Teaching music in indigenous Australian settings

By Robert G Smith

Mine has been a long forty year journey as a music educator and yet still the slopes of the learning curve rise steeply!

Because a part, if small, of my New Zealand heritage is indigenous I entered the profession with a particular interest in Maori music. Consequently I taught across the 'sixties in primarily Polynesian contexts. I spent almost five years as National Music Adviser in the Fiji Islands. Subsequently my music education career has been a sort of love affair with indigenous musics, in the Pacific, North and Central America, east Africa, back again to New Zealand and across the past two decades, apart from a recent sojourn as International Music Consultant in Sri Lanka, here in the Northern Territory of Australia.

I find my experiences do not aalways match the assertions of some authorities. For example in many of these settings I found students had limited interest in west-centrically-oriented high art and almost none in its music. I was challenged to seek the nexus between what I and they understood by 'music'. I found that observing local music teaching - often an informal affair - gave me illuminating insight into some very effective practical pedagogies. These, some of which I elaborate elsewhere, emphasised that music needed to involve 'doing' rather than theorising, analysing and regulating practice. Nowadays I employ many in my teaching of urban Australian children.

My experience also suggests that across cultures music might best be viewed as an art form that depends for effective communication on the organisation of sound in time. Therefore to understand how their music functions and achieves its aesthetic intentions we must comprehend thoroughly a people's perceptions of time. We need also - and here time continues to play a significant role - to recognise the impact of cultural beliefs as they affect music creation and performance and the contexts for music. A very practical definition of culture suggests that music, like most other cultural artefacts, informs us as to 'how things are done around here'.

Evolving pedagogies

Too many successful music programs in schools equate with quality orchestras, bands and choral ensembles. Coupled with this there is an expectation that effective classroom music will lead the 'more capable' students to 'qualify' as musicians by satisfying the requirements of formally moderated or examined music syllabi. How often are the interests of the remainder neglected?

In my first school there was an expectation that I would enhance the workings of a new school orchestra, maintain existing instrumental ensembles, run choirs at all levels and introduce other music activities, such as school concerts and productions, as the occasion demanded. At the same time I would conduct an effective classroom music program.

As an enthusiastic young teacher I put much energy into establishing the subject and my music programs flourished. While these appealed to many students whose backgrounds were what might be described as 'west-centric', I was aware that others viewed aspects of the curriculum as culturally irrelevant and often felt excluded from music activities offered in the school. I found increasingly that I needed to look at ways in which I might create a musically more inclusive environment.

I undertook a number of changes as experiments. For example I began by outlawing that 'gatekeeping' exercise, 'audition' as a means of entry to any music activity. If a student gained enthusiastic satisfaction by playing an instrument or singing even if somewhat 'unmusically', I believed he or she was entitled to continue. Surely students can only become 'musical' if they are encouraged to engage with music. They can't do this if they're 'locked out'!

While I encouraged the notion that a group could only perform when its presentations were of a professional quality I did not necessarily insist on this.

With freer access for students to music increasingly it became one of the more popular activities in the school. My personal 'consequence' and reward was in sharing music with students who actually wanted to be in my classrooms.

Music and indigenous Australian students

These early experiences have prepared me well for diverse cultural music learning and teaching settings. I have no doubt they encouraged me to slip into any new setting with surprising comfort. Thus I am rarely 'shocked' in any cultural sense when a new event is alien in its concepts or experience.

I recall the first occasion I ever visited a community in Arnhem Land. I opened my first lesson by singing a song to the class. This was in a language other than English - a song I had brought with me from East Africa. I began singing. Every member of the class began singing along with me, mostly word and note perfect. After a few moments I stopped.

'Where did you learn that song?' I asked, stunned that they would know it so far from its cultural home.

"From you!" they shouted. This was my first visit. How could that be?

"When" I asked.

"Now," they replied.

Sharing music learning and teaching with indigenous Australian students is invariably exciting and always very satisfying. It may not even be an exaggeration to say that these children, such as those in this first contact, often learn 'milliseconds' behind their teacher. Despite my sharing music education with students in many different countries I remain almost overwhelmed by this quality in Aboriginal children.

Some teachers have discomfort with the familiarity Aboriginal children often display in class. Anything displayed in the classroom is 'fair game' and has to be touched and tested. This is explained in part by the fact that much learning in Aboriginal settings is shared with familiar people. Typically girls learn from aunts and boys from their uncles - noting of course that the concepts of uncle and aunt are not strictly as we would perceive them. Aboriginal children are far more comfortable working in family groups and with kin from their own moieties.

In a number of communities I have been given a 'skin name', so that people in that community can recognise my status or lack of it and my place. This means that there are people with whom I cannot communicate, my 'poison cousins', but for the greater part it grants me considerable freedom to teach more effectively with children who recognise me as 'kin'.

Aboriginal people living in relatively traditionally oriented remote communities in the Northern Territory model much of their learning and teaching. Talking about how we are going to learn is an alien notion. Asking questions may be seen as inquisitive and rude and a typical response is to ignore the 'inquisitor'. Similarly analysing a piece of music seems an extremely peculiar notion. Why would anyone want to know how music works? Music is its own messenger, saying everything it needs to say for itself.

