Episode 2.2: Dr. Lucy Green

[MUSIC] >> Welcome everyone, thanks for joining us for another episode of the Musicast podcast. Today, Maggie, Marissa and I are joined with Dr. Lucy Green. Dr. Green, thanks so much for taking the time to speak with us and answer a few questions. It's a real pleasure. Thank you very much for inviting me and it's lovely to meet you all as well. >> It's lovely to meet you also. I was wondering if you could take a moment and just give our listeners a little bit of a background, Dr. Green, of yourself and your career in music and music education. >> Well, I suppose it's a lifelong thing, really. Although I do remember saying to my parents when I was about 16 or 17 that I definitely, definitely, definitely did not want to be a school teacher. [LAUGH] And of course, I've ended up working my entire life in a classroom-based education. And I worked for six years in schools. So that's how little I knew myself at the time. But when I think back to it, the seeds were always there. I was born and brought up in India and grew up in Bombay. We did come back to the UK for a six months period. There was a lot of two in frame, different schools and some instability. And that has affected my sociological outlook on life. I think it's made me very conscious of how different assumptions, beliefs, values, practices, not to mention food, clothes, languages. So totally different in one part of the world to another. And I think all children who move from one part of the world to another have a different take on what is taken to be normal. So that was one seed, I think, of my interest in the sociology of music. And musically, I never heard music in Bombay that was live or recorded. Hardly ever, because we had no television, no radio at the time. My family didn't, and I didn't know any families who did. And there was no, we didn't have a take record of anything. So I very rarely heard either live or recorded music. But the first time I heard some live music in Bombay was a jazz trio. And it was a pianist. And I was sitting with my back as the pianist. I was the guest of another family. And I thought it would be rude to turn around and look. But I spent the whole meal with my ears kind of bent backwards, because I'd never heard anything like this before. You know, I just thought it was fascinating. And I asked my mom for piano lessons. That all slightly went wrong, because there wasn't a piano teacher in Bombay, who you could do it. But I was, anyway, a long story. That's how my interest in music first manifested itself. Let's put it like that. So the seeds of being a sociologist of music will be there. And the education thing, you know, it did come in a lot later. And I do remember when I was about 18, and I was going to go to what we here call, or used to call, teacher training college, to train to be a music teacher. And to be honest, I didn't really want to go. I was kind of being pushed into it. My parents were just about to move to Japan, and they didn't want me running about UK without anything to do. And they did kind of push me into it. But I do remember getting really, really excited when I started having some ideas about how I could teach something. And the classroom. So that was the earliest seed of putting the three things together as sociology, music, and education. And from there, when I finished my Bachelor of Education, which was my teacher training and included music and education, I'm sure it's very similar to what you have in the States. I, by that time, I had become fascinated by these ideas. And so I went straight to do the masters, but it wasn't in music education. There were no masters in music education in those days. Certainly not in this country. And I don't know if there was one in the States or anywhere else. But I did a masters in sociology and aesthetics of music, and musical, I'm an analytic methodology, and it is brilliant, brilliant course. And then I, you know, the ideas from my first book and all the interests that I've had ever since were forming. So I then went straight on to my doctorate. Then during that time I taught the piano privately. And then after my doctorate, I taught you a sixth-form college. We call it here. It's a college for 16 to 18 year olds. I was director of music there for a year. Then I was assistant music teacher in a big high school. And then I became head of music in another high school. And then I went from there to the Institute of Education where I still am. So that's my sort of brief positive history, I suppose. Was it exciting to find having not had music as active of a part of your life in the early stage of your life? Was it exciting to bring music during piano lessons or working at a high school to those younger age students? You know, that's, nobody's ever asked me that. But I think there might be something with that there. Yes, because when I did first experience in live music or indeed recording music in a big way, it wasn't until I was about 11, 10, 11 when I'd come back to the UK. And it was immensely exciting. I found incredibly exciting to be at school in a choir and to have this wonderful sound around me in a church where we had a Christmas Carol service. And I do feel a huge motivation to share that excitement with children. Yes. And whether that has got anything to do is the fact that I haven't had much music in my earlier life or not, I really don't know. But it's an interesting question to consider. So I think it's very interesting to hear about what excited you as a child, kind of in contrast to what a lot of your work has surrounded throughout your research career. And correct me if I'm wrong, but a lot of