ABSTRACT
Christopher Small contended that art, education, and society are intrinsically interlinked, with changes in each one inevitably affecting the other two. He further challenged the view of children as 'consumers' rather than as 'artists', and in his final treatise Musicking, the reification of music as a 'thing'. His arguments echo in the subsequent work of Gaztambide- Fernández, who has analysed the rhetoric of effects in arts discourses, arguing that these discourses arise out of and also continually reify hierarchical conceptions of artistic practices in education and in broader society. Taking these analyses as points of departure, we consider two music educational projects in the Palestinian-Israeli geopolitical context.
The iconic Barenboim-Said Foundation encourages Palestinian children and young people to study ‘music’ (meaning Western classical music); it also aims to strengthen ‘music’s place and status in society, as well as promoting the beneficial effect of this kind of music upon children, and in turn, upon society in general. Here, music is taught mainly in a product-oriented fashion: ‘art’ is seen as product or art work of that (Western) tradition; and ‘artists’ are those people who can make a profession of ‘art’, i.e. earn a living with this and enter the world of art. The project achieves both high visibility and substantial funding.
Other music educational projects with Palestinian children follow far more closely the narrative of children’s own experience, with no agenda – explicit or implicit – of locating talent or developing virtuosity, and where the Western canon is neither sovereign, nor even much in evidence at all. Our second case study takes the project Musicians without Borders, and examines the acute questions arising: of children as makers of art versus children as consumers of the artworks of others; and of the underlying purpose of music educational processes. We argue that that the still-prevailing hegemony of the Western music canon optimises visibility, support, and status for high-profile educational projects appearing to sustain this, while other kinds of musicking, and therefore the children doing it, remain under-resourced, and are kept sidelined or indeed invisible.
