Finney (2002)

B. J. Music Ed.
2002 19:2, 119±134 Copyright # 2002 Cambridge University Press
Music education as aesthetic education: a rethink

John Finney
edwin.®nney@ntlworld.com
The article uses methods of philosophical enquiry and historical research to clarify
questions surrounding the epistemological basis for music education. It critically examines
the idea of `music as aesthetic education' in the context of evolving policy and practice
within the English National Curriculum. It argues for broadening the concept of aesthetic
education as a necessary antidote to an impersonal curriculum where an undifferentiated
notion of knowledge distorts the character of goals, pedagogy and the valuing of musical
endeavour.
Preamble
In 1985, in the wake of James Callaghan's Ruskin College speech and intensive activity by
Her Majesty's Inspectorate (HMI), my work as a music teacher in a Basingstoke compre-
hensive school came under scrutiny in an interesting way. The school had decided to
review its purpose and revise its curriculum. There was to be a new curriculum: broad,
balanced and relevant to the needs of pupils and the society in which they were growing
up. HMI were encouraging an approach to planning that recognised a number of essential
areas of learning as a way of bringing coherence to the curriculum. This was in line with
ideas developing within the philosophy of education where realms of meaning, forms of
knowledge and ways of knowing were seen as a means of articulating a liberal education
and as a key to curriculum planning. The school's curriculum committee worked broadly
within the areas of learning set out in the document The Curriculum, 5±16: Curriculum
Matters 2 (DES, 1985a). These areas were designated as aesthetic and creative; human and
social; linguistic and literary; mathematical; moral; physical; scienti®c; spiritual; and
technological. However, the committee decided on some amalgamation and con¯ation of
areas and the spiritual was omitted altogether. Those of us teaching the arts were seen as
spearheading thinking about the aesthetic and creative area. The teachers of music, drama,
art, ®lm, physical education and English were called upon to work out the distinctive
contribution of the aesthetic dimension within the curriculum. We were to set about
de®ning the nature of aesthetic knowledge and understanding, the kind of progression this
would call forth and the kind of objectives desirable in our subjects as pupils progressed
through the school. While other groups found it agreeable to work with the general
curriculum model being developed, where behavioural objectives, linear progression and
the accumulation of easily assessable knowledge were the way forward, we were playing a
different music. We had discovered the value of èxpressive objectives' as proposed by
Eisner (1979). We worked on the basis that the outcomes of aesthetic engagement could
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John Finney
not be easily prescribed and in the belief that appraisal involving pupils themselves would
be the preferred way to assess their achievements.
Some subjects found themselves in more than one group. English teachers, for
example, were split between the aesthetic±creative group and the linguistic group. The
aspiration that each area of experience would reach across all subjects only partially
succeeded as the need to create a school timetable and secure staf®ng limited any serious
or sustained philosophical inquiry. The ®nal report from the school's curriculum committee
revealed the victory of instrumental rationality, as it used the economic well-being of
pupils and society as the central rationale for a curriculum. There was to be a particular
emphasis on science. In this view, the arts were to serve as recreation, leisure, pleasure
and entertainment, thus reinforcing the arts and sciences as cultures apart. The possibility
of viewing music and the other arts as key contributors to aesthetic education, with
particular ways of seeing reality and the ability to support and assist in the prospering of all
other ways, had not been grasped.
The problem
The belief that music education could be conceived as aesthetic education had grown
steadily from mid-century. It promised to release music education from its utilitarian past
and to establish it as an intrinsically worthwhile discipline: music for music's sake and not
for any other. It would no longer be in the curriculum as a commission from societal
leaders to further the aims and ideals of society where it might attend to matters extrinsic to
music and had long been associated with practices such as self-discipline, poise,
gregariousness, loyalty to community and country, and so on (see Mark, 1999). As an
aesthetic discipline, music could attend to its inherent values and thus contribute to a
liberal education. In England, HMI had come to recognise the aesthetic as a signi®cant
dimension of the curriculum, one that easily embraced all arts subjects and indeed the
whole curriculum. Weak understanding of the nature of aesthetic experience and knowl-
edge was to prove to be a dif®culty, however.
But times have changed. While professional discussion continues around the nature of
aesthetic education, there is no longer talk of the aesthetic in of®cial speech. Once again,
leaders of society have come to patronise the school curriculum. Politicians, entrepreneurs
and philanthropists again proclaim aims and ideals and expect particular outcomes in
reward for their sponsorship. This leads to necessary questions. Can music education any
longer have one overarching imperative? Can music education any longer be conceived of
as aesthetic education?
The English National Curriculum places knowledge and understanding at the heart
of every subject in the curriculum (DfEE, 1999). But what kind of knowledge and
understanding is this? This enquiry sets out to explain some current dilemmas facing
music education, one of which is whether it is wise for music to have a place in the
curriculum at all. The enquiry is concerned to clarify the meaning and purpose of a
music education attending to aims, values and the process of valuing, or assessment, if
you prefer. It begins by reviewing the thought and practice emerging prior to the making
of a National Curriculum and on through the events that have followed in the wake of
the Education Reform Act of 1988 (ERA) and that continue to shape the current position,
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where a state-sponsored music curriculum continues to struggle to meet the aspirations of

