Category: Teaching

UBC is blessed with some first rate ethnic music ensembles that perform music from Sub-Saharan Africa, Korea, Bali and China, all directed by stellar music directors that are at the top of their game. These ensembles allow Western Art Music students (and non-music students) to see how “the other musical half live” (more properly, the other 90 per cent) by experiencing performance practices, technical demands and the roller-coaster ride of new emotional responses from other music worlds. There seems to be an additional benefit for visiting or recently immigrated students who want to explore, or even discover, their ethnic musical roots.

But what would a Canadian Music ensemble look like? And sound like?

Before answering those questions, another one demands an answer right now. Who would be interested in such an ensemble? You would think that young Canadians, newly arrived in Canada, and visiting foreign students would be first in line for such an opportunity. I know that my appreciation of Japan and England was deepened beyond measure when I participated in their music and dance culture. Canadianists and ethnomusicologists from around the world and even within Canada would be equally intrigued by such a resident ensemble, perhaps even arranging for Monbukagakusho 文部科学省奨学金, Fulbright and SSHRC scholarships to research and report in the same manner as ethnomusicologists. And then there are the home-grown students who feel the need to explore what it means to be Canadian.

Oops

But there’s a problem.

Any discussion of a Canadian anything must first of all confront the fact that Canada is now multicultural. Therefore, in the domain of music, for example, there are no historical or recently arrived music ensembles that can lodge a claim to be Canada’s musical Intangible Cultural Heritage.  Further, the music of Canada’s founding immigrant communities will never again serve the agenda of the Vertical Mosaic, where Anglo and Francophone Canada once sat at the top. The short of it is that Canada now has no single cultural identity beyond its Bill of Rights, only multiple identities that comprise the Canadian cultural landscape. Further, some ethnic groups in Canada (and other diasporan locations) are so devoted to the music of their homelands that they maintain it in a more traditional frame, un-blemished by modern cultural events (i.e., hybridisation) and even neglect, back home.

This artistic and cultural conundrum did not exist several decades ago. The answer to the question, “what is a Canadian ensemble?” was simple. It was comprised of the fiddle, singularly and in groups like the string band and the Quadrille ensemble. This was the quintessential sound of Anglo and Francophone Canadian pioneers, inherited from the Old World and shared with the US.  And yes, they are now the sound of the voices of the top of the vertical mosaic, now destined to become equal members of Canada’s ethnic groups in a more equitable, horizontal configuration. Some day.

The Canadian Fiddle

There are some twists and turns that put the Canadian stamp on the fiddle. It was enthusiastically picked up by Metis and First Nations people in the boreal forest. There are First Nations fiddle masters from James Bay to the Yukon.

Francophone-Canada introduced crooked music (la croche) with its bar lengths of unequal length and the chair dance, known as podorhythm  (les tapements de pieds).

Cape Breton became known as a far-flung outpost of Scottish fiddle style that even the Scots used as resource to re-discover their homeland musical heritage. There was a time when the most popular radio and then television in Canada was directed by Maritimes-native Don Messer, a household name that is still revered by the dozens of fiddle clubs from BC to Nova Scotia. As you watch the video below, you will marvel at the simple, some would say, corny side of old Canada. Welcome to the roots.

All of this activity has been pushed to the back of the room. If you are an ethnomusicologist from say, Japan, you would be hard-pressed to make contact. But with persistence, you would find yourself in a kitchen or a dance-hall filled with multi-generation families in the midst of a party. It’s more likely that the researcher would mistake a Suzuki violin class for a fiddle club because Suzuki violin instructors have enthusiastically picked up the fiddle and added it to their Western Art Music repertoire as a kind of popular music division.  The most telling manifestation of this activity is the set of fiddle books introduced into the pedagogy of the violin program of Canada’s Royal Conservatory of Music.

Where there is the fiddle, there is dance. But song tends to take a back seat. Canada has an equally rich history, some of it unique, in Anglo and Francophone folk song. It was (not “is”) a major feature in the music programs of grade schools across Canada. Edith Fowke was the most prominent compiler but there are many others going all the way back to Marius Barbeau, Canada’s star ethnomusicologist, and even before him. Many of these songs made their way into Canada’s busy Kodaly program of early childhood music education. All of this activity has faded to grey as Canada embraces multiculturalism.

