The Music Education Podcast
Listen for authentic and challenging conversation on all things music ed. Brought to you by Charanga. Hosted and produced by Chris Woods of The Chris Woods Groove Orchestra.
The Music Education Podcast
Episode 54 - ‘Soul, Spirit and Sound In Music Education Pt1' June Boyce-Tillman MBE
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This episode has an accompanying article in Music Teacher Magazine, our media partner. Head to https://www.musicteachermagazine.co.uk to read it. Thank you to our Sponsor Faber Music. Visit https://www.fabermusic.com/education and use Podcast1 at the check out for money off. This podcast is brought to you by Soundstorm.
Welcome to the Music Education Podcast. I'm Chris of the Chris Woods Groove Orchestra, and this podcast is brought to you by the SoundStore Music Education Hub and our sponsor, Faber Music. And as a listener of this podcast, you can get 20% of Fabre titles by heading to FaberMusic.com forward slash education and using the code podcast one in the checkout. This episode of the Music Education Podcast has an accompanying article in Music Teacher Magazine. And you can read it by heading to musicteacher magazine.co.uk. Now the subject of this episode and the article is soul, spirit, and sound in music education. And it's such a huge and powerful and profound topic that I think it justified me speaking to two guests. So there is a part one here with one guest, and there will be a part two coming with another guest very, very soon. So what do I mean by soul, spirit, and sound in music education? Well, I guess the reason we all got into music is the way that we connect with sound, the way that we might lose ourselves in music. We use all manner of different terms and ways of describing this connection that we have with music, this moment of sort of losing ourselves in it. But strangely, it doesn't seem to crop up as something in music curriculum or music education conversations. So I really wanted to do this article and this episode on this very subject to explore these ideas. And my guest for this episode is a fascinating person, the Reverend Professor June Boyce Tillman MBE. Now, without any exaggeration, June has to be one of the most fascinating human beings that I've ever had the pleasure of speaking to. This is incredibly deep and powerful stuff. It's honest and it's real, and it's the kind of thing that I reckon maybe we should be talking about a little more. I think essentially sometimes we're scared of having conversations about this stuff. Maybe partly because finding the words to describe it is really, really hard. But also because we can start to stumble into areas of spirituality or religion, things that can be really controversial, whatever your viewpoint is, especially when we're working in education. But let's be honest, this deeper connection with sound and music is the reason we do it. So we probably should be talking about it. I hope you enjoy listening. June, thanks so much for joining me this morning. Can we start off with a bit of a who you are and what you do?
SPEAKER_03I'm the Reverend Professor June Boys Tillman. I'm now a professor emeritor of applied music at the University of Winchester. And a title that I really love: an extraordinary professor in the Northwest University of South Africa in Pochestrom. I'm also an Anglican priest and I serve the parish of All Saints Tooting. And I was a chaplain to Winchester Cathedral, and also that enabled me to do lots of work in the cathedral with children and young and people and older people and put a variety of people together because it's a marvellous space. I'm now doing something similar in All Saints in London.
SPEAKER_02Wonderful. Thank you very much indeed. So the inspiration behind us having this conversation is the subject of music education and soul spirituality. Maybe some other words in there. But on the phone, to me, you described I think four elements of music teaching which seemed to sort of compound this idea that I'm trying to express, but haven't quite got the words to do it.