pupils.
Music, schooling and loss of happiness

In proposing that the act of being musical is voluntarily undertaken in search of meaning,
and that through it it is possible to express a common humanity, we might argue that here
lies a realm of human experience best nurtured beyond the bounds of formal education,
free from its socialising function and agenda of assessment and accountability. Placing it
within the sphere of schooling can only distort acquaintance with it and impinge on the
rich growth of subjectivity and inter-subjectivity that self-directed involvement can bring
about. Music inspires deep personal responses beyond the reach of language. Attempts to
codify, classify or normalise these can only lead to a loss of happiness. The last thing we
would wish to do is to formalise and therefore institutionalise children's discoveries that
being musical involves making sense of feelings, motivations and the means of bringing
unity and sensibility to their lives.
Music is an artistic±creative endeavour and this, ipso facto, leads those who partake in
it to bring forth work that cannot be held up against existing criteria. To place what we
make and say of musical experience within existing categories, or to benchmark them
against theories, rationales and exemplary models, denies the very nature of the creative
adventure. In other words, music institutionalised will lead to generalising artistic and
creative work, to taking it away from the child and to a concentration on public meanings,
which will lead in turn to a diminishing of the uniqueness of individuals and their group
encounter with the art form. The continuing dif®culty which assessors face in determining
the value of a composition, performance or individual response to music merely
emphasises the point. Students moving to post-16 and higher education are quick to
identify the inherent dangers in offering musical composition for examination, for example.
While they may be drawn to the possibility of creative freedom, they become driven by the
reassurance of areas of study that offer clear guidelines and the comfort of ®rm criteria.
But all this has a history. I am describing the case of music and the arts that sought in
the 1960s and 1970s to ®nd a place in a world that admired òbjective reality' and `truth'.
The triumph of the Enlightenment had nurtured a con®dence in these notions. These, it
was thought, depended either on empirical veri®cation ± something could be shown to be
the case ± or on a particular form of logical reasoning. That which was accurately
measurable, clearly quanti®able or rationally justi®able had objective status and was
therefore worthy of assessment. Value judgements were recognised but were viewed with
suspicion and thought to be inferior to objective judgements. Music, like all subjects
claiming a place in the curriculum, had validity to the extent that it was able to establish
objectives amenable to this kind of àssessment'. Thus, at examination level certain kinds
of knowledge, such as well-codi®ed harmonic progressions and melodic patternings,
musical historical truths and established interpretations of music, quali®ed as being
assessable. This socially constructed knowledge rested upon a canon of works and
procedures that endorsed high-status knowledge long codi®ed, reduced and abstracted
from musical experiences and from personal and social meanings. The objective model
that could measure reliably held sway.
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John Finney
The polarisation of subjective and objective reality was ®rmly in place. The Certi®cate
of Secondary Education (CSE) examination that was introduced in 1965 and designed for
average and below average secondary school pupils breathed its ®nal notes in 1985,
asking of its candidates: `For what activity was Cavallie-Coll renowned?' The divorce of
fact and feeling was ready for a reconciliation. School music and its assessment as loss of
happiness had a case.
A response from the Music Advisers' National Association

