Updating Music Education in Australia:  Recommendations to bridge the divergence between classical and contemporary music as a response to issues raised in national and state reports in 2005 and 2007. 

Dr. David Salisbury, James Cook University (2008)

Abstract 

This paper delves into the problems Australian teachers are facing in today’s music education environment.  In 2007 the South Australian Department of Education and Children’s Services (DECS) produced a report in response to a 2005 report conducted by Murdoch University for the Department of Education Science and Training titled, National Review of School Music: Augmenting the diminished.  Both of these reports recommend the inclusion of music technology and contemporary music of all styles and genres in order to engage students (Anderson 2007).  In the Australian context this initiative falls most directly into high school instrumental programs.  The aim of this investigation is identify some of the main issues in the implementation of these types of directives and to propose recommendations to support teachers who are engaged with implementation of these reports.

Introduction

The following excerpt from a Queensland Sunday Mail report points to funding priorities in Queensland Education:

Education Minister Rod Welford has called for a shake-up of the state’s schooling system in the wake of alarming literacy and numeracy results (Weston 2008).

In this education climate the arts including visual, performance or theatre, music and dance are usually the first to experience cuts in funding.  In Queensland individual tuition in instrumental programs have been replaced with group lessons with a minimum of three students per group.  In classroom teaching and instrumental programs many schools are hard pressed to maintain numbers after years eight and nine when music becomes an elective and student are more inclined toward technology based elective such as IT and other computer based subjects. Southcott and Hartwig (2005) state that, “Music, as with the other arts areas, has, in some states, effectively become optional and, once again, music educators are forced to undertake advocacy for their place in schooling” (p. 142).

This study looks at four case studies to highlight the issues facing music education teachers in the current education climate.   These case studies underline the challenges that music teachers encounter maintaining their programs and responding to directives or recommendations outlined in reports such as the 2005 National Review of Music Education: Augmenting the diminished.

Background and Literature

National and State Reports

Anderson (2007) produced a state report in response to a 2005 national report titled, National Review of School Music: Augmenting the diminished, for the South Australian Department of Education and Children’s Services (DECS).  Both of these reports recommend the inclusion of music technology and “the breadth of music in contemporary society” in order to engage students (p. 6).

There is a need for instrumental music to be open to innovation, change and development. In a similar vein, instrumental music must encompass the broadest definition of what a musical instrument is in contemporary music practice (Pascoe et al 2005, p.126).

In regards to technology in music education the report states:

Music technology, which is essentially using new musical materials to make music, is heavily involved in popular music, film music, computer games music, most ‘cross-over’ music, and much new classical music (p. 23).

Also that:

A survey of music technology literature shows that nowadays it is a pillar of mainstream music making and probably connects more than other music to young people’s lived experiences. This has impacted on teaching and learning of music (Pascoe et al 2005, p. 23).

Watson (2007) gives a clear summary of curriculum initiatives over a thirty-year period in which she points to the National report focused on in this paper and the statement made by the authors that “it was difficult for teachers to access curriculum materials suitable for music” (p. 170). 

The national review identified that there are major concerns about music curricula in regards to a cyclic attention to music; the currency and relevance of curriculum materials; a movement towards frameworks away from specific syllabi (in some States and Territories); a movement to essential learnings curricula; and, some problems with access to curriculum materials (Pascoe et al 2005, p. 120).   The review also pointed to some specific gaps in curricula including: in particular music technology; the need for inclusive repertoire and indigenous music; music education for gifted and talented students; and, approaches to creativity, improvisation and composition (ibid).

Lowe (2007) referring to the same report emphasizes the authors comment “Many secondary class music programmes in Western Australia suffer high attrition rates” (p. 95).  Southcott and Hartwig (2005) point out that in Queensland the new syllabus starting in 2006 still maintains an emphasis on Western art music and that there is no inclusion of other representations of music, graphic or technology based, but rather a reliance on 19th century classical notation and theory teaching methods.  In a study conducted by Ballantyne and Harrison (2005) pre-service and early career music teachers did not see the development of knowledge and skills in technology as important.

