Blog 1 – Why ‘The Music Informal’
I have been teaching the Viola and Violin for over 30 years and during all that time something was unrelentingly nagging me at the back of mind. Don’t get me wrong as this is an amazing profession and I am privileged to have had this as a major part of my music career. However something didn’t quite feel right and I could never pin point what it was but I was missing something.
More recently, I was stumped for an area of study for an M Ed dissertation. I shared my quandary at a meeting with my Music Service team and a fine colleague of mine suggested I should look at “Informal Learning” (IL) in music. With curiosity burning I did some initial research and immediately made this the focus of study. Ever since then I have been fascinated by this rich and unselfconscious area of music skills acquisition.
I now realise that this was part of the missing ingredient in my admittedly average teaching. What was lacking was an essential perspective – music is part of our desire to just… play!
For some of you reading this it must feel like this is a bit of a quantum leap in reasoning and a bit crazy. Meanwhile others of you will be shaking your heads because it has taken me a good 30 years to arrive at this conclusion!
However the issues are complex and draw together many areas of study like music history, social history, anthropology, ethnomusicology, developmental psychology, educational psychology to name a few.
I feel that I am new to exploring Informal Learning in music despite studying it for best part of 10 years. I am no anthropologist or psychologist but just a humble bowed string’s specialist, musician and teacher. My hope is to pull together a community of interested parties from a variety of fields of study and professions who can help assemble the salient threads of current thinking to help explain the notion of Informal Learning. Why is that important? I think that mental and emotional wellbeing is at risk when certain elements of play are denied in childhood and that includes music making.
Why do children play? Why is music part of that play with little encouragement from grown ups? What skills do they acquire just from hearing, processing and experimenting with the music stimuli around them? Should music education be an imposed curriculum or should it build on the skills the children acquire naturally and unselfconsciously through play?
I also believe that the play skills learn’t in childhood never leave the individual and that adults use them in furthering these and other skills in adult life. It stays with the person but it looks different and yet it is just as vital as it was in childhood.
Therefore I would value your challenges, mentoring and thoughts on this shared journey with you.