The publication Assessment and Progression in Music Education (Preston, 1986) marked a
sea change in approaches to music in the curriculum. Recognising music as an aesthetic
discipline, the report pointed out that aesthetic judgements are personal and that precise
criteria for making these cannot be laid down in advance of a musical encounter. To
attempt to do so would be to deny the personal nature of individual judgements. This was
not to suggest that judgements in music were simply a matter of personal taste and
preference. Aesthetic judgements were ìn one sense personal but in another, communi-
cable, open to inspection and capable of negotiation' (ibid., 10). Inter-subjectivity could
lead to meaningful disagreement and consensus. The issue was whether reasonable
ground could be found to support judgements. The process of negotiating value created its
own kind of truth and objectivity.
It is not possible, in the Arts, to make right or wrong judgments; the only thing that is possible is to
be prepared to `take one's coat off', so to speak, and get down to an argument. (Aspin, 1982: 48)
The choice, it was thought, was not between relativism, which had no basis for
determining value, and absolute truth, where given truths waited to be applied. In a subject
where it was crucial for pupils to learn how to make judgements, to discriminate and to
decide for themselves what felt right, the knower was at least as important as the known.
Musical appraisal, musical criticism and the discourse of music were at the heart of
assessment and the pupils themselves needed to be inducted into making decisions about
the value of their work and the work of others. Assessment was therefore about teaching
self-assessment, and self-assessment was learning. The report noted, too, that music was
more rewarding where it was not formally assessed. The problem lay not with assessment
as such, but with the ways in which it was frequently conceived and carried out. The
report coincided with government moves to revise approaches to assessment.
The minister of state, Sir Keith Joseph, recognised the limitations of norm-referencing.
Criterion-referencing was established, to broaden access and to allow all children to show
what it was they knew, understood and could do. This was a key feature of the General
Certi®cate of Secondary Education examination (GCSE) instituted in 1986. The GCSE set
out to be more inclusive than previous examinations and to function both formatively and
summatively.
The argument for fresh approaches to assessment in music rested upon the subject as
a key element within the aesthetic realm, as a bearer of aesthetic knowledge, or aesthetic
knowing, as it became more frequently described. Earlier in the century, Dewey had
recommended the signi®cant shift from `knowledge' to `knowing'. Use of the word
`knowing' gave status to awareness and perception and recognised the involvement of
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states of mind. These all contrasted with other kinds of knowledge, where description,
words, statements and propositions held sway. Together with the other arts, music could
establish an identity where the hard dualisms of fact and feeling, cognition and affect,
objectivity and subjectivity were, if not completely lost, at least suspended. At the heart of
aesthetic knowing was feeling, and feeling was knowable. Reid (1980) pointed out that
feeling, thought of as immediate experience, is present throughout our waking conscious-
ness, and we engage with it more or less depending on our concerns and dispositions.
Feeling bears most signi®cantly on knowing when we are orientated towards beliefs and
values, when we care about what we do. Feeling, unlike emotion, was therefore an aspect
of cognition. Reid (1983) proposed the term `cognitive-feeling' to help this way of thinking.
This contrasted with the approach where music is linked to emotion. This view, still the
most common within the cognitive psychology of music, assumed that the subject listened
to music with a contingent emotional response, a stirring up, a reaction of some kind.
Perception was arrested by the musical stimulus. This discounted the possibility of the
subject both moving the music and being moved by it, of investing feeling and meaning in
it, of being in a dialogue with it (Witkin, 1974), and of music being thought of as intentional
human behaviour (Scruton, 1983). It posited a view of the human subject as passive and
without agency. Yet we know musical perception to be active, interpretive and knowing.
While the seat of feeling is unknowable and not ìntelligent', non-cognitive in fact, it is
through the processes of aesthetic experience that unknowable responses become know-
able and intelligent. This is what distinguishes the aesthetic curriculum. The term
`cognitive-feeling' was helpful.
Aesthetic knowing
The CSE examination asking after knowledge about the French organ builder Cavallie-Coll
was symptomatic of the hegemony of propositional knowledge that was thought to
approximate to fact.
Cavallie-Coll, Astride (b. Montpellier, 4 Feb 1811; d. Paris, 13 Oct 1899). French organ builder.
Of an established family of organ builders, he studied in Paris . . . (Sadie, 1994: 148)
Reid argued against the inadequacy of thinking of music and the arts as statements of truth,
as subjects whose knowledge structure existed independently of the knower and were
waiting to be unwrapped and for the enlightenment of each new generation. This
