The Application of a Critical Sociology to Music Education

Abstract

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 résumé of our perspective, we shall address four criticisms that have been made fairly generally by a number of reviewers ofWhose Music? (Shepherdet 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 anti-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.