your work has surrounded informal music learning. So can you talk to us a little bit about what sparked your interest particularly in that area and how informal learning music can or has impacted music classrooms really around the world? Yeah, cool. Well, that also goes back to early times. Because when I did come to the UK, I was mid-ten. Although I said I had a fantastic musical experience, that was an experience of live music at my secondary school, my high school. But I also was very excited by popular music of the time, in 1967-68 this was. So it was the Beatles and the Roans, Dunes and the Who and the Kinks and other bands in the UK. Also some bands from the USA. I just thought of the monkeys. I mean, I was only 10, so forgive me, but I thought the monkeys were great. And I do still think some of their songs, actually. Mickey Dole was a pretty good singer. Yes, I was already excited by both popular music and classical music by that time. And that has carried with me all the way through. So how I eventually came to be looking at informal learning, my first book was on musical ideology and musical meaning in the school, in school, curriculum really, and in the beliefs of teachers. That was looking at the pop classical division and why popular music was excluded from school curriculums at that time, almost completely. So the pop thing was in there and the classical industry. Because I myself, obviously, I had piano lessons and I was training as a classical pianist, but I had this pop thing. I'm sure a lot of us share that. And increasingly younger people are coming up who have been there's no issue, is there if you're a classical musician about also listening to another pop music or indeed the other way around. But in those days, in the 1960s and '70s, there was a really big divide between the two. And most adults who listened to one of them wouldn't be listening to the other one. And there was a lot of disdain as well from them. So some of the classical music world who thought that popular music was just love-earshing and there were books written about it. There were newspaper articles saying it was all nonsense and it's bad for young people. this kind of thing. So anyway, I went from there to I took the theory of musical meaning further and considered in my second book of how it relates to gender and that was an interest that I'd grown for a long time as well. And then the third book was about how popular musicians learned and that came about because as a trained notation reading classical pianist I was always fascinated how pop and also jazz and traditional musicians could learn how they actually did it the mechanics of what happened that enabled them to play sometimes so incredibly well without ever having seen a notebook and down without ever having had a teacher. So my study of how popular musicians have learned came about because of that interest. And I called it informal learning because I think that's quite a good just an everyday description for the way that they learn. But it's been taken up and people often refer to it as being a part of education but to me informal learning can be adapted for an educational setting but it's never going to be exactly the same thing. So informal learning in education is an adaptation and an adoption of some of the even many of the main aspects of informal learning as it's because in the school or in the world outside the school which it's not exactly the same thing. I think there was another part to your question after that wasn't there but I slightly forgot what I think you were saying what is the role of informal learning now in classrooms? Yeah particularly in music classrooms what has what has the impact been since this idea has surfaced? Well it starts in the UK where of course our music head system as I'm sure you know is well different to yours. We basically have general music everybody does what I think you call general music which is I understand Maggie's area and we when we have banned an orchestra and choir and that sort of thing it's all extra curricular so everyone's doing general music and inside that general music class there will be some kids who may be also play in band or orchestra but they'll only be a handful of them and of course in many schools there are no bands and no orchestras because it's not mandatory part of the curriculum a lot of schools were very impoverished musically in that way. So coming into a completely different situation I felt when I did my study of informal of popular musicians learning you know one of the things that that really struck me was the huge motivations of these people felt when they were young the huge amount of commitment the huge enjoyment that they got from what they were doing and how little enjoyment and motivation was being expressed by children in classroom so it was it was I would say 50% of what I wanted to do was to increase motivation but I also noted from the informal learning study that there were a number of skills really really valuable skills that any musician would want to have which were being developed by the musicians through these methods of learning particularly of course oral skills the ability to play things by ear and improvisation and so I thought you know it's a really valid thing to bring into the school classroom. The first teachers I worked with some of them were at the very beginning really quite skeptical I would say even cynical in some cases that you know that any that this was going to be a valuable thing to do be that it wasn't going to result in absolute chaos and all that sort of thing but very very quickly in most cases after only one or two lessons of