Among the many voices that would protest the creation of a Canadian music ensemble in a university school or department of music, I can hear one clarion criticism. Its folk music, now re-named vernacular music. The West moved on from that shibboleth long ago when Dylan stepped out on the stage with an electric guitar and Pete Seeger tried to cut the electrical cable to the stage. That protest is easy to accommodate because essentially, folk music is the Early Music of times long since passed among “the people” and nicely folds into all the interests and concerns of the multitude of Popular Music Scholars who populated organisations like the International Study of Popular Music, including the Canadian division.

The Vision

So, would you like to imagine what it would be like to enroll in the Canadian Music Ensemble? What would you do each Monday and Wednesday afternoon from 3 to 4:30 pm, each semester?

You would be issued a violin and begin a series of group lessons. Now I hear a new howl of protest from the violin division of the School of Music. The fiddle does not embrace virtuosity (although some professional players go there.) All their music is in First position. They may or may not hold their fiddles under their chins. No one will use a chin rest or a shoulder rest.  Detachable frets allowed! Like training wheels, they may come off later, but not necessarily.

In addition to playing jigs, reels and country dance tunes, the students will learn how to dance them. More important, students would be introduced to step-dancing, the aural percussion accompaniment par excellence of fiddle music.

Students would also learn some songs that would open the door to falderal – one singer providing the verses, the class chiming in on the chorus.  The instructor would have a box of percussion as well – spoons(!), tambourine, bones…stuff like that. Would the piano be introduced to the class? Perhaps, but solo and group fiddles (i.e., string band) are the norm so they might not be a fixture, only an occasional luxury providing rhythmic accompaniment. Accordion and melodeons might sneak in the door as well. Perhaps even penny whistles, although they were not found in Canada. The end-of-semester concerts would be dances held in a community room, not the stage of the recital hall.

So how do I make this ensemble “multicultural”?

The fiddle is found around the world as a crucial piece of luggage carried by the colonisers that followed in the wake of the imperialists, and sometimes adopted by the colonists, around the world. For example, there is an amazing world of violin in India.

Even China dabbled in adapting the violin for their own ethnic use (in sizhu ensembles, along with the saxophone!) at the same moment they were falling head over heels into love with Western Art Music.  It would seem that the sizhu violin is now completely overshadowed by the “Chinese violin”, the er-hu which borrowed many of the Western Art Music techniques like vibrato and playing high up the neck.

My “vision” of the violin in a World Music context is 180 degrees opposite to the usual potpourri where ethnomusicology music directors look for ethnic equivalents, such as the Chinese er-hu in place of the violin, and the South Asian sarangi as a stand-in for the cello.

My excursions into World Violin would be brief tangents before the class would get right back to developing the skills for that well -known Canadian historical past-time, the fire in the kitchen.  Graduates of the program will always have a secret smile on their lips when they hear Stravinsky’s L’histoire du Soldat and see the Faust spin-off, The Devil and Daniel Webster. Not to mention concerts of klezmer, Taraf de Hoidouks and Muzsikas.

I doubt my vision of a Canadian Music ensemble will occur any time soon, so UBC music and non-music students will have to be content with my lecture on the fiddle in my World Music course, M328. Yes, fiddle as “ethnic instrument”.

Readings

Pauline Greenhill (1994) Ethnicity in the Mainstream: Three Studies of English Canadian Culture in Ontario

Peter Burke (1978/1994) Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe

Christopher Marsh (2010) Music and Society in Early Modern England (the successor to the above)

Jacqueline Cogdell Djedje (2008) Fiddling in West Africa

Drew Beisswenger (2011) North American Fiddle Music: A Research and Information Guide

Online versus conventional lectures; that is the question (not asked by Hamlet). The recent issue of UBC Reports (January 2, 2013) has several senior administrators musing about the future of university education. What looms large is the assumption that online instruction may become the equal, if not the superior, mode of delivery.

My course material is now almost entirely online, and my office is virtual (via Connect and Skype). Everything in my courses (readings, lecture descriptions, word lists, bibliographies, exams, assignments) can be accessed online from the comfort of a living room or a coffee shop.