Methodology

 This study was based on four case studies conducted in Townsville, Queensland and represents phase one of more broadly based inquiry that will include a wider regional study in phase two and a statewide survey in phase three.  The four case studies include Case Study One from a co-educational state high school and an interview with Philip (all names used are aliases); Case Study Two from a co-educational state high school where Gail was interviewed; Case Study Three a private boys high school with Mark as the teacher interviewed and Case Study Four a private co-educational high school where Steve was interviewed.

Interviews and Case Studies

The following excerpts focus on three main questions of a ten-question interview conducted over a two-week period in September 2008.

Question One

(Researcher) What are the main issues facing music education teachers in Queensland and more specifically in your school?

(Philip) Probably from our perspective here and from an education Queensland perspective is the creative curriculum in general and what I mean by that is the marginalisation of the arts and music through other mandated programs in schools especially when you look at the situation with numeracy and literacy and an increasing targeted time given to addressing that problem in response to poor results on standardized test.  So some of the programs they look at first in terms of cutback are what they call non- core areas and the arts and music fit into that.

(Gail) In my school it is the lack of formal education for these kids or private education most of the kids will come here with only having done classroom primary school music or been in the instrumental programs at a very beginning standard.  None of the kids here due to the socio-economic level can afford private lessons, that is an absolute luxury so that what we are dealing with here is a real grass roots or basics standard.

(Mark) Probably the biggest is budget restraints.  I have been at this school now for five years and it is only now that I am starting to see a little bit of money come my way.  We are not considered a rich school, it need to be so structured and they need to have every detail covered in what you want to achieve but saying that there is still not the money there to put in new initiatives, so money is the biggest one for us.  This then leads on to space.  I’ve got three rooms to use and I’ve got a full classroom program to run, bands to run, instrumental tuition to run, so space is the next biggest issue.  The knowledge base that these kids have got when they come to us in year eight, the problem I’ve got is that I’ve got a thirteen-week timeslot to get year eight students interested in music because they’ve been scarred from what they did in primary school so I have thirty-nine lessons to get them interested in doing music from years nine to twelve.

(Steve) Fitting decent music in an already packed curriculum, there are not enough hours in the day.  That’s one challenge and another challenge is to encourage kids to broaden there musical experience and understanding so they are expose to music in the popular media and it’s important to validate that.  I think it is also important to enrich their general knowledge musically by encouraging them to listen to and perform in styles and genres other than what is generally streaming through such as the Australian Idol type of music.

Discussion Question One 

Of the four teachers interviewed only Steven prioritized issues other than funding and space.  Mark also brings out an important point of  “previous musical knowledge” in his student body as being a problem for him in the delivery of the Queensland music syllabus.  Steve also points out that time constraints where an issue for him in delivering the best outcomes for his students.  Overall the funding and space issue was of prime importance to three of the four teachers interviewed and represents the fundamental issue stated at the beginning of this paper, which is that the arts are usually the first to be cut in a critical fiscal decision by education administrators aiming to use their funding allocations in the most economical way.

Question Two 

(Researcher) A recent national review calls for the implementation of the “breadth of contemporary music”.  How can you achieve this directive in the context of your school and current situation?

(Philip) It is difficult and I really think you have to look at the skill sets of the teachers you have.  Bearing in mind our situation here, our three classroom music teachers, one is a classically trained violinist, the other one is a brass band person and the third one is a classically trained singer.  So our backgrounds are not the contemporary music area and I suppose, unless the teacher make a personal decision that they are going to go and invest time and energy to improve their knowledge and skills in that area, we are not going to get time and works not going to arrange for us to do it. 

(Gail) Well I do, you certainly do because you have to, to suit the clientele that’s here.  If we just did pure art music, you’d lose them even though I can, but I can mix it up with popular music.  They can also have the chance of singing popular music in the choir as well as traditional music.  We also do that in the band so we can mix up traditional concert band stuff and popular and contemporary, same as the strings.