rationalist view, where knowledge transcended human experience and sense perception,
consisted of frameworks of concepts, procedures and rules. Music and the arts could be
considered in this way. For Reid, however, engagement with the arts at once involved a
different kind of knowledge. Àll propositional knowledge of music is empty if not based
on direct, intuitive, ®rst hand cognitive experience. Experiential intuition is essential' (Reid,
1986: 14). For Reid, the musician engaged in her art is `coming to know'. In the creative
act, whether as a performer, composer or respondent, the knowledge she discovers is not
fully known until the making has been completed. The artist works in dialogue with her
medium and the meaning is in the making. In this way, experience-knowledge becomes
the raison d'eÃtre of the arts and concerns knowledge that stresses the tacit, personal,
revelatory and insightful.
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John Finney
As Reid implied, this is not to say that `knowing that something is the case' in music
has no value. To know about Cavallie-Coll has value, providing we have listened to, or
even played, organs and organ music. Indeed, we ®nd learners searching after this kind of
knowledge once they have gained and valued experience-knowledge. Green (2001), in
reporting the way popular musicians learn, points out the enthusiasm with which they
acquire propositional knowledge through deep commitment to music making.
Ah, I hear a Cavallie-Coll organ ± like meeting an old friend, an irreducible
experience, an event with meaning and realisation (see Dewey, 1958: 330). The musician
feeling and shaping a phrase in performance, or a listener experiencing this, are in a state
of coming to know and revealing musical understanding of a unique kind. Reid (1986: 42)
cites Yehudi Menuhin talking to a pupil in a master class: Ùntil the current ¯ows from the
toes to the ®ngers . . . and you feel the weight and movement of the body . . . you won't
quite ``get'' the music.'
Establishing this crucial distinction between experience-knowledge and propositional
knowledge was fundamental in the in¯uential work of Paynter (1982), who had shown
the ef®cacy of coming to know inside musical creative processes and notably the act of
composition. He reaf®rmed that music's place in the curriculum depended on recognising
it as a non-verbal, intuitive area of experience. Whatever we might have to say about it
and whatever might be known about it could never be a substitute for the knowing of it.
Paynter's ground-breaking report of the Schools Council Secondary Curriculum Music
Project (1973±82) started with a historical overview that showed how, since the
institution of music education in England in the nineteenth century, the intuitive had
been consistently overrun by the formal, the practical by the theoretical. The learner's
search for personal meaning and relevance had been overhauled by the external world of
non-negotiable concepts, structures and formalities and by the inertia of fact and theory.
Swanwick, writing about the multilayered nature of musical knowledge, argued that `the
absolute central core involved in knowing music can be appropriately called ``knowledge
by acquaintance''' (1994: 17). Unlike Reid, Swanwick argued that it was important to be
clear about what we were becoming acquainted with. Following substantial empirical
work on the development of children's compositions (Swanwick & Tillman, 1986), he
proposed that in music, knowledge by acquaintance worked on four levels: there was
understanding of sound materials, expressive character, structural relationships and value
(Swanwick, 1992). Not only was there an ideal form of musical engagement but also it
could be thought of developmentally. In this way, the holistic and inarticulate imperative
of knowledge by acquaintance becomes conditional on given criteria. This interpretation
of knowledge by acquaintance imposes a conceptual framework on the subject.
Swanwick saw a clear correspondence between knowledge by acquaintance and knowl-
edge that could be described. Reimer (1992) too, speaking of `knowing within', saw a
growth in the understanding of formal relationships, content, function and feeling through
musical engagement. For Reimer there was an ideal way in which a learner should be
engaged with musical work. Swanwick and Reimer proposed that what can be known
intuitively inside aesthetic experience is predetermined and can be more fully known
propositionally as part of growing into culture and its conventions. It was important to
clarify what music meant in the abstract. This broke with Reid's conception of
experience-knowledge and embodied-meaning. Reid saw intuitive knowledge as con-
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cerning instant apprehension of the mind, a matter of immediate insight. That was it. It
didn't expect acquaintance with anything other than itself, and in any case, this kind of
knowing was likely to be, using Polanyi's term, tacit. Polanyi (1966), a philosopher of
science, established human perception as an awareness of objects without attention
being ®xed upon them. This kind of perception was integral to the wholeness of
consciousness and formed the background grid that made focused perceptions possible,
intelligible and meaningful.
However, Elliott (1994) found the Reimer±Swanwick version of aesthetic education
wanting and set about systematically dismantling it. He objected to music being thought of
