The Art of Teaching Music

8. Performer

eight performer Music needs to be brought alive through performance. We may hear music imaginatively without needing to hear it as phenomenal sound; however, we hope ultimately to hear music performed or realized sonically. John Cage’s 4'33", a piece consisting of silence, is a statement of this reality.1 Its meaning depends on indeterminacy in which the silences within which a listener imagines sounds, or anything else for that matter, play an important role along with sounds. Cage’s preoccupation with silence in this piece is only interesting as it rebuts a pervasive emphasis in musical thinking on the sounding tones in music. He does not want to say that music should consist only of silence, since he spent considerable effort designing such sounds.2 Rather, he broadens the definition of music to include imagined as well as heard sounds and silences. We define the performer as one who creates the sounds and silences of music in the phenomenal world. Notice that I draw mainly on the image of music as a sonic phenomenon, one of an array of musical images.3 This stance is appropriate because it is commonly in use in the Western classical tradition and others such as jazz, rock, and country music. Although other musical images are suggested, I leave it to another time to mine more systematically the ways in which they might play out in performance. Rather than make a comprehensive study of the nature of musical performance and the performer’s experience,4 I focus on issues of performance that are of particular interest to music teachers. These include the importance of performance, musical canons and repertoire, performing venues 136 • The Art of Teaching Music and times, and teaching performance. Questions that drive these reflections are: Why is performance important in music education? What roles do musical canons and repertoire serve? How do place and time impact performance ? How should one teach performance? And I conclude with implications for music teaching. Performances differ across musical traditions. My choice of a particular view of music construed as sonic phenomena in this discussion helps shape my sense of the nature of the performer’s musical experience and of the desirable aspects of musical performance and reflects my own background within the Western classical tradition. Since this tradition is multifaceted , I cannot be sure that performers from its every nook and cranny will necessarily agree with me. Still, given the importance of musical performance to our work as music teachers, we need to have a conversation about our various views of musical performance and develop more systematic and comprehensive understandings of it. The Importance of Performance Music teachers have long advocated performing as a principal component of music education.5 In recent decades, this commitment has been enshrined around the globe in formulations of national standards and examinations .6 In the United States, the profession has committed to “singing alone and in groups” and “playing instruments alone and in groups” as imperatives for music teaching.7 These goals appear in the statements of national standards endorsed and forwarded by MENC—The National Association for Music Education, but it is unclear why it is necessary to play and sing in groups and alone or why one cannot be substituted for another . Rather, these aspects of the curriculum are taken to be self-evident goods that are necessary and not interchangeable. This is a tall order for anyone really serious about studying a particular instrument, since every musician-teacher understands the effort and time required to become a skilled musician with a limited expertise on a particular instrument. When the range of objectives is broadened to include others, a critic may wonder whether, practically speaking, one is doomed before one begins. Within the profession’s world-view, however, it seems that musicianteachers are expected to sacrifice depth for breadth in order to accomplish an array of objectives. And it would be quite understandable if, because teachers must seek to do so many different sorts of things in a limited Performer • 137 time-frame, students’ accomplishments in each of these aspects did not amount to very much.8 Among the approaches to music performance within music education, I engage most closely with the work of Bennett Reimer, David Elliott, Eleanor Stubley, and Vernon Howard. Reimer and his colleagues examine music performance within a frame of MENC’s national standards that seem, on the face of...