SPEAKER_03Well, I think it's an interesting one because I think that I am aware as a performer and a composer of the times when one manages to access what I see as a different way of knowing, where time operates differently, where there appears to be a greater connection to the wider world as well as the other people, and to the divine, if you want to have some concept of that, sometimes called a sort of higher self or a universal energy of some kind or other, those all of those might describe that moment when you feel actually, as a musician, that you've done your job, because your job is primarily to take people to that other space, which John Taverner described as a healing space. He said, you know, if my music manages to heal just a small part of a human being or the world, then I will have done my job. And it seems to me that somewhere down the line, post the Enlightenment, which I sometimes call the Indarkenment, we lost that sense of music as having that capacity. And indeed, maybe its primary capacities is what Anthony Storr says in his book Music and the Mind. Why does every society have music? What's it for? Um, and he comes to the conclusion that it is for the creating, creating of community, whether that's the peace within oneself or the peace with the with other people or the peace with the natural world or the peace with the divine or beyond, however you want to see it. And I think the way in which we've construct education in this country now is based on the individual heroic journey and the individualism that characterizes Western society. And that has meant that's very difficult for music because the thing that it's supposed to do is not at the heart of Western society. We're regarded, I'm regarded as June and you as Chris, and as two separate individuals. Now, if we lived in other parts of the world, we wouldn't be regarded as separate, as separate as that. Our lives would be more bound up together, we'll be more bound up with the wonderful pear tree that's out. I'm looking at my window as I look up here, and we we would have seen a much greater community. And that would have included a spiritual power of some kind rather, named by a variety of names, whether you want to call that power one of the goddesses, Saraswati, or whether you want to call it, you know, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost of Christianity or the energy of quantum physics. So I think that once we lost that as a value in Western society, then music education got caught up in that. If we take the associated board exams, for example, I mean, when in making music does one person sit in front of another whose job it is to critique it? I mean, how does that ever examine what the nature of music is? Um, and so on. So, for example, when I was working at Winchester University and we had a course in world music, the performances were always contextualized, the final ones. So we had a lovely medieval hall with a beautiful piano where the classical musicians could perform. We had the back room of one of the pubs where the rock musicians could perform, and we had a church hall which could be turned into something resembling a Hindu temple. And it was a concert where people could invite all their friends, but somewhere in the middle of it, there were people who were examining it. But it meant that you were more likely to get that sense of liminality of spirituality in the processes of making music that we are used to, rather than this bizarre notion of a single person playing to a single person whose job is actually not to go to that space, but actually to assess usually whether they've decoded the notes right. So that process of decoding a literate society meant that we lost quite a lot of the other aspects of music which are essential. So a lot of our music education went down the area of construction. How is music put together? Um, what key is it in? Does it change key? Uh, do you know what the key signature is? Is it a crotchet or a quaver? Those things are very important in a literate society. They will be far less important if we were not teaching a literate musical tradition, but teaching one that I call orate, because you don't have to go through all that there. It's more about uh the nature of the performance and the communication with the people there, with yourself and so on and so forth. So the notion of expression, the notion of what is being communicated and what is being aroused in the person who's receiving it, or in the whole gathering in which it's taking place, that notion of expression, in a sense, often gets lost in uh working out whether it's in three, four, or four, four. Um, and the total sense of the values of a concert, whether it's a concert or a church service or a carnival, all of those things are contexts in which music does play a significant part, it gets lost somewhere in concentrating on just one area. In my thinking, developed from my PhD research and then on through a series of books, is that there are four areas in which music is functioning at any given time, and they all have to work. One of the areas is the materials that are making the sound. So the notion of the body and how it works when we sing, or when we blow an instrument, or when we m play an instrument of some kind or other. We almost lost that. We've we we get it in technique and so on, but uh, one of the stories of singing that in one piece in Winchester Cathedral, I asked people to sing a single note and walk along with a candle. And one of the women who was, I don't know, been singing for a lot of her life, she said, for me, singing had become is the next note G or G sharp. But because you only asked me to sing one note, I realized that singing was about breath going through my body. And Juno I'd been singing for all these years, and I'd never really thought about it being breath going through my body. So, and what was she doing trying to decode whether it was G or G sharp? She was taken up with the decoding rather than the relationship with the body, and so I think that's important. And little children, if you bring a musical instrument