March On In Honour (from Star of Wonder)

Teachers on Toughest Terrain

If you live in a country where leaders consistently loot the national treasury, where a tenth of annual budget is allocated to education, where politics is the thriving profession of the elites, it’s easier to understand a terrain with its own peculiarities. Of course, more serious issues brew on people's front burners. There is insurgency which drives them so far away from home if they are lucky to be alive. There is religion which continually fuels cowardice potent enough to keep them off the protesters' streets. There also is poverty which combines with ignorance to harrow the grounds ploughed by the previous two.

When you consider how far spent these grounds have been you begin to get a picture how tough the terrain about which we speak. Our topography evolved through ethnic differences and inter-tribal discord that degenerated into a civil war. Poor leadership and communal mismanagement continue to ruin the little infrastructure there ever has been. Area boys have been beatified when the uniform meant unbridled repression. Loyalty to patriarchy have desecrated the holy grounds of patriotism.

What these grounds need the most right now is the fertilization only quality education can provide. The leaders themselves realize that the fetters of servitude and the shackles of subservience will fall off upon the rise of a seeming oblivious followership. It’s just a question of time. But the ticking clock is slow. These are the days when the numbers of the dead are climbing past the three-quarter million mark. The claws snatching innocent souls are those of a ruthless foe invisible to unaided sight. Its strategies are cruel, very little known to experts, very poorly communicated to the masses. The globe’s most knowledgeable professionals, most powerful military and most influential democracies have been caught napping and the planet's poorest are paying the steepest. We still don't understand that poorly educated societies die faster with the help of a pandemic than without it. Therefore, at such a time when we should take education most seriously, we continue to neglect our teachers. That way, if their souls are not delivered to the fangs of the virus, they will succumb to the grips of hunger and malnutrition as well as the consequent lower immunity, depression and lack.

To understand the extent of their lack, dial up anyone who hasn’t earned a dime in the past five months. The experience they would share will shock the stout-hearted. Although the shock is familiar in this part of the world, people in other climes may find it strange. When the news cycle fed sufficient airtime to palliatives citizens were receiving from their governments, some people raised their hopes here at home. Now self-employed people in the U.K. have been paid £2,500 on average. It's $1,000 opening in the U.S. Even these palliatives barely kept people above poverty lines, otherwise some 40 million job loses wouldn’t have been reported in the United States alone. As such, food queues are longer than thirty-six weeks.

Thirty-six months before however, a colleague shocked me with the starkest words ever used to describe people in my profession. He said, “Don’t you know society perceives teachers as poor?” No, I didn’t! No, we’re not! Well, some people have learned first-hand that a more painful coinage might just be apt. The true state of things is that the teaching profession has always been a little less than noble. Low pay, non-existent benefits, societal disrespect are the bitter recipe for the low self-esteem which ride down the shoulders of so many teachers on so many mornings. In many private schools that experience falls lower when you add job insecurity. If those are not bad enough, should the leaders of a country add neglect at a time these teachers need help the most? Most private school teachers grew through under-resourced  schools, trained and continue to retrain through self-sponsorship and high-interest loans under the toughest economic realities. This is the first time they will ever look up to their government for help. Nothing should narrow their chances of survival.

Of course, the fittest will survive. Once these terrible winds blow past, they will have evolved with a firm decision never to be caught in such low state again. By that time my nation may have lost a fraction of its finest teachers. They’re taking their vows right now. No one hears, no one listens. They will dessert the profession in droves. They will take trade and artisan paths with pain in their hearts. Some will take flight to finer shores in search of greener pastures. The people who will take the place of today's teachers may neither think as thoroughly nor act as carefully. Those ones may churn out even lower quality education into society. They will flip when the time is right. Our communities will not be the same when these toughest teaching times pass. Our city’s roads will be beaten when these tumultuous, trying terrain turns.

These are the times to accord our teachers some respect and show it with tangible financial help. Give encouragement to the ones who have always done no less for your children and grandchildren. Reach out to private school teachers directly and hurriedly. Let this nation know that the stakes they hold are those of honour at a time when circumstances have denied their employers the right to charge fees. They currently face the toughest times on the most trying terrain.