trying an adopted form of informal learning in school classrooms that teachers utterly changed their minds utterly because they saw and heard the children doing things that they had never heard or seen them do before and these things were fundamentally musical things so that that was brilliant and as I think you know it grew from there a project by the name of musical futures which is now an international project was funding me to do this work and it has but at one time I think about 40% of all schools or was it 60% of all schools in England were using informal learning or using a musical futures approach which was based originally on informal learning and then of course it was opened up in Australia where I think they're a lot of people using it. Singapore they don't call it musical futures but they have a lot of informal learning and they you know they came over here to see how it was working over here as did the Australians and then in Canada when the rights started and musical futures there and I'm there's Somon Brazil we're just talking to a group of people in Mexico who want to start it up there so it's rather taken off yes. How do you think music teachers can structure their classrooms to create these informal learning settings of course they're different in an education setting than a real natural informal learning environment but as a general music teacher I want to create spaces like this I've done some music play with students but what kind of advice would you give teachers who want to create these kind of informal learning settings in their classroom? Well the first advice would be practical advice which is that if you haven't got some spaces literal spaces not metaphorical spaces where the kids can get away from each other then it's going to be extremely challenging and possibly not even worth trying. At least not during class time maybe after school when there are more classrooms free or something like that but if you have a classroom I mean how bigger your classes maybe 30 children in a class or something? Minor much smaller I think elementary general music classes are usually between like 16 to 25 depending on the school. Okay so but yours isn't an elementary school not a high school. Right yeah. Okay so I would give different advice to a high school teacher and to an elementary school teacher so if I could start with a high school which is where the work started a high school general music teacher wanting to do these things I would say if you've got some space it could be the corridor outside the room it could be an instrument cupboard but some space where the children can actually hear what they're doing it's really really important. Beyond that the informal learning practices is very very simple. The kids are allowed to choose their own friendship groups and that means the teacher not saying you two we can't work together because you must behave they're allowed to choose their own piece of music and that means the teacher not saying you can't play that it's too difficult for you. The only stricture we have which you don't even need to explain to kids do you they can't bring in songs with racist sexist or violent words but there's plenty of songs that they still like that don't have words like that so the teacher doesn't say you can't do that song because it's too difficult for you. The kids get to choose their instruments from whatever is available and my musical future's project is often associated with having lots and lots of money because we had funding thrust into the schools and lots and lots of electric guitars and John Gibson things like that but it's not actually the case when I started the work I was working in schools that just had zyla phones and you know the occasional electric keyboard and hand percussion and things like that and the schools in Brazil do it with no instruments actually. So third thing is the kids choose their own instruments from what's available. Fourth thing is they are asked by the teacher to listen to the song and try to work out how to play it amongst themselves and well that I said five things but that's about it really I mean what tends to happen is that the huge amount of enthusiasm the kids get so excited about this and they they can start very quickly much more quickly than we think. I had this phrase that the teacher's role is to stand back observe what the children children are doing and try to understand the goals that the children are setting for themselves. So this is not teacher saying no you don't hold the guitar like that, no you are playing the wrong note, no you're out of time. This is not what it's about, it's about the teacher observing, empathising with the goals the kids are setting for themselves and then after one or two lessons the kids are asking the teacher for help and where they're not you might get a child who you know is sitting there not engaging then it's the question of course the teacher will go up and say what's up should I help you to do this should I show you how to do that and just gently guiding the group so that they get more and more close to the desired outcome. Now in the elementary school I would say it's more difficult to give children that amount of autonomy. The informal learning adapted for the classroom approach was intended for age 13 to 14 year olds but for younger children or indeed children with special educational needs which we have done some work with. They just need a similar approach but more guidance and if they can choose their own songs it really really helps. But on the other hand in the elementary school and again if you don't have little spare classrooms or corridors or cupboards