RILM staff periodically contribute writings to EBSCOpost, a lively blog run by our partners that publishes pieces pertinent to librarianship, higher education, and beyond. Over time, some of these posts are removed, and even those that remain generally recede from view, following the ephemeral nature of much digital content. With 60 years of preserving the world’s writings on music and music-related topics behind us, we are now adding a small rescue project: bringing these blog posts back into circulation. However modest, they help document our history as an organization, and we hope they will continue to resonate with our international readership as well as with any music enthusiast who happens upon them.
We follow up an inquiry into What is musicology? with a piece written by Executive Director Tina Frühauf that inspects how music education is conceived and practiced across cultures and time periods, as well as its establishment as a discipline, modern institutionalization, and more.
What is music pedagogy? Universality of education in sound and sound in education
Learning music is as old as music-making itself, tracing back to the earliest times of civilization, that is prehistory. Since then, the world’s cultures have developed different systems of teaching and learning – one may think of maguru panggul, literally, “teaching with the mallet” in Bali and Java; or the system of the Xhosa in Ngqoko, South Africa, which is based on the progression incentive–songs–techniques–terminology. Master–apprentice approaches have been common in many cultures around the globe and throughout history, from the troubadours to the guru-śiṣya paramparā tradition in India to the Bach family. But as a field of study, music education has only been established in later modernity and it was not until the 20th century that it moved towards becoming a discipline in its own right: music pedagogy.
In its broader sense, music pedagogy refers to all practical, application-oriented, as well as scholarly efforts aimed at teaching and instruction. The tasks of music pedagogy focus on ability, knowledge, experience, understanding, and interpretation in all areas of music. As such music pedagogy includes the related concepts of music education, didactics, teaching, and instruction in music, although their distinctions are neither clear nor consensual.
In its narrower sense, music pedagogy has come to refer to the scholarly reflection of and theory formation within all its fields. Systematic music pedagogy thus provides the practical, applied areas with a theoretical basis for their actions and reflects on aesthetic, psychological, and sociological questions on the meaning and effect of music and on the reception of art in the most diverse forms of music. As such it serves artistic, scholarly and didactic practice.
With music pedagogy’s evolution in the 20th century, many distinctive approaches further developed or received refinement and new methods came to the fore. Among them, the Kodály method named after Hungary’s charismatic composer and pedagogue, eurhythmics developed by the Swiss musician and educator Émile Jaques-Dalcroze, the Schulwerk of Carl Orff in Germany and the Suzuki method created by the Japanese violinist and pedagogue.
Paralleling its establishment as an independent discipline, the institutionalization of music pedagogy began as well. Aside from its place in the academy, music university or college, and school, music education also takes place in individualized, lifelong learning and community contexts. Both amateur and professional musicians typically take music lessons, short private sessions with an individual teacher. In all these diverse efforts and approaches, all share the goal to educate people how to produce organized sound, make and transmit music, and do it well.
RILM abstracts and indexes music pedagogy topics, representing as many countries and languages as possible. RILM also offers a selection of music-pedagogy journals in full text, which you can explore at https://www.rilm.org/abstracts/.
Above: Phnom Penh, Cambodia. 2002. Ek Son (top left), one of the first four masters hired to teach for the Cambodian Master Performers Program in 1999, along with students, including sisters Yim Chanthy playing kloy (bamboo flute) and Yim Poukunthy playing takhe (behind Chanthy in white shirt); below, an excerpt from Music für Kinder (Music for children), Orff and Keetman’s own realizations of the Schulwerk material.