into school, the first thing they want to do is, uh the sophisticated one, is you know, feel it, ask how much it costs, look at the read, and they're fascinated by it. And if you look at a nursery class with a lot of simple percussion instruments, you know, they look at them, they feel them, they smell them, they touch them, often try to lick them, and so on, because they want to explore the totality of it, and then they want to play all over it and see what it can do. And often what we start with with musical instruments is how you do it, not all the things you can do. Indeed, Evelyn Glennie described in one of the International Society Music Education things how she was introduced to the side drum, and she said it was marvelous. The tutor just gave me the drum and took I could take it home and find out what it could do. And I was a far I was on a farm, and then on on the next time I took it back to him, and he said, Well, what can it do? Um and uh she said, Well, it can make the sound of a tractor, and that's exciting. Um, and he said, Well, can you show me that? She said, Well, which gear would you like it in? So, which I think is wonderful. She and she said, I fell in love with the drum. And often, of course, we start with a side drum of it goes on a stand like this, and this is how you hold the sticks. But first of all, you have to fall in love with the instrument and and want to get to know it. And that was a wonderful story of how that works. Do we do that in school? You know, often it's this is the way we do it, you do it this way. But first of all, there's that falling in love. Um, the notion of what can you say through music? What I mean, does actually decoding a piece of one of the great composers, so-called, on a bad day, tell you about what they wanted to say on that day. This is why a lot of my research was on children as composers and improvisers. And one very moving story of a teenage girl whose mother was dying of cancer, and she was doing GCSE, and I was helping her with the composition, and she was writing a piece for piano. I think it was violin and cello, it was a piano trio, that's right. And she called it in the end winter. And when we got to the GCSE, her mother had died, and we were looking at the pieces, listening to them and seeing what we would like. And we listened to this piece and she said very insightfully, I don't like it, but it says what I wanted it to say. So in that piece, she'd been, in a sense, putting in all the grief at the loss of her mother. It was called Winter, the Devastation. Now, allowing children to compose and improvise is often, I think, a very interesting way of getting them into that space. I can remember a child in the class where we had an auto harp, the one with the strings across it. And in most lessons, he was usually at the bottom of the class and struggling. But this time he took the harp and he improvised for 10 minutes on it. And the start the class knew that this was magic. And somehow or other, he found that space for himself and other people. And I've often found that through composing and improvising, because they're saying something about themselves. If you can relate what the composer's saying to uh to um themselves, then of course that does happen. So I think that Beethoven Symphony 5, the famous one which he wrote when he was struggling with the knowledge that he was going deaf and nobody could cure it, that's often a good starting point for people who've had to face things which can't be cured. Um, and that notion of the expression of the composer. I mean, indeed, when I introduced Smetina's Vlatava, the story of the river, often the children were composing a piece about a river first themselves. Then when they listened to Smetina, they could relate to what Smetina was trying to express. And the last thing, which in a sense I did at the beginning is the values. What context is it work are you working in? What does it feel like to play in front of your class or to play in front of your parents, or even to go to the festival hall? All of those surrounds have to be made places in which you're likely to be able to set up this. What does it feel like if you're going to sing in a church with lots of candles and less light and so on? What does it feel like if you're going to take the children into an into an old uh an old people's home or amongst the elders and play and sing for them? How does the whole thing fit together in a package? Because there it's not what you not just what you do, but how you do it, how you set it up, and so on. So my sense is that if you get the values that you're trying to communicate to in that particular context, the construction, so you're playing in a sense the right notes, whatever that might mean, um the expression and the handling of the materials well, then you're likely to be able to move into that other space. Interestingly, you can only set up the conditions in which it's likely to happen. You can't make it happen. And this, in a sense, is where the spiritual comes from in a funny way. You it will come from one knows not where. Is it another world, another space? Is it another way of knowing? Is it a different form of consciousness? All of those things have been said, but you leave the ordinary world, you stop thinking about the next piece of shopping you've got to do, or the next piece of maths you've got to do, and you go into this other space. I'm sorry, that was rather a long explanation, but I hope it made it clear.
SPEAKER_02Absolutely. Because when you started talking about those four aspects or um uh angles, yeah, four domains. I think uh and probably other listeners might feel this too. I was expecting to hear that um spiritual, soulful, magical, use the word liminal, that's a good word, isn't it? I like that one, um, in there as one of those four domains. But what uh am I correct in thinking that you're saying we need those four domains to reach that space? So 90% of music classrooms aren't covering anything beyond the construction domain. So how on earth are we ever going to reach kind of deeper musical experience?