(Mark) This is a tricky one because with boys, they have got to see rewards straight away.  Now that is difficult when you got to have some basis in theory or music knowledge before you can give them those rewards, so there is a fine line there that you need to tread to say right if you do this little bit here then you going to be able to achieve this and that is why in year eight we dabble a little bit with keyboard and guitar so they get into the instrumental stuff but I have also got to give them some theory so that they can play the stuff.  Same with notation, I start them in year nine with Sibelius so they need to understand basic notation before they can use those types of programs. So it is the balance between having to teach the basics but give them the rewards soon after otherwise they lose interest.

(Steve) Mostly this would be up to me in terms of how I interpret the syllabus and implement it.  My aim is to encourage kids to be listening to and be involved in contemporary Australian music.  My own interest would happen to be ‘art music’ of the last thirty years within the Australian context and when I was teaching in New South Wales that was a mandatory requirement for year-twelve music, as outlined in a course called music 2.  One unit was Australian music of the last twenty-five years and the understanding was that was ‘art music’ such as Sculthorpe, Ross Edwards, Matthew Hindson, and Carl Vine etc. were composers we were looking at.  But we have to mindful that not all students would be wrapped in that so we would also introduce units of work on the history and development of Rock music which I find is good for middle schools so years eight and nine and encouraging kids to perform in those styles.

 Discussion Question Two 

Interestingly three of the four teachers interviewed felt that they lacked a certain level of understanding of contemporary music in regards to implementing more contemporary based music into their delivery.  Paul confirmed that most of his staff had a Western Art Music (WAM) background and Mark admitted that it was an important factor for retaining students in his program after grade eight when music became an elective.  Gail was comfortable with the most genres of contemporary music as she put herself through teacher training playing bass in bands to make money.  Steve admitted that WAM was his forte but felt confident to do units of popular music as well.    

Question Three

 (Researcher) What is the state of technology hardware and software in your music section?

(Philip) We have work over the last couple of years to improve the technology that we have got and we are not talking big money here but we’ve spent about $30,000 dollars over the couple of years and we’ve bought fifteen Macs (IMacs), plus two Macbooks available to our students.  The biggest problem connected with that is of course software and the flow on to that is space. At the moment in music we are using Garage Band, we are using Finale 2004 which we are about review that whether we are going to continue down that path, or move away from spending that much money on site licensing for notation software, really the bulk of our students when given a the opportunity to choose wether they are going to compose using notation software or through recording and sampling are not choosing notation software.  So why are we spending all this money on site licensing for that?  That is the extent of our software at the moment.

(Gail) Money, that’s the main thing however, I do have finale notepad.  I don’t have that set up here in the music building but I do have that program set up on all of the library computers.  So for composition, we can write it here on manuscript paper and then go and punch it in and that way the kids actually get to listen to it.  The good thing about it too, I’ve just finished with year elevens, they can email me those composition and can then mark them and listen to it as well.

(Mark) Once again budget and the second would be the amount of programs that are out there.  I am not talking about notation programs but music loop programs that use sound loops such as Magic, Groove, Acid all those types of things and programs so there are lots of programs but no one has said this is the best program for you guys and of course site licenses are expensive.  Also in my own professional development I don’t have a lot experience in music technology because I have come through on a traditional program so I am learning as I go but I am also working collaboratively with the IT people here at school and so I am getting most of my information and direction from them.

(Steve) The technology is updating and changes more quickly than a curriculum document can keep up.  For example ten years ago sequencers were all the rage with classrooms with keyboards, sequencers and samplers.  We moved on from that now, so I think keep up to date and also keeping my skills up to date, I used to worry that I would know less about the technology than the kids.  That doesn’t worry me any more, if they know more about a program than I do that’s good, they can share their knowledge with me and I view it similarly that I don’t know how to play the bassoon but if I take an orchestra that has a bassoon in it, I know enough to be able to deal with it, so that is one issue.  Another issue is maintaining it so that every work station is operable it is frustrating if you got twelve computer but only eleven are working, so having it maintained and keeping abreast of what it can actually do, so the other issue is making sure that the technology is not the tail wagging the dog. 