All, that is, except for one crucial component- the lectures.

Online lectures

The next and final step would be to deliver my lectures online. But how? Most of the online courses that I have seen are text-based. The student buys the course, opens up the course modules, reads a whole lot, and then completes the assignments. Borrring. And very likely redundant, given that so much information is available online, and for free no less, starting with Wikipedia.

Lectures via webinars might be a solution, but they are tied to particular time on a calendar. Then there are the audio podcasts which involve listening to somebody reading the text of a lecture. Borrring.

The most likely candidate is the video podcast, which a student could access 24/7 until the final day of the course. It gives new meaning to the idea of cramming, where a hapless, last-minute student spends umpteen non-stop hours in front of a screen before the posted last date to complete the final exam, and hyper-ambition, where the student completes the course in 3 days of non-stop viewing and assignment completion. For students who properly pace themselves to take full advantage of the video podcast, the experience is somewhere between reality TV and a Ted lecture.

The obvious advantage of online lectures is the convenience. An online form of instruction must seem very attractive to those students who truck in from distant homes and sit row upon row to listen and make notes, especially if all they want is 3 credits and a pass so they can get on with the business of graduating and finding a job. Rote-learning is served well by this method.

Another advantage is the false sense of personalisation that comes from one-on-one lectures – you and me on your computer screen.

My third and fourth year courses require a rather large population (30-40 students) to be financially viable. In other words, they lie somewhere between the massed classes of 200 or 300, and the cozy seminars with 6 or less students around a table. They are still relatively crowded with each precious consciousness in danger of being lost in the crowd, so the lure of the video podcast is strong.

The living lecture

With all this in mind, what’s the point of lectures? Enter in, the timeless role of the teacher. University professors are certified as PhDs, Doctors of Philosophy, They frame their academic expertise in the context of a philosophical point of view.  Their real-time musings, pacing, change of mind, tangents, and other instructional ticks reflect the organic nature of their experience of the discipline. In the end, the experience of them in real time is similar to visiting say the Ryōan-ji in Kyoto, as opposed to going there virtually, online.

Teaching reminds me of the power of oral transmission. I learned about this form of music education in Japan when I was there to learn how to play the shakuhachi. I quickly discovered that the music notation contained about 30 per cent of the information needed to perform each piece. The other 70 per cent was supplied by instruction from the teacher (sensei). In the process of instruction, sometimes by demanding nothing more than direct imitation, the teacher insured that the spirit of the music was conveyed, as well as the technical requirements.

The drudge of the commute and the inconvenience of the scheduled visits to the campus are offset by the experience of the teacher first-hand. Think of the difference between a CD or video production of a pop star’s music, versus the live experience of seeing them on stage. Or more cogently, and relevant to WAM (Western Art Music) students, imagine learning to play the piano or whatever instrument from self-help manuals or online instruction, using the notation that is readily available in any music store, versus living lessons.

But the 21^st century teacher must not slip back to the 20^th century where instructors simply downloaded factoids, to be uploaded on a written exam later. Millennials want experiences before facts. University instructors must also come to grips with the reality of 21^st century presentations where the entertainment industry inevitably influences public talk. Even if a teacher is not charismatic, they need to explore the kind of personal development that comes from instruction similar to good old Dale Carnegie, or Toastmaster Clubs.

Gone are the days (I hope) where students are required to overlook eccentric, even anti-social behaviour in a teacher in order to glean the expertise encased in the teacher like gold in dross.

My particular solution to the challenge of teaching in the 21^st century is to blend live lectures with student presentations and end-of-the-week tweets (in Connect) where students can speak their minds about the course.  And just to make it worth the time, I make those weekly contributions worth a mark towards the final mark. Does it get any better than that? If so, please send me a line using the comment function, below.

Readings

Anne Dhu McLucas (2010) The Musical Ear: Oral Tradition in the USA

James A. Davies, editor (2012) The Music History Classroom

 Why study ethnomusicology and popular music?

As music students approach their third year of undergraduate studies, they glance at the subject offerings and spot two courses devoted to music of the world and popular culture. In the massive universities in the States, even non-music students are tempted by the same courses and enrol in the hundreds. The introductory courses are similar to Music Appreciation programs where music notation is not a pre-requisite to understanding the course material. The textbooks, as expensive and ubiquitous as the classic Mus App books and CDs, are Cook’s tours of factual information and scholarly observations.