where they can all separate you can you can do the work in the whole classroom and you can have a group vote on what school what's on to do for example. That's quite helpful. It refound it was one of the most important things that they could choose and that they could be doing music that they identified with later on with the secondary high school students when asked to do the or given the chance to do the same product again we found them bringing in a much wider selection of music. The first time they did it they just bought in music that was immediately in the chance that they were listening to. When we repeated it again a few months later they brought in their parents music they brought in some traditional music from their ethnic origin because they knew what they were doing and there there is had developed so that they could actually choose more wisely. But for the elementary school they're going to need more guidance on that to start with and there's a lot of free resources on the musical futures website which are open to teachers in any country both for secondary high school and also for elementary schools which are based on the informal learning method but much more so direct or really teacher directed and had to logically organized. Oh sorry I'm curious this is kind of a two part question. Do you present this as a unit within a year's worth of curriculum where they're doing prescribed music learning how to read music more formal learning it or is this a more philosophical approach where this is your every day in your classroom all year long. That's a really interesting question it's certainly not every day in the classroom all year long I want to dispense with that idea immediately. Some people I think imagine that the informal learning approach advocates children you know people can say rather silly and untrue things like the kids just muck about all day long and they don't learn anything and that's absolutely nonsense of course. But I would never advocate using it as a replacement for the traditional curriculum I've always seen it as filling a gap that I perceive in the traditional curriculum where children are taught marvelous things I value very highly you know how to play their instruments how to read notation how to count how to listen to each other but they're not taught how to pick up a tune by ear how to work out chords by ear how to improvise how to play along together how to learn a song by ear and these are really crucial music musicianly skills that I think any musician would like to have including any classical musician so the idea of bringing this into the curriculum was to fill a gap not to replace anything whatsoever that was already there and secondly as I said to increase motivation so yeah my sort of ideal scenario for the informal learning model is for it to be maybe a six week module six lessons something like that and also for it to be revisited at other times you know when the children having done it once will approach it with more knowledge and skills than they did the first time but for it to be into woven with other traditional aspects that the teacher would be doing as a matter of course but one thing that's very interesting I think that many many teachers have told me I haven't done formal research on this but anecdotally a lot of teachers who've been through some training or education concerning this have said okay it didn't it hasn't changed my curriculum and it hasn't actually been incorporated I have never incorporated the informal learning model in itself in its pure form but what it's done is it's changed the way I think about children's musicality it's changed the way that I perceive my children's musicality it's made me realise that children actually have a great deal more musical skill hidden than I was previously aware of and also it revealed to us a large number of children who in every single class we did research in this is a research finding there were children identified by the teacher who previous to the project were considered to be either unmusical uninterested and disruptive and it was very often these were the exact children who came round in the informal learning and became leaders of their groups who showed themselves to have a wealth of musical talent and motivation and leadership qualities that their teachers just never seen before so even without doing the actual full sort of informal learning thing a certain amount of it even doing it for two lessons is likely to reveal these things and make teachers more conscious of what they're doing as teachers one one teacher said you know I used to be she was she described herself as a control freak and this is only one example there are many others as well she said before I did the project I used to be constantly on top of everybody you know if there was any disruption at all I would make the whole class stop and come back and behave and start again and she said I now realise that I'm actually stopping them from learning by doing that and that you can leave kids to learn if they're motivated by the task that's the crucial thing then you can leave them to learn on their own and a lot of the kids many many of the kids told us that they learn more when there isn't somebody there telling you you're getting it wrong because they they're not so threatened and be they learn by trial and error in a lot of them said they learn in a kind of deeper way and a lot of the kids it was revealed had never actually realised this is 13 and 14 years they never actually realised that music was made in their words of layers that they just thought music was lyrics so many of them said that to us without us