Discussion Question Three 

Issues that appeared to be prominent in response to this question included a lack of funding, physical space and experience or training in the use of music technology.  Philip confirms that his school has supported him financially but also makes that point that software licensing is an issue with many of his students preferring to record their projects versus using a notation program to score their music.  Steve also brings up the point of the rapid changes in the technology and the inability of any curriculum document to keep up with these fast changes.  All of the teachers where grappling with the issue of music technology in some fashion and all of them agree that students are attracted to the inclusion of music technology in the music offerings at their schools. 

Technology and Resource Issues

During an information night at James Cook University recently, eighteen teachers out of approximately 40 attendees filled out a short survey.  The table below highlights many of the issues the respondents considered important such as infrastructure or resource issues and professional development needs (see Table 1)

Survey of Eighteen Teachers in the Townsville Region

Overall Infrastructure Issues

Lack of Resources Generally

Lack of Space

Lack of Recording Equipment

Lack of Funding or Budget 

10/18 or 55%

5/18 or 27%

10/18 or 55%

10/18 or 55%

Types of Technology Professional Development Needed

Software

Recording 

9/18 or 50%

9/18 or 50%  

Table 1 - JCU Teachers Night Survey (August 2008)

The responses in the survey align with the four case study responses and highlight the concerns teachers have when confronted with directives such as those found in the reports discussed in this paper.

Process versus Product 

Green (2006) discusses the phenomenon of how contemporary musicians gain their knowledge of music without formal training and is essentially self-taught.  She emphasizes that all aspects of musical awareness, listening, composing, improvising and performing are more holistically connected in an informal learning environment and usually take place in a group setting.  Finally that informal learning is a process rather than a product oriented activity.  Her contention is that contemporary music originates from an organic process that should be reflected in a classroom context as well.

The researcher’s experience lecturing in composition to tertiary students, many enrolled in a teacher education course, created an opportunity to develop alternate assessment strategies due to the fact that some of these students would have little formal composition experience or depth of musical background.

It became apparent that assessment of the aesthetic and technical aspects of a composition would be subjective and biased towards full time music students.  The alternative strategy employed was to emphasize a process diary that chronicled the student’s progress in creating their compositions.  The process diary is an established assessment strategy in the visual arts but may not be as widely employed in a music education context. 

 Discussion and Conclusions

In this paper issues facing music education teachers have been identified in particular with regards to recommendations by national and state reports.  The recommendation of a more contemporary based music approach with a music technology basis is problematic in most cases due to a lack of contemporary music experience or training and a lack of resources and funding to establish an adequate technology platform.  Although these issues are not new and teachers have been contending with ongoing difficulties in the delivery of music education in Australia, over the last two or three decades, the comments and opinions expressed by the four case study participants contained in this paper present an opportunity to document their concerns and frustrations.  The condensed list below highlights a few of the problems discussed in this paper.

• Teachers are facing difficulties in assessment practices due to technology-based submissions.

• There is a lack of curriculum materials and support for teachers who lack contemporary music backgrounds.

• There is a lack of support and few opportunities for professional development in technology or contemporary music pedagogy.

To address the issue of curriculum materials for teachers who lack contemporary music backgrounds, the teacher from Case Study Four lent me a copy of Peter Dunbar-Hall’s Teaching Popular Music textbook.  In this well researched and effective textbook Dunbar-Hall gives a thorough grounding in contemporary music along with ways in which a teacher can set up a classroom and Black-Line Masters for exercises and practical tasks.  The issue the teacher had with this textbook was that many of the examples and references to current artist and styles are now out-of-date as the textbook reviewed was published in 1993.  This reinforces the need for an ongoing output of new curriculum materials for teachers to access.

Recommendations

Two recommendations generated by this study include:

• Encourage music education providers to run more workshops and short courses for professional development to give teachers more support in contemporary music concepts and music technology.

• To create more curriculum materials to support classroom and instrumental teachers in delivering contemporary music and music technology.

About the Author

David Salisbury is a composer, arranger, performer, ethnomusicologist and lecturer in music at James Cook University School of Creative Arts (SoCA). His current research interests include Contemporary Music Education, Contemporary Music Analysis, North Queensland Aboriginal and Torres Strait performers of contemporary and traditional music as well as a continued investigation of Indonesian music.

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