Stagnation leading to Toxification

Negativity and humiliation = excellence in music education?

The above link is to an article showing the most extreme side of music education. It warns us again what can be produced by the toxic music education culture prevalent in many schools and higher education, and which extends into professional music culture.We have all experienced this to some degree.

Music education has avoided the rigorous assessment and evaluation processes that has reformed and developed education in other disciplines, mostly because it still predominantly exists in the domain of private education. It's quite staggering to think how little music education has developed - having church choirs operating the same way they did in the Middle Ages is not necessarily a good thing.

The music education world, and the classical music world in particular, needs to do away with the following:

• Perpetuation of the 'Talent' myth
• Idolization of prodigies and maestros
• Idolization of 'dead, white blokes' and the fixed concept of a 'one true way' to perform their music
• Elitism and maintaining music education in a silo separate from other disciplines
• Unhealthy focus on technique to the detriment of fostering musicality
• A total lack of interest in considering audiences
• A hierarchy of 'most talented' musicians from conductor, soloist down to teacher - Those who are not a professional soloist have not 'made it' and have made to feel that they have failed
• The dismissal of the potential of music as an integral part of how a community functions and how we serve each other

You can read lots of similar thoughts in Music, Talent and Performance: A Conservatory Cultural System.

Although admittedly El Sistema in Venezuela does not avoid all of the above, it is so refreshing how it demands us to ask questions of our music education contexts. Many El Sistema-inspired programs are approaching things in a very different way - but we must be careful not to replace some of the above with Venezuelan celebrities. The more music education programs become accessible to the wider community, the more accountable and progressive they will have to be. Teaching and learning methods will have to be based on solid academic research and brain science rather than the possession of a performance diploma or degree. Teachers will have to be engaged in reflective practice rather than replicating from experience at a conservatory. Much of this is starting to happen and we need more!

One month at the Pastoral Women's Council

My first month as co-programme manager at the Pastoral Women's Council has been hectic to say the least. Whilst the projects themselves operate in Loliondo, Longido and Monduli (North Masaailand in general), I have been working at the Arusha office. Here I spend my time with my co-manager, two finance assistants and the executive director when she is not in the field.

I've been plunged into the season of reporting and fundraising - luckily the reports are almost over, and we've had renewed committments from donors to sponsor masaai girls at secondary school and higher education. Also the beginning of the year has seen the renewal of staff contracts and other HR fun and games. Right now, the rest of the management team are getting ready for the annual staff meeting, General Assembly and the first board meeting of the year, which will be in Loliondo. Phew!

Learning about the organisation and all the projects they run has obviously been a necessity, along with how best to communicate with staff across three districts. I still have so much to learn but these have been the most important things so far:

• Girls sponsorship at secondary school is the most effective way of preventing forced early marriages and pregnancies.
• I did not previously know about the tradition of 'esoto' - night time dances with Masaai warriors and girls that ends up in unwanted pregnancies.
• Its a dilemma to encourage girls (and boys) to finish their education when the schools are of such low quality; corporal punishment is rife, teachers are ill-trained and often don't bother showing up to lessons, and the curriculum is pre-Victorian.
•  Land rights cases can be postponed for over six months at a time and subsequently can continue for years.
• There is a bewildering array of various mechanisms of local government, some of which are taking on the responsibilities of their community e.g. sponsoring girls' education, and funding the process of women receiving land titles.
• Nursery schools that don't receive any funding from the government are trying to sustain themselves through livestock businesses.

On to month no. 2...

 

The Middle Ground

I have just finished reading the inspiring story of missionary pilot Nate Saint in the book ‘Jungle Pilot’. One of the first MAF pilots in the 1940s and 50s, Saint was a pioneer in the true sense of the word; he built airstrips, flew into areas never accessed by plane before, designed bucket drops to deliver parcels without landing, vastly improved the safety of small aircraft that has a continued legacy in missionary aircraft, and built houses, a hangar, mission hospital and school. His most famous legacy was being part of the team of missionaries who established contact with the notoriously violent Waodani people; all five men were martyred in the process.

Many have been inspired by stories of pioneers in whatever field of mission and development they are working in, but the next generations require different approaches in their more developed and urban contexts. Nate's son Stephen writes an epilogue in our edition where he talks about the challenges of establishing services run by and for the Waodani people, who Nate was contacting when he died.