putting that words into them we just thought music was nothing but the lyrics I never knew about all the underneath bits before I never realised that there were all these different layers in the music so there years were opened in a way I don't that I think will remain open for the rest of their life I don't think they'll ever close but I do think that some children from the ways they talked could have gone through adult life never what we musicians call listening to music just hearing it you know to slowly follow that up I do think that one of the things that scares people away of trying these things is that loss of control within their classroom and it is it's so important to give the students that opportunity if you weren't able to work in a hands-on capacity with someone that wanted to give this a shot what would what suggestions or advice would you offer them to combat that fear of losing control in the classroom for their first attempts at informal learning I would say just give it a little try because you will find that you don't lose control you will if you do the actual full informal learning to module where you literally let the children choose their own groups, choose their own music, teach themselves, choose their own instruments. If you literally do that, you will not feel out of control. If you interfere with that and you have to do it, by keeping on saying no, you can't do that, no, you shouldn't be in this room, no, you get out of it, then it won't work and you'll blame it on the model. But I'm confident enough it's been done in enough countries and different contexts, but I'm confident enough to say that if you do it like that, you won't feel out of control because the motivation will be high, the kids glue themselves to the task, the kids get on task and they don't want, they're enjoying it so they don't want to disrupt the lesson. If they disrupt the lesson, you'll call the halt to the lesson, right? They don't want that and you'll find, I think you'll see things that you've not seen before. Okay, I don't want to paint it all with primrose spectacles as if there won't be any problems whatsoever, but I think that the problems that you will perceive will be no more than the usual problems you would expect to have and could be less. Sorry, I'm just checking out the time. We have questions for time for about two or so more questions if you guys have anything super pressing before I ask. Yeah, this kind of circling back to something that you mentioned at the beginning about kind of bridging the gap between classical music and popular music. And I find that it still feels like a gap in, I think in my teaching, I think my students feel that I think the other teachers kind of have like this idea that I teach classical music or I'm teaching pop music and they view them as very different things. So I guess I'm wondering how you how you view that, how you kind of bridge the gap in the rest of in the rest of the year when you're not doing an informal learning module, what that kind of looks like for you. I think it might be different in the States. Popular music has been a part of our curriculum here in the UK for coming on 40, 40, 50 years and it's entered into the States schooling system much, much more recently. So these things never change overnight, do they? But I think there are a number of things you can do to integrate the two. So I mean, for example, if you're an elementary teacher so you're probably not doing things like listening out for ostinatio or something but you might be, I don't know what you do in your lessons, but if you're listening out for ostinatio in a classical piece, you can listen out for bass riffs in a popular piece. So you can actually compare as well as contrast certain things that are in common with the two kinds of music. I think it's a matter of every teacher's own personal belief. If they see the value or hear the value of both popular music and classical music themselves, then this will come out in their approach and they won't create a block between the two. But I think there's a lot of pressure and as I say, more so in your country than in some other countries that parents might not want to have popular music in the curriculum, maybe the head of school doesn't want to have it in the curriculum. So it's not something that's going to change overnight, it's a cultural change which is going to be slow, but the only way to make cultural changes is hit by bit. And also on that, something else that people sometimes don't know or if they know they forget about it. With my informal learning model, having done it with children's own choice of music, I've then did it in a more structured way where I chose a piece of popular music and broke it down into riffs and then the kids did their own choice again and then we did improvising and composing. Then I did informal learning with classical music and I chose classical music because we all know, but also we had actually data from the children saying they hated it. This is 13, 14-year-olds in general music classes. They were extremely rude about classical music. So when we gave them a task where they were asked to learn to copy a piece of classical music in their groups, they were not too pleased, but they all did the task, they all produced something and afterwards about nearly half of them said. They felt they now understood classical music better. They didn't dislike it so much. They didn't think that the people who play it had just stupid showoffs and things like that. So there was a barrier there broken down amongst the children's views themselves. I'm not saying they all went off and started listening to