The Application of a Critical

Sociology to Music Education

Graham Vulliamy
Department of Education, University of York
and
John Shepherd
Department of Music, Carleton University, Ottawa

The aim of this article is to explore some important issues which music
educators have raised concerning our work on the use of popular
music in teaching and concerning the sociology of music thesis that
underpins this work. Following a brief resume of our perspective, we
shall address four criticisms that have been made fairly generally
by a number of reviewers of Whose Music? (Shepherd et al. 1977),
and of the Cambridge University Press books (Vulliamy & Lee,
1976, 1982a) and the Routledge Popular Music Series (Vulliamy
& Lee, 1982b). These criticisms are, first, that we hold an
over-socially determined view of music; secondly that we have
overstressed the qualitative differences between various musical
traditions, especially in their differing relationships to analytic
musical notation; third, that the culturally relative view of music
which we espouse is both suspect theoretically and potentially
ami-educational in practice; and, finally, that many of our
suggestions for a reform of music teaching are impractical. Our hope
is that we can dispel some ambiguities in our earlier work concerning
these important but complex issues and thus leave music educators
in a better position to appraise the relevance of our thesis.

A Sociological view of Music Education

Vulliamy's advocacy of the use of varieties of popular music in
teaching springs both from his practical experience as a rock
musician and from sociological analyses of school curricula. His
approach is rooted in the 'new sociology of education', a radical
departure in sociological thinking on education whose advent
was signalled in 1971 by the publication of the influential
volume, Knowledge and Control: New Directions for the Sociology
of Education (Young, 1971). Until the publication of this collec-
tion of essay s, traditional approaches to the sociology of education
had viewed the school curriculum as relatively unproblematic.
The failure of certain students to perform satisfactorily within
the school system was laid at the door of the supposed cultural
and linguistic deprivation experienced by those students in their
home environment, such deprivation being linked to the eco-
nomic and social stratification of modern industrial society. The
'new sociology of education' stood this traditional approach on

B. J. Music Ed. (1984) 1, 247-266. Printed in Great Britain 247

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 The Application of a its head by viewing the school curriculum as problematic for
Critical Sociology to ' failing' students and exposing the notion of cultural deprivation
Music Education as largely mythical (Keddie, 1973). It was argued that school
Graham Vulliamy
and curricula are drawn overwhelmingly from middle-class culture,
John Shepherd that students from working-class backgrounds consequently
experience a 'culture clash' in the classroom, and that working-
class students thus stand a smaller chance of aspiring to estab-
lished educational goals than middle-class students. In this way,
the school system could be viewed as contributing to the
reproduction of the social and cultural hegemony of the middle
classes.
The approach offered by the 'new sociology of education'
seemed fertile ground for understanding the reasons why ' pop'
and' rock' music should be ignored as a resource by the majority
of music educators. School music curricula in Britain are drawn
extensively from the musical culture of the middle classes in the
form of ' classical' and ' serious' music (for a discussion of the
role of ' classical' and ' serious' music in forming part of the
' cultural capital' of those with power and influence in modern
industrial society, see DiMaggio & Useem, 1982). The implic-
ation, sometimes explicitly stated by music teachers, is that such
music is aesthetically and culturally more valuable and
challenging than ' pop' and ' rock' music, and that the cultural
and musical ' deprivation' of certain classes of students makes
them difficult to educate musically (Vulliamy, 1977b: 205,
214-19).
Drawing upon a 'new sociology of education' perspective,
Vulliamy shifted the focus of attention from the supposed musi-
cal 'deprivation' of certain classes of students to the traditional
music curriculum by examining the assumptions upon which
notions of' serious' music's aesthetic and cultural superiority are
founded. Situating his analysis in high culture critiques of mass
culture, Vulliamy identified the following arguments (1977a:
191—2): 'serious' music is not subject to commercial gain and
is thus free to reflect the unique creative potential of the
composer - ' serious' music is consequently heterogeneous,
being subdivided into many different types with strict bound-
aries; 'popular' music, on the other hand, is subject to
commercial pressures which deny the possibility of true creat-
ivity to the musician - it is consequently standardised and serves
only to manipulate, determine and exploit the cultural and
musical tastes of young people. These general, cultural criticisms
are usually backed up by more technical criticisms in terms of
which 'popular' music emerges as inferior to 'serious' music in
'purely musical' terms (Vulliamy, 1976b: 39—40; see also
Shepherd, 1979: 14-17).
It is important to realise that the criteria in terms of which
different musical traditions are ranked are arbitrarily or absol-
utely conceived. That is to say, high-culture critics have trad-
itionally argued (Shepherd 1979: 8-20) that the proper concern
of art and music is with the revelation of some kind of' higher'
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 or 'ultimate' reality in the world. In order to validate the claim The Application of a
that it is their art-form or music which best reveals this ' higher Critical Sociology to
reality', high-culture critics have claimed that it is only a limited Music Education
Graham Vulliamy
number of people (such as themselves) who are capable of
and
appreciating this reality in an unaided fashion. This squares with
the notion current in contemporary society that only a minority John Shepherd
of people are imbued with a special gift of musicality. Because
'good' music is representative of some kind of 'higher' or
'ultimate' reality, it is possible to distinguish 'good' music from
'bad' music in terms of a set of objective, technical criteria
(Meyer, 1959). The role of the high-culture critic consequently
becomes that of preserving the cultural and musical standards
of a society through the application of those criteria.
It should be noted that such attitudes allow high-culture
critics to divorce any artistic or musical discussion from an
adequate social or cultural grounding, since it is they who are
determining criteria in an idealist and a priori fashion. Any
suggestion that high culture is significant in an inherently social
fashion would immediately require that such grounding be
instituted, thus denying high-culture critics ultimate control
over' the rules of the game'. It is for this reason that high-culture
critics are at pains not only to argue that the superiority of their
particular art lies precisely in its inherently asocial nature, but
to point to the inferiority, in particular, of 'popular' music,
tainted as it is by commercial and mass social pressures (She-
pherd, 1979: 14-20).
The specific high-culture arguments identified by Vulliamy
are easily countered by pointing out that not all 'popular' music
has an exclusive commercial orientation, that 'popular' music
is at least as heterogeneous in style as ' serious' music, that much
'popular' music is motivated by artistic and creative concerns,
that the music industry goes to great pains to do market research
before issuing a record (implying that the industry cannot
determine and exploit the cultural and musical tastes of young
people to the degree imagined by some critics), and that technical
criticisms of 'popular' music are rooted in criteria drawn from
'serious' music which are thus not necessarily applicable to
'popular' music (Vulliamy, 1976b: 40—46). Additionally, the
notion that only a select minority of people are 'musical' has
been significantly weakened by Blacking (1973). There is,
however, one simple assumption that brings the entire high-
culture position into very serious question, namely, that any style
or genre of music is pervasively and inherently social in
significance. For if music's significance is taken to be socially
located, then it must be understood as an aspect of the socially
constructed reality (Berger & Luckmann, 1967) of the group
producing the music in question. In other words, the music can
only legitimately be understood in terms of the analytical
categories which are an aspect of a particular group or society's
reality, and there can consequently be no recourse to the notion
that musical significance is derived from some form of 'higher'