LEARNER-DRIVEN PEDAGOGY - Teaching by Conducting

TEACHING BY CONDUCTING

2.1 Composer-Conductor Interaction     

When a conductor opens a score, s/he becomes aware of the efforts of a composer to portray in musical symbols the inspiration, imagination and creativity that stimulated the composition. It is the obligation of the conductor to make a sincere effort to understand and protect the composer’s creations while bringing the strength of the conductor’s own artistry to the realization of the composer’s intent. This is not always an easy assignment. Many deceased composers left little in the way of information that could be used to gain insight into their works. Others provide contrasting information. It is only through direct contact with a composer that the conductor can be confident in understanding artistic intent. So, with every composer-conductor interaction, the conductor gains insight into the creative mind that creates music. The insight is then used to revisit composers of the past in an effort to form artistic collaboration with their music as well (McMurray, 2016).

As much as direct contact would be a fantastic idea for gleaning the original intentions of the composer, other issues naturally emerge, possibly to the disservice of the conductor. One of such problems is authorship: should the conductor who transforms the music hold the rights or should the composer – whose creativity the conductor comes to serve – retain all rights to his own work which the former has only come to showcase? This subservient relationship between conductors and composers becomes highly problematic when viewed from the postmodern perspective, which questions the notion of authorial authority. The current incarnation of the modern conductor remains narrowly conceived as a didactic relationship between a subservient interpreter, his obedient followers, and an all-significant composer (Bartleet, 2009).

Shying away from ennobling the conductor therefore suggests a low appreciation of the challenge s/he overcomes in the bid to bring awesome pieces of music to a discerning audience while working with a school of professional musicians. The real work begins by an expenditure of quality time and effort digesting and transforming the score.

2.2 Score Interpretation          

Conductors study scores for a living (Woods, 2006). Getting meaning out of a score is challenging indeed when one considers the enormity of styles that there are. From working early baroque music into their varied forms and the myriad streams of thought that pervade art music today, to accompanying popular musicians and performing seasonal events favoured by concert goers, there are considerable challenges indeed. They range from opera to ballet, from theatre to solos, and then unto cross-disciplinary concerts (Taddei, 2013)! Therefore, it is vital that the conductor has as much in-depth knowledge as possible of the document which offers the best insight into the composer’s intention (Heron, 2004). What a conductor tries to do may have been best captured in the words of Hans von Bulow: “You must have the score in your head, not your head in the score.” (Wade-Matthews & Thompson, 2011)

Knowledge of the score therefore, fuels all aspects of a conductor’s responsibilities: teaching, leading, interpreting and moving in rehearsal and performance. Of particular interest is the aspect of interpretation. It is the responsibility of the conductor to digest all of the information provided by the composer and then form a “point of view.” The point of view engendered by the collaboration between the composer and the conductor (or the conductor and his/her research) to realize the inspiration of the music (McMurray, 2016) may be as broad as the very multiple elements of music itself.

To understand the principal themes and their functions, a conductor begins by looking at the form, whether they are regular or irregular. S/he then attempts to make a meaning out of the melody which may be based upon a short motif, such as the opening of Beethoven’s “Symphony No. 5,” or organized around leitmotifs such as in Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde,” or move from one fully developed melody to the next, as in Tchaikovsky’s “Swan Lake”. The conductor is aware of how the harmonic tension relate to elements such as tone quality, tempo and rubato. If the rhythm flows with serenity, pleasantly entertaining, or grip the audience with primitive barbarity, a conductor makes a note of that too. He is not unaware of dynamics as well as the subtle gradations required to maintain vitality should a section be sustained at a particular intensity. There is also consideration for the combination of instruments used in the piece (orchestration) along with the registers employed for each (tessitura). Their overall aural consequence (timbre) is key to the performance, which may be rich or transparent, lithe or robust.

Equally important to a conductor is the stylistic convention which obtains in that historical period as is observable in the work. This may be novel or shocking. An example is the humor or harmonic twists in the works of Haydn. Whether a piece is representative of its period is not necessarily more important than the composer’s personal conflicts or political context. For instance, “The Planets,” “Hammersmith,” and “Suite No. 1 in E flat” are works by Gustav Holst that display a considerable range of style by comparison to each other.