I have been thinking about putting approaches to development into four categories; Emergency relief, short, medium and long term. Many development organisations, and the wider public, are familiar with the approaches required for the first two; we raise money for disaster relief, and ship out huge amounts of second-hand resources, we build schools, hospitals and dig wells. This has been going on for over a hundred years.

Medium term approaches have been more recent; sponsoring children to go to school, micro-enterprise and micro-credit. In the West, we are getting more used to buying products from these enterprises and even funding small loans for business start-ups (www.kiva.com). I have found that there is not much of a continuum from the short term still; training the teachers and management at the schools and hospitals that have been built, and facilitating the maintenance of wells in rural villages. Likewise, many of these small businesses or NGOs that offer training in a variety of skills and crafts are still run by expats, the products are designed according to western styles, and their markets abroad and access is facilitated by volunteers. Without adressing these issues, the short term solution has had little impact.

How do we as development organisations continue to make an impact in this middle ground? By building on existing infrastructure, by adding to and working within the infrastructure, by training those who are running social services and advocating for their contributions to providing those services outside of urban areas. This is the medium term approach with the aim of reaching long term goals of independence, sustainability, accountability and ownership.

In the Ngorongoro Conservation Area, the Pastoral Women’s Council has been working with the Pastoral and the District Councils to advocate for support for pastoralist girls’ education. As a result, these institutions are taking on education as a priority in their strategies, are sponsoring girls to go to school and are establishing a Pre Form 1 centre to support the transition from primary to secondary school. These projects are starting to change community attitudes towards education for girls, and making long lasting changes within the existing infrastructure. Much more needs to be done, and I feel there should be more dialogue around successful partnerships with government institutions and how we can best support them.

Many organisations also do not have an exit strategy. If there is no thinking behind making your operations defunct and unnecessary, there is no commitment to making long term changes. Instead we create further reliance on the support we deliver. It’s very hard to imagine yourself or an organisation being useless, and too many NGOs thrive on the notion of being needed, and in fact use that as a ‘selling point’ for support. We need to more accurately map out the landscape of the middle ground to consider a future where services are locally provided and sustained.

 

What a year!

Return to the Pastoral Women's Council

So tomorrow I go back to the Assistant Programme Manager job for the Pastoral Women's Council. Three months of reporting, fundraising and helping to find someone to take over the position permanently in March. I hope this will be more great management experience as well as getting to grips with how an NGO works here. All good for when more musical opportunities come my way...

The Pied Piper of Haydom

Lena Ward - Haydom Lutheran Hospital

 

It has been my great fortune to visit this hospital for a week every month for the last four months. Whilst Kirstein flies nurses and chanjo (vaccines) to remote villages in the area, I have been enjoying a kind of retreat; writing, researching and getting to know some of the people who are dedicating their time and expertise to this astonishing hospital. I was lucky enough to get a detailed tour of the hospital on my first visit, as it coincided with a visitor from a nearby health clinic who was eager to see if their patients could be referred here.

 

A friend suggested that I should take my violin to play for the patients, so on this last visit I managed to play for the children and their relatives. They have visiting hours between 2-4pm; the first afternoon I played in the main room where they have parties on weekends, and the second time I played in each room. A wonderful nurse called Sister Paulina was my escort to the different rooms and joined in singing with me as I played Swahili hymns and Christmas carols. It was great to hear relatives joining in (mostly the mamas) and clapping along.

 

There has been a lot of debate in the media recently about the well-intentioned Sir Bob and the re-release of 'Do they know its Christmas?' to raise money for the ebola crisis. It's hard to believe that the same tales of the woes of Africa are still being thrown out today - that the West hasn't moved on in their misconceptions and misjudgements after 30 years. Yes, the ebola crisis is horrific and requires external help, but it is only the crises that demand money that ever reach the wider attention of the West. I want to focus on the assets and the potential. The children and families in the Lena ward are receiving good care, they most definitely know it will soon be Christmas, and they most likely have a better idea of the true meaning of Christmas than their counterparts in the West. Mungu awabariki! 

 



Ignition!

I have just finished reading Daniel Coyle’s The Talent Code, and I was especially interested in his idea of there being, in the learning journey, points of igniting desire to commit to deep practice of skills – Coyle says that along with master coaching this leads to being an expert of whichever discipline is involved. This ignition could also be termed as intrinsic motivation. We used this term a lot in our discussions and writing during the Fellowship, but we didn’t have time to really unpack what it means.

