Dilemmas of Pedagogy: Knowledge to Impart or Creativity to Unleash?

That the debates over genius and the nature of creative endeavor explored in section 1 are not limited to the 18th and 19th centuries but are very much a twenty-first-century concern, is illustrated by disputes between two prominent pedagogical North American philosophies, those of David J. Elliott and Randall E. Allsup. These approaches diverge significantly in their priorities and methods and in how they believe originality can be fostered.

Elliott is keen to distinguish acts of creation from child’s play or undirected thought. He argues that all creative acts are “intentional” (1995, p. 222, emphasis in original), even if the precise product at the end is unclear. For Elliott, “music educators must be honest with students about what counts as musical and what counts as musically creative in relation to past and present attainment in musical practices” (1995, p. 222). He encourages creativity to be developed within particular artistic domains in which excellence can be achieved. Creativity is, he states, a “congratulatory term that singles out a concrete accomplishment that knowledgeable people judge to be especially important in relation to a specific context of doing and making” (1995, p. 216). There is more than a little residue here of a Kantian focus on exemplary artistic works within particular domains of artistic practice, though Elliott does also offer a more Hegelian nod to a “set of social institutions, or field, that selects from the variations produced by individuals those that are worth preserving” (1995, p. 217). The canon, or canons for he does not mandate the particular musical “domain,” are very much still in action.

Allsup, in his Remixing the Classroom, characterizes Elliott’s approach as being com- plicit in a “Master-apprentice” relationship (2016, p. 16; c.f. Lamb, 1999), an accusation Elliott has attempted to refute (Elliott & Silverman, 2017). There is a residue in Elliott of an approach Margaret Wilkins labels old-fashioned, in which “[y]oung composers were expected to thrive on a diet of weekly exercises in which the styles of the classical composers of the past (Palestrina, Bach, Mozart, Schubert) were imitated.” Once these techniques were “mastered, young composers were ‘allowed’ to compose freely, though by then they were nearing the end of their higher education” (2006, p. 4). Taking inspiration from radical pedagogies of such thinkers as bell hooks and Elizabeth Gould, Allsup looks for a different way of conceiving creativity and the educational process that should encourage it. He searches for tools to create different relationships between students and teachers in which teachers do not have all the answers, “outcomes are as unpredictable as they are (currently) certain” (2016, p. ix), and to distance pedagogy from a model in which “initiates must learn the rules before they are allowed to break the rules” (2016, p. 16).

Elliott’s argument that teaching should strive for excellence in a single domain comes in for particular criticism from Allsup. He states that “[w]hen education is tradition- based, rather than focused on the reordering and remaking (and rereading) of past and present realities, practitioners are always starting with another person’s frame or the outlines of a tradition one must earn entrance into” (2016, p. 32). He encourages teachers and students to “put together their own frames as often as not—or look for new ones” (2016, p. 32). Rosalind Krauss might agree here, exhorting students to find their own grid. Rather than clarity of expertise and prior knowledge, Allsup wants pedagogy to be “willfully hybrid, the open-sourced and appropriated, the interdisciplinary and the weird, our wondrous and unholy muddle” (2016, p. 33).

Certainly, there is issue to be taken with Elliott’s conception of original products being recognized by those with expertise as “worth preserving.” The history of art is littered with marginalized figures whom the tastemakers ignored. Allsup makes similar critiques to those of genius above in terms of what people, what bodies are more “in place” within particular spaces (Ahmed 2007, p. 153). He argues that “closed” pedagogical forms, in which “norms are preestablished, expertise is objectively recognized” (2016, p. 67), are “commonsense definitions as to who can do what and how—who can play the tenor saxophone, who can direct a college band, and so on” (2016, p. 28). A fixed attitude to these roles is detrimental to students for Allsup as “[t]here is no master without an apprentice” (2016, p. 29).

A move to facilitation of learning is important and logical if originality is conceived as self-expression given space to breathe. The teacher cannot teach originality because they do not—and cannot—know what students’ originality would sound like. Originality, in this view, can seem like heightened individuality, i.e., that the road to original expression is to find out more about the self. It is important, however, to stress (as does Allsup) that few educators would see the encouragement of self-expression and encountering the new and strange as mutually exclusive. Constructivist views of the self see it as an ongoing narrative, into which many diverse streams feed, not least our encounters with the outside world. The classical tradition—implicit in much of what Elliott describes—can play a key part in this construction of the self, but teachers cannot necessarily decide on its role.

Crudely characterized, then, there is a question here about whether the teacher is an expert with knowledge to impart or a facilitator engaged in a process of exchange with their students that has the potential to allow both to find their voice. In fact, in this formulation it begins to assume the form of venerable question regarding whether composition can be taught or is “innate.” For the composition teacher, however, it is important to break down this pedagogical binary: there are (classed, gendered) routes to self-realization within more traditional music pedagogy—why would so many teachers, performers, and composers be here if there were not?—while Allsup is not advocating a learning environment in which teachers have no expertise and students are only confronted with what they know—quite the opposite in fact.¹⁴ Rather, the tendency in more recent pedagogical literature is to help students come up with responses to their own particular position in their world and to learn skills that will help them express themselves more fully (e.g., hooks, 1994).

The implementation in practice of such a position is less simple than it might first appear. Students do not arrive as blank slates but with particular ideas of what music is and should be, while, at the same time, as Michele Kaschub and Janice Smith write, “[i]mitative works are often the first to emerge” (2013, p. 7). The response to these works is usually both to provide technical feedback that might make these pieces more like their models, while also facilitating a process of expansion and discovery so that students have a wider world of music to choose from. The latter includes being exposed to different kinds of music, trying out new composition techniques and contexts, and experimenting with instruments. I am often reminded of a fellow student who was perfectly happy creating music that resembled its models with—to me—incredible accuracy. For most of a music education this should be unproblematic, though issues may arise in later tertiary study, which is geared further toward the training of future artists. This example is useful in that it points out that music education, even in the empowering and diverse recent literature, is still invested in a sense of unique selfhood. That a self might be completely happy to submit to previous models is so rarely considered shows the level to which we are still invested in the idea that we are all unique, that the idea of genius as individual spirit lingers.