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 The Application of a or 'ultimate' reality. Difference in cultural values and musical
Critical Sociology to style is due not so much to varying degrees of' cultural devel-
Music Education opment' or 'cultural deprivation' as to the existence of socially
Graham Vulliamy
constructed and different cultural criteria which not infrequently
and
display a mutual incompatibility. As Vulliamy concludes, 'by
John Shepherd
illustrating the social origins of [high-culture] assumptions the
way is open for the possibilities of alternative definitions and
assumptions'(1976a: 19).
Vulliamy's arguments for the inclusion of' pop' and' rock' in
the school curriculum thus rest on notions of cultural relativism.
The view that 'classical' and 'serious' forms of music are
superior to ' pop' and' rock' in both an aesthetic and moral sense
are essentially mistaken.' Pop' and ' rock' should be included in
the school curriculum because they speak to the world of young
people and so provide them with a means of critically exploring
and developing their personal and cultural realities. Notions of
cultural relativism as evidenced in the 'new sociology of
education' have, however, been criticised by philosophers
(Flew, 1976; Pring, 1972) on the grounds that until criteria for
assessing alternative forms of knowledge are established, such
notions remain epistemologically suspect.
In two of his later publications (Vulliamy, 1978, 1980),
Vulliamy met these criticisms as they apply to music education
by drawing on the work of Shepherd (1977). Shepherd argues
(see also Shepherd, 1976; 1979; 1981) that a series of interrelated
social and psychological blocks has prevented aestheticians and
musicologists considering seriously the proposition that the
significance of music is, indeed, ultimately and inherently social.
Once the social origins of these blocks are exposed, it becomes
possible to understand how the abstract and dynamic patterning
of social and cultural realities finds quintessential expression
through the abstract and dynamic sound patternings of music.
Society is in music in the sense that music could have no
significance independently of the social processes responsible for
the creation of individuals and cultures. Conversely, music is in
society in the sense that it is but one form of human activity
without which cultures and societies could not arise in the first
place. Social and musical processes are interpenetrative, and
there is no need, in attempting to understand how music can
express social meanings from within its very structure, to have
recourse to our commonsense understanding of 'meaning' in
terms of which a symbol can only 'mean' anything by pointing
outside itself to some discretely existing referent. Shepherd has
illustrated this approach to understanding significance in music
by reference to the way in which plainchant (1977), 'classical'
music (1977; 1982b) and different styles of 'popular' music
(1982b) articulate social and cultural realities from within their
very structures.
Two qualifications must be made to this sociological perspec-
tive on music education. First, discussions pertaining to the
' new sociology of education' are frequently couched in terms of
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 class to the relative exclusion of age, gender and ethnicity. The The Application of a
question of ethnicity as it relates to music education has been Critical Sociology to
addressed by Haughton (1983) in his discussion of the way in Music Education
Graham Vulliamy
which state education policies affect the music education of some and
ethnic groups in Toronto, while Shepherd (1984b) has John Shepherd
considered some aspects of the way male gender-typing among
high school students detracts from the success of traditional
vocal music programmes in North America. The neglect of age
in itself as a sociological variable is a particularly serious
omission. It has permitted Tanner, for example, to view 'Top
40' pop in Canada as the music of the majority of high school
students who ' endorse the assumptions and values which und-
erlie school culture', while noting that the adoption of 'heavy
metal' music was largely confined to delinquents and working-
class school rejectors (Tanner, 1981: 10). While it is important
to heed Brake's warning (1980: vii; see also Frith, 1978:26) that:

... what is central to any examination of youth culture is that

it is not some vague cultural monolith appealing to those
roughly under thirty, but is a complex kaleidoscope of
several subcultures, of different ages, yet distinctly related
to the class position of those in them

it is equally important to realise that young people in modern

industrial society, regardless of class, gender or ethnicity, tend
to be isolated as a dependent, economic liability, and thus
experience what Eisenstadt (1956) has referred to as a marginal
status in moving from the family in which they are brought up
to full membership of the social and economic system in which
they must eventually take their place. At school, in college and
on the lowest rungs of the work ladder, they have emerged from
one family, but have not yet formed another. Consequently, they
are not fully integrated into the social system. They are contained
in a number of social institutions where they are encouraged to
adopt the attitudes and the values of adults, but where they
experience little of the power and influence of adults. Even those
students who in terms of class, gender and ethnicity should
identify strongly with ' the assumptions and values which und-
erlie school culture' none the less experience significant alien-
ation with regard to those assumptions and values. It is possible,
therefore, that many high school students 'embrace the more
conventional forms of pop found in the Top 40' not because they
uncritically' endorse the assumptions and values which underlie
school culture' but because they 'see no great problems with the
world in which they live, but ... nevertheless [experience]
temporarily a marginal status vis-a-vis that world' (Shepherd,
1982b: 164). If 'Top 40' pop expressed entirely consensual
social values, it would be surprising not to find it included in the
school curriculum. That it is not is symptomatic of its incipient
values of disaffection.
Secondly, Vulliamy 's research has been carried out exclusively
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 The Application of a in the United Kingdom, where the dependence of the traditional
Critical Sociology to school music curriculum on 'classical' and 'serious' music
Music Education makes it particularly easy to mount arguments based on a clear
Graham Vulliamy
distinction between the 'music of the middle classes' and the
and
music of youth cultures and youth subcultures. The situation in
John Shepherd
North America is not quite as clear, however. The music of the
traditional school curriculum (big band, dance band, show and
light classical music) might not be that of youth cultures and
youth subcultures, but equally, it is not unequivocably that of
the middle classes. Moreover, that proportion of the music
curriculum substantially influenced by Afro-American musics
displays technical characteristics (marked melodic, harmonic
and rhythmic inflections, improvisations, as well as a dependence
on individualised, un-pure timbres) which have a considerable
amount in common with those of 'pop' and 'rock' music.
Research in one Ontario school system has shown, however, that
while the traditional North-American music curriculum may
have a peripheral significance for youth cultures and youth
subcultures, the criteria in terms of which it is performed and
discussed still tend to be drawn from the tradition of' classical'
or 'serious' music (Shepherd, 1983). The means by which the
knowledge content of music classrooms is controlled thus tend
to be the same in the United Kingdom and North America,
despite marked differences in actual curricula (Shepherd &
Vulliamy, 1983).

Is Music Socially Determined?

An important area of our thesis that has been subject to some
misconceptions relates to the question of the extent to which
music is ' socially determined'. Many musicians, and even some
sociologists, feel that the assertion that any style or genre of
music is pervasively and inherently social in significance presents
an over-determined view of musical styles and downgrades the
importance of such factors as individual creativity. To demon-
strate that this is not the case requires some further elucidation
of Shepherd's thesis.
The position elaborated by Shepherd with regard to the
relationship between music and society is, to say the least, quite
distinct from any position advocating the social determination
of music. Shepherd argues, firstly, that individual creativity is
not in opposition to social processes, but is, indeed, essential to
them:

The extreme rigidity of ... a society [without individual

creativity] would make dialecticism a logical impossibility,
and it is very difficult to see how society could either come
into existence or survive under such circumstances. The
creative element of individual minds is thus as necessary a
pre-condition of structural changes in society as the flexibility
of human behaviour in the face of environmental changes

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 ... is for the survival of human individuals as biological The Application of a
organisms (1977: 55-6). Critical Sociology to
Music Education
This position has been argued more thoroughly and extensively Graham Vulliamy
by Nutch (1981). and
Secondly, Shepherd argues for an open-ended relationship John Shepherd
between music and society. Musical styles no more result from
social determination than they do from their own' internal laws',
a position sometimes advanced by musicologists (see, for example,
Meyer, 1956: 90).

It should ... be emphasised that music does not possess its

own internal laws. Tonality was not generated simply from
within previous musical forms, but was constructed and
created as part of a continually developing social process.
Even if music's dialectical relationship with wider social
process is accepted ... it could still be thought that the
internal and self-sufficient laws which caused tonality
paralleled wider social causation. But . . . social process
knows no strict or prime causation. And, since creativity is
an integral part of the social process, there can be no
ultimate and complete explanation for the particular form
that a symbol takes ... harmony might well not have been
an absolute necessity for the development of an explicit
musical language (Shepherd, 1977: 100).