In the midst of searching for these features, a conductor must decide if there is one clear moment of climax, or a series of high points to help determine how to pace tempo and intensify dynamics. As such, aesthetic considerations come to the fore, suggesting if the work mirrors a waterfall or a sunset which connects the natural to the emotional. By this token, irrespective of the experience of the individual listener, the aesthetic range and the artistic intent of the work – from the functional to the abstract – are all matters carefully considered by conductors (Price, 2017). Yet studying the score is one thing, working musicians through that piece is another.

2.3 Maestro Morale                                      

          Since the effect intended by a composer may not be clear to every performer in the orchestra, a conductor who understands that position and can convey it to performers becomes necessary. That task is arduous, especially the communication part. Luckily, a trained conductor is extremely well-prepared in communicating to the musicians what s/he wants. In reality, the most important part of a conductor’s work happens not at the concert but during rehearsals (E.B., 2016).

Thus, the conductor assumes the responsibility of transmuting that original to the audience through the orchestra because he has the capacity to do so. The guild of conductors includes personalities with often very special characteristics proven to be central to the job description of this profession. An introverted musician hardly decides to be the person in the spotlight, whereas musicians with a more executive nature, high self-esteem, and a certain predilection for emotional musical exposure – along with the exertion of power – make it to the conductor’s podium (Platte, 2016). Raising the morale of an ensemble therefore, is the business of a conductor if the essence of a latent score must come alive matched in vigour and veracity to the sounds and silence borne by sheet music.

These sounds can change the way we feel. They can make us happy or sad, calm or angry, frightened or relaxed (Taylor, 1991). They possess such wonderful power of recalling in a vague and indefinite manner, those strong emotions which were felt during long past ages (Darwin, 1872). Conductors know this and perceive their next piece of business, beyond interpreting the score, to be that during which they help the orchestra appreciate the work before them. This may not come across as the job of a teacher if that professional only seeks to churn out pieces of information. It would however, if the teacher considers herself a learning aid worker who seeks to help learners appreciate learning and make its process their own.

2.4 Conducting Music

          To some audiences, orchestral conductors seem to dramatically wave their arms with no discernible effect on the music. In reality, conductors undergo rigorous conservatory training, followed by feedback on the job as they move up the career ladder. But what, exactly, they learn remains a mystery to most non-musicians; and what constitutes good conductors’ training even more so. At the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki, Finland – a conservatory reputed to be one of the best in the world – conducting students are helped to develop schoolteacher qualities. A good teacher makes children work well together and makes them pay close attention even when he speaks softly (E.B., 2016). Conductors evolve the culture of saying less and doing less yet getting the most out of musicians. Rather than do otherwise, teachers should approach the paradigm of saying and doing less in the classroom yet getting the most out of learners. The student conductor, who would rather do more, gets better by gleaning twenty-first century schoolteacher qualities. That teacher gets better by imbibing an accomplished maestro’s strategy. The question demanding an answer is: how does the maestro on that podium get such beauteous music out of an orchestra without sounding a note himself?

          The finest conductors master how to effectively communicate five elements of their music by way of gestures. The time signed at the beginning of the sheet music is the first. A conductor must sign that in patterns, suggesting the number of beats in each bar. The second is the ictus which is the lowest point of each stroke in the pattern, signifying each beat. The faster the conductor gestures, the faster these “icti” are reached. Thus, s/he passes the third message, tempo. The fourth is the preparatory (usually upward) stroke which triggers the opening beat. In addition to these, a conductor’s pattern may also convey a wealth of other expressive information to an ensemble – the fifth – most notably dynamics and articulation. Size is the conductor’s best tool in manipulating ensemble dynamics. By keeping the baton in the same tempo but varying the overall height and breadth of the pattern, the conductor may alternately tell his ensemble to play louder or softer, while an emphatically pronounced ictus indicates an accent which makes for a heavier feel to the music (Andrews, Das, & Lederer, 2009). These five gestures are communicated by the conductor in rehearsals, anticipated by an ensemble in performance and witnessed by an audience in concert.

