An Outside of Our Time Curriculum
Some Goals and Principles in Music Education
What’s Your Music Education Curriculum?
I often get asked to see my music curriculum in the older grades at Geneva Academy. This question is noble but misses the more significant point. More important than finding a specific curriculum, music education should be clear on its goals and purposes. I am convinced that music education, rightly understood, aims to get students to be joyfully and skillfully literate in singing, reading, and writing music—in that order—all their days regardless of their career goals. The purpose is to musically do what the famous catechism question says is our purpose: “to glorify God and enjoy Him forever.”1 Ultimately, we are all called to be singers because we are made to be worshippers of the God of the Bible all the days of our lives.
Finding Community in Music Education
As I teach music, what keeps getting reinforced is the love students have for singing and playing together. This is the beauty of choir and, yes, even lesser appreciated recorder ensembles. There is something about achieving a goal together in community, be it singing a concert, playing a duet, or even rehearsing a piece to achieve mastery and completion. This is why singing in a choir or playing in a group or ensemble is often more effective in creating a lifelong love of music than simply taking private lessons in an instrument.
Additionally, I have found that music education is most well-rounded when it sees itself as giving students the ability to be stewards of past music generations. If students can access and perform music outside our time borrowing from C.S. Lewis, they will have a broader perspective than just the here and now.2 More than likely, they will be able to see how current cultural trends in music and elsewhere are affecting them when they have a comparison from other periods or eras. They are part of a “community of song” that has come before them, which can be a formative aspect of their training.
Why Do We Sing Early Music Works?
I teach in a classical Christian school tradition that does not chase the newest gimmicks in modern education. Instead, it seeks to ground students in history and awareness of who they are in this world that the triune God of the Bible has made and placed them into. From a distance, this looks like we are ignoring the new and giving favoritism to the old. I can see how that would be the casual observation in passing.
But, when it comes to music, we live in a time that is overall less-literate than at different points in history. This is a bit ironic because we have the most access to music—be it printed, performed, recorded, etc. There are more recordings of any music than ever before in history. But that merely disguises the fact that fewer people have the pressure to make music for themselves when they can pull up an internet playlist or download a music video.
As a result of less pressure for the average person to be an active creator or performer in music, the composition of music today is less layered and complex than in previous generations. Where you had four different voice parts singing at other times in polyphony three-hundred years ago, today people joke about songs having only four chords throughout. With a decrease in music literacy comes a decrease in composition and performance ability. This is why I try to purposefully expose and lean into older forms and styles “outside of our time” in our music education. We do this in other forms of education already. We teach them historical literature and poetry when many of them may never access that same literature level in their daily lives. We teach them math problems and historical theories in math when they won’t likely need to call those theorems to mind in their adult vocations. Still, there is a grounding in the past, not to be weird, but to help orient our students to where they are now and where others have been before them.
My Upper-Level Musicianship Classes
Additionally, we sing “old music” that sounds funny to help the students see how the world and the cosmos are bigger than each of us. If they want to be wise, they need to have a humble thankfulness for what has come before them. Here is a video of my combined 10th/11th-grade musicianship class at Geneva Academy in West Monroe, LA. We sing, play recorders, arrange, take down music dictation, and more to position these students to be skillful musicians who have broad exposure to the music of a wide range of styles and eras. Here is a Latin setting of a Good Friday Antiphon written by Orlando di Lasso in 1604, which roughly translates, “We adore you, O Christ, and we bless you because by your holy cross you have redeemed the world.” Here the students are working on the independent voices of three-part polyphony set for alto, tenor, and bass. Then I asked a few of them to play through the same piece on their recorders. I combined them together to share with you. Also, it gives them a little performance pressure to stretch them. I hope you enjoy it.
Question 1 from the Westminster Shorter Catechism: “What is the chief end of man?” Answer: “Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever.”
C.S. Lewis wrote on an introduction to a 1944 edition of Athanasius’s work “On the Incarnatioin” Later an essage in God in the Dock title, “On the Reading of Old Books” thats this great quote, “Every age has its own outlook. It is especially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books…. Not, of course, that there is any magic about the past. People were no cleverer then than they are now; they made as many mistakes as we. But not the same mistakes. They will not flatter us in the errors we are already committing; and their own errors, being now open and palpable, will not endanger us. Two heads are better than one, not because either is infallible, but because they are unlikely to go wrong in the same direction. To be sure, the books of the future would be just as good a corrective as the books of the past, but unfortunately we cannot get at them.”