The misgivings that musicians and sociologists have with

regard to Shepherd's thesis give rise to two related issues. First,
in interpreting Shepherd's argument for the pervasively and
inherently social significance of music as an argument for the
social determination of music, musicians in particular seem to be
implying that there exist sources other than the social (such as
the biological and psychological) for the creation and establishing
of personalities. We are not, of course, suggesting that in
proposing sources such as the biological and psychological for
personality disposition there is a necessary implication that
individuals and societies do not mutually affect each other. What
we are suggesting is that an acknowledgement of the funda-
mentally social nature of people does not automatically result in
a view of people as socially blueprinted. This latter view, while
certainly symptomatic of the dominant sociological tradition of
structural functionalism, has increasingly been challenged by
other sociological perspectives (see, inter alia, Nutch, 1981;
Shepherd, 1982a). However, if it is believed that 'personality
disposition' has a source other than social interaction, and that
social interaction can only have, at best, a peripheral effect on
' personality disposition', then any argument that the significance
of music is ultimately and inherently social will inevitably result
in the position that musical styles are socially determined. If
individuality is conceived as being essentially separate from, and
quite possibly in opposition to social processes, and if music is
conceived as being ultimately and inherently social, then indi-
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 The Application of a vidual creativity will be denied as an important aspect of the
Critical Sociology to musical process. Composers and musicians will become little
Music Education more than ciphers. The position of the social determination of
Graham Vulliamy music was one adopted by the Russian authorities shortly after
and the Revolution, and Shepherd (1977: 53-61) was at pains, in a
John Shepherd discussion of these very issues, to highlight its shortcomings.
The only course open to the Russian authorities was to curb the
individual creativity of their composers, and ultimately to
assume, as they have more recently, that dissidents who contest
the logic of a crude Marxist materialism have been subject to
faulty socialisation, are thus mentally unsound, and should be
committed to mental institutions.
Secondly, there is a feeling on the part of some musicians that
Shepherd's thesis does not address itself to real, living pieces of
music, but only to some abstracted musical' language' that has
no existence in actuality. The implication is that real, living
pieces of music are devalued by having their 'meaning' or
'significance' approached solely at the level of an abstracted
'language'. Even if this 'language' does have actuality, it is
argued, and even if its significance is pervasively and inherently
social, then it does not necessarily follow that the ' significance'
of individual pieces is likewise social. This line of thinking
clearly relates back to the issue of whether or not personality
disposition has a source essentially independent from social
processes. If one adopts the position that personality disposition
does, indeed, have a source essentially separate from social
processes, then the composer can be thought of as both drawing
and commenting upon basic music materials which have a
pervasive and inherent social significance in ways that are largely
asocial. In drawing a clear distinction between the sociality of
basic musical materials on the one hand and the largely asocial
personality disposition of the composer on the other, it does,
indeed, become possible to analyse musical significance in the
functional tonal tradition at higher architectonic levels whilst
taking the fundamental musical materials facilitating such archi-
tectonic structures for granted. This is exactly the procedure
adopted by Leonard Meyer in his book Explaining Music (1973).
Shepherd (1981) has argued that while Meyer's analyses are both
insightful and phenomenologically adequate within the functional
tonal tradition, his tendency to ignore the question of musical
significance at the level of fundamental materials results in
questions of social significance never being raised.
Elsewhere, Meyer (1956) has, however, dealt with the question
of social significance in music. He argues that while social factors
influence musical styles (and the notion of a musical' style' is just
as much an abstraction as Shepherd's notion of a musical
' language'), such influence serves to facilitate the transmission
of the aesthetic experience.

Yet the explanation furnished by reference to political,

social and cultural history tells only part of the story. For

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 stylistic changes and developments are continually taking The Application of a
place which appear to be largely independent of such Critical Sociology to
extramusical events. Although an important interaction Music Education
Graham Vulliamy
takes place between the political, social and intellectual and
forces at work in a given epoch, on the one hand, and John Shepherd
stylistic developments, on the other, there is also a strong
tendency for a style to develop in its own way. If this is the
case, then the causes of these changes must be looked for
in the nature of aesthetic experience, since for composer and
listener style is simply the vehicle for such an experience
(Meyer, 1956: 65).

While, therefore, it is more than possible for someone subscribing

to a position similar to Meyer's to argue that there is a dialectical
relationship between personality disposition and wider social
forces, such dialecticism, as reinterpreted through a belief in the
social immanence of all human activity (Shepherd, 1982a),
results in the position that a musician's or composer's use and
interpretation of fundamental musical materials is itself
inherently social. This squares with a position elaborated
elsewhere (Shepherd, 1982a), that human creativity may indeed
be biologically or genetically coded, but that it knows no
concrete form or expression until it engages the social world.
Shepherd's desire to argue for the inherent and ultimate social
significance of musical meaning resulted, for the reasons just set
out, in an initial sociological analysis of fundamental musical
materials (1977). In concentrating on such materials, Shepherd's
analysis was doing little more, in a musical context, than drawing
a distinction similar to that made in the realm of linguistics by
Saussure (1960) when he talks about langue as distinct from
parole, and Chomsky (1965) when he talks about 'competence'
as opposed to 'performance'. As a consequence, Shepherd's
work should not be interpreted as a desire to reduce all
significance in music to some form of monolithic social deter-
mination, but more as a starting point from which to understand
musical' performance' or parole as an inherently social utterance.
It is quite clear that the different social situations of individual
cultures and peoples lead to musical commentaries on the
pervasive structuring of our society, which are themselves
socially significant (1982b).