          The experience of an audience at an art music event may constitute a parallel for the community directly impacted by an institution of learning it hosts. The transformation experienced by performers who work with a conductor is the subject in focus and should serve as the parallel for the learners in class who work with a teacher. What the conductor does is create the right atmosphere for dozens of musicians to play the same piece of music keeping the same time. What the teacher does should be similar: create a learning environment fit for learning the same content within the same period.

Such a learning environment serves its purpose in a school system if it’s all-encompassing. Therefore, learning environments are student-centered to the degree to which they are concurrently knowledge-centered, learner-centered, assessment-centered and community-centered (Froyd & Simpson, 2008). This is unachievable where the instructional strategies revolve around the teacher.

In a lecture-formatted classroom obtainable in a traditional school system, students listen to an instructor speak, process the new information being conveyed, and write down key ideas for future reference (Drake, Kayser, & Jacobowitz, 2016). This sounds more like the conductor showing musicians how to play all the instruments in a rehearsal. Of course, learning to play instruments should have been achieved before this rehearsal. When one considers the flipped classroom – one way to make teacher and students trade places – everything changes. In a flipped classroom, students gain new material outside of class, usually via reading or lecture video, and then use class time to do the harder work of assimilating that knowledge, perhaps through problem solving, discussion, or debates (Brame, 2013).

Although changing to a flipped classroom takes time, effort and commitment on the part of teachers and students, benefits abound. Students learn at their own pace; teachers engage with individual students (or groups of students); teachers witness mistakes students make as they are making them thereby gaining a better sense of students’ thought processes and as such are able to differentiate content in class. There also is the unique benefit of being able to educate parents along with their children (Drake, Kayser, & Jacobowitz, 2016). In all these, learning is taking place, but it is not the teacher who is actively doing it.

Most of what the music teacher does – like the conductor of the orchestra studies the score – is done before the lesson. For instance, in planning and assessment, the teacher employs the three levels of preparation: what students know; what students can do; and what students think about their music-making (Hansen & Imsie, 2016). This is based on the six levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy as revised by Anderson and Krathwohl (2001). Again, it works where a teacher sincerely desires to make the change from controlling everything to allowing students take charge of their own learning, an experience they crave.

Ceding control of that experience to learners has proven to be enjoyable on the one hand and to improve student learning on the other (Froyd & Simpson, 2008). Instructors who reverse the teacher-centered approach place learning at the center of the classroom environment, where both teacher and students share responsibility for teaching and ensuring that learning is occurring (Moate & Cox, 2015), and that students are the very ones actively doing it. This means a good chunk of the responsibility goes to them. Fortunately, a model for the gradual release of responsibility has been furnished educators. It involves focused instruction, guided instruction, collaborative learning and independent learning (Fisher & Frey, 2008).

This is how learning is achieved by conducting techniques. In other words, the end is that the teacher ensures that learning takes place by actively engaging learners. The means is that the teacher adopts the strategy of a conductor who is familiar with the work by first-hand experience or by research. The teacher conducts learning by allowing students play an active role while she guides with purposeful instructions, making them work together, and work alone when necessary, so that the learning experience becomes that of one and all. That teacher may be more appropriately referred to as a learning aid worker.

LEARNER-DRIVEN PEDAGOGY - Curtain Raiser

CURTAIN RAISER

1.1 Theatrical Classroom

Think of your classroom as a theatre. If the first scene is boring, the audience is forever lost! An opera’s overture is therefore brilliantly conducted for the effect of buying over the audience. A teacher must make her lesson as irresistibly captivating an experience for the varied learners who ‘buy tickets’ for a good time as the conductor seeks to achieve for his audience.

1.2 Parallel Professions

Drawing a parallel between the teacher and the conductor of an orchestra would help focus our lenses on the learner. The conductor interacts with the composer in person or by research. S/he studies the score for the purpose of interpreting the composer’s original intentions. S/he then brings an executive personality to the orchestra, tall enough to command respect yet friendly enough to earn acceptance. Working through the score with the musicians then, with the aim of effectively communicating its very essence with the benefit of a maestro’s panoramic view, makes the cake worth the candle. The teacher thus conducts learning to make it the experience of students, who actively take charge of it, by communicating the subject matter through guidance. When this is done, s/he cedes control to the learners like the conductor who does not play a note but harnesses the skills of many to achieve a beauteous performance.

