‘Illiterate’ musicians: an historic review of curriculum and practice for student popular musicians in Australian senior secondary classrooms

2019 ◽  
Vol 36 (02) ◽  
pp. 155-171 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christine Carroll

AbstractThis article examines curriculum and practice in Australian secondary classroom music education, in order to trace the inclusion of, and provision for, students with learning orientations based on popular music forms. A 60-year period of curriculum reform, matriculation statistics and literature is surveyed with a focus on the state of New South Wales (NSW), where the ‘non-literate’ student musician was first acknowledged in curriculum documents dating from the late 1970s at the senior secondary level (Music Syllabus Year 11 and 12: New 2 Unit A Course. Draft Document). Three overlapping eras frame discussion. The first discusses the original post–World War II school curriculum established for Western art music (WAM); the second discusses the period of curriculum reform beginning in the 1960s and 1970s, which leads to the inclusion of popular music at junior secondary levels; and the third is the present era from roughly 1980 onwards, where separate pathways of instruction are maintained for WAM and students with interests in popular and contemporary musics. Legitimation Code Theory (LCT) from the sociology of education is employed, with analysis unveiling a series of historic code shifts and clashes with implications for present practice. An unveiling of these codes explains the cause of ongoing tensions surrounding the inclusion of popular music and musicians in Australian music classrooms and provides foundation for much-needed curriculum development in the NSW context, and potentially elsewhere, where similar dynamics underpin practice in secondary classrooms.

Author(s):  
Helen Ennis

Australian photographer Max Dupain distinguished himself as a professional and artistic presence from the 1930s well into the 1970s. His earliest works were in the Pictorialist style, but by the mid-1930s he had become an ardent modernist—using sharp focus, bold and geometric compositions, and contemporary subject matter. Dupain was strongly influenced by vitalist philosophy, the work of Australian artist Norman Lindsay, the photography of Man Ray, Margaret Bourke-White, and Edward Steichen, as well as writer D.H. Lawrence. The son of Ena and George Dupain, Max Dupain lived in Sydney his entire life. He joined the studio of Cecil Bostock in 1930, taking night classes at East Sydney Technical College and the Julian Ashton School of Art. In 1934 he opened his own studio and quickly established his reputation in fashion, advertising, and celebrity portraiture. After World War II he reoriented his practice towards industry and government assignments, favoring a documentary approach. During the 1960s and 1970s, he specialized in architectural photography. Dupain’s photography is distinguished by its physicality and embrace of Australian sunlight and conditions (as seen in Sunbaker, his best-known work). He also regularly wrote on photography, contributing spirited reviews to the Sydney Morning Herald. His work was widely exhibited and published and is held in numerous public collections.


Author(s):  
Geraldine Torrisi-Steele

The notion of using technology for educational purposes is not new. In fact, it can be traced back to the early 1900s during which school museums were used to distribute portable exhibits. This was the beginning of the visual education movement that persisted throughout the 1930s, as advances in technology such as radio and sound motion pictures continued. The training needs of World War II stimulated serious growth in the audiovisual instruction movement. Instructional television arrived in the 1950s but had little impact, due mainly to the expense of installing and maintaining systems. The advent of computers in the 1950s laid the foundation for CAI (computer assisted instruction) through the 1960s and 1970s. However, it wasn’t until the 1980s that computers began to make a major impact on education (Reiser, 2001). Early applications of computer resources included the use of primitive simulation. These early simulations had little graphic capabilities and did little to enhance the learning experience (Munro, 2000).


Author(s):  
Megan Asaka

The Japanese American Redress Movement refers to the various efforts of Japanese Americans from the 1940s to the 1980s to obtain restitution for their removal and confinement during World War II. This included judicial and legislative campaigns at local, state, and federal levels for recognition of government wrongdoing and compensation for losses, both material and immaterial. The push for redress originated in the late 1940s as the Cold War opened up opportunities for Japanese Americans to demand concessions from the government. During the 1960s and 1970s, Japanese Americans began to connect the struggle for redress with anti-racist and anti-imperialist movements of the time. Despite their growing political divisions, Japanese Americans came together to launch several successful campaigns that laid the groundwork for redress. During the early 1980s, the government increased its involvement in redress by forming a congressional commission to conduct an official review of the World War II incarceration. The commission’s recommendations of monetary payments and an official apology paved the way for the passage of the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 and other redress actions. Beyond its legislative and judicial victories, the redress movement also created a space for collective healing and generated new forms of activism that continue into the present.


