Music, Society, Education

9 Children as Artists: Music and music in education—a model for change

Children asA rtists I have said that art, education and society move in a kind of loosely lockstepped three-legged race; each can change only very little without involving corresponding changes in the other two. Of the three, clearly, society as a whole exerts the most leverage but since it is ideas that shape society none is completely without influence. Daniel Bell: 'Ideas and cultural styles do not change history —at least, not overnight. But they are a necessary prelude to change, since a change in consciousness - in values and moral reasoning (he might have added 'styles of perception') is what moves men to change their social arrangements and institutions.'1 Teachers, as we have seen, whether in school, college or university,have extremely little room for manoeuvre in this respect, being obliged to work within the framework of an organization which, despite its apparent diversity, is in fact extremely unified in its purposes, its monopoly control of the market and, especially, its devotion to the ethic of production. The relation of this organization to society is clear: it exists to serve society's needs (one could go further and say the interests of the dominant sectors of society, since it obviously serves large sections, even perhaps the majority, of society extremely ill) and it is therefore kept on a very tight rein. Art, on the other hand, exists in a very ambiguous relation to society, and is generally considered to have only the most tenuous of effects upon it; it is therefore indulged in its eccentricities like a child, and noone other than the conservative critic worries too much when it veers from one extreme attitude to the other. (One can see this perhaps most clearly in the situation of music on many university campuses, where the most outrageous musical experiment is tolerated, even welcomed —and rendered socially innocuous.) So in the last fifty years or so we have seen artistic movements following one another in dizzying succession without visible effect on the fabric of our society. Although they may have had a more profound effect than is recognized —art, as I hope I have shown, exists in much closer relation to the fabric of society than is imagined —the apparently complete revolution which has taken 9 Children as Artists 207 place in western music in this century has in fact, as can be seen from a comparison with other musics, taken place still within the framework of an aesthetic and a set of institutions and conventions that have changed hardly at all since the end of the nineteenth century. The present-day proliferation of musical styles may, in fact, represent not a new movement but the last efflorescence of the post-Renaissance western tradition, rather like those strange and baroque forms of life that often appear at the end of an evolutionary line. I did, however, suggest that the beginnings of the post-revolutionary forms are already with us, not in majestic concert halls like the Royal Festival Hall or Philharmonic Hall but in draughty church halls and council-flat living rooms, in condemned houses inhabited only by squatters, and even for all we know in the barradas that fringe the great cities of South America, in the African slums of Johannesburg or the shanty towns of West Kingston. History suggests that it is equally possible that new dominant classes may emerge from these same places. These musics, unnoticed by the cultural establishment, receiving no subsidy from arts councils or foundations or support from wealthy patrons, are analogous to those rat-sized creatures, ancestors of the mammals, that scurried around the feet of the dinosaurs and were adaptable and sufficiently uncommitted to any single lifestyle to flourish when a slight shift in climate wiped out their larger and more impressive contemporaries, which were unable to adapt. We have already received hints of the changes in social and financial climate that could wipe out our symphony orchestras, concert halls and opera houses more easily and sooner than the ordinary music lover might imagine; Stockhausen showed his awareness of this in a 1971 interview in which he said, 'The system is dying. It's in its last agony right now, only the musicians themselves are not sufficiently aware of it .... What I'm trying to do ... is to produce models that herald the stage after destruction ... and that is going to be badly needed in the time of shocks and disasters that is to come.'2 (I do not, however...