Beethoven's symphonies, you know, a talk, but their ears again were more open and their prejudices against classical music. We're a little bit broken down. One of the things that this is just supplementary, I guess, for the listeners. One of the things that keeps coming to mind as you talk is on Hulu McCartney 321, which is a six-part series with Palma Cartney came out this summer. And it was, I think, it's a beautiful example of how obviously a pop star who was idolized around the world was an informal learner. He's sitting at the piano or playing guitar based. He can't even label the chords properly. And I thought that was hilarious. He admitted to the world that he cannot read music. One of the Beatles. And it's just. None of them can. I mean, none of the band members of any of the huge bands who made worldwide success in the second half of the 20th century, all those in the jazz bands and the others. Most of those also couldn't read music and they didn't have tuition. It's incredible phenomenon, isn't it? And how are we to ignore that? Where music edge cases for Heaven's sake? Yeah. And I think the other thing that I found so interesting, which I didn't realize, though, was that he was referencing fantastic classical works as influence on these pop songs. And so he could name them exactly and make the connection. And I was just. I was a Beatles stand before this, but I was truly amazed listening to him talk and it just. It's all coming coming together as I listen to you speak. Yeah. One of my findings when I did the interviews with the pop musicians was that because that is an open you see, in that way that I was just describing that even our little kids in the classroom had only done this for a few weeks, a few lessons once a week, a few weeks, their ears were opened because playing by ear opens your ears. And so I found that the pop musicians who I interviewed were very wide open to classical music. There was none of this pop classical division coming from musicians. It comes from, I think, in the past some classical musicians towards pop music. And that's because they've not played by ear and they don't respect what's going on in there. They don't understand things like how tight is the band or the bass player is coming in just fractionally before the beat, all the way through. Little subtleties like that. But the pop musicians have had their ears wide open to classical music. And I've never met in my life a pop musician who didn't respect classical music. That's, I find that incredibly interesting because I'm from the flips that I'm a classical musician, I think first and then you know, I obviously love pop music, but that's I think a really interesting tidbit to hear. My last question for you and I was hoping to kind of get away from the COVID questions, but I don't know, at least here it looks like maybe we won't be so lucky this year. In a COVID or hopefully post COVID world, is there a way to do this online? Is it more valuable in our classrooms where we're not putting on concerts, you know, like our big formal concerts right now? I'm just curious to know your opinion about how COVID might change how teachers are looking at this and what the uses might be. Yeah, I mean, I think you probably know as much about it as I do really, because you've probably seen as I have so many hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of examples on YouTube and make music and other things like that where choirs and bands are doing stuff online in spite of COVID or because of COVID rather. And I just can say an answer to that question, I'm no expert on technology or on lockdowns, but I think there's absolutely miles and miles that people can go doing this kind of thing through technology if we're in the down situation or any other kind of situation where we can't be faced to face personal reasons. Well, I'm taking a look at the time. I could sit here and talk to you about this for hours, but if people are interested in your work or musical futures or any of the other resources that you have available to folks, where would you suggest they turn? Well, musicalfutures.org is the UK model, which is the original model where it all started, and then there's musicalfutures.international.org, which is the Australian one, which is also working in parts of Asia, and there's lots of information on both of those and lots of, as I said, free resources for teachers. If people want to look at the background to the work, probably if they just Google me, if they're all there, go to Amazon, website or something, for my books, the different books that I've written on different aspects of this work. The one on how pop criminalization is called how popular musicians from learning. You can't miss that one. The one on bringing this all into school classrooms is called music, informal learning, and the school. You can't really miss what the books are about because I gave them quite simple titles. Anybody wanting to read in more detail, perhaps we'd want to go to find one of those. Well, thank you so much. We really appreciate you taking the time and speaking to us about this. I know I felt like I was talking to a celebrity this morning. I've read so much of your research, and I've been following your work since I started in music education. So thank you so much. You're absolutely nice. Thank you. I mean, I've had a lovely conversation with this three of you, and it's been really, really, really nice and you've asked some great questions. So I'm really pleased to be in touch with you, and I hope we'll keep in touch. Absolutely. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Thank you very much. (upbeat music)