as an object, as a set of works rather than practices. He criticised both the idea of aesthetic
perception as being concerned with a one-dimensional form of listening with meaning
inherent in musical patternings, and the belief that musical education is the education of
feeling. He saw the homogenising of the diversity of music endeavour as leading to
ethnocentrism. Elliott's criticisms had some basis, for the dominant version of music
education as aesthetic education, particularly as promoted in North America, took no
account of the way aesthetic education had come to be conceived of as an active
disposition towards people as well as objects, as a way of being human. It had not been
able to sustain an existential strand as delineated in the work of Dewey, Witkin and Reid,
for example. Signi®cantly, the GCSE examination introduced in 1986 declared a concern
`to encourage imaginative teaching in schools and foster a greater understanding of music
through more direct experiences of the creative processes involved' (DES, 1985c: 1, my
italics). On the most common sense and practical level, aesthetic experience was equated
with the direct experience of music.
Aesthetic learning
Hargreaves (1983) opened up an interesting line of inquiry. While acknowledging that we
commonly think of learning as incremental and cumulative and that this is entirely
reasonable, the impact of what he referred to as `traumatic' experience in the arts was as
signi®cant as, if not of greater signi®cance than, progressive encounters with arts teaching.
In interviewing adults for whom the arts had become important, Hargreaves found a
remarkable consistency in attributing ongoing commitment to the arts to life-changing
experiences. Taylor (1991) corroborated aesthetic learning as being centred on ìllumi-
nating experience', and Abbs (1994) claimed aesthetic experience as overwhelming,
sensationally powerful, involving feeling, heightening signi®cance, incommunicable in
words and leaving one with a desire to share in it. As a chorister aged ten, for example, I
recall being overwhelmed by processing as part of a huge diocesan choir in Winchester
Cathedral to the sound of a mighty organ and the subsequent singing with over 1000
voices. It was an overwhelming experience and I am still enthusiastic about sharing it.
Such experience may well have been a source of vocation in both a more limited and a
wider sense. Hargreaves' informants spoke of their experiences as disturbing, shattering
even. They were quite like those associated with religious conversion. They destroyed all
previous conceptions about an art form to which they may even have been hostile or
indifferent. Hargreaves identi®ed four elements in this kind of experience: concentration of
attention, revelation, a state of inarticulateness and, ®nally, arousal of appetite. It was the
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John Finney
last that had most signi®cance. Quite simply, with arousal of appetite we come back again
and again. I am still singing.
This insight into learning in the arts, where aesthetic experience-knowledge is pre-
eminent, leads to the question of motivation and more particularly to the nature of intrinsic
motivation where activity is undertaken for its own sake. Arts educators have repeatedly
argued for the intrinsic value of artistic endeavour. The distinction between extrinsic and
intrinsic learning is helpful here. The former deals in content and skills: Ìt is controlled
from the outside, a learning of impersonal associations, and it is extrinsic to the personality
of the learner' (Maslow, 1973: 159). Intrinsic learning is about becoming a particular
human being. It is learning that accompanies the profoundest experiences in our lives.
Extrinsic learning sees the teacher shape the learner. Maslow (1986) believed that intrinsic
motivation thrived once a set of basic human needs had been met, once the needs for
safety, belongingness, love and esteem had been achieved. These led to what Maslow
called `self-actualisation' and with it the prospect of `peak experience', where, for
example, one sees clearly that the universe is all one piece and that one has a place in it.
Vivid meaning is given to life. Radford (2001), examining aesthetic and religious awareness
among pupils, saw this intensity of experience as providing a sense of transcendence
through which subjective and objective worlds unite. Dewey (1988: 11) spoke of `raw'
aesthetic experiences, experiences that suddenly call forth attention and compel us,
making experience come alive, as it were. These he saw as revelatory, signi®cant
existential events.
Csikszentmihalyi (1996) broadened the idea of personal commitment and well-being
in learning through the concept of `¯ow'. Transcending distinctions between intrinsic and
extrinsic learning, the learner becomes effortlessly involved in what he or she is doing,
loses sense of time and awareness of self. Psychic energy is freed and goals get ful®lled.
The learner is effortlessly in control. Traumatic aesthetic experience, self-actualisation,
transcendence and ¯ow are all times of tremendous concentration and attention, ensuring
a sustained level of personal insight and understanding linked to the human desire for self-
ful®lment. Knowing this con®rms that one is on the right track, as it were, and that there
will be future satisfaction as one grows as a person.
What should be taught at what age?