The Role of Notation

A related problem concerns our view of the relationship between
different musical languages and analytic notation. The response
of many music teachers to our analysis (Shepherd & Vulliamy,
1983) of the constraints which a notated conception of music
places upon music teaching has been that such contraints occur
equally with all styles of music. There are two separate issues
here. One is a pedagogical concern that an over-emphasis upon
the teaching of notation can impede musicality, whatever the
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 The Application of a musical style - a concern which we share with our critics. The
Critical Sociology to second issue is that, in addition to such pedagogical problems
Music Education concerning the role of notation, we contend that there are
Graham Vulliamy
qualitatively different relationships between 'classical' music
and
and notation and Afro-American musical styles and notation.
John Shepherd
This extends an argument formulated earlier by Wishart (1977).
At this point it might be helpful to rehearse the main arguments
put to us over this, together with our response to them.
Many musicians argue that the musical characteristics of the
' classical' and Afro-American traditions are broadly similar and
that those technical differences that can be discerned are
differences of degree, not of kind. They point out that if
Afro-American musicians who write down their music do so
after the fact, then so do composers working in the ' classical'
or 'serious' traditions. The composer's conception is essen-
tially aural, and not notationally and therefore literately defined.
And to back up their contention, many 'serious' musicians
would challenge those arguing that modern Western notation
has effectively controlled the musical perception and conception
of' serious' musicians in a visual manner to identify character-
istics of Afro-American musics not found in 'classical' music.
They would claim that if Afro-American musics contain melodic,
rhythmic and harmonic inflections, and marked timbral differ-
ences between individual performers of the same instrument,
then so does music in the ' classical' tradition. It could also be
added that although improvisation is now something of a lost art
in the performance of' classical' music, historically it was a very
important aspect of different performance practices. In short, it
can be argued that without the inflections aurally discernible in
' classical' music, and without the timbral differences associated
with different performers, renditions of' classical' works would
be robot-like and without life. As music educators often observe,
this kind of robot-like performance frequently occurs in school
music classrooms. On this point we share a deep concern for the
way in which the teaching of notation often adversely affects the
development of musicality in students, even within the' classical'
tradition. The personality of the performer, it could therefore
be concluded, is essential to the individuality of a particular
interpretation of a particular piece, and notation remains nothing
more than the visual servant ofa fundamentally aural phenomenon
(Greene, 1972).
This is not the place to engage in an extended discussion of
the relationship between different musical traditions and analytic
notation. However, certain observations are pertinent. Implicit
in the counter-argument brought by some 'serious' musicians
to Wishart's (1977) thesis is the assertion that for there to be any
significant qualitative distinction between the relationship of
traditional notation to ' classical' music on the one hand and to
Afro-American musics on the other,' classical' music should not
display any inflectional or timbral individuality at all. Yet it does
not follow, because some inflectional devices are discernible in
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 the performance of 'classical' music, and because timbral The Application of a
differences between 'classical' performers are clearly audible, Critical Sociology to
that traditional music notation has not had a strong constraining Music Education
Graham Vulliamy
influence on what counts as a musical as opposed to a non-musical and
sound in ' classical' music. Clearly, performers in the ' classical' John Shepherd
tradition must retain a viable enough sense of their own musical
individuality to make sense of and interpret the composer's
wishes. Such interpretation cannot help, to a certain extent, but
be individual in nature. It must not, however, be individual to
an extent that would break up the harmonic, rhythmic and
timbral unity of thefinitemajor-minor scale system of' classical'
music (see Shepherd, 1977: 94-111; 1982b: 154-8).
The role of traditional music notation has been to filter out
those sounds (the markedly inflected and timbrally 'dirty')
which, within the tradition of'serious art-music', would disrupt
the sonic homogeneity of the major-minor scale system. Its role
has been to ensure that musical materials have become sufficiently
homogeneous to facilitate the unified articulation of a centrally
focused harmonic field. This is why the inflections of a Maureen
Forrester are acceptable, indeed desirable, while those of a Janis
Joplin are not. In these terms the composer's conception may
be, at the conscious level, thoroughly aural. He may well think
first in a genuinely aural fashion, and then translate the results
of that aural thinking into visual marks on paper. What tends
to get forgotten, however, is that at the unconscious level of prior
musical socialisation that which is admissible to initial aural
thinking is itself mediated notationally and visually. Greene's
observations on the relationship between the visual exigencies
of early thirteenth-century part arrangements and the harmonic
'clashes' between the duplum and the triplum (which did not
seem to trouble musicians at the time) point to the way in which
only that which can be seen tends to be heard (1972: 243). And
so it would have been with improvisation in past performance
practices. The improvisation might well have been genuinely
creative in an aural sense. But again, that which would have been
aurally admissible to the improvisation would have been
previously filtered notationally and visually.