SPEAKER_03Exactly so. You because what we've been teaching is a small part of the musical experience, not the totality of the musical experience. And you're right, the spirituality is very different from the domains, it's something that happens when all the domains are working effectively in that particular context. Um I think um so it's not separate. It's and I think it's um something that's almost a given. It comes from beyond, and of course, in some cultures, in the medieval culture of Europe, you know, Hildegard felt that the songs that she composed did not come from her, they were given to her by God, or she was doing it was, and indeed, Vollmar, the person, well, people who were writing them down, they were critiqued if they were if they were interfering. Um, and when I was staying with the Mi'kmaq people in Newfoundland, and um it was a woman who was leading a sweats lodge there and singing, um, I said, beautiful song at the end of it. She said, Yes, I think the Great Spirit gave me all of it today. So she wasn't getting, we would say I hadn't finished it, but for her it was a given. And although we don't use that so much from the moment further on from the Enlightenment, we had a sense that all of these things came from inside the self. There is, I think, often in those moments where some of it comes from what you've done, but some of it appears to come from you know not where. And that's where you go back to what you call that place. You can call it the higher self, God, divine power, Saraswati, um, you know, all of those things. But there's a sense of givenness about it, and that's why I say that you can't guarantee it will happen. You can only set up the conditions in which it's likely to happen.
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SPEAKER_02June, everything that you've just been saying there makes me think about the idea of originality of ideas, where those ideas originate from in the in the creative process. And going back to your um talking about the um domains and the sort of construction domain, and so much time spent focusing on the construction of music in the sense of the mechanics and dividing notes up into ratios or understanding chords or functional harmony. And it seems that as a culture, we believe that that's where ideas are generated from, which always to me feels a bit reductive anyway, because ideas are far more complex than that, aren't they?
SPEAKER_03Well, I think the problem for us musically has been that we've been so dominated by a literate tradition, the decoding. I mean, you know, somebody comes to me, you know, with to uh to learn the piano and they say, I've forgotten my music. And I say, But can you put your finger on a keyboard or can you sing? Um and they say they do that. I say, Well, you haven't forgotten your music. You've simply forgotten the picture of a music. Because that those those those those notes are only pictures, they're not the music itself. The music itself is the sound that you make from the pictures. And it was very interesting. We did a piece in which the cathedral, we had a lot of community choirs who in general aren't using the dots, they're learning everything orally, and so on. And the critique, uh, the critic from the Times who was there said, We so seldom hear a community choir um launch its sound down the cathedral with no copies in front of it. And of course, that gives that sense of openness, and you know, everybody's immediately transported, whereas quite often when you see the classical choir with the copy, the copies even physically between you and the audience. And that particular comment made me think a great deal, because in a sense, we in the literate traditions have to get to that place that the oral traditions get to much more easily. Um, but we have to go via that complex process of decoding the dots and then getting into that place. And so much of our tradition stops at the process of decoding and does not go beyond that into that sense of liminality. Um, and there was a wonderful story of one of our students talking about her experience. She played the clarinet beautifully, did a marvelous performance of one of the Brahms sonatas, where I mean, all of us were carried along on this. And then after that, she said, I thought I ought to offer you the piano. I've never really performed on it, I've only done the grades. And it said it all. It said it all because she knew that in the grades it was really a decoding exercise, and you were going to be marked on the success of your decoding. Um, and you didn't need to go beyond that in some way. Although at this precise moment I'm fascinated by watching the piano on the television where uh the people are playing um in the railway stations on the piano, and you've got uh Lang Lang alongside a person whose name I don't remember, um, talking precisely about that, about which ones of them carried people along and and excited them, and they were, in a sense, assessing those pianists on precisely that a sense notion of did they carry me along? You know, what are the people around them, who's stopping, who's at some point there was a lovely little child who was dancing around, and clearly they they had engaged with the with the pianist and so on and so forth. So I think that the the notion of and the snag is the way we examine is often the way we teach. That's the problem. That if we examine in this way, then we teach in this way. So the examinations are crucial, really. And I think one of the joys of performing in GCSE now that that the oral traditions have come in. So you've got more of the rock, pop, the drumming, the other world traditions coming in. And in a sense, we need the classical musicians need to learn from them. They need to learn how the drumming traditions of the djembe, for example. Now it's not that they don't have to do a lot of work, those families of djembe drums have to do an awful lot of technical work and so on and so forth, but they're not decoding anything in the sense as we are, the written tradition. So the way the the way that the literate tradition of the classical music world has dominated what we call music and what we need to teach in music, I think has worked against that process because decoding it is hard. You know, decoding a hemi demi-semi quaver and so on. I mean, it as you rightly called it, the ratios. But we have got to get beyond that.
