Musicianship in the 21st Century: Issues, Trends and Possibilities

Sam Leong, editor

Australian Music Centre, 2003, 333pp.

ISBN 0-909168-50-4

Reviewed by Peter Dunbar-Hall

For many people in many music teaching institutions, the term 'musicianship' continues to conjure up harmony exercises, aural drills and theoretical study divorced from the reality of music as a daily activity. Thankfully, and as the authors in this book continually point out, a more correct interpretation of the term that refers to the skills of being a musician has now become accepted. Looking at Musicianship in the 21st Century, these skills are broad – including the ability to culturally contextualise music, to historicise it, to respond to it in a variety of cognitive, emotional, physical and spiritual ways. This current view of musicianship is only logical, given that over the past four decades music education in schools, conservatoria and universities has undergone substantial change, even if there are still places where harmony is taught distinct from aural, and the idea that being a musician can be summed up by the learning of rules of historical compositional processes with little reference to how those processes might interact with current music trends. Musicianship in the 21st Century not only raises issues of the definition of 'musicianship', it sums up the current state of music education as a field of inter-disciplinary influences, of global agendas, of a subject under scrutiny from post-modernists, post-colonialists and post-feminists. That these areas of analysis are somehow related to the ways music is taught and learnt and to the reasons behind music education as an undertaking is also indicative of how music education has shifted since the days of unthinking definitions of music pedagogy as the domain only of art music practitioners and divorced from the wider world of cultural and social debate.

Musicianship in the 21^st Century present the work of twenty five international authors across a range of music education situations and covering a mixture of applications of the idea of music teaching and learning. That chapters are situated in the training of actors, the teaching of adult learners, the divides between classical and popular music performance, the music industry, in aspects of improvisation, applications of ethnomusicological thinking to music education, the sociology of music teaching and learning, and in philosophical debates over how and why music is important and therefore an imperative of education is reflection of the widening of music education discourse which the past few decades have witnessed. A recurring theme, perhaps arising from globalisation and the increasing trend among music educators to acknowledge and respond to culturally embedded ways of teaching and learning, is the distinctions between and need to reconcile differently located ways of teaching music. If not already firmly on the agenda of future music education discussion, this is surely a topic we will see more of. Scott Trendwith, writing from and Australian perspective, discusses Australian Indigenous music from his experiences playing with Top End Aboriginal rock group, Wirrinyga Band; Liane Hentschke and Jusmara Souza investigate Brazilian music education; Yusuke Taniguchi analyses music teaching in Japan; John Roh discusses music education in South Korea, and Boh Wah Leing, that in Hong Kong. Far from challenging accepted Western ways of teaching and learning, these discussions offer ways of incorporating, of redesigning the strategies and expectations of music education. Another trend observable throughout is that gone are the days when discussion of music education shunned the work of the latest cultural theorists; here it is expected that readers are conversant with the breadth of contemporary thinking and can apply it to music and music education.

There is much to think about in this book, from Liora Bressler’s summing up of arguments about the correctness of teaching technique separately from teaching music (should we teach music through technique, or technique through music?) to Michael Hannan’s predictions for the effects of change on the ways we prepare popular music performers, and consideration of theories of embodiment and personalisation through music (Liora Bressler, Ros McMillan, Meki Nzewi). For its breadth of scope and links to other disciplines, this book will be welcomed by many in the music education community as a summary of the issues many of us seek to establish as the basis of music education. I fear that those who might benefit most from it, music teachers who desire to continue outmoded views of musicianship and work to keep music education separate from the realities of the world of music, will not read it, or if they do, will strive to counter its logicality and pedagogical good sense. This is the problem that Musicianship in the 21st Century not only defines but invites.

Music Forum Vol 11 No 1