While `coming to know' and èxperience-knowledge' might be the hallmarks of a mean-
ingful music education, HMI had produced a blueprint for the school curriculum (DES,
1985a). Schools as described in the preamble above were identifying appropriate criteria
for measuring progress, meaning objectives to be ful®lled at various stages of education.
The satellite document Music 5±16 (DES, 1985b) saw music as a means of developing
insight ìnto areas of experience some of which cannot easily be verbalised'. A key aspect
of aesthetic education had been recognised. Schools were encouraged to plan their
curricula with areas of experience in mind. Those of us teaching the arts at this time fought
to establish an aesthetic entitlement for all pupils aged 11±16. While this way of knowing
was expected to reach across the whole curriculum, the arts claimed to be exemplary in
providing for it. In considering assessment, HMI af®rmed a synergy with the teaching
process and declared a prime purpose to be to improve pupils' performance. While
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assessment as self-assessment, appraisal, criticism and learning could sit comfortably with
this, there was no mention of the education of feeling and discrimination. A key feature of
the subject documents was the setting out of what should be achieved by ages 7, 11, 14
and 16. The way had been prepared for a National Curriculum and the shaping of teachers
and learners.
A National Curriculum for Music

The Task Group for Assessment and Testing (TGAT) (DES, 1988b) advised on the practical
considerations governing assessment within the National Curriculum and started from a
number of propositions:
Promoting children's learning is a principal aim of schools. Assessment lies at the heart of this
process (para. 3). The assessment process itself should not determine what is to be taught and
learned (para. 4).
Assessment needs to be incorporated systematically into teaching strategies and practices at all
levels (para. 4).
This was in tune with the recommendations of the Music Advisers' National Association
and their concern about the principles of assessment. But the National Curriculum had a
key principle that music educators had been hitherto unwilling to confront: the standardi-
sation of achievement at all stages and not merely at the customary 16- and 18-plus
examinations. There had been much talk of assessment by consensus and about the
subjective±objective nature of making valid judgements. While the success of the GCSE
exempli®ed the ef®cacy of this in practice, the calibration of standards in aesthetic learning
across the whole age range presented quite another challenge. Teachers had been
instrumental in moderating judgements at GCSE level. Their aesthetic knowing and the
aesthetic knowing of their students were part of the process. Indeed, teachers had been
advised that they might not be quali®ed to make judgements about musical genres and
styles with which they were unfamiliar. As bearers of high-status musical knowledge, were
they really equipped to make informed judgements about rock, pop and ethnic styles?
Such questions were lost as enormous political energy was unleashed in a drive to control
the content of education and raise standards. There was a fundamental shift in the source
of educational values and how these were translated into policy and practice. The TGAT
report proposed a key criterion:
The scales or grades used should be capable of comparison across classes and schools, if
teachers, pupils and parents are to share a common language and common standards: so
assessment should be calibrated or moderated (para. 5).
The group pointed out that no system in the world had yet managed to hold together
criterion-referencing, formative assessment, moderation and progression. This was to be an
ambitious project.
Music, as a foundation subject and of lower order than the core subjects, was late to
be considered in all this. The Working Party for Music (DES, 1991) produced a clear
rationale that was in line with the developing principles of aesthetic education. However,
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John Finney
by Chapter 3 of their report, where they set about creating a rationale for the structure of
attainment targets and programmes of study, their obligation to the requirement of the ERA
(ERA, 1988) to specify `knowledge, skills and understanding' led to proposals that were to
prove problematic (see Swanwick, 1992). They argued for the inevitability of listening,
composing and performing activities and that it would be appropriate to think of these as
`skills'. They argued that the `skills' of performing and composing could not be acquired
and developed without attendant knowledge and understanding of concepts related to
music:
of the ways in which music is notated, recorded and shared, and of the contexts ± historical and
geographical and social background of a piece if they are to talk about and critically appraise it.
(DES, 1991: 13)
The group had thus, despite a hint of recognition that knowledge might be more than fact
and some insistence on holding together both the practical and the intellectual nature of
musical experience, aligned musical knowledge and understanding wholly with the
propositional, with knowledge of this and knowledge of that, with words and with
concepts. By providing an incoherent set of attainment targets based on a confused
conception of knowledge it would be dif®cult for teachers to treat the programme of study
holistically as intended.
The Education Reform Act of 1988 expunged the aesthetic dimension of education
from the nation's consciousness, a dimension recognised from the time of Plato and
Aristotle that had been repeatedly and consistently af®rmed during the twentieth century.
A previous age had believed that
No system of education can be complete unless it heightens what is splendid and glorious in life
and art. Art, science and learning are the means by which the life of the whole people can be
beauti®ed and enriched. (The Conservative Party Manifesto, 1945)
Now, there was an absence not only of an aesthetic dimension to the language of of®cial
discussion but of any recognition of its existence. The philosopher Marcuse, a constant and
insightful critic of instrumental rationality, may provide a clue to this way of thinking.
Marcuse argued that the aesthetic dimension had come to be seen as a place where
freedom from the demands of necessity could be found; it was not the real world, and thus
a considerable cost had been exacted:
The aesthetic dimension had retained its freedom from the reality principle at the price of being
ineffective in the reality. Aesthetic values may function in life for cultural adornment and
elevation or as private hobbies, but to live with these values is the privilege of geniuses or the
mark of decadent Bohemians. (Marcuse, 1987: 172)
The life work of educators such as Dewey and Reid in raising the status of the aesthetic
dimension of human experience, in distinguishing it from the study of aesthetics as a
branch of philosophy, as a philosophy of art and as contemplation of formal elements
within works of art, and giving it an everyday signi®cance as a mode of awareness, had
been disregarded. Did the curriculum high priests see in the aesthetic realm the dangerous
potential for `freedom from necessity' and a serious incongruence with the new curriculum,
or were they distracted by the lure of cultural education, of moral imperatives and the
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much sought after citizenship? Was the aesthetic identi®ed with the soft and the subjective,
with the sentimental and the progressive?
Was the word àesthetic' simply too dif®cult? The attainments proposed by the
working party in its Music 5±14 document (DES, 1991) unsurprisingly took the form of
quantitative statements, easily calibrated. The process of making the National Curriculum
had yielded to old dualities: now experience was opposed to knowledge, practice to
theory and the intuitive to the formal. These awkward dichotomies surged forth as the
process of making the curriculum proceeded. Despite a conviction about the holistic
nature of musical experience, the working party was wedded to a way that made this
dif®cult. Despite the intervention of Swanwick and the establishment of a meaningful
Attainment Target 2 as `Listening and Appraising', the draft programmes of study showed
little understanding of what this might mean in practice, or how it might relate to
Attainment Target 1, `Performing and Composing'. The subtle relationship between
experience-knowledge (the immediacy of knowing) and mediated knowledge was barely
to be found. The result was the inclusion of dead matter in the programmes of study that
had the potential to demoralise pupils and teachers. Before long, pupils at Key Stage 3
were gaining knowledge of ternary form and musical epochs from the outside:
People suppose that to understand music one must not simply know much music, but much
about music. Concert-goers try earnestly to recognise chords, and judge key changes, and hear
the separate instruments in an ensemble ± all technical insights that come themselves with long
familiarity, like the recognition of glazes of pottery or of structural devices in a building ± instead
of distinguishing musical elements, which may be made out of harmonic or melodic material,
shifts of range or tone colour, rhythms or dynamic accents or simply changes in volume, and yet
be in themselves as audible to a child as to a veteran musician. (Langer, 1979:106)
The working party found itself needing to accommodate an unrelenting demand for a
particular kind of knowledge and understanding. The ®nal report was, in any case, overrun
by government ideology. In making a National Curriculum, there was a key reform at work
insisting that knowledge be independent of the knower. Education was about equipping
children with knowledge and there was to be one size of knowledge to ®t all.
The plight of assessment