SPEAKER_02Um so in some senses, you could remove the decoding element and still reach those.
SPEAKER_03Well, I think it would be extremely difficult to read remove the decoding element. Um, you know, if you're going to play Mozart and Chopin and so on. Although particularly children or young people on the autistic spectrum are able to play those simply by hearing them. And of course, we have the you know, examples of Mozart and people like that who've been able to do that. So you can actually reproduce those works with without simply by receiving the sound. And now you've got so much sound coming out of, you know, machines and that, then you know, would everybody be able to do it in that way? I wouldn't, because I haven't been trained to do it that way. And I find my own story interesting because you know, it's taken me a long time to be confident in improvising on the piano because I was taught about reading the dots, I was told to look at the dots, I was told not to play by ear because I needed to read the dots. Whereas on the guitar, you know, I wouldn't know which notes I was playing on a string. I was told that I put my fingers down and I get a G chord and a D chord and an E minor chord, and I can improvise that to a song quite easily. Uh but give me a piece of guitar music written down, I wouldn't be able to do it. So the way you were taught is also the way that you most easily do it. And and the associated board exams, um, some teachers, in a sense, just teach from one exam to the next. Um, there's no very little sense of performance beyond that, with the result that certainly in the piano, we're turning out rafts of pianists who, in many ways, for the wider world are useless. Because what do you need a pianist for to be able to accompany? Well, anybody who's ever accompanied will know that the important thing is to follow the person, not to read the dots. And if they leave six bars out, well, you've got to go on and find them. Play for a dancing class and be able to improvise something for people walking, jumping, skipping, or what have you. Or play the hymn in a church when the congregation goes fast, slow, and so on and so forth. That's not about decoding, that's about sensitivity to the environment and being able to do lots of things. And what we're trying to, what we seem to be doing is turning out solo concert pianists. How many do we need in England? Two or three, but we do know an awful lot of people who can play the piano to a company to for improvisation as part of a rock group and all of that. So it seems to me that we've we've lost that sense of value of context, in certainly with the piano, um, which is what I'm familiar with. And I know that of people have asked the piano teacher if their children can learn something other than the material for grade four, after they've done grade three. And often piano teachers have no idea what to do next. And the terrifying thing of that is that when I say I'm a musician, people say, Well, I'm not a musician, I failed grade four. To which I say, Well, did you pass grade three? Oh, yes. I said, Well, then you must be a musician, mustn't you? So people are defining themselves at the point where they fail. Um, and I think that's a tragedy.
SPEAKER_02I think um in my experience, the uh measuring by grades comes up in just alarming uh situations that you wouldn't imagine it to, you know, non-classical situations, we're talking music education in the wider sense of asking students what what grade equivalent are you, for example? And you're thinking, well, that's doesn't make doesn't make sense. So if the problem is then measuring and the exam process, if you like, okay, so we need to be able to measure this, so we're going to measure the decoding ability. How then because so much of education is weighted on that, you know, if we can't measure it, then it has no value, you know, in that way. How do we measure this spiritual, liminal, soulful, deeper connection that we're talking about? Or is it impossible?
