Revisiting Larry Lessig’s Ted talk on the web yesterday, I was prompted to reflect on where we are ‘creatively’ with music education and technology in school. Larry is a law professor at Stanford and takes an active interest in civil rights and technological innovation. He founded the Center for Internet and Society, chairs Creative Commons and regularly comes “to the aid of citizenry” against corporate interests (see here).

His Ted talk is partly a commentary on laws that choke creativity. John Philip Sousa is given as an example of someone who foresaw the transformational potential of technology when he predicted the end of music making as they knew it with the invention of recording machines. He goes on to talk about how when ASCAP threatened to double their rates for broadcast music BMI (having been set up a year previously in 1939) stepped and opened up the market with African American music and arrangements of public domain works. ASCAP said “the people will revolt” because we have the best music. Well, they didn’t and this forced an opening up of the restrictive policies of ASCAP. He closes by suggesting that copyright laws, which currently make many remixes and mashups illegal, are forcing our youngsters to behave outside the law (because these new forms of expression are part of their digital culture). The example of Sousa demonstrates that technology will transform music making whether we like it or not. At the same time, the example of ASCAP and Lessig’s discussion of copyright laws illustrate that restrictive ideas towards music may force creativity underground but it is still there waiting to rise to the surface in whichever way it can.

“So how does this link to music education?” you may ask. Well, I have a couple of points to ponder. If we teach Bach harmony do we make sure that we tell students never to use cadences, passing 6/4s, cadential 6/4s, augmented 6ths, etc (and also ensure that they use plenty of chord III and VIIs)? Of course not! (At least I hope not). Yet, if we do not promote the use of samples (which could be seen as building blocks of digital culture) to be the building blocks of the music that some our students create then the music we are teaching is the music of history. Still many course and exam specifications are limited in their view of where and when samples are ‘acceptable’. Famous musicians have their place in history not because they did the old stuff well but because of the way they transformed the art and took ideas forward with new innovations. Just as Sousa identified the transformational potential of technology at the turn of the century (although he was a sceptic), in a digital age might a positive transformation be digital in nature? If so, then don’t we need to allow students to build forward from these innovations.

This leads on to a second and wider point.  If we only teach students the music of the past how will they learn how to live and work responsibly within their worlds and the worlds of the future? If we do not engage with what is happening in their world, then music as a subject of study will become just as irrelevant as the ASCAP polices of the late 1930s. Change will happen (and has) whether we embrace it or not. Surely technology in music education is not about ‘doing Bach better’ or even just ‘making pop songs’ but moving our art forward and reflecting on the world in which we live. I should add that so many students do manage it… but if we are engaged in the tasks of nurturing learning and fostering development then could we help a little more than we are doing at the moment?

Some questions to ask:

• How many of your school instrumental lessons teach instrumental techniques that did not exist until the last half century?
• How much of your local school’s curriculum looks at music from your students’ lifetimes?
• How much will your school curriculum help students to engage with, understand and transform their world?

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