Walter Meyer writes:

>...  I see nothing wrong, however, w/ pupils and students being exposed to
>a (preferably wide) selection of classical compositions and being required
>to recognize them, even if they don't like them.  It doesn't seem to me to
>be different from literature or painting.  It's all part of the culture in
>which they are growing up or at least in which people used to grow up.
>Yes, the selection will reflect the bias of the selector, a problem that
>also exists when affording exposure to works of literature and other forms
>of art.

I can see three arguments against this.

Firstly, the purpose of schools is, ideally, to educate rather than to
teach facts.  It's easy to illustrate this in the context of sciences - for
example, in chemistry (if taught well), one learns why particular elements
or organic functional groups have the properties they do (in progressively
more detail as one studies further) rather than memorising the periodic
table or the names of particular reactions.

It's a bit trickier, but still possible, in the context of the humanities.
A good history teacher could, for example, try to explain _why_ the Normans
won in 1066, rather than provide a list of dates to be memorised.  Whether
or not the Norman victory was a good thing is another matter entirely, and
unfortunately that tends to be what they concentrate on (the official
answer varies from one county to another).

In music, any attempt to educate ought, by analogy, to explain _why_
Schubert's music is better than Rossini's, but that obviously contains
a judgement with which not everyone will agree.

Secondly, CM is not part of the culture in which I (or my ancestors) grew
up.  While I was growing up, most people listened either to the Beatles or
to the Rolling Stones (but not both).  My Yorkshire ancestors came from
brass band territory.  I don't know what music my Welsh ancestors listened
to (they were too far east to be part of the valleys choral tradition).
I love Schubert's music, but the culture in which I live has very little
in common with Schubert's Vienna - I live now, not two hundred years ago,
I live in a seaport town, not the land-locked capital of an empire, and
(AFAIK) the Secret Police don't have their eye on me.

If the idea is that the school teaches what the culture values, it ought
therefore to be brass band music, choral singing, or whatever, not CM.

Thirdly, there is quite often a reaction against the things which are
taught in schools.  I think most of the hostility to Shakespeare comes
because the plays were forced on people in school, and I suspect that any
residual hostility to CM comes from the same cause, and not because it is
associated with a snobbish elite.

Personal experience suggests that children who attend out-of-school chess
clubs stick with the game far more often than children who are taught chess
as just another school subject.  By analogy, some sort of 'music club',
run principally by and for adults but where interested youngsters are
encouraged and treated as equals, might be a much better way of introducing
them to CM.

>In an ideal system, some self selectivity can be encouraged by making
>libraries, the contents of which are unlikely to be exhausted by any one
>student, available.

I agree entirely.

Peter Varley
[log in to unmask]