[MUSIC] In module two, we met Ethan Hein of NYU, and reviewed some of his ideas about Western Art music-based music education. He, and a raft of other researchers, pointed out those enrollments in elective music subjects in high schools are incredibly low, despite the fact that music is such an important part of teens' identities. In his 2013 thesis, Hein criticized what he calls the music academy, because it quote “continually laments students' lack of interest in ‘legitimate’ art music, and their preference for supposedly vacuous Pop”. Hein asserts that from the students' perspective, however, there are valid reasons to find it difficult to connect to the music they encounter in most classrooms. In our interview, Hein pointed out that he is not criticizing classical music education, per se, but suggesting it shouldn't be the norm. At the Northern Beaches Christian School in module one, we looked up a popular music based program, in which technology was infused throughout, and saw classes of 56 engaged middle schoolers learning music and learning about music all at once. But at the same time, one cannot deny that the engagement of the elementary and middle school-aged children at Kamaroi was just as high, and that was in a traditional Orff-Schulwerk based music lesson, in which the technology used was a xylophone and the voice [SOUND]. As Richard Gill reminded us, children can be taught detailed, notation-based music in a sophisticated way, with composition at its core and from a very young age. And where we saw Kamaroi's fourth grade students, choosing to compose and perform their own pieces for a musical evening they were putting on, rather than performing covers of songs they knew, we could see direct evidence of the highly abstract thinking young children are capable of through musical learning, just as Richard suggested. And here at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, we see the fabulous results of a traditional music education. And we've heard the stories of the musical journeys of our students. Here, we see a Masters of Conducting student, conducting an orchestra of players who are playing selected repertoire to help him in his learning. You need special students and a unique setting with world class teachers to see this kind of learning. At the end of last module, I concluded that in music education, we have all of the ingredients that others are looking for in ideal 21st century education more broadly. We work across disciplines all the time, we work on big projects with public and meaningful outcomes, we learn nearly entirely experientially, and those of us privileged enough to teach, always do the project ourselves first because we're active musicians in our own right. And we've always engaged with the latest music technologies right from the creation of the first instruments. I'd like to argue that we can take up the challenge laid down by researchers like Hein, Green, and Bernard, and make our music classes much more culturally relevant to the children we teach, but without throwing any Western Art music babies out with the last century of bath water. I want to propose that our modern music education can be truly pluralist. So much exciting work is going on at the moment that works across genre or across style. Max Rifter recomposes Vivaldi, Steve Rice recomposes Radiohead, and Johnny Greenwood writes film scores. Hip-hop artists work with classically trained musicians in many ways, recorded orchestral music has never been so successful and seen such huge audiences as Hollywood has now provided. As teachers, if we can seek to give legitimacy to all musics, even the ones that we may not like much ourselves, we can teach across these genres too. In this module, I'm going to begin by looking at the creative processes of one of Australia's most successful composers and one of our leading electronic dance music producers to see if there are common elements in the process and propose ways that we can approach these in our classroom. I'm going to examine music pedagogies, old and new, and identify a few cross over points that I'm already exploring with my music education students here at the conservatorium. I'm going to propose that we need serious curricular change to help us create a new pluralist music education, that is, as good as it could really be, and where technology fits into all of this. Today, we're asking and hopefully answering some of the really big questions. [MUSIC]
