Music education should not be concerned only with technical instruction, nor simply feeding pupils with ready- made answers to well- established lines of enquiry. It should help them to set up and answer problems of their own devising in the organizing of experience – which is what all artistic enterprise is about.
Paynter, J. (1976), All Kinds of Music, Teacher’s notes, London: Oxford University Press, p. 7.
The call for the teacher to be a creative musician able to improvise both musically and pedagogically; to be a co-explorer of musical ideas alongside their pupils; to act with sensitivity in response to what pupils offer; to ensure that whole pieces are made; and importantly, to have insight into the compositional process itself was what was required. This constituted a radical move against the historical flow of educational practice and the concept of the lesson, bounded by time and space. If the making of music were to be an ongoing organic process of coming to know and understanding music, the weekly timetabled music lesson might not be the best vehicle for this… There was a disruption to the long-established patterns of schooling. Its closed formats were likely to militate against an open-ended, indeterminate approach to music making, involving the weak framing of musical knowledge.
Finney, J. (2021). John Paynter, thinker. In J. Finney, C. Philpott, & G. Spruce, Creative and critical projects in classroom music, Vol. 1. Routledge. P. 20.
*
I recorded a version of Grandma’s Hands with whatever I had around me. The process was:
1. Grabbed the guitar and figured out a way to play a bit of the melodies and chords at the same time while singing.
2. Sat at the drum kit and played along with my guitar recording.
3. On the keyboard, played chords along with the guitar recording.
4. Did a little vocal harmonising + maraca.
5. Put them all together using InShot.
This was my first attempt at doing this kind of arrangement and recording. In doing so, there were many other things I had to learn how to do on the spot. All done very quickly without trying to perfect anything, as if doing it in a class along with my students. I started with simply playing along with Wither’s recording and figuring out what else I could do, and things happened as I went along. I did not even use a metronome or count in for any of the tracks and just hit play, played along, and then matched the starts. At times, my recording sounds a bit out of sync. But at the same time, this is very much like a live improvised recording. It has this fresh and relaxed quality, exactly because it is not perfect.