become untenable. I am not accusing him of implicit musicological colonialism; I just want to suggest that maybe our own experiences with music are so fundamental that it is hard to detach us from them.

The main thing I want to say is: when people start defining music, be cautious. So here is my own definition of music, to be equally cautious of: "music" is what someone considers to be 'music'.

Are DJs Musicians?

Earlier I wrote about the question whether or not singers are musicians. The question is as pressing as ever - again and again I find snippets of language in daily life in which speakers equate 'music' with 'music played on an instrument'. Please understand me right: this is not 'wrong' - it is simply 'culture'; it is the way we ('we') think and speak about music. I guess the fact that Mischa Spel (about whom I wrote in my previous blog) is announced to write for her newspaper about 'classical music and opera' is connected to the same question. And the fact that the particular blog entry called "Are Singers Musicians" is the entry that has attracted the most readers of all 150+ entries of this my blog may show that the question makes people curious (or maybe it shows that there are many singers around longing for a positive answer?).

I can tell you that there is a related question: are DJs musicians? Again, the question revolves about ideas whether or not they produce sounds in the way instrumentalists do - "with their own bare hands", one might say. We are so used thinking in terms of the production of sound vs. the reproduction of sounds that it seems unthinkable that somebody 'just' reproducing music produced by others is a musician. And of course, while typing the sentence, I realize that for example classical musicians do precisely that: in their production they reproduce.

Erik Scherder, Mischa Spel, and why the New Lobby for Music Education desperately needs some opposition

Interesting times for music education in the Netherlands. A New Lobby for Music Education seems to be forming. It consists of journalists, researchers, opinion leaders, performing musicians, culture hotshots. They (claim they) base themselves on research showing why music is important in education. And they equate 'music' with 'playing an instrument', and 'music education' with 'learning to play an instrument'.

A possible - and rather black - interpretation of this New Lobby could be the one in which the argument runs thus: the guild of professional performing musicians, traditionally mainly classical musicians but today also jazz and even pop, were mainly found in government-sponsored orchestras and ensembles, they performed on government-sponsored stages and taught music lessons in government-sponsored music schools. Now that the gusto in governmental circles to keep on sponsoring seems to diminish, professional performing musicians and the enormous fringe of organisational professionals around them look into other governemnt-sponsored areas where they might work, and have cast their eye on schools. Hence the attention for the benefits of 'music' (read: playing an instrument) for 'the brain', 'creativity', and 'social skills' (all very important in educational discourse these days). And hence the call for money for music education, and for specialists in the classroom; a call with the mixed origins of wanting the best for our kids and wanting to secure work for professional musicians.

How many people sing shanties, really?

The Monitor Amateur Arts 2015 has appeared. Always interesting food for thought.

This year in particular, at least for me: one of the questions asked in the questionnaire on which the monitor is based is what kind of music people make - and this year 'shanty' was included in the list. My colleague dr. Teunis IJdens from LKCA kindly provided me with the precise question asked in the questionnaire. It is: "Which kind of music do you play or sing?", with the possibility to indicate one or more genres from a list of 10, including "shanty", and the possibility to add other genres.

The Monitor shows that shanty is actually quite popular. These are the figures:

6-11: 0% of people active in music are active in shanty
12-19: 0% etc.
20-34: 3%
35-49: 1%
50-64: 4%
65+: 7%
Overall: 2%

On a first glance I recognized my observation that shanty singing is done mainly by elderly people. But a second glance awoke lots of questions. Is really about one out of 15 active 65+ musicians a shanty musician? What about those 3% active shanty singers between 20 and 34? I never meet them (I am, at 51, mostly considered very much to be a youthful shanty singer).

And according to the Monitor, the percentages may be extrapolated from the survey sample to the total population - the claim is that 3 million Dutch people are active musicians. 2% of them would mean that we have 60.000 shanty singers in the Netherlands. And then I got really suspicious.

On the School Orchestra

The school orchestra has become fashionable lately in Dutch primary education. A thorough genealogy of the resurrection has still to be written, but elements that would figure in such a genealogy would be: the impetus of the 'Jedem kind ein Instrument'-initiative in Germany (which would require a genealogy of its own, of course); the dwindling municipal music schools in the Netherlands who see a new market here, a market in which their instrumental teachers may earn a living teaching groups of children a classical music instrument; the also dwindling amateur brass orchestras in the Netherlands, who have trouble surviving and see new possibilities of recruiting members; policy makers in music education who seek for new justifications of music education and in school orchestras find a means to combine arguments about the benefits of the beautiful, the ad nauseam reported beneficial effects of playing an instrument on school achievements and that 21st-century fetish 'the brain', and the supposed sociability of playing in an orchestra as an antidote to our so individualized times; and also the tendency of primary school teachers to think about themselves as 'unmusical' and that therefor the best thing to do is to give music education away to external 'specialists' such as instrumental teachers and conductors.

Feeling Known

I went to regional radio station Radio Westerwolde in the east of the province to be interviewed about music for an hour on Tuesday last week. I had visited the same programme on the radio station (entirely run by volunteers) a couple of years earlier, and was happy to find myself back again with Wilma and Herman in their programme for the 50+ listener - this time I just made it into the target group, so that already made me feel at home, as did warm and welcoming technician Peter

But what made me feel at home even more was the fact that Herman and Wilma had really taken the time to find out about me. They read my blog, my website, my other blog; they had devised a range of questions on topics they knew I would find interesting; and the music choice in their programme was entirely based upon the topics I wrote about. So they played the Beatles, Bob Dylan, shanty, Dolly Parton. And in the end they read a poem they had miraculously found somewhere which so precisely matched the interview that I asked innocently if they had written it themselves.

I felt recognized.

A couple of weeks earlier, we had a home concert featuring Danny Schmidt and Carrie Elkin. They sang two sets, and afterwards we had a homecooked meal with musicians and audience. Danny's song with the line "When I die, let them judge me by my company of friends" matched the occasion perfectly.

Before starting the concert, Danny asked if I had any songs I would like to hear. I asked him if it would be possible to play "This Too Shall Pass" (with its great first line "Things change fast, but this too shall pass - better carve it on your forehead or tattoo it on your ass") and "Stained Glass" (which is a great piece of poetry; and how I like lines such as "It was thirty days till Easter when the elm tree hit the church/Thank God it fell on Friday cause at least no one was hurt"). Which he did. And at the end of the concert they played a Bob Dylan song as an encore because, as Danny remarked, there were Dylan CDs and books about Dylan all over the place.

I felt recognized.

And I pondered how easy it is to make me feel recognized. Just connect, in some way or other, to my musical biography and I'll be happy.

Just to let you know what to do in order to count me in as your audience member.