ABSTRACT
Getting people to play any instrument without musical understandingnot really ‘knowing music’—is an offence against human-kind. It denies both feeling and cognition and under such conditions the world becomes meaningless. Discourse is stripped of significance, shorn of quality; intuitive understanding is driven out and the knife of technical analysis cuts away to the bare bone. Some of the most disturbing teaching I have witnessed has been in the instrumental studio, where-in a one-to-one relationship giving the teacher considerable power-a student can be confronted simultaneously by a complex page of notation, a bow in one hand and a violin in the other, along with exhortations to play in time, in tune, with a good tone. On the contrary, some of the very best teaching has been by instrumentalists. For example, take this case study, a description by Christine Jarvis of children at work as part of the Tower Hamlets project in London primary schools.