SPEAKER_03Well, I think it's a it's an extremely interesting uh question, and it questions not only music education, but the way music no education has gone. And I would describe the process of testing, which characterizes all our education now, is I describe us as digging up the roses to see if they're growing, with the with the result in education and learning that you would get if you did keep digging the roses out to see if they're growing, that in the end what you're trying to culture dies, you know. So um, and I'm very much against all of that, um, and so on, partly because people develop in such different ways. So if we take youngsters around 15, 16, 17, um, who in music go in all sorts of directions. I mean, some of them will play in a string quartet and so on, but some of them will want a rock group, others of them will play a guitar and just love playing around on the guitar at home at night, others will be jumming under a pier on a set of djemba drums and so on. And so you there are such a variety of ends that it's extremely difficult to cater for the way in which these people are going to grow as they mature into adults and musical adults. I mean, I my vision of a school is certainly when you get to the teenagers, that you need to know in your area exactly where all of this is going on and be able to channel uh students into the wider world rather than keeping them necessarily. So the classroom may well be a sharing of experience rather than carrying on with the decoding exercise. In some places that's happening, but that I think depends on um what our education has lost, which is starting where the children are or the young people are, rather than starting where the government wants them to be. And that will be very, very diverse, um, I think. So I think it's a tragedy of education. Can you measure it? I don't know. I I can remember examining with my colleague Malcolm Floyd at um Winchester University, and and yes, there were times when we sat and some and people were playing, and often you'd have a pencil in your hand, um, and you'd sometimes just put it down and listen. And uh Malcolm would often say to me, I would have paid to hear that. And you knew that that person had taken you into that space. Um, in a sense, it's much more readily accessible by narrative accounts of experiences than it is by formal assessment. But if in the formal assessment one includes those four areas, um, you know, was there a technique in handling the instrument? Could they handle the the making, could they breathe, and so on and so forth? Is there a sense of expressing something in emotional or or um a feelingful engagement with it? Um, is there a sense of you know things coming round again and that that works? And is there a sense of contextualizing what they're doing in some sort of context? So we did ask the students to say, you know, the performance that we're going to do, did they have a sense of a context in which they might do it like that and so on? So um I think also the other thing which is interesting is the pursuit of difficulty for its own sake. So, I mean, you quite rightly reminded that people are often asked to do something of the equivalent of great something, and that's what they're expected to be. But in some contexts, you've got that expectation, which means somebody who can't do stuff at that grade is playing stuff that they can't play. Whereas it'd be much better to choose something easier and give it a good performance that they can do rather than the pursuit of difficulty for its own sake. And I I've got some pieces of my own that were based on Hildegard's uh writing. And a youngster in Lithuania actually wanted to um to play them and she took them to her teacher who said they were too easy. Well, how can something be too easy? The person wants to play it. I mean, I can understand that it's too difficult, but too easy does seem a curious thing.
SPEAKER_02It's pretty absurd, isn't it? And it's it but it's there all the time. And um I've in fact I'm comfortable to say that the criticism that I've had as a practitioner will be of not challenging students technically, even though say my uh career as a musician is kind of built on virtuosity specifically, you know, being technically able, but I know that the way I've commanded those techniques is by playing stuff that is easy so that I've able to master it and to connect with it and to play with it deeply before moving on. Whereas students seem to sp be forced into a onto the edge of possibility continuously.
SPEAKER_03Well, I think this is the problem, that the model of Western society that we have is firmly based on Greek and Roman notions of um the heroic journey seen in Homer's um at the stories of Odysseus and Aeneas, that you know life is setting out and meeting challenges and so on and so on and so forth. But that's only half the story. There's a balance in our lives which we need between challenge and nurture. If you challenge somebody too much, like many of the people who say, I fail great for, uh they collapse. If you nurture them too much, they may not realize their full possibilities. So keeping those two, but our society in every context, not only in education, but in career structures, in families, in all of that, you must always be moving forward. Why? Why? Because sometimes it's nice to stay where you are and to play just for fun. And that's what a lot of the children who the young people who are learning piano, there's seldom a time to learn for fun. I mean, I can remember my own entrance, although my piano teacher was very good. She always had little concerts and I was allowed to make up pieces, so it was very good. But there was always the next grade or the next music festival or the next performance. And I would be working on that. I wouldn't sit down and play for fun. And where is that? Just playing for the joy or singing for the joy of singing. Um, so that heroic journey model that we that we have as a basis of our culture is deeply flawed. And it, you know, it's it's so that's something not only to do with music, but to do with everything. You know, I mean, I just look at, you know, Richie Sunak's latest thing on maths. Well, I don't know that I wanted to go on doing maths when, you know, I've learned things like signs and cosines, logarithms, I've never used them at all. I mean, what is the point of that? Um so I think, and I suppose I'm a woman and I've got had two children. There's a lot in a family to do with nurture. And you see the result of parents, not only teachers who challenge their children too much, that in the end the children collapse under the strain of it. So, and it's often about you know keeping that together that's so important. Um, and uh I know that if you nurture all the time, then you get apathy and and no, but if you challenge too much, then a lot of people simply fall down and won't do it anymore. They just collapse. And I think that's what's happening in our society. You can see it in you know, long COVID, you can see it in the homeless, you can see it in the addicts, you can see it in the increase in mental health. Well, the reason is that is there's very little nurture. So when you can't do it, you just fall out of society, really.