But what of the needs of students in a school of music? They are rapidly getting up to speed on the technical requirements of their music instruments or voice. Some will even be in the zone for a full-time career as musicians in the near future. At the same time, they are becoming increasingly more aware of the historical and a theoretical foundation of the music they perform. Their core music history and theory programs have already established the primacy and complexity of their adopted high art, Western Classical Music. So why embark on such a tangent as ethnomusicology or popular music?

One of the many answers is simple.  Triangulation.

Triangulation

This word may be familiar to those of you who, like me, have enjoyed the out-of-doors. Many’s the time my friends and I located ourselves on a hiking trail or slope of a mountain in Banff and Yoho National Parks by locating and identifying the surrounding peaks. The more peak spotting, the more confident we were of our maps. Occasionally our exact location was not at all what we imagined.  Back in the real world of day jobs, triangulation can be regularly seen in use by surveyors who measure land for future development.

Sociology has been obsessed with the concept of triangulation for decades, thanks to Norman Denzin. He developed a triangulation methodology which he described in his 1978 book, The Research Act. A quick search of the internet reveals that educational theorists have also used Denzin’s research to measure the effectiveness of their teaching goals and objectives. The goal of these triangulators is to get as close to the “truth” of an initial observation as possible by invoking several research techniques to either reinforce or cast doubt on the primary thesis.

Triangulation and the musical experience

Triangulation in the context I am suggesting is a method for locating your musical self by measuring your current understanding and appreciation of Western Art Music with the new points of view offered by ethnomusicology and popular music. In the process, you will likely discover that your musical needs, and those of your potential listeners, are not what you had imagined. You are no longer located in the same place you were as a Western art music practitioner.

Of course, Western art music listeners are aware that a deeper appreciation of, say Beethoven symphonies can be achieved by comparing (“triangulating”) his later masterpieces with his early works. Symphony number 7, for example, takes on new meaning when compared to the early symphonies.

However, the triangulation I am recommending results in more than a deeper appreciation; it is transformative. I am suggesting that you, the listener and/or music performer, can discover a new location of “you” when you triangulate your current music preferences and understanding with diverse genres completely outside your Western art music preferences. In other words, you discover that your understanding of music is not a “fixed point” from which to achieve greater insight. It moves around as you ramble through entirely new vistas of music-making.

This is an entirely different concept of learning, 180 degrees from the classical learning curve of knowledge acquisition. It is in keeping with the future of education as a system of creating artists of knowledge, rather than artisans of facts. The BC Ministry of Education has labelled this new direction in their dramatic, innovative mandate entitled Enabling Innovation: Transforming Curriculum and Assessment (August 2012). The ministry wants to replace the steady and inexorable procurement of facts to the back of the room, in favour of teaching young people how to be creative with knowledge and experiences.

Triangulation and Western art music

My definition of triangulation can be applied in the most wonderful ways to the music world.  In the realm of performativity, the sedentary stage presence of WAM musicians is found desperately wanting when triangulated with the movement and theatre of their popular music counterparts. Objections will be raised by old-school traditionalists who re-affirm the role of Western art music performers as ego-less broadcasters of the sound of the music coded in the music notations in front of them. When I think of this scenario, I am always reminded of Japanese puppeters in Bunraku.

Western art music audiences, equally committed to restraint and immobility, allegedly insist on this quietude so they can meditate more properly on the sounds. But musical statues both on and off the stage are hand-in-hand with the steady decline in the interest in Western art music (except by those nations who have made a fetish of all things Western, especially “high art”). All are agreed that something has to change. And who’s to say that a performance of classical music wouldn’t be enhanced immeasurably by say, the musicians standing while playing (cello excepted, maybe) with music memorized?

Triangulation and hybridity

It is in the territory of musical hybridisation that triangulation really shines. Interestingly, hybridity is most common in popular music. Folk music (aka traditional, roots, ethnic, and/or heritage music) is usually bounded by ethnocentricity. When combining two or more musical cultures into something new, an invigorating new location of music is fomred in the town square we call “the global village”. And if you don’t find yourself uplifted by the new sound, but instead, frustrated by the loss in translation of your “familiar” heritage, then welcome to the 21^st century and its new mode of critical awareness.

