MusicEd
 








        
 


16. The buffeting music services have received over the years has toughened the hides of heads of service against body-blows. How else does one explain the equanimity with which, at their recent annual conference, they received what, on the face of it, was an uncompromisingly bleak message from John Sloboda?

17. Sue Hallam's persuasive essay on the value of music would have been even more welcome had it been written in 1997 when some politicians and those who advise them, including the then HMCI and head of OfSTED deemed it appropriate to take music out of the National Curriculum for children aged between 5 and 11 and not to inspect the content of any music lessons. Fortunately, thanks to effective national campaigning, that mistake was corrected, though much damage was done with head teachers and governing bodies acting quickly to de-prioritise if not drop entirely music from their school's curriculum; and then needing big financial incentives, such as the music standards fund, to begin to re-instate music provision.

   
  18. That experience calls into question whether John Sloboda's answer to his own basic premise - that music education in schools cannot function effectively without an implicit agreement between stakeholders about what it is for - is entirely accurate. He argues that
 
- the underpinning consensus represented by a stable mid-20th century agenda collapsed as a result of the same cultural shifts, most evident in the sixties, that led to the collapse of Christianity (and the decline of church choirs) as a dominant cultural force;
- as a result of cultural fragmentation music educators no longer occupy a privileged vantage point; they are now a small sub-set of the many sub-cultures that co-exist in the population;
- the National Curriculum for music was introduced at the very moment when its sustainability had never been less certain.
   
  19. We might well characterise all that as interesting academic speculation. John Sloboda is perhaps on firmer ground when he goes on to suggest that no plausible "mission" for music education can be established independently of an understanding of the ever-evolving way music is being used by the various stakeholders. Then come the body-blows: recent research (some of which is described elsewhere in this MusicEd site) suggests that
- many school music teachers have little respect for or understanding of the musical lives of those they teach;
- the musical enthusiasms and aspirations of many young people are not addressed by the current curriculum;
- the transition from primary to secondary school is a key 'parting of the ways' between young people and their music teachers;
- music retains a key and central role in the lives of most people who see themselves as 'not musical', and that emotional self-management is at the heart of this role.