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Troubleshooter - Views and Reviews
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 Although Part 1 of my reaction to the government’s short-sighted, ill-informed, and regressive attitude to education, is predominantly based on personal experience and observation, it’s still, surely, valid, compelling and reliable evidence.
But there’s also a wealth of thoroughly researched evidence which supports my observations, and which has often surprised the researchers and confounded those who seek to dismiss their findings. One such researcher is Dr Anita Collins, an educator, researcher and writer in the field of neuroscience and music education at the University of Canberra, who believes that music education is the key to raising literacy and numeracy standards. After publishing her research nearly ten years ago, Dr Collins summarised her findings for the Sydney Morning Herald where she writes: “Based on neuroscientific research, the approach used at present of ‘more time in the basics means better results’ may well be flawed.” She goes on to say that “it may be time to consider a very old idea that has been made new again by neuroscientific research, that is: music education – the neural network enhancer.” Some of us have known this for many years from personal experience. I, like many school music teachers, chose my profession (and stayed in it) because of my belief in music’s value in education. We’ve consistently observed that kids who learn a musical instrument or participate in a school orchestra, jazz ensemble, rock band, or choir, demonstrate far greater engagement with other aspects of their learning. I can name many former students who would have left school much earlier but for their involvement in music. I will even confidently go so far as to say that students who miss classes in order to attend music lessons, or to rehearse in a school production or music group, are noticeably better organised, focused and positive, not to mention having higher self-esteem and, thus, a better foundation for learning, than those who don’t. I could also name many socially reticent, shy or otherwise insecure students who, once they ventured to learn a musical instrument, blossomed, thrived and succeeded in other aspects of school, as well as in their lives beyond. All of this is confirmed by Anita Collins’s findings when she concludes that “Two decades of research has now found that music education grows, hones and permanently improves neural networks like no other activity. Children who undertake formal, ongoing musical education have significantly higher levels of cognitive capacity, specifically in their language acquisition and numerical problem-solving skills. They also continue in education for longer, reverse the cognitive issues related to disadvantage and earn and contribute more on average across their lifetime.” I can remember one rare year at the school where I worked, when the dux prize, considered the supreme achievement at prizegiving or graduation, was awarded to a student of whom I was totally unaware; an individual who had not participated in any performing arts or sport or club or school communal activity; a student who had, as I saw it, taken and not given; one who had failed to engage or contribute to the community from which they benefitted. Thankfully, it was predominantly the school’s musicians, actors and sports participants who achieved the award – the students whose engagement in learning, participating and contributing was beyond the measurements that examinations or standardised tests can demonstrate – and beyond the parameters imposed by Christopher Luxon’s stated intention in this year’s budget of “Teaching the Basics Brilliantly”, because his concept of what constitutes ‘the basics’ is alarmingly flawed and limited. Ten years ago Anita Collins faced government meddling similar to that which the PM and his coadjutors are now trying to impose on New Zealand. At the time, she wrote that “research flies in the face of suggestions in the Australian Government's Review of the Australian Curriculum this year that music and arts education should only be started after Grade 3 so students could get a handle on the core literacy and numeracy requirements.” In our county’s current climate of government cuts and premature interference, it’s sobering to read Collins’s evidence that finds there is more harm being done than improvements made: “Music education is often one of the first programs to be cut or scaled back when the purse strings are tightened in a school. Again, when considering the research that now exists, this also seems flawed. Many of the intervention programs that are in operation in schools may find they are less in demand if music education is viewed not as an extra but as a concurrent neural enhancer to literacy and numeracy education.” And Dr Collins’s research is verified and reflected in the work of many others, just a few examples of which include:
But that’s just the formal, scientific research. From the 1980’s, the late Sir Ken Robinson was a famously insightful commentator on the essential nature of music and the arts in education. His inspired and engaging ‘stand-up’ style presentations were derived from observation, perception and insight and, for anyone who is serious about understanding the benefits of music in education, his 2007 TED talk (available on YouTube) ‘Do Schools Kill Creativity?’ is essential viewing. Three minutes into his talk, Robinson contends that “Creativity is now as important in education as literacy” and goes on to develop a hypothesis that endorses Picasso’s famous dictum that “All children are born artists; the problem is to remain an artist as we grow up.” Again, there are numerous articles and papers that support this including Tham Khai Meng, writing in The Guardian (2015), who asserts that “Everyone is born creative, but it is educated out of us at school”, and he goes on to describe how “We spend our childhoods being taught the artificial skill of passing exams”. Further worthwhile (and often entertaining) viewing on these topics (the arts, literacy, creativity) include another Robinson presentation – ‘Boundless Possibilities’. Ironically, Sir Ken Robinson’s knighthood was for ‘services to the arts’; a rather limiting substitute for what surely should have been ‘services to education and the arts’. But perhaps I do Christopher Luxon a disservice; perhaps he actually does understand the value of music as a literacy enhancer. Maybe it’s just that he can’t say that in the face of his voters, so his quick-fix solutions are all about seeming to have the answers, however temporary – just as long as it takes him through to the next election. In the meantime, he has no qualms about pretending to care about education and purporting to know better than experienced educators about what should be done. “Isn’t it great to be in government?” asked the deputy National party leader in her opening statement at the party’s recent conference. Could there be a clearer indication that their policies are nothing more than populist vote-catchers, even if that results in New Zealand sinking into artistic, scientific and political insignificance – id est: Making New Zealand Small Again. Finally, as much for your entertainment as for your erudition, watch singer-songwriter Bobby McFerrin’s ‘The Power of the Pentatonic Scale’ at the 2009 World Science Festival.
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 When the New Zealand prime minister Christopher Luxon says that he is “prepared to see schools deferring the arts and music curriculum to raise achievement in maths and reading”, he shows such a dearth of understanding of how the arts support and enhance maths and literacy, that he is already a leading cause of their further deterioration.
There’s a standing joke in our car whenever we head off to a concert – “there seems to be a lot of traffic tonight; I suppose they’re all heading to the concert.” – They’re not of course, but, while the concert hall might be full, it’s still a small percentage of the city’s population. And in Christchurch where I live, the orchestral musicians on stage comprise a significant number of Eastern Europeans and other immigrants from countries where music education is considered one of the basics. While most New Zealand schools are more-or-less a level playing field for what are traditionally considered ‘academic’ subjects, the number that can boast high-quality music programmes is variable at best – and, if Mr Luxon has his way, about to get smaller. Speaking of ‘small’ . . . Long ago I attended the smallest of the three secondary schools that boys could attend in a South Island town. The school had fewer than two hundred students and around nine or ten teachers, none of whom was a music or drama or art or physical education specialist, despite the requirements of the New Zealand curriculum even in those days. At my school, in order to pay lip-service to the music curriculum, various teachers (a different one each year as I remember) would enlist the help of the nearest student slaves to haul a record player and its speakers to our classroom where he (always ‘he’) would play a classical LP (‘vinyl’ in today speak) while he marked work of his specialist subject, and we ‘studied’. To this day I still wonder if, on the day that Frank Twiss played Leopold Stokowski’s recording of Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony, any of my 5th form (year 11) classmates experienced even a fraction of the Damascus moment that changed my life that afternoon. With my chemistry homework untouched on my desk, I was gripped and transported by the music as my physical surroundings faded into irrelevancy and made that token lip-service one of the most productive and rewarding lessons of Frank’s career, although he never knew it. I went to him and asked about the music after class, but he seemed to think I was taking the mickey and told me that “you’d have done better to get more work done Ryan!” as he returned the LP to its sleeve and strutted away. With a piano at home (not an uncommon household item in those days), I organised piano lessons for myself at the age of nine, an expense my parents could ill afford, but indulged nevertheless. I later realised that I’d always responded to music in a more intense way than most, but, as a teenager, it was mainly the current popular chart-toppers that engaged my active interest and which I played by ear on the piano, although the occasional short well-known classical piece certainly made a periodic impression when it chanced to emerge from a commercial radio station's listener request