Hi. My name is Janet Barrett, and I'm a professor of music education at the University
of Illinois, at Urbana-Champaign. Today
I'd like to invite you to take a journey with me across
the music curriculum. Imagine a music classroom
where students and teacher are exploring John Coltrane's jazz
classic, Giant Steps, alongside the surprisingly sophisticated
children's book by Chris Raschka, which celebrates the textures
and layers of the piece, and the award-winning film
by Michael Levi, also called Giant Steps.
Together, students enjoy Coltrane's sheets of sound,
his cascades of melodic invention, and the
imaginative leap of paying tribute to a renowned musician through
story, image, sound, and movement.
Now, imagine a choral classroom performing Martin
Lauridsen's Contre Qui Rose, based on
the poetry of the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke.
In this classroom, the choral music educator takes the time to
explain Rilke's poem to the students, exploring multiple
meanings of the text, and then draws from
students' responses to consider multiple interpretations of
Lauridsen's settings. Imagine a music composition classroom, in which
students encounter the fascinating artistic output
of the artist Chuck Close, who creates expansive portraits by
stacking small lozenges of color successively
to form the overall image. They turn to a
poem written by Jan Greenberg written in a special form called
diamante. It also resembles Close's lozenges
Alongside those two works is juxtaposed Philip
Glass's musical portrait of his friend Chuck Close. They were lifelong
friends. Also constructed with tiled
musical patterns. Across the arts, students examine
the artists' use of their respective materials and the affordances of
their disciplines, which launches the creation of their
own portraits of family, friends, and persons close
to them. Imagine an orchestra rehearsal preparing to perform
Mendelssohn's overture to A Midsummer Night's Dream. A
piece composed when Mendelssohn was himself only seventeen years old.
In glorious serendipity, the English literature classes
across the hall are studying the play, while simultaneously
comparing it to Neil Gaiman's graphic novel of the same
name. The inner sections of thematic ideas,
historical and contemporary eras, distinctive modes of
working across music, literature, drama, give both
students and teachers a complex mix of art forms
and inner sections to consider. The music educators in
these four classrooms are committed to the pedagogy, benefits, and
value of an interdisciplinary approach. They reflect on
key principles to guide their work, and this is probably one of the most
foundational principles: that music influences
and in turn is influenced by other
realms of knowing. As a discipline, music is really
unbounded as an expressive field of human experience.
We move out of music in our lives
in a dynamic and free flowing way.
So in many ways, music cannot be held still.
As a school subject though, music is often bound by time of day,
by location within the school, by the expertise of the teacher,
by students' expectations, and by the traditions
and norms of the community and school.
The dynamic nature of music, then, can be compromised when it's confined
and isolated from other forms of experience.
Music teachers who are committed to
an interdisciplinary approach move across boundaries in order to
foster meaningful connections between music and other
disciplines. In this way of thinking, you can
imagine a school subject to function in the same way that a cell wall does.
The cell itself retains its shape and its character
while allowing inspiration and ideas to flow
across the cell wall in a permeable fashion.
Music then is not sequestered or isolated.
When it makes sense, the study and performance of music is enhanced
by parallel, complementary connections to other
subject matters. In music classes, teachers help students
develop this valuable relational thinking by
stressing intradisciplinary connections: that is,
the myriad ways that music is connected to other musics
and musicians. For example, think back to
Coltrane, other pieces besides Giant Steps, and how
one might situate his work in the entire realm of jazz
and all the subgenres of jazz. Think of Mendelssohn
as a part of a group of composers of the romantic era, and how
understanding style principles will enhance our performances.
Think of the entire song cycle of Lauridsen's,
of which Contre Qui Rose is but a part.
How do the other settings of the Reilke poems relate to
one another as a musical whole? When we explore
those kinds of relationships, we're thinking in an intradiscipinary way.
Within music classrooms, as well as across
classrooms, students develop relational thinking when we stress
interdisciplinary connections across many subject matters.
Our sister arts, our natural compliments to this
work, as our other closely related disciplines of history,
cultural studies, and many more. If you
are interested in pursuing an interdisciplinary approach further, here are some
good starting points. Begin by gathering a repertoire
of works with a high IQ. When I say IQ,
I mean interdisciplinary quotient, rather than intelligence
quotient. Search for examples that pulse
with possibilities for connected work.
Take the time to take inventory of the connections that make
sense to you first. Do your homework by
steeping yourself in the work, generating your own deep
rather than superficial connections. Make note, though,
that no matter how many connections you make as a teacher, your students
will make informed connections that you will not be able to
imagine in advance. This open-endedness is one of the joys
and one of the prime reasons that this approach is so important.
Juxtapose closely related works by teaching them side by
side. This makes it all the more likely that related ideas
pop into students' fields of attention. Lastly,
consider when to teach for connections. I often keep my
dear friend's Claire McCoy's heuristic in mind, that interdisciplinary work makes sense
when one plus one is greater than two.
In other words, you know you're on the right track when, as you combine
disciplines, the overall educational experience is
stronger than if you had dealt with each of them separately.
When you think broadly about these ideas,
you'll begin to see how meaning, relational thinking, and
connections are at the heart of these integrated world views.
Accordingly, you'll find many opportunities to pursue
these avenues: connections with an arts discipline,
in our case, music, connections between music,
and other related art forms, and connections
from the discipline and the arts to disciplines outside the arts.
Ultimately though, the power
and value of this work rests in the sense that the students
form from the arts to their lived experience.
As you already know as teacher, students are sense
makers. An interdisciplinary perspective enriches
the music curriculum by allowing many forms of experience
and many responses to music to flourish and take root.
I invite you to consider these possibilities.