The future of music lies in the hybridizing effect of globalisation, reflected back on each member of a culture no matter where they live.  Local musics, including Western art music and folk music in general, will inexorably become static, even if it is perfectly formed and steeped in nostalgia. The future will assign these experiences to the museum. Canada is perhaps the first nation to develop and champion hybridity, first by establishing a society of multiculturalism, then moving inexorably into the domain of transculturalism. Canadian identity will transform from the isolating effects of hyphenation (e.g., Latin-Canadian) to simply “Canadian”, as the mixing of music and other forms of culture finally achieve critical mass.

Readings

Peter Burke (2009) Cultural Hybridity

(From Amazon books) The period in which we live is marked by increasingly frequent and intense cultural encounters of all kinds. However we react to it, the global trend towards mixing or hybridization is impossible to miss, from curry and chips – recently voted the favourite dish in Britain – to Thai saunas, Zen Judaism, Nigerian Kung Fu, “Bollywood” films or salsa or reggae music. Some people celebrate these phenomena, whilst others fear or condemn them. No wonder, then, that theorists such as Homi Bhabha, Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy, and Ien Ang, have engaged with hybridity in their work and sought to untangle these complex events and reactions; or that a variety of disciplines now devote increasing attention to the works of these theorists and to the processes of cultural encounter, contact, interaction, exchange and hybridization. In this concise book, leading historian Peter Burke considers these fascinating and contested phenomena, ranging over theories, practices, processes and events in a manner that is as wide-ranging and vibrant as the topic at hand.

Tyler Cowen (2004) Creative Destruction: How Globalization Is Changing the World’s Cultures

(From Amazon books) A Frenchman rents a Hollywood movie. A Thai schoolgirl mimics Madonna. Saddam Hussein chooses Frank Sinatra’s “My Way” as the theme song for his fifty-fourth birthday. It is a commonplace that globalization is subverting local culture. But is it helping as much as it hurts? In this strikingly original treatment of a fiercely debated issue, Tyler Cowen makes a bold new case for a more sympathetic understanding of cross-cultural trade. Creative Destruction brings not stale suppositions but an economist’s eye to bear on an age-old question: Are market exchange and aesthetic quality friends or foes? On the whole, argues Cowen in clear and vigorous prose, they are friends. Cultural “destruction” breeds not artistic demise but diversity.

Through an array of colorful examples from the areas where globalization’s critics have been most vocal, Cowen asks what happens when cultures collide through trade, whether technology destroys native arts, why (and whether) Hollywood movies rule the world, whether “globalized” culture is dumbing down societies everywhere, and if national cultures matter at all. Scrutinizing such manifestations of “indigenous” culture as the steel band ensembles of Trinidad, Indian handweaving, and music from Zaire, Cowen finds that they are more vibrant than ever–thanks largely to cross-cultural trade.

For all the pressures that market forces exert on individual cultures, diversity typically increases within society, even when cultures become more like each other. Trade enhances the range of individual choice, yielding forms of expression within cultures that flower as never before. While some see cultural decline as a half-empty glass, Cowen sees it as a glass half-full with the stirrings of cultural brilliance. Not all readers will agree, but all will want a say in the debate this exceptional book will stir.

Introduction

 The beginning of every semester brings to my mind, yet again, the dilemma of teaching at a university in the 21^st century. Along with all my notes, readings, and online preparations, I find myself revisiting this troubling question like some sort of ghost of Christmas past, present, and future.

The End of Traditional Education

My quandary surfaces in the exams that I am required to administer. “Assessments” as they are now called, exist to ostensibly measure the amount and quality of learning that has occurred in each student’s mind. Students take these evaluations (i.e., final marks) to their undergraduate advisors, scholarship committees and ultimately their future employers, as proof of their competency. But exams can also be trials by fire, dominated by stressful rote learning and crisis management techniques. Granted, some people thrive on competition, but “some” is not “all” and those who loath the race to superiority are sometimes brilliant in their own quiet way.

