Miming to recorded music: Multimodality and education.

Abstract

Listening is understood in the field of music education to be one of the most important ways through which people engage with music. On the one hand, it is an integral part of performing and creating (Elliott, 1995; Loane, 1984; Sloboda, 1988), allowing control, regulation, and assessment of each decision; on the other hand, listening is also valued as an activity in itself (Reimer, 1989; Swanwick, 1979) and it is, as such, one of the pillars of many music curricula, namely, in Portugal, where the present research was developed.Despite the general agreement on the importance of music listening for music teaching and learning, it is also acknowledged that listening activities in the classroom need careful design in order to allow successful response and learning on the part of the children (Espeland, 1987). Classical music is one of the listening choices of many teachers, not only to fulfil curriculum demands but also to draw children's attention to some types of music that do not usually make part of their listening lists. Notwithstanding, having children listening to recorded music in the classroom raises some pedagogical problems, especially if children do not spontaneously identify themselves with the idioms or if children are asked to listen quietly and in physical passivity; they usually lack interest and motivation and they tend not to learn many relevant things from those experiences.As opposed to the active music making involved in performing and composing, where children sing, move, or play instruments, listening to music in the audience might indeed result in a poorer context of experience, with less perception modalities being activated. To make this point clearer, a pianist on the stage, for example, even if she is playing a piece of music for the first time, is likely to develop a stronger interaction with the music, due to what she listens to, reads on the music sheet, and feels through her performing gestures, than the person sitting and listening in the audience. The modalities involved are potentially more powerful for the pianist than for the listener (ignoring for the moment the difference in time spend with the music).The present paper focuses on some pedagogical strategies of listening to music in the elementary music classroom, which have been developed and published in Portugal (Godinho, 2010, 2012; Godinho & Brito, 2010) and which have become quite spread in elementary schools. With the broad purpose of expanding the listening scope and aural skills of students, these pedagogical materials deliberately involve children in active participation during the listening situations, either playing rhythmic instruments or miming stories along with the pieces. In this sense, listening activities are slightly transformed into performing activities, having children becoming a sort of musicians in the orchestra or mime performers.These strategies are aligned with other studies and projects (Cohen, 1997; Espeland, 1987) that were also concerned with authentic listening experiences in classroom settings. Espeland (1987) has advocated that the active response on the part of the listener is crucial in understanding and, therefore, his project involved the children in activities of verbal, visual, and kinetic expression. These activities were mainly the result of creative group work by the children, and watching the group discussions and solutions for each piece allowed teachers to have access to the ways children understand the music they listen to.The idea that the physical active response can constitute a window into one's understanding was also developed by Cohen (1997) through two kinds of processes: first, she created some kinesthetic analogues for the pieces, or musical mirrors, which she modeled for her students, allowing them to enter into her listening experience, by inviting them to perform the analogues with her; second, she asked her students to create their own kinesthetic analogues for the pieces they listened to, which represented their understanding and personal response to the music. …