programme. But nothing had penetrated the depths of my being like that Tchaikovsky symphony and its forty-five-minute world of unrelenting power, sweeping passion, and heart-stopping emotional expression. I was so overwhelmed that soon the money I earned from my holiday job began to disappear on whatever random recordings I could find in the thread-bare classical bins of the town’s department stores. And so began a life-long exploration of the art of music, and many years of rewarding adventures in pursuit of its infinite revelations. In my final year of school, I persuaded my parents and my school to allow me to take music as a Bursary subject (now NCEA level 3). This could only be achieved by my travelling to one of the girls’ schools for music classes, but such inter-school timetabling wasn’t unknown in our town, so the deal was done! Unfortunately it clashed with my other most favourite subject – Latin – a compromise that, on balance, had to be accepted. The job money, intended to fund me through university in a year or two, needed subsidising considerably by my father who, when he discovered that my original maths and science focus had changed to music, expressed the hope that “it will end in a job”. At that point, a job was the last thing on my mind, but with the eventual guidance of a wise and pragmatic woman (who remains the main influence in anchoring my feet to terra firma), ‘job’ status was achieved! And so I became a secondary school music teacher and spent the next forty-or-so years indulging my preoccupation with music by inflicting its compulsive properties on thousands of unsuspecting teenagers. My own performing and composition continued alongside ‘the job’, but the job proved to be a life-long learning experience that benefitted me as much as it did my students. And working with young people continues to inform, shape, enhance and sustain all the other music-making that I’m still fortunate to be involved with. As a teacher, I was lucky to always enjoy the support of colleagues and principals who valued and often participated in the music-making that brought such fulfilling rewards to the school community. Of course, there was the odd short-sighted ‘academic’ who believed that music and drama were a distraction from real subjects and real learning; one Head of Science going so far as to refer to the performing arts as “the entertainment subjects”. And now, in New Zealand, we have a prime minister who promotes that same antediluvian attitude. But ‘entertainment’ is so far from the core value of music, that only someone who has never experienced its humanity and spirituality, and who views the world in monochrome, could possibly see it that way. Anyway, music is both an art and a science. Its logic, acoustics and sound properties, all require practical scientific understanding. Its rhythms are mathematically complex; its stylistic variety and its use in different eras, societies, cultures, conflicts and ceremonies provides unique lessons in history and sociology; its wide variety of foreign words and musical terms gives insight into many languages and the ways in which different cultures think (Another lesson for today's NZ government?). Its need for co-ordination, good posture, stamina and accuracy contributes to physical fitness; and its symbols, terms and notation is enhanced literacy in action. And it stimulates the neural circuit (sometimes called the ‘reading circuit’) of the brain. But music is also an art which brings all of those different disciplines together for emotional expression, intellectual insights, poetic and imaginative creativity, cultural identity, mutual respect and understanding, and, above all, humanity. |
AuthorTony Ryan has reviewed Christchurch concerts, opera and music theatre productions and many other theatre performances since the mid 1990s. ReviewsTony has presented live and written radio reviews of numerous concerts, opera and other musical events for RNZ Concert for many years. An archive of these reviews can be found at Radio New Zealand - Upbeat
His reviews of opera, music & straight theatre and numerous reviews of buskers and comedy festival performances are available at Theatreview. An archive of Tony’s chamber music reviews is held at Christopher’s Classics He has also reviewed for The Press (Christchurch). Links to Tony's Press reviews are listed below: 2024 Songs for Helen – Music by Chris Adams 2022 A Barber and Bernstein Double Bill – Toi Toi Opera The Strangest of Angels – NZOpera Will King (Baritone) and David Codd (Piano) – Christopher's Classics 2019 Ars Acustica – Free Theatre Truly Madly Baroque – Red Priest The Mousetrap – Lunchbox Theatre Iconoclasts – cLoud Last Night of the Proms – CSO 2018 An Evening with Simon O’Neill NZSO Catch Me If You Can – Blackboard Theatre Brothers in Arms – CSO Fear and Courage – CSO Sin City – CSO Don Giovanni – Narropera at Lansdowne Mad Hatter’s Tea Party – Funatorium Weave – NZTrio Tosca – NZ Opera 2017 Sister Act – Showbiz Broadway to West End – Theatre Royal Chicago – Court Theatre Tchaikovsky Symphony No. 5 – CSO Homage – CSO Last Night of the Proms – CSO SOAR – NZTrio Pianomania – NZSO Rogers & Hammerstein – Showbiz Songs for Nobodies – Ali Harper The Beauty of Baroque – CSO Travels in Italy – NZSO Archives
August 2024
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