Chapter 1: Process and Product

What is music teaching?

What exactly do we mean by “teaching music”? It is important that we address this question before all else, for unless we are clear about our answer to it, we can be led up any number of interesting, but nevertheless irrelevant, cul-de-sacs.

It is possible, for example, especially for the music teacher working at pre-school or primary level, to be fooled into thinking that being a good music teacher means using music to service other areas of the curriculum. Head teachers and principals often commend my lessons for “teaching so many things:… numbers, colours, days of the week,” etc. If I wait for further compliments, I am often told how good my lessons are for “socialisation… sharing… listening… taking turns,” and so on. Only rarely am I complimented for the music I have taught.

As the philosopher Frank Furedi rightly bemoans, these days “knowledge and art are not likely to be valued for themselves, but because of their usefulness for society… How knowledge and art are regarded is determined… by their utility for some other purpose.” [1] Thus a booklet published by the Campaign for Music in the Curriculum lists the values of music education as follows:

Learning music helps children from an early age to improve their:
                    - reading ability
                    - ability in maths, science and engineering
                    - speech-fluency in native and foreign languages…
                    - reasoning capacity
                    - time management skills…
                    - ability to handle… stress…
             These skills give children… the very abilities that employers are seeking. [2]

This instrumentalism is undoubtedly well-meaning, but inevitably leads to a decline in respect for standards. As Furedi explains:

If we cannot value… cultural achievements in their own terms, it becomes difficult to discriminate between them. Claims to excellence sound self-serving… to the extent that… the insistence on upholding a particular standard is represented as a form of… discrimination… Once the inner content of art and knowledge ceases to have a socially accepted meaning, the standards become negotiable. [3]

But no: a good music teacher may well be delighted that his music teaching also facilitates the learning of other things, but that should not be his first priority. He is a music teacher, before all else, and that is of intrinsic value.

Our society’s attitude to music education in general has over the years become fatally compromised by our blind obsession with external product over internal process. In recent years, the music-teaching institutions of this country, including county music services, have fallen prey to the same level of governmental interference and stultifying documentation as schools. Between grade examinations, the National Curriculum, and the all the attendant apparatus of so-called accountability imposed by various bureaucratic tiers, as well as a shocking lack of funding, the British music teacher often has very little room in which to remain passionate and creative about his work. [4]

It is therefore easy for the music teacher to be deceived into thinking that as long as he is teaching his students about music, he is doing his job well. Schools are full of students who spend their music lessons learning about a variety of instruments, about different types of music, about composers past and present, and so on. This is not intrinsically a bad thing – especially if, as is sometimes the case, the information they are learning is correct. But I would suggest that learning music is not exactly the same as learning about music: if a music curriculum is to be a music curriculum rather than just a subsection of the social sciences, the former must be our primary objective.

“Of course,” says the music teacher: “we learn music by making music.” This is indeed a wonderful idea, so long as we are clear about the difference between making music and merely imitating it. This is not about the difference between playing pre-existent music and composing: the difference is more subtle, and more important, than that. Emile Jaques-Dalcroze recognised it a century ago, when he wrote that:

the word “music”… has come to stand for the mechanical production, or, rather, reproduction of sounds... Not music, but a mere imitation of music, continues to be taught in most schools. [5]

What then do we mean by making music, as opposed to imitating it? How do we get our students to make music from the depths of their souls, not merely imitate music with their limbs – whether composing their own or performing someone else’s? And why is it worth the trouble?

The answer will, I hope, become clear if we look in some depth at what I believe to be the true vocation of the music teacher, which is to help his students to be musical. Our primary job is to develop our students’ musicality, for a child who is musical will make music. Let us look at this idea in some detail.

What is musicality?

Musicality is an oft-misused word. A musical child is not necessarily one who plays an instrument; some proficient instrumentalists are profoundly unmusical, and some highly musical people play no instrument at all. And needless to say, passing examinations in music (whether instrumental or theory) is no token or guarantee of musicality either. Nor is participation in performances, concerts, or school nativity plays!

Nor is it entirely honest to say, as some do, that everyone is equally musical. Musicality is indeed a quality which is available to everyone, regardless of whether they pursue music as a specialist subject. But to what extent a child avails himself of the possibility of being musical depends upon many things, including the education he receives, the environment in which he grows up, and his own interests and inclinations.

Musicality is not a trivial matter: it belongs deep in the heart of every human being. Therefore, for a child to develop his musicality is for that child to be transformed by it. Developing musicality is a profound long-term experience – which some children, for reasons we should respect, may not be interested in.