SPEAKER_02I feel like uh a lot of what we've talked about has been um how at odds our Western culture, not necessarily just English culture, but uh Western culture is with these deeper connected things, uh so if I can just come in on that, does it the notion of intention?
SPEAKER_03If you look at some of these other cultures, the intention of the drums is a healing ritual or a celebration and so on and so forth, you can get away with a few mistakes if your intention's right. But if you think of the the uh uh symphony orchestra preparing to go on the stage in the festival hall to play a pantomime Mozart, and if you said to them, I want you to play this Mozart in order to love the audience, they would think you came from another planet. Well, you would be coming from another culture because the notion of intention has we've substituted technique for intention, and in other cultures, intention is paramount to build the community or to worship God or to heal someone, all of those are intentions, but we have we've we've lost that. That's what comes in that area of expression, um the nurturing power of music and so on, uh, and that's gone. It's well, you can interest in quite a lot of younger people, and then if you look at the music going on in the new age on the internet with singing bowls and and gongs and bells, I mean, that's where a lot of my work is now. Even the sound of the plants. We've got I've got the mechanism for um uh the links with the roots and with the petals, and then you you've got the the uh electronic impulses of the plants audible and so on. Um, for me, that's forming a relationship with a plant in the same way as it is with the other musicians that I'm working with, a harpist and a guitarist. Um, you know, it's about relationship. It's not about whether we've well, I don't think the plants probably know much about grades one, too. I hope they don't. Maybe we can just learn from them, really.
SPEAKER_02What about the words associated um with this stuff? Partly a challenge in talking about this for me has been to find the right words. But also, I think when I'm writing an article or a podcast, and I'm putting this out to the broad spectrum of teachers that are out there, there are words that are triggering, right? Immediately, spirituality, God, so even go, even talking soul, you know, I can sell that in a kind of a, oh yeah, you've got soul there, but actually, if we're talking about soul, whoa, back off, you know.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, we're a materialist society, aren't we? Um, and this is where sort of evidence base and all of that is very is very tricky, and where, you know, in some areas you're measuring, I mean medicine is one, where you're measuring a lot of things by means of numbers and you're not taking narrative accounts. But I think the words are difficult because all of those words have been associated with religion, and particularly in the West with a with the Christian religion. Um, and many people have ditched it for a variety of very good reasons, whether it's imperialism, abuse, gender, disability, name all of the things where Christianity has made serious mistakes. Um, I think it's possible to uncouple them, but Limenoa, which you've picked up before, I think is, which was uh Victor Turner's word, is probably um a better descriptor. But in the books I've written on the spiritual experience of music, um I've, you know, in a sense tried to uncouple. I think there are two descriptors, or even three descriptors in our society. There's spiritual and religious, and those people can be in any of the great faiths, whether that's you know, Hinduism and Sikhism with its raft of songs, or whether it's Christianity with its cathedral choirs. Um there's um spiritual but not religious, which is by far the largest lot of people really, who wouldn't want to have any of the religious narratives in that. And there's also religious but not spiritual, you know, people who are very suspicious of this, you know, who go to church and read their hymn book and wouldn't want to have any of this engagement, um, and so on. But I think it's possible to uncouple spiritual from religious. Um, and that's particularly necessary in the states. The US, of course, has can have no religion. And one of the problems about writing these articles in a US context is that it that you can't have religion in public life, at least in in England. We have to have some, and because you've got an established church, and you know, you have to teach something of it in schools, whatever you're going to do. Um, and I think one of the stories from the states of the US that I heard was it was a person who was teaching, I think the crucifixus from the B minor Mass. And he said, You must sing this with immense conviction because Jesus died for our sins. Now, at that point, he