The TGAT report had set an ambitious agenda. Assessment had to ensure progression with
®xed criteria in view (levels of attainment or, in the case of music, End of Key Stage
Statements). It must ensure that these would be as formative as they were summative in
effect. And all this demanded moderation to ensure standardisation and accountability.
Many music teachers had developed considerable skill in working both formatively and
summatively at examination level. They had worked hard to interpret examination criteria,
which for the most part had been neither prescriptive nor atomistic, and had found a
substantial degree of consensus. However, there had been some loss of autonomy.
Examination boards moderated teachers' judgements and this led to a degree of conformity
as a set of tacit criteria emerged that left out the possibility for too much value contestation.
Music from diverse cultural traditions was accommodated and found manageable by
the generalist secondary teacher. However, practice in the compulsory Key Stage 1, 2 and
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John Finney
3 curriculum typically saw teachers working impressionistically and holistically (Har-

greaves & Galton, 1992) and reporting on matters of process, attitude and creative
disposition as much as on matters now contained within the End of Key Stage Statements.
Since music was not a core subject, the reporting requirement for it at Key Stage 3 was of
low status. Teachers used a combination of best guessing, norm-referencing and self-
preservation to make sense of the increasing demands for accountability. Without a system
of moderation between school departments or a standard attainment test (optional test
material had been provided for teachers and largely ignored), the critical place of
assessment in the government's programme of improving standards was, in the case of
music, a `birth-strangled babe'. Swanwick (1997) pointed out the inadequacies of the
assessment framework in music. An approach that emphasised linear and incremental
development and confused quality with range and complexity led to questions about what
exactly was the foundation for the descriptions proposed. Knowledge of children's
aesthetic-musical development went unheeded. The prospect of eight levels of attainment
in the revised curriculum of 2000 held out little hope for a more reasonable approach.
Swanwick (1999), despite a degree of circumspection about the nature of the aesthetic
realm in the ®rst chapter of his book Teaching Music Musically, dealt with the issue of
aesthetic value and public accountability with assurance in Chapter 4. He again exposed
the inadequacy of measuring pupils' musical utterances and responses against inert verbal
descriptions creeping gradus ad Parnassum-like in quantitative increments posing as
qualitative nuances. What was the basis of this National Curriculum? Was there one? The
National Curriculum levels that replaced the 1995 End of Key Stage statements (DfEE,
1999) predictably appeared as behavioural benchmarks acting as curriculum guidelines
regulating content. Only the most astute or most foolhardy of music teachers would now
employ expressive objectives and allow criteria to emerge from musical events and from
the minds of pupils who were coming to know within them. The holding together of
summative and formative functions of assessment remained a challenge as school
managers began to ask for regular evidence of pupils' progress against level descriptors.
One local authority, for example, required evidence of movement of at least two-thirds of a
level within an academic year. Both researched notions of musical development, and
teachers' intuitive focus on what mattered, were inimical to this. School inspection focused
on pupils' progress and attainment. But inspection, too, called for the development of
whole school monitoring and assessment policies. This, in turn, led teachers to record
pupils' progress in the shorthand world of marks and grades, setting up a potentially
confusing situation for the music teacher where they and pupils were likely to become
distracted from the unexpected in aesthetic endeavour. Inspection evidence was now able
to remind teachers of one of the TGAT tenets:
Overall, the purpose of assessment is to improve standards, not merely to measure them.
Although the quality of formative feedback has improved perceptibly, it continues to be a
weakness in many schools. (OFSTED, 1998)
But the same inspection regime had discarded another:
The assessment process itself should not determine what is to be taught and learned. (TGAT,
para. 3)
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As the initial training of music teachers came under inspection, trainers were provided
with a challenge. The summary report following the ®rst round of inspections revealed that
For very good trainees, monitoring and assessment of pupils' work is an integral strand of their
planning and teaching. They use good observation skills to acquire all available information
about progress and attainment during lessons and they have manageable systems for recording
it.
The weaker trainees are diligent in carrying out assessment procedures, particularly those
required by placement schools, but they do not make suf®cient use of informal techniques, such
as observation and participation, to monitor pupils' progress. Assessment is therefore often
formal and summative. (OFSTED, 1999)
In schools, inspection had left a picture of uneven practice at Key Stage 3, the stage lying
crucially between primary enthusiasm and permanent commitment. Inspection evidence
showed standards in music to be satisfactory or better in the majority of primary schools.
The results at Key Stage 3 were less good. This reality found a sharp counterpoint in a
professional debate about music education in crisis. Ross (1995), whose work on assessing
pupil achievement in the arts had expected learners to be deeply involved in creating
relevant criteria for assessment (Ross et al., 1993), made a devastating critique of music
education, pointing out its inability genuinely to reform and pursue aesthetic and artistic
goals. Music teachers were disinclined to actualise the musical minds of their pupils or to
create a climate of mutuality in which these might grow. Composition, the activity thought
to draw music closer to the other arts in their aesthetic aims, had failed in this. Paynter saw
the one-dimensional approach to knowledge and understanding adopted by the National
Curriculum as problematic and likely to diminish the possibility of composition achieving
its potential: `Should we not be asking what kind of knowledge is appropriate to the
subject?' (Paynter, 2000: 26). Ross's insights were supported by research into the teaching
of the arts (Harland et al., 2000). Where the arts were taught well, pupils acquired
increased knowledge of and skills in art forms, personal and social development, and the
enrichment of communication, expressive skills and creativity. In music, unlike art and
drama, pupils registered a more limited range of achievement of these desirable outcomes.
Unsurprisingly, pupils noted a missing space in which to draw in their own meanings and
®nd relevance.
Government reforms, built on inadequate ground, seemed to have largely got their
come-uppance. They had achieved very little in music. Many teachers were disorientated
and frequently somnambulant in respect to the kind of curriculum development being
imposed upon them. When close surveillance threatened, in the form of inspection, they
woke up, coped and performed. Most were unwilling or unable to colour the curriculum
with insight or interpret it with generosity. It was something to ®t in with demanding
adaptation and compliance (Plummeridge, 1996; Finney, 2000). The regime created
curriculum stagnation. An of®cial model of music education had been imposed and there
was mounting evidence to suggest that it was de®cient. The text Teaching Music in the
Secondary School, written by an OFSTED inspector (Bray, 2000), set out a view of effective
music teaching for the twenty-®rst century. It shows teachers how to manage and control
learning outcomes that are largely non-aesthetic. The knowledge and understanding
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John Finney
gained is far removed from the imperative set out by Reid in earlier times. The case given
of the blues is exemplary in this respect. `By the end of the project pupils will be able to:
use a standard 12-bar blues sequence, play chords in C major, have listened to and
recognised the use of ninths in three pieces of music, know the names of notes in chords I,
IV and V' (ibid.: 22). There is no mention of musical qualities, of human interest or of felt
experience. The core of aesthetic endeavour seems to have been lost. The blues doesn't
seem to be about the way people feel or how these feelings become musical. It is barely
worth becoming acquainted with. The model of what is thought to be of®cially good
practice causes music educators to pause for thought.
Music education as aesthetic education