Flow

If we are at all musical ourselves, we will have an instinctive feeling for what it means to be transformed by the development of our musicality. The psychologist Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi is perhaps unique in attempting to describe this state of mind, and working out how and when we achieve it. He has coined the term “flow”, which he describes as “the positive aspects of human experience – joy, creativity, the process of total involvement with life.” [6] Flow is of course not unique to musicians, but anyone who is truly musical will experience it through music. And it is our task as music teachers to help our students to find it in music.

Csikszentmihalyi draws diagrams like this: [7]

Many people remain in the bottom-left corner of the diagram, facing low musical challenges and having low musical skills. This is of course not a problem for everyone – but it is not where we as music teachers should allow our students to remain! If a music student attempts to progress vertically up the diagram from here, he will face increasing challenges, but his skills will not enable him to meet these challenges: he will end up anxious and stressed, and may give up out of sheer frustration. If instead he moves horizontally across the diagram, increasing his skills without facing challenges which match his growing skills, he will end up bored, his attention may wander, and he may similarly give up. None of these options results in a feeling of “flow” – and all of them make the learning of music pointless and unfruitful. However, if a student moves diagonally up and across the diagram, his skills and the challenges he faces will keep pace with each other: he will experience on-going satisfaction and enjoyment. “Enjoyment comes… whenever the opportunities for action perceived by the individual are equal to his or her capabilities.” [8] This is what Csikszentmihalyi calls the “flow channel”: this is the path we should want our students to take.

Csikszentmihalyi describes several characteristics of “flow” states, and I will list here the ones which I think are most salient to us as music teachers:

(1) The first we have seen already: Flow requires a balance between level of skills and level of challenge. If either of these parameters falters, then we drift into either anxiety or boredom.

(2) “When all a person’s skills are needed to cope with the challenges of a situation, that person’s attention is completely absorbed by the activity.” [9] Therefore, “flow” demands and creates a sense of deep concentration and focus, which is directed not at achieving some externally-imposed goal, but at the activity itself. It makes us concentrate on the process of what we are doing, not any supposed end-product. Therefore, “flow helps to integrate the self because in that state of deep concentration consciousness is unusually well ordered. Thoughts, intentions, feelings and all the senses are focused on the same goal.” [10]

(3) “Flow” therefore makes us feel complete involvement in the activity. Our “sense of self” disappears, precisely because our self is so fully absorbed by what we are doing. Often a feeling of communality emerges, either a communion with the activity itself or with others who are involved in it with us. “Concern for the self disappears, yet paradoxically the sense of self emerges stronger after the flow experience is over.” [11]

(4) Achieving such a level of concentration allows us to develop our own goals as we progress, which are intrinsic to the activity. Because we are concentrating on the process itself, not any external goals, the activity itself gives us ongoing immediate feedback as we progress.  This means that we can constantly adjust our progress as we proceed. “Without such internal guidelines, it is impossible to experience flow.” [12]

(5) “Flow” is its own reward. We do it for its own sake, not to satisfy someone else. Because we do it not to achieve externally-imposed goals, we do not need to seek feedback from outside ourselves. “It is when we act freely, for the sake of the action itself rather than for ulterior motives, that we learn to become more than what we were.” [13]  “The purpose of the flow is to keep on flowing…; you move up to keep the flow going.” [14]

What are the practical implications of all this for us as music teachers? Here are some of my thoughts:

First, point (1) above demands that in our music classes we must teach children genuine musical skills. Their musical competence must constantly increase. “Just a bit of fun” is not an option: it leaves children in the bottom-left corner of the “flow” diagram. Fun, on its own, without the required development of skills and challenges, does not “produce psychological growth.” [15]

Second, therefore, we as music teachers must know what the competencies are which go to make up musicality, and we must know how to develop them. We must therefore develop both our own musicality and our understanding of pedagogy. There is no alternative.

We will all have different ways of understanding and categorising essential musical skills. Here is my list, which I will be using throughout this book:

(a) PULSE & RHYTHM – the latter depends, of course, on the former;             (b) METRE, PHRASING & STRUCTURE – three different levels of organisation in music;             (c) MELODY – including understanding of pitch (relative and absolute) and scales;             (d) HARMONY – so often neglected, but absolutely essential.

Third, Csikzentmihalyi’s point (2) above demands that we create environments for our music teaching which conduce to focus and concentration: clean, uncluttered spaces; order, peace, and clear behavioural boundaries. “We must be able to concentrate on what we are doing.” [16] This is especially important for very young children, who often, for the best of reasons, may find concentration difficult.

Fourth, point (4) above implies that we do not need to be constantly telling children what their goals are, nor giving feedback to every activity they do. We should be sparing in correcting them individually, and either praising or criticising them too much: instead we should constantly draw their attention to listening to the sounds they are making themselves. This way, we can give them the skills which allow them to access the intrinsic feedback which music-making gives them.