2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 141-155
Author(s):  
SIMON FRITH

AbstractThis article considers the role of Marxism in the history of popular music studies. Its approach combines the sociology of knowledge with a personal memoir and its argument is that in becoming a field of scholarly interest popular music studies drew from both Marxist theoretical arguments about cultural ideology in the 1950s and 1960s and from rock writers’ arguments about the role of music in shaping socialist bohemianism in the 1960s and 1970s. To take popular music seriously academically meant taking it seriously politically. Once established as an academic subject, however, popular music studies were absorbed into both established music departments and vocational, commercial music courses. Marxist ideas and ideologues were largely irrelevant to the subsequent development of popular music studies as a scholarly field.


Popular Music ◽  
2000 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 293-318 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexander Stewart

The singular style of rhythm & blues (R&B) that emerged from New Orleans in the years after World War II played an important role in the development of funk. In a related development, the underlying rhythms of American popular music underwent a basic, yet generally unacknowledged transition from triplet or shuffle feel (12/8) to even or straight eighth notes (8/8). Many jazz historians have shown interest in the process whereby jazz musicians learned to swing (for example, the Fletcher Henderson Orchestra through Louis Armstrong's 1924 arrival in New York), but there has been little analysis of the reverse development – the change back to ‘straighter’ rhythms. The earliest forms of rock 'n' roll, such as the R&B songs that first acquired this label and styles like rockabilly that soon followed, continued to be predominantly in shuffle rhythms. By the 1960s, division of the beat into equal halves had become common practice in the new driving style of rock, and the occurrence of 12/8 metre relatively scarce. Although the move from triplets to even eighths might be seen as a simplification of metre, this shift supported further subdivision to sixteenth-note rhythms that were exploited in New Orleans R&B and funk.


2013 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 41 ◽  
Author(s):  
Antti Pajala

In a parliamentary system it is by definition justified to assume the government parties voting almost always in a unitary manner in plenary votes. In a multiparty system it is, however, hard to predict how the opposition groups vote. Few studies analysing government-opposition voting in the Finnish parliament Eduskunta were published during the 1960s and 1970s. This study provides similar analyses regarding the parliamentary years of 1991-2012. Combined the studies provide an insight into the government-opposition relations since World War II. The results show that before the 1990s the government-opposition division in plenary votes appeared rather clear and the political party groups’ positions followed the traditional left-right dimension. Since the 1990s, the government-opposition division has become greater. The governing coalition acts almost as a bloc while the opposition groups are divided into moderate and hard opposition. The opposition groups, however, appear in a more or less random order. Consequently, since the 1990s the left-right dimension has disappeared with respect to plenary voting.


Author(s):  
Todd Decker

The use of popular music in post-Vietnam Hollywood war films has varied depending on the war being depicted. Swing, the popular music of World War II, goes almost entirely unrepresented in films depicting that war. Films about Vietnam have exploited the rich resource of popular music from the 1960s to characterize significant racial and class differences among American soldiers, typically pitting black Motown and soul music against white country music. Draft scripts for Apocalypse Now reveal how that film might have used late 1960s rock to emphasize the pathological nature of the American effort in Vietnam. Popular music in films about the all-volunteer, post-hip hop military suggest that racial tensions have abated, with a racial mix of soldiers enjoying a variety of musics. Films about twenty-first-century soldiers have almost no popular music, eliding well-documented practices of contemporary soldiers and denying civilian audiences potential points of connection by way of popular culture.


Author(s):  
Anna Stirr

Nepal's twentieth-century tradition of leftist music, known as pragatisil git or progressive song, developed musically during the 1960s and 1970s along with state-sponsored nationalist genres meant to serve as musical representations of Nepali identity. The differences were primarily in the lyrics: pragatisil git's leftist themes were deemed too incendiary for a regime that forbade political organization. Composers writing songs for the national radio were encouraged to produce love songs, deemed apolitical and therefore safe. At first glance, communist pragatisil git avoids themes of love, in stark contrast to mainstream folk and popular music. Yet, while themes of romance are indeed absent from most Nepali communist music, a closer look demonstrates a strong concern with other forms of love and sentiment. This chapter focuses upon the theme of class love, examining how it is imagined to be socially transformative, and how it has changed through different communist parties' imaginings.


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