Music and Cultural Relativity

Our approach to music education and the sociology of music
thesis upon which it is founded carry clear implications of a
cultural and musical relativism. Not only, as we noted in the first
section of this paper, have the notions of cultural relativism
which underpin much work in the ' new sociology of education'
been criticised by philosophers such as Flew (1976) and Pring
(1972). In their more specifically musical forms, they have given
rise to misgivings on the part of many musicians. The central
issue is whether criteria for the admissibility of any musical
tradition as part of the school curriculum should be adduced in
ways which we have identified as a priori, absolute and idealist,
257
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 The Application of a or whether the criteria can or should be adduced in a manner
Critical Sociology to specific to the culture of the particular musical tradition in
Music Education
question. The problem for many music educators is that while
Graham Vulliamy
criteria associated with the 'classical' tradition (or traditions
and
which are strongly influenced by ' classical' music) carry a large
John Shepherd measure of agreement and seem relatively clear, there appears
to be a vacuum where criteria specific to more 'popular' and
Afro-American forms of music are concerned. In the absence of
such alternative criteria, music educators argue, it seems suspect,
at the very least, to dispense with the traditional criteria which
point to the musical and moral inferiority of many forms of
'popular' and Afro-American musics.
Our argument is simply that dispensing with objective criteria
opens the way for criteria of worth and value in music which,
rather than being set up in an idealist fashion, are derived and
related to specific social and cultural situations. Establishing a
position of cultural relativity does not, of course, dispense with
the issue of how one is to judge musical worth within any
particular musical tradition. Vulliamy, for example, set aside a
considerable portion of one publication (1976b: 35^3) to spell
out the major technical characteristics of Afro-American musics,
drawing on the work of such eminent musical scholars as Keil
(1966) and Schuller (1968), while more recently Vulliamy & Lee
(1982c) have jointly addressed such issues in a paper discussing
the alternative musical criteria by which popular music might
be judged. There is, nonetheless, a sense in which the misgivings
of music educators might be justified, but only because the study
of popular music is a relatively recent undertaking which does
not have the benefit of a long-established and commonly accepted
set of analytic tools, such as those of historical musicology, in
terms of which to scrutinise and evaluate individual pieces. The
study of popular music has yet to match Meyer's (1959) percep-
tive study of value in music of the ' classical' tradition, but then
the task at hand is arguably more difficult. As well as containing
discrete elements of syntax deriving from music of the 'classical'
tradition, most forms of popular music also reveal considerable
degrees of melodic, harmonic, rhythmic and timbral inflection
which are continuous and consequently not inherently susceptible
to being fixed or frozen for the purposes of traditional analytic
discourse. Those engaged in the study of popular music are
aware that they are raising more questions than they can at
present answer. That does not mean, however, that the analysis
of popular music in terms specific to itself is futile, or that the
questions raised cannot ultimately be answered. Volume 2 of
Popular Music (Middleton & Horn, 1982), for example, attests
to the rich and varied manner in which issues of theory and
method in the study of popular music can be addressed.
The absence of fully developed and clear alternative criteria for
judging music in the 'popular' and Afro-American traditions,
while not necessarily invalidating our position at the theoretical
level, does allow some musicians and music educators to argue
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 that music is a kind of' universal language' that, unconstrained The Application of a
by the strictly semantic considerations associated with verbal Critical Sociology to
Music Education
language, can be understood and appreciated on a cross-cultural
Graham Vulliamy
basis. This argument clearly relates back, once again, to the issue
and
of whether or not personality disposition has a source essentially John Shepherd
separate from social processes. If, for example, as is the clear
implication in some of Meyer's work (1956; 1959; 1973), it is
assumed that personality disposition is linked in some way to a
fundamental psychological structuring of the human mind at the
species-specific level, then it is easy to see how music could be
understood as a unified, transcultural phenomenon which none-
theless attains higher realisation in some cultures over others.
This is a position, of course, to which we do not subscribe. While
it is not to be denied that we can respond to the music of other
cultures, it remains highly questionable whether the response is
true to the culture and the music. Even within our own society
there is ample evidence of the way in which the members of one
culture can misinterpret the music of another, even when the
interpretation is well intended and sympathetic. Vulliamy has
referred, for example, to the way in which Mellers overemphasises
the harmonic structure of the Beatles' music at the expense of
'many facets of the Beatles' music which the rock music lover,
untutored in academic music, find the most musically satisfying'
(1977a: 194; see also Shepherd, 1982b: 146-7). Such misinter-
pretations can only be avoided by examining the musics of other
cultures as integral aspects of the societies in which they are
created and performed. To hive off individual creativity from
social process and then approach musical significance pre-
dominantly in terms of that creativity in a cross-cultural fashion
is to allow idealism and ethnocentricism to creep in through the
back door.
But whatever the position espoused by music educators and
those concerned with music education on issues revolving
around music, society, personality disposition and the importance
of individual creativity all seem united in the basic assumption
that music education should serve to enable young people to
fulfil themselves not only musically, but personally and culturally
as well. For us, the central question therefore remains whether,
in regarding music as a positive, humanising force for young
people, one judges such humanism simply within the constraints
of middle-class cultural criteria, thus relegating much popular
music to a second-class moral and aesthetic status, or whether
one views all music as aspiring potentially to humanistic goals
according to different cultural criteria. Evidence in support of
the second option is strong. Blacking has argued (1973: 101), for
example, that the whole purpose of Venda music is to maintain
individuals within that society in a balanced relationship with
themselves, while more recently Keil has made a similar point
with regard to another African society, the Tiv of Nigeria (Keil,
1979: 94-5; see also Shepherd, 1982c). The aim of the music in
these societies, which is full of dynamism, energy and movement,
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 The Application of a is not only to enhance those aspects of human consciousness
Critical Sociology to which are cerebral (and which would therefore likely find
Music Education admittance to the classrooms of modern, industrial society), but
Graham Vulliamy
and those which are bodily and sensually incorporated. The music
John Shepherd of African societies tends to address the whole person in
relationship to other whole persons, not simply an isolated and
ruptured sliver of mental awareness.
In these terms, ethnomusicology can lend considerable insight
into our society, our music and our education. Unlike the
African musics referred to, Western musics tend to emerge as
deficient as forces for social and personal integration at any more
than a local, cultural level. While African musics seem to provide
a means for facing reality and solving problems, most Western
musics serve, in one way or another, to deflect attention from
the totality of our reality and to obscure the full social and
historical roots of our individual situations. 'Classical' or
' serious' music is viewed at the conscious level as being funda-
mentally 'asocial', while continually re-instituting, at an
unconscious level, the cerebrally dominated, social and emotional
structuring which guarantees the preservation of our society in
its present form (Shepherd, 1982b). Conversely, much popular
music is capable of making direct personal statements which are
very much symptomatic of the 'here and now', and which can
consequently be sensed by audiences as being of direct social
relevance (Shepherd, 1982b, 1984a, b). However, an acknow-
ledging of social significance does not necessarily equate with a
facing of reality and the solving of problems. For while market
forces are certainly not deterministic, the music industry does
have significant success in deflecting the attention of audiences
from political realities. Their gaze is never allowed to linger on
the inescapable actuality of their social situation, but is drawn
away by the mass-mediated music industry to visions of mythical
escape (Brake, 1980; Shepherd, 1984b).
In being conceived as fundamentally 'asocial', 'classical'
music detracts from an awareness of the emotional and spiritual
alienation it continually helps to recreate among the middle
classes, while many forms of ' popular' music, in having their
significance mediated by the music industry, detract from an
awareness of the working-class material and intellectual alienation
to which they initially speak. This double-edged, class-bound
alienation finds expression in music education programmes.
There is the potential for students to be alienated either expres-
sively or instrumentally according to whether or not they engage
in school music programmes:

Through participating in school music programmes, many

students lose the potential to musically externalise their own
social situation or to make any spontaneous, fluid, emotional
musical statement ... Equally, those students who are not
encouraged to take music ... or who ' turn off' from school

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 music for cultural reasons, are being socialized into living The Application of a
outside their minds (Shepherd, 1983: 40). Critical Sociology to
Music Education
Graham Vulliamy
To the extent (and the extent is far from total) that the music and
industry appropriates and exploits the music of youth culture John Shepherd
and youth subcultures, music educators are clearly justified in
being suspicious of popular music as an educational medium. In
the light of ethnomusicological analysis they should, however,
be equally wary of ' classical' music. For if the music industry
attempts a centralised social control of students' own music
outside the classroom, thus preventing students from developing
personally and culturally in their own terms, then it would seem
that traditional music curricula effect a similar kind of centralised
social control by preventing such development inside the
classroom.
If we are keen to develop music programmes with a strong
humanistic purpose, then students should be encouraged to
consider, in as open a fashion as possible, the social and cultural
implications of a wide variety of musics, including their own.
And in moving from analysis to creativity, they should addition-
ally be encouraged to develop their own musical styles in a
manner which avoids splitting and repressing human individ-
uality, and which seeks to face constructively the differing
cultural realities and problems generated by modern, industrial
society. A belief in cultural relativism provides as broad as
possible a background in terms of which to make moral choices
in the here and now of concrete situations. The fact that we are
uncertain where these moral choices may lead musically should
not act as a deterrent to the expansion of the traditional music
curricula. To avoid such expansion as idealistic in the face of the
very real problems it would present serves only to perpetuate a
filtered version of the world for students, and certainly does not
help anyone deal with, as opposed to escape from, the realities
which face us all. This brings us to our final section, which is
concerned with some of the practical implications of reforming
music education.