slipped over from being spiritual to being religious. If he'd said you must sing this with immense feeling because crucifixion is dreadful wherever, you would uh he but you can see how that tips over into a belief system. Um, whereas, you know, this is a dreadful story, try and enter into the in into what it's like. Wood doesn't do that. Um, but I can understand uh the people's fear, but a lot of people are using the sense of spiritual but not religious. People are using the word soul, you've only got to trawl around well-being on the internet, and you'll find lots of soul, sometimes called spirit, sometimes called energy, um, sometimes called higher self is very popular as well. You'll find all those words out there. And I in my looking at spirituality, but not religious, some people find that spirituality in a different way of knowing, in some sort of transcendent experience. Some people find that largely in their relationship with the natural world and with vegetation, touching trees and flowers and all that. Some people find it with a sense of internal transformation, that suddenly something becomes clear, a moment of insight. Some people find it simply by being with a group of people they love, and some people find it by being ethical, ethical behavior, fair trade, and largely in the area of uh virtue and so on. And then there's another group of people who do need the narrative of Buddha or Jesus or this um uh Khalil Jibran, all of those people in it somewhere. Um, and some people who find things like meditation and that helpful, but wouldn't want to associate that with a particular religious tradition. So there's an awful lot of it out there, and I think it can be uncoupled, but as you rightly say, for many people spirituality means religion, and that can be uncoupled, and therefore liminal may be a better word, which is crossing a threshold. Lemen is a threshold. So liminality means you cross over a threshold into a different way of knowing, where things like paradox, you know, you don't have to resolve them, where you have this profound connection with everybody in the natural world or the instrument itself, and so on. I mean, the violinist, you can see that you know they're completely sort of joined up with the violin, you know, and so on. You see all this happening. Liminal may be better. A lot of the consciousness studies say it's a different form of consciousness of some kind or other, and so on. So I think it's difficult. I think if you use the word liminal, people often don't know what it means. You know, if you use the word spiritual, people might like it. But I think if you go to a concert, even a classical concert, and at the end you're thinking about what you're gonna buy in the supermarket afterwards, most people would say it hasn't worked. They expect to be taken into this other way of knowing. Call it what you will, and acknowledging that some of those descriptors are hard and difficult.
SPEAKER_02Perfect. June, I could talk to you all day, but thank you so much for your contribution and your time. I'm really grateful to you.
SPEAKER_03Well, it's been a pleasure and a great honour to do it, and uh, I just hope that uh, you know, we can restore the whole of music. And I think this just uh to finish, I think that's perhaps more easily done now outside of the classroom. It's more done in extracurricular material than being done within the context of a of a formalized lesson. And that's certainly in Winchester when the course at the university was no longer taught as it was. But we I set up something we called the music center, where you know 400 students or so can be involved in doing whatever they want, make their own choices and and and do it in that way, simply for what it does for them and and their belonging and so on. That may be the way forward because the way in which the curriculum has got so locked into the classical tradition. I would indeed be sorry if the classical tradition died, and I need it needs to be kept alive. And I think the big question to us, the classical tradition, is can it take its place alongside the rock and the pop and the djembes and the sitar and and the Kyoto, all of those things, the Kyoto. Um I'm or does it need to be best? If it needs to be at the top of the frame to survive, it won't survive. But if it can take its place, and that may be in Saturday morning music schools, which a lot of educational people run, it may be in that way. Um, but I think that's the real problem. Can we readjust the value systems that we've had? And then we might include the totality of the experience, um, what whatever that may be. So uh, you know, I I I it's an area of not knowing and simply hoping.
SPEAKER_02Perfect. Thank you. Thank you so much to you for listening to this episode, and thank you to Faber Music and Soundstorm for making it possible.