1.3 Teacher Transition

The teacher, who ought to be a learning aid worker, tends to see through a veil if s/he does not make the transition. Just like sheet music poses as a screen between the performers and the conductor, that veil transforms into illusions (or fault lines) upon which no one should lay the foundations of knowledge and the critical components for skill acquisition, let alone the sense of judgement denied the learners gathered for transforming experiences. Teachers must make the paradigm shift. Otherwise, erroneous principles upon which traditional strategies are based persist in the classroom and society bears the brunt. But the collective abilities of students in learner-driven lessons are powerful enough to transform a society. It all begins with the learning aid worker.

1.4 Twenty-first Century Strategies

What twenty-first century teachers want to do is reverse the familiar position where the teacher who should be conducting functions as a violinist or trumpeter. Today’s treasured teachers guide and prompt learners to drive the very lessons that brought them to school.

MASTERSTROKE - Knowing the How

Raindrops on roses
And whiskers on kittens
Bright copper kettles and warm woolen mittens
Brown paper packages tied up with strings
These are a few of my favorite things

Many people identify that tune not bothering who wrote the words. Many played that musical over not caring if neighbours enjoyed it that much. Yet many others relive their first experience seeing that movie not worrying about the science that explains how they’re able to do so.

         But learning ‘the how’ was John Coltrane’s business. Born in 1926 America, when and where jazz was just taking roots; having no grasp of mathematics, crucial to understanding the genre; and living for only 40 years, which meant too little time to achieve mastery; John William Coltrane lumbered against the odds to know ‘the how’. His work would endure by learning how. And learn he did – inflection, syncopation and improvisation – the very how of writing, recording and performing on “Moment’s Notice”. He had to learn if truly, and how, “The Night Has a Thousand Eyes”. John Coltrane found how “Midriff” would reel out of the Art Blakey Big Band. For Trane, nothing compares to knowing the how.

On John Coltrane for Legends of the Score

MASTERSTROKE - Composing a Master's Brew

How do you compose a master’s brew? He knows – this Camerounian born in 1933 – that selecting the finest quality ingredients do not necessarily translate into a perfect age-old lager: assembling professionals. The best grains are crushed and mixed with demineralized water: creating originality. The resulting mash is boiled, its starch broken down with enzymes: melodic and rhythmic phrases. Fermentation begins here using purpose-grown yeast in suitable tanks: pitching the process. The beer you arrive at will now be filtered, bottled, pasteurized, labelled, cooled and shipped to your favourite pub so you may savour the bubbles, sparkling and tempting: staging the performance.

Begin with Soul Makossa and Africadelic in the 70’s. Go on to Goro City and Douala Serenade of the 80’s. Find Wakafrika and Mboa from the 90’s. And make certain to return to Aye Afrika and The Panther released in this millennium. Manu Dibango fuses the syncopation and improvisation of jazz with its bass groove. He blends the complex rhythm of afrobeat with blues riffs and wind blasts always in a bid to lure you to the art of the science of composing a master’s brew.

For Legends of the Score on Manu Dibango

MASTERSTROKE - The Twist in the Plot

Just like we speak of multitasking in work and life today, Handel’s music is typified by contrapuntal harmony. That jargon is from the word “counterpoint” which refers to the use of more than one strands of independent, yet concordant, melody. We hear a lot of that in Messiah.

But it was not only this German composer’s music that was contrapuntal. His very life, between 1685 and 1759, was a paradox of sorts, a couple of twists and turns: he went to law school but took organ lessons; he wrote fascinating operas like Rinaldo depicting sensual love then composed dramatic oratorios like Samson evoking ethereal devotion; he was religious enough to serve as church musician yet secular enough to drink and squabble a little too often; he was a commoner whose finances were debt-laden from declining patronage, nevertheless a nobleman whose works thrived on royal commissions repeatedly.

The truth is: life is not a straight-line graph. Sometimes you take a right turn but end up on the left wing. Do what needs to be done therefore, choosing the best options under the circumstances. Somewhere around that turn lies the Twist in the Plot.

For Legends of the Score on G.F. Handel