The most extreme example of the inherent malice of the exam process is found in Japan. The trains always run on time. When one is late during national university entrance exam time, it is almost always because a student has jumped on the tracks in front of one. Far less extreme, but equally troubling is the after-school programs of supplementary education, called Juku (Cram Schools). In the world of music, the after-school band programs are famous for their sky-high standards. A closer look at the programs reveals that the students practice 2 to 3 hours a day after school, and 5-6 hours on each day of the week-ends. Euroamerican educators and sociologists wonder out loud if a deep price is being paid for such obsessive behaviour. In the realm of the national entrance exams, the cost becomes obvious.

The New Examination

“What would an exam look like if it was devoid of fear and loathing?” is the question I ask myself every year.

My path to the answer of this troubling question has been the evolution of my exam procedure, which has moved inexorably from in-class misery to online freedom. I began by playing ambient music, and then the sound of crickets in the night, during the writing of the exams. The music was not to everybody’s liking, but the quiet sound of evening crickets was surprisingly successful. I then went on to allow students to write the exams anywhere in the music building, even outside in the sunshine, on the day of the exam. Finally, I gave everybody permission to access their notes and books, commonly called open book exams.

Now I have arrived at the final stage – online exams. And here I find an amazing intersection of two worlds. I have, almost by accident, created a blend of online instruction and traditional lecture-hall education. One could even say that my classes are a form of distance education, given my use of Connect online course materials and online exams, but without the distance from the teacher. A quick search of the internet reveals that university distance education online is  over-taking traditional instruction, much to the consternation of traditional universities and colleges.

The Future is Now

My introduction to this radical new style of examination was co-incidental. Some years ago I decided to upgrade my computer skills by enrolling in some courses at the Academy of Learning, just up the street from where I lived. Classes were drop-in, not scheduled. When you arrived, you found a free PC and monitor, rather like a study cubicle in a library, and worked from a teaching manual. The educator was referred to as a facilitator who was there to assist students if there was one or another detail in the manual that they couldn’t understand. There was no time limit on enrollment. And the exams could be taken anywhere, any time. And they could be repeated as many times as necessary until you achieved your 100 per cent mark.

Music students who have participated in the exam system of the Royal Conservatory of Music have somewhat the same experience. Each student prepares for an exam for as long as they want. The RCM sends out examiners at certain times of the year to evaluate your efforts. You don’t go to the RCM and enroll for several years, you take the exams in your home town.You can fail the exams, and take them again. You can skip exam levels (but not at the highest levels). You can take as long as you want to acquire your “degree”. You can start and end at any age. I’ve personally examined wind players in the 60s and 70s.

The New Education

The new style of examination stands up well to the early warning signs of the demise of traditional instruction.  For example, the National Training Centre’s hierarchy of average learning retention states that listening to lectures is the poorest form of education. Another pyramid is Benjamin Bloom’s hierarchy of meaningful education, reflecting the same urgency of reformation.

And then there is David Ausubel’s Assimilation Theory of Education, which some label “the flight from rote learning”. The goal today appears to be a blend of rote/memorisation and “meaningful” learning, with far greater emphasis on the latter because it can motivate the learner to willingly do the former, without threat of failure. In-class exams based on rote memorisation do not to fulfill this mandate, at least in the social sciences and humanities.

Perhaps even the hard sciences, if you believe Thomas Kuhn.

In addition to the radical re-assessment of the act of teaching, this current age of digital information and social media results in the alarming fact that everything I say in lectures is available online, sometimes with brilliant illustrations. How can teachers like me compete with the internet? Not by being more erudite – that is impossible. We do our job by organizing the information in a meaningful way, while continually being reflexive, so students can see how experience combines with information.

Conclusion

So I will lecture, but I will try not to pontificate. I hope. Some students may mistake my casual manner for talking down, as if they had travelled back in time to a grade 11 classroom. Others are grateful for my style of passing on knowledge and experience, as if it were peer-to-peer, rather than knowledge from on high.

With all this in mind, I have placed my exams online. You can write them in a coffee shop, a bedroom, a park bench, wherever there is a wifi connection.  The exams require you to apply the information you received in class, and supplement with online resources like Wikipedia, and apply them to unique situations, not found on the internet.