Whether enlightenment is attainable or not is beyond debate. This is only because writing and language cannot express words completely. Words cannot express thoughts completely [this is from Master Kung, in his commentaries on the I Ching]. The trouble is that no matter how colorful or wordy, language often falls short of the mark. Even Lao-tzu said, “Those who know do not speak; those who speak do not know.” The use of an irrational medium, such as art and poetry, can help us work through anomalous thoughts and feelings.
Musical composition is one attempt to express something that we cannot represent in any other way. This same kind of personal communication exists in performance. Improvisation is the heart of the musical experience. It is because of this human input, music as art moves us so. We can think of our work as enabling the musical voices of the inner child, our anti-ego, to be heard. Good music teaching, in fact all good teaching, is less about authority or knowledge and more about guidance toward personal construction of knowledge, skills, attitudes and values. Learning is can be founded on the dialectic, such as used by Master Kung and Socrates. They questioned the student so that the student came to a solution for themselves. This is discovery-based. Music is a sense of community exploration of an idea in which students are actively engaged and are challenged to think about solution.
“Critical thinking skills” and Higher levels of thinking are really subsets of the ability to think creatively. The gifted among us are those who can efficiently discover answer that are obvious to them, that the rest of us just did not think of. They can join threads of thought, theories that might not seem related. What elevates these folk to the status of hero or hera, is the courage to make that connection, and make it public. For most of us, education seems only to be the acquisition of facts, filing things away into a biological computer. Of course, this sort of education has its value, when learning math or grammar. These are areas where we must submit to convention so that others may understand and accept us as part of the whole. Evolution has favored us as social animals after all, and we do well when we are understood. This is what makes humanity superior to the rest of the animals, our efficiency at sharing information with others. Rote and memory alone is nonsense, because our brains don’t just store information, it finds meaning in it. This need for meaning is so powerful, that we will find teddy bears in otherwise chaotic clouds.
Music blends the rational and irrational parts of the mind. The rational mind understands the wave forms, and knows how to read notation. The irrational mind knows what works, what feels right, what moves us. Few of us select a piece of music because it is mathematically correct. I don’t know that many of us can do that sort of math without having a sudden and temporary case of Attention Deficit distract us into another chain of thought. Yet, listening to Madonna sing “Santa Baby” in that sexy tone she does so well can do more for an ear than just reading the music before us. I still feel that art in all of her forms is an irrational expression. When a Pagan drummer selects a rhythm, why do we feel it in our bones and want to dance. Who is the better dancer, the one who must think of every step, count every beet? Or is it the one who seems to flow like a river, joining as one with the music, the other dancers, and even those who sit and wish they could do half as much? Why do our imaginations soar, or our hearts break at the right melody, the right combinations of wave forms? Why does Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa affect us the way it does? Or why does a fully dressed Satanic Witch enchant us into revealing our true natures? And why, why does gothic architecture inspire us to lofty ideals and thoughts? Art, weather by using words, dance, music, ritual, or the simple appreciation of a sunset, will remain founded on the irrational nature of the imagination, and the subconscious mind that expresses with it. Art as a medium is, however, also an illogical bridge between the irrational nature of the subconscious mind and the conscious mind. The artist must rationally select his or her materials, pigments or words, motions or brushes. Each must relay to the conscious mind what the subconscious cannot otherwise express. Do we consider an art expression good when the colors or rhythms are in balance? Or do we consider it good when they move us to feel, to think, when they inspire us to move another step beyond ourselves and into another’s perspective? Any camera can take a picture of the Washington monument. What can a camera really tell us about what it meant to the photographer at that time? Even in architecture, we hardly think of a building that is little more than a box with windows and doors, yet prize those that are odd and magnificent.
Music is valuable to any educational curriculum. Music is a safe media for learning to take risks. Constantly insisting that young composers work with strict limits of timbrel, tonal and rhythmic materials so that they will have safe sounding music is malpractice. How do we begin to encourage the inner voice, to encourage higher levels of thinking and to celebrate real creativeness more effectively? As in all forms of education we can begin by consciously not providing the full structure of a music experience, but only its outlines. In other words, create a scaffold as if one were creating the means to build a building. If one is encouraging melodic composition, provide outlines of melodic and rhythmic motion and have children fill in the details. If one is teaching complex forms, provide the superstructure and purposely leave holes.
I remember a story. A man had asked a great composer to teach him how to compose. The composer suggested they start at the beginning. The man was infuriated. He did not know why he couldn’t start like Mozart? “Of course Mozart never had to ask how, did he?”