Take the case of knowing not music but a lake. I experience it at sunset as calm, dark,
mysterious. I am perceptually open, able to forget myself, dreaming yet wide awake, able
to indwell. The lake has symbolic and metaphoric resonance and my experience is
intensi®ed. In knowing the lake I know something important to me. I may remain in an
inarticulate state, in a state of intelligent feeling. I become deeply interested in and
committed to the lake. How deep is it? Does it contain ®sh and of what kind? How was it
made? I wonder about the lake and about other lakes close by and far away in distant
places. I become willing to learn and to know and any kind of calculative thought
becomes laden with an aesthetic imperative. Being poetic in this way acknowledges my
existence as a part of others, as a social and cultural being. Winnicott (1985) told of the
value of àpperception', a preparedness of mind and body to receive and to give in
dialogue with external reality, a harbinger of creativity. Buber (1970) spoke of the twofold
human disposition, the I±THOU and the I±IT. The former shows the mutual relationship
existing between subject and object, while the latter shows some control, some distance or
objecti®cation existing between subject and object. The former would seem to correspond
to aesthetic musical encounter. This does not make our knowledge and understanding
solipsistic, subjective, nor does it give credence to the hopeless relativity of pupil voice
epistemology.
To know the blues aesthetically I might feel the weight and nuance of its gestures. I
may know something of its sorrow and complaint. This may lead me to wonder why it was
made. What did it mean? What does it mean now, to me in my life, to others, to all of us? I
would like to sing and play the blues. How shall I get its feel? How is that effect created?
The question `What chords does it use?' may then take on signi®cance. Criteria for valuing
the experience begin to emerge, not rooted in normative theories of musical development,
though these may be helpful, but in the subtleties of musical engagement (see Mellor,
2000). Teachers must know what they are looking for, what their pupils are feeling and
®nding, how to manage what is a delicate balance between different kinds of knowledge.
They must decide on emphasis and weigh the costs. Teachers need to be aware how their
pupils become involved in the lake or the blues. We might look for the knower to be in
dialogue with the known as she discovers that there can be no knowledge or truth without
meaning. This way of thinking about music as aesthetic education broadens its scope and
leads teachers to consider the kind of learning climate that is needed for it to ¯ourish, the
kinds of relationships to be developed between learners and between pupils and teachers.
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And in holding these matters together, music as aesthetic education allows teachers to
consider their pupils' moral, spiritual, personal, social and cultural development as
inevitable sub-elements of an aesthetic education that concerns their burgeoning identities.
However, our National Curriculum holds to an undifferentiated concept of knowledge and
understanding. Must all subjects have the same kind of intellectual virility? To differentiate
and pluralise would require a willingness to recognise fresh relationships between the
knower and the known.
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B. J. Music Ed.

2002 19:2, 119±134 Copyright # 2002 Cambridge University Press

Music education as aesthetic education: a rethink

where a state-sponsored music curriculum continues to struggle to meet the aspirations of

Music, schooling and loss of happiness

A response from the Music Advisers' National Association

What should be taught at what age?

A National Curriculum for Music

The plight of assessment

3 curriculum typically saw teachers working impressionistically and holistically (Har-

But the same inspection regime had discarded another:

Music education as aesthetic education

ABBS, P. (1994) The Educational Imperative. London: The Falmer Press.

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