The Reform of Music Teaching

There is a tension in our work, which in the context of this paper
is worth making explicit. On the one hand, recent sociological
analyses of the processes of schooling, including aspects of both
overt and hidden curricula, have pinpointed the difficulties of
implementing any reforms which threaten the status quo. On the
other hand, Vulliamy's practical suggestions for using popular
music in teaching, together with accounts by practising school
teachers of such approaches (Vulliamy & Lee, 1976, 1982a),
involve not only radical shifts in definitions of 'acceptable'
music, but also changes in the conventional educational process
itself. This tension is symptomatic of three rather different kinds
of criticisms, all of which have some substance.
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 The Application of a The first criticism is that both the prior socialisation of music
Critical Sociology to teachers and the normal conditions of classroom music teaching
Music Education
preclude all but the boldest teachers from experimenting with
Graham Vulliamy
such approaches. The second is that where pop music is being
and
used by school teachers, it is either being academicised (with
John Shepherd CSE questions on the history of the Beatles) or the performance
and analysis of the music is being accommodated within a
traditional musical framework. Such academicisation results in
the essence of the music, together with the social messages within
it (which are often explicitly or implicitly critical of schooling),
being defused. The final criticism is related to the other two in
pointing out that where pop music has been used effectively, in
schools such as Countesthorpe College (Nicholls, 1976), the
effectiveness is facilitated by the unconventional nature of such
schools themselves.
While it would be inappropriate to develop such points here,
there are powerful sociological arguments that the schooling
system operates in such a way as to help perpetuate the social
class structure of our capitalist society. Young (1971) has
suggested that the characteristics of high-status knowledge in
schools, such as abstractness, literacy, individualism, and a
divorce from everyday life, in themselves contribute to this
process. It could be added that it is such characteristics that
militate against music, as a school subject, being accorded a very
high status. Other sociologists have stressed instead the role of
the hidden curriculum, and the assessment system which
accompanies it, in reproducing social class inequalities (Bowles
& Gintis, 1976). In such an analysis, the process of certification,
the hierarchical relations between teacher and taught and the
emphasis on particular standards of conduct within classrooms,
all of which will have acted as constraints on enterprising music
teachers whatever approach they have adopted, are testimony to
the wider function of schooling as one of social control. More
recently, sociologists have combined the insights of previous
analyses by focusing upon a combination of both overt and
hidden curricula (Apple, 1980; Giroux, 1981). Against such a
background, it is to be expected that, where innovations in
education are proposed, those that threaten the status quo most
will be the most difficult to implement (Papagiannis et al. 1982)
and it is because of the role schools play as institutions in social
and cultural reproduction that important elements of human
experience are systematically distorted or neglected in the school
system. The nature of music is such that music teachers will
experience more constraints in this respect than, say, maths
teachers, where the characteristics of the subject both give it a
higher status and make it more amenable to the critical role that
assessment plays. We have argued elsewhere (Shepherd &
Vulliamy, 1983; Vulliamy & Shepherd, 1984) that, within music,
one would for similar reasons expect teaching to be concentrated
on a conception of music that best fits the more general role that
schools play in our society. This argument has been further
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 substantiated by Haughton (1983), who has demonstrated the The Application of a
role played by the state in Ontario in selecting members of music Critical Sociology to
curriculum guideline committees who are more than likely to Music Education
Graham Vulliamy
perpetuate established trends in music education. In this respect,
and
proposals to use pop music in teaching are contrary not only to John Shepherd
dominant ideologies of schooling, but also to dominant musical
ideologies.
Such analyses help inject a greater degree of realism into the
question of what changes are likely to be practicable, as opposed
to just desirable, in schools and in what sorts of conditions. Thus
some advocates of the use of pop music in teaching, such as
Spencer (1976, 1982), have developed musical and pedagogical
approaches to pop which accept the limitations of the prior
socialisation of music teachers and the current context of mass
state schooling. By doing so, both performance and analysis are
subjected to constraints which defuse the essence of idioms such
as blues and reggae. Nevertheless, such activities, especially if
conducted by skilled and sensitive teachers, are, we feel, a
considerable improvement on many current approaches to music
teaching in that they develop aspects of Afro-American musical
languages (such as improvisation) which are usually neglected.
Ideally, however, we would advocate what Vulliamy (1976a)
has referred to as an 'open' approach, in which the musical
interests of students are encouraged and expanded, whatever
these may be. There are two reasons for such an approach. The
first is pedagogical — an argument that we should start where
students are, taking their musical culture seriously rather than
dismissing it as a deprived culture (even if, as we have already
argued, we can recognise the limitations of aspects of such a
culture, given the existing power relationships of our society and
concomitantly the influence of contemporary mass media). The
second is musical, and relates to our earlier arguments concerning
the issue of cultural and musical relativism. Our argument that
different musical traditions require different criteria for
evaluation applies as much within the popular music tradition as
elsewhere.
In the current context of schooling, and in the light of the brief
sociological analyses of schooling above, there are two major
impediments to such proposals being adopted, even by teachers
who are keen to do so. The first is that they challenge key aspects
of the hidden curriculum of schooling. Consequently, Vulliamy
(1977b) has argued that the success of such approaches at
Countesthorpe College required that a similarly radical approach
pervade the rest of the school. The second is that they challenge
the dominant musical ideology and the notated conception of
music which it embodies. Our views on this have been presented
at length elsewhere (Shepherd & Vulliamy, 1983) and relate also
to the earlier discussion in this paper on the relationship of
different musical languages to analytic notation. However much
enlightened music educators bemoan the undue emphasis on
notation at the pedagogical level, there can be no doubt that the

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 The Application of a 'status' of 'musicians' in the educational system is directly
Critical Sociology to correlated with their ability to read music. How else does one
Music Education get offered the opportunity to pursue music at the tertiary level
Graham Vulliamy or even obtain a CSE Mode 1 pass? But the ability to read music,
and
John Shepherd of course, does not correspond to the status of musicians in most
of the ' real' world - in Africa, in the Caribbean, and also in the
youth subcultures for whom any programme in music education
is ostensibly designed.

Conclusion
The issues raised concerning our work have been helpful, not
only in leading to a clarification of our own position, but also in
highlighting more explicitly than before the differences between
our understanding of what music education is and could be, and
that of our critics. Precisely because some of those differences
are fundamental at a theoretical and ideological level, it is all the
more necessary to stress our common concern at the practical
level, namely the desire to provide students with musical
experiences that are fulfilling and meaningful, both personally
and culturally. We hope, therefore, that we have been able to
clear away areas of doubt and misgiving to an extent that will
allow music educators a clearer understanding of our arguments
and an increased willingness to consider them seriously as the
basis for an alternative pedagogy in the music classroom. At the
same time, we recognise that there is much work to do if an
alternative pedagogy is to become a reality. Two areas seem
prominent. First, we need to develop much more extensively
than has hitherto been possible alternative criteria through
which the presence of different musics in the classroom can be
justified, musically, morally, socially and culturally. Second, in
beginning to implement alternative music programmes in school
classrooms, we need to gain a detailed and comprehensive
knowledge of the concrete problems such programmes encounter,
as well as of the very real tensions they may create for teachers
and students alike. Systematic, theoretically informed fieldwork
in this second area has hardly begun.

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Parts of this paper first appeared in Vulliamy & Shepherd (1984) and
Shepherd (1984a).

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