Coyle cites the following factors as tinderboxes waiting to ignite a passion for ‘deep practice’:

1) Having an expectation and understanding of commitment involved: Gary McPherson studied students new to music in 1997:

“We instinctively think of each new student as a blank slate, but the ideas they bring to that first lesson are probably far more important than anything a teacher can do, or any amount of practice. It’s all about their perception of self. At some point very early on they had a crystallizing experience that brings the idea to the fore that says, I am a musician. That idea is like a snowball rolling downhill”.

2) Role models

3) Sense of belonging to a group 

4) Sense of danger or lack of safety - dissatisfaction leads to efforts to change our situation or the pressure of impending accountability such as a concert or exam

5) Being the underdog

6) Praise of effort rather than achievement

Daniel Pink is his book Drive adds the following:

7) Autonomy – Being able to choose your own direction

8) Mastery – Satisfaction of getting better at something 

9) Purpose - this could be personal “I want to be the first person who goes to college in my family” or seeking a change in the lives of others “I empathise with this person’s situation and I want to do something to help”.

I’m writing this at a Lutheran missionary hospital in Tanzania. As the hospital approaches its 60^th anniversary, you can’t help but consider the ‘deep practice’ of Norwegian missionaries who built the best equipped hospital in the country, in the middle of the bush, surmounting cultural, logistical, geographical, financial and linguistic barriers, and who have sponsored children from primary school age to have them return to the hospital as surgeons. I’m not sure you could even grasp a sense of the commitment that would be needed from those early years to now, although there was and is a sense of danger in terms of providing decent medical services to a catchment area of 2 million people. It is their sense of purpose that has ignited their commitment and perseverance in this task.

I have one more point to add:

10) Personal relevancy – searching and learning about yourself leads to personal satisfaction, relaxation and often emotional and spiritual uplifting.

 

The El Sistema program in Venezuela has been able to create a culture that ignites many of the above:

1) Understanding of expectations - Students see the progression from paper violins to to youth orchestra level in the nucleo and the daily commitment to the program.

2) Role models - Along with the inspiring figure of Dr Abreu, Dudamel is the hero of many musicians in Venezuela.

3) Sense of belonging - Students go through their years in the nucleo belonging to the ensemble, and the Venezuela jacket is their uniform showing that they belong to a greater group of the Venezuelan people.

4) Sense of danger  - not just a feeling of unease on the streets of Caracas, but that the music education available to them at the nucleos is not found elsewhere and is therefore to be treasured and appreciated. Some facilities are barely suitable for their purpose but they soldier on regardless. Students are also prepared for a performance shortly after starting to play their instrument.

5) Underdog – Venezuela has no strong history of classical ensembles or a place in the classical world compared to the cultural bastions of Europe and the US.

6) Tochar y luchar – 'fight and play' rather than you’ve either got the X factor or not.

7) Autonomy - One aspect of motivation that El Sistema may not be encouraging; there doesn’t seem to be much choice of instrument and repertoire, and there is lack of opportunities to study other musical disciplines such as composition and improvisation. There also doesn’t seem to be much flexibility in terms of how much you want to commit to the program, the daily rigorous rehearsals and regular performances, and there is not uniform access to auditions, more advanced ensembles and touring opportunities throughout the country.

8) Mastery - Many El Sistema commentators remark on the sheer brilliance of students, the joy apparent in performances and how many hours they are willing to commit to practice. Being invited to take over the Salzburg Festival must say something about the excellence of the musicians in the program.

9) Purpose - The corporate mission that music belongs to the community and exists to serve others.

10) Personal relevancy - Eric Booth: "El Sistema conductors and teachers invest far more instructional time in describing sections in terms of stories, or giving visceral images for a note or a phrase, than do traditional conductors. This enables the musicians to make stronger emotional and physical connections to the music. This investment in emotional connection fuels the Sistema teaching truth that “passion provokes precision”—meaning that a young artist’s emotional investment leads to mastery more reliably over the long haul than technical drill; indeed, the hunger to express more fully drives the improvement and creates motivation for technical solutions more than compliance or a generalized hunger for improvement."

Maybe the fact that El Sistema reaches 9 out of 10 'ignition' points explains why so many people devote their time to the program, both in and out of Venezuela.