Fifth, if their skills and challenges are to remain always increasing but always in balance, then we must respect the rate and nature of the development of children’s musicality. We must understand the process by which it develops. Let us take a look at this issue now.

Process and product

My favourite way to explain this concept is to draw a tree. Have a little study of this picture before you read on:

The roots of the tree, which are hidden, represent that elusive quality, musicality, which I define as the instinctive, internal, sub-conscious, concrete feeling for music which a musician needs if he is to play well. If the tree grows well, then the roots develop into, and support, the trunk and branches; these are visible, and represent what I call musicianship, which I define as the conscious, abstract, intellectual understanding of music and how it works. What we are all waiting for, of course, are the products, the fruits, which are the pieces of music the musician plays.

If anything at all matters about these musical products, it is not their quantity or frequency, and certainly not how early we can grow them, but – their quality: Are they tasty? Are they juicy? Do they delight us? More importantly, do they delight the child producing them? Do they transform us? Do they transform the child producing them? If the musical fruits taste bitter, or bland, either to the listener or to the musician, it would not be unreasonable to wonder whether the roots of the tree are sound, or what kind of soil it is growing in; we may, not unreasonably, conclude that, in the words of Edmond Holmes, the fruits have been “artificially deposited… like a film on the surface of the mind,” [17] and that the roots cannot go very deep.

Assessing musical quality is of course inevitably a matter of subjective judgment, based upon our emotional reaction to it. This does not mean that quality is not assessable in any sense; however, it does mean that assessment cannot and must not be reduced to “objective” attainment targets. To do so is to deny the fact that music’s value is intrinsic, because, done well, it is transformational, both for the musician and for society. Music is there for the soul – and this, by definition, cannot be objectively assessed.

These fruits, these musical products, are the end result of a long process. If all that matters to us is the products, then learning musical skills will be a long slog, and we will never get to the end of it. If however we can delight in the process, then we will see that the products are developing all the time. If a child does not like the process of developing his musicality for its own sake, then there is no point in inventing fake external goals to pursue, such as assessments or examinations. That merely distracts from the process, and scuppers any chance of real “flow”. To quote Csikszentmihalyi again: “There is no inherent problem in our desire to escalate our goals, as long as we enjoy the struggle along the way. The problem arises when people are so fixated on what they want to achieve that they cease to derive pleasure from the present.” [18]

Assessing the health of the roots is even harder than assessing the fruits (the pieces of music), because the roots are underground, hidden from us unless we know how to dig for them. But it is the hidden development which matters; the roots must remain healthy, even once the fruits start to appear.

This is so important. Music education is a process, not just a means to a product: a journey, not just a way to reach a goal. Musical “learning outcomes”, if they are truly to delight us, will come only as the by-product of a sound, well-grounded process.  If we become obsessed with the exterior results of our teaching, then we may be able to produce in our students the superficial appearance of competence (or even of “the very abilities that employers are seeking”) [19] but it will be rootless and will crumble at the first opportunity – usually the day after the exam or the performance. Even worse, we give our students an attitude to learning which perpetuates, in the words of Christopher Small, “those states of mind by which we see… products as all-important regardless of the process by which they are obtained” [20] – which does not demand of us any commitment, passion or sense of interior struggle.

Music teachers, no less than any other teachers in the world, are often in far too much of a hurry to produce assessable results. To be fair, we are often put under intolerable pressure to do so by the bureaucrats. The consequence, to continue the analogy above, is that we can make the mistake of pouring masses of chemical fertiliser on our growing tree; the fruits come thicker and faster, but they are more and more tasteless, the bark grows thin, the roots grow weak, disease strikes the tree, and eventually it withers and dies, or is blown down in the first gale of autumn.

If we music teachers were less obsessed with producing musical results, we might be more likely to think carefully about the processes we use to teach. We would recognise that the first thing a tree needs to grow is time: there is no point in planting it too early in the season, nor is there any point in attempting to accelerate its growth. Musical development cannot be strictly timetabled, and it often does not grow in a straight line. No teacher should attempt to unnaturally hurry a student’s musical development, or to timetable it, or to plan it too much. If we do this well, then eventually juicy healthy fruits will grow, relatively effortlessly, in due season, to delight and transform our students and anyone who listens to them.

What matters most, of course, is the health of the roots of the tree – that instinctive, internal, sub-conscious, sense of musicality. Therefore, the teaching of music must always facilitate learning at the instinctive, concrete level, to develop an internal sense of musicality before all else. This is especially true for very young children who, despite the sometimes misguided ambitions of the British school system, are rarely ready for intellectual learning until they are six or seven years of age. Even when working with older ages, it may be hard to curb the self-impatience of some of our students (and their parents!); but patience is necessary, and one of the main tasks of the teacher will be to reassure, and to encourage students to be forgiving of themselves.