I suggest that these are among many understandings from which we have much to learn of our Aboriginal colleagues. Increasingly across my years of working with Aboriginal people I reduce talk, instead physically demonstrating what I want my students to learn. For example teaching guitar is easy. I sit in front of students and strum the chords of a piece of music relatively slowly but in the context of a real piece of music. As they visualise and interpret what I do they copy. This is sometimes called learning 'magic'.

Aboriginal society is a 'doing' society. If you want something to happen you 'do' it. There is little notion of 'rehearsal' towards a performance because every rehearsal is a performance. We play or sing until we have communicated what we want then we move on.

If you have attended Aboriginal dance performances you may have noticed that some dancers dance only very briefly within the physical space allocated. It is as though each is saying "This is my little contribution - this is me". Then they move out of the circle. "I've said what I wanted to say. Now it's your turn."

A significant issue for music education colleagues who correctly seek the support of informed indigenous Australians to implement 'Aboriginal' music is in compromising the two perspectives of 'time' which must impact on the process. Aboriginal 'teachers' are very likely to arrive when it is convenient to them, not at the time a west-centric teacher might 'schedule' It is not that Aboriginal people are 'unreliable'; it is simply that their perceptions of time are vastly contrasted to ours.

I suggest that it is ours that is less natural and perhaps in a sense more aberrant than most cultures, timewise, not the other way around. We speak of 'wasting time' and of being 'controlled by the clock'. This is of course only possible in a culture reliant on linear time. For many indigenous people time is a matter of recognising events as 'time', not the 'time' which leads up to these events. 'Time' is dotted across a vast landscape with pathways indeterminate in 'seconds' or hours leading to and from these events.

Thus when I teach indigenous children I am aware that I may or may not see them at the specified or timetabled time 'tomorrow'. Something of greater consequence might come up. Somebody might be born, or somebody else die. If I teach with an expectation that I will be able to construct and accrue a sequence of evolving lessons week by week I am doomed to disappointment. Instead I must be prepared to work recursively with students. Sometimes this means introducing most of the attributes of my program all at once. Then as students return I also return to the understandings and skills I introduced initially. It is as though we approach the focus as a many faceted diamond and gaze for a time into each face, rather than learn along the taut regularly knotted string that represents west-centric music education time.

A case-in-point

Last year I paid a visit to a remote Aboriginal school. I spent three days in the community school sharing a diverse range of music education activities and structuring programs students and teachers would be able to sustain when I left. A part of this process I insisted that the music be learned, initially at least, orally. I am aware that this is anathema to many music educators who insist that children learn music through notation.

Of course we ought to introduce and give children a working understanding of staff notation but some conditions must apply. This topic deserves more space than this present discussion allows. Suffice it to say that learning to read and write music staff notation in this community was not something they or I gave high priority. Besides there is plenty of evidence to suggest that where song lyrics and music are initially learned orally there is a much greater probability that words and music will be memorised and retained indefinitely. We know there are physiological reasons for this, related to left and right brain activity.

Incidentally, research also suggests that when people make music they physically release and communicate endorphins best described as 'happiness' endorphins. I notice that no matter how tired or unwilling I might be to work when I first enter a music class at the beginning of the day, within minutes of making music I and my students invariably begin to feel affirmed, sometimes almost euphoric. This is particularly evident in Aboriginal classrooms.

I returned to this same school last month after over eight months away. When I revisited classrooms I was delighted to find that almost every child and many teachers had retained accurately all I had taught. They were able to reproduce material we had 're-created' virtually as I had introduced it. Music we had earlier created led consequentially to other created items. Perhaps it is because Aboriginal people understand the value of performing arts and give these high priority in their living that they have such a propensity for learning in and through music. It is embedded in living.

The activities I undertake in communities encourage music to support all other key learning areas. That is appropriate in a culture where music is not perceived as separate or autonomous.

A final word

I hear it often in our society but I've yet to meet the Aboriginal person who tells me "I love music but I don't have a musical bone in my body". Nor have I met Aboriginal people who tell me music is not an important part of a child's education. For indigenous Australians engagement with music is an area where they are able to enhance the value of their own world and to connect with so much of ours. It is also an area where we could be sharing more with each other instead of insisting as we so often seem to do, that Aboriginal children learn about ours but we need not learn about theirs.

It is in Aboriginal settings that I am often most able to see how critically important music is in general learning. This supports my strongly held belief that if we place music at the centre of learning how much more greatly enhanced is learning. In Aboriginal communities where children rightly or wrongly make choices about whether they want to go to school 'today' you can be sure they'll attend on days when music is being made. I guess if all music does is get children to want to go to school even that can't be a bad thing!

All of this suggests to me that we ought to be thoroughly convinced of the validity of our own definitions of 'music' and of the roles we believe music plays in education if we are to teach music effectively.

Dr Robert Smith is Music-in-schools adviser to the Northern Territory Department of Education, National President of the Australian Society for Music Education and until July a member of the Research Committee of the Music Council of Australia. He can be found at http://www1.octa4.net.au/bobsmith/