The roots only emerge above ground, i.e. musicality only develops into conscious musicianship, in due season, which I would suggest comes gradually between the ages of four and seven for most children. Prior to this, our students will be working almost exclusively at an instinctive, concrete level. Part of our job as music teachers is to manage this growth, from working at a concrete (subconscious), through a semi-concrete (semi-conscious), to an abstract (intellectual) level. This development will be one of the main recurring motives in this book.

Thus it matters immensely that our student should learn their music not at a superficial, but a deep level. They must learn everything at a profound, instinctive, sub-conscious level, as well as, later, consciously and intellectually. If the roots are deep and sound, the fruits will be lovely to taste. If the roots are feeble and shallow, then the fruits will be passable but not worth eating, and will not delight the heart, move us, or help us transcend our normal lives. We will have produced musicians who pass all the exams but may as well not have done. Our job is to help children to access the intrinsic satisfaction of being musical: process, not product.

Have another look at the tree diagram above. The teaching of musicality, if it is truly to transform inner musical perceptivity at the instinctive level, needs to involve the student’s whole self in learning. The three roots which I have drawn above represent three main paths to musicality: (1) the physical (body), (2) the aural (listening), which depends profoundly upon the vocal (singing), and (3) the emotional/imaginative/spiritual. What a student can do is not what we should be most concerned about. A student will do music well if first he feels it well in his body, hears it well in his ears, and feels it well in the depths of his heart. Let us now examine these three paths to musicality in more detail.

The first point to make is that these three means to musicality are really not so distinct from one another as to be mutually separable. This is because all of them come from the centre. The voice, which trains the ear, emanates from the centre of the body. All good physical body movement originates in the centre, the core, the torso. And our emotional and imaginative impetuses and reactions to music are things which we feel, metaphorically at least, in our heart, in our soul. So these are not three roots so much as one large, complex root, intertwining with itself in a myriad of ways as it grows. So when a young child, in his infancy, begins to develop his musicality, he does so in all these three ways at once. For him, they are indistinguishable. His voice sings, his body bounces, his spirit is uplifted: they are all part of the same thing.

There are two main implications of this: First, to be good music teachers we need to train the centre, not the externals. If the centre works well, then the extremities will also work well. From the centre will all good musicianship come. Music is not, fundamentally, what our fingers do, nor it is what notes we hear. Music is what we feel in the depths of our being, which is expressed in a number of ways outwards from there.

Second, we need to keep these three roots of musicality firmly intertwined. In modern society, with our pseudo-scientific obsession with categorisation and specialisation, we far too often unnecessarily prise these roots apart. To claim that one can or should teach music using just the voice, while neglecting the body and the spirit, is not tenable. It is similarly unrealistic to say that one can teach musicality using only body movement, while neglecting singing and the imagination. And it is positively destructive to say all that matters in music teaching is for a child to have fun, unless his voice and body are being trained as well. Voice, body and imagination belong together.

Let us look at some aspects of these roots of musicality in greater detail.

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[1] Frank Furedi, Where Have All the Intellectuals Gone?: Confronting 21^st Century Philistinism (Continuum, London, 2004), p. 14

[2] The Fourth “R”: the case for music in the school curriculum (The Campaign for Music in the Curriculum, 1998), p. 7

[3] Frank Furedi, Where Have All the Intellectuals Gone?: Confronting 21^st Century Philistinism (Continuum, London, 2004)., pp. 14-15

[4] see e.g. anonymous article “Where the Rosin Hits the Zyex: Highs and Lows of a Peripatetic Teacher”, Music Journal xlli.9 (ISM, Feb. 2005), pp. 356-357

[5] Emile Jaques-Dalcroze, Rhythm Music & Education (Dalcroze Soc., London, 1980), p. 92

[6] Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (Harper & Row, New York, 1990), p. xi

[7] from chrisbailey.com

[8] Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (Harper & Row, New York, 1990), p. 52

[9] Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (Harper & Row, New York, 1990), p. 53

[10] Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (Harper & Row, New York, 1990), p. 41

[11] Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (Harper & Row, New York, 1990), p. 49

[12] Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (Harper & Row, New York, 1990), p. 56

[13] Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (Harper & Row, New York, 1990), p. 42

[14] Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (Harper & Row, New York, 1990), p. 54

[15] Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (Harper & Row, New York, 1990), p. 46

[16] Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (Harper & Row, New York, 1990), p. 47

[17] Edmond Holmes, What Is and What Might Be (Constable, London, 1912), pp. 54f

[18] Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (Harper & Row, New York, 1990), p. 10

[19] The Fourth “R”: the case for music in the school curriculum (The Campaign for Music in the Curriculum, 1998), p. 7

[20] Christopher Small, Music, Society, Education (Wesleyan, 1996), p. 3

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© 2025 Nikhil Dally
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