Hannah Quinn’s chapter “Perspectives from a new generation secondary school music teacher” chronicles her transition from piano player to electronic musician. Quinn recalls how her high school examinations in music required her to compose and how the result was “something vaguely classical sounding” (p. 23). From a peer Quinn discovered electronic music and became enamored with it. Quinn soon went from being a listener of the genre to a composer. She is a classically trained pianist with a degree in electro-acoustic composition. She has been educated in two very different schools of thought, but she seemed to find more enjoyment in being an electronic musician. Quinn writes:
Perhaps it was something do with the solitary hours which I had spent writing bits and pieces, the individual engaged with a computer, which allowed that deep relationship to develop. While I seem to have learned to enjoy both working alone and with others, my bedroom studio was a place of solitude, a private world where I was able to take things at my own pace, a place to both lose and find myself (p.24).
What Quinn reveals is that in composing she experienced what Csikszentmihalyi (1990) calls “flow.” Based on the experiences of Quinn and PJ mentioned in Finney (2007), it is apparent that music technology enables musicers to experience flow. Although Quinn does not state it explicitly, I believe that she is more partial to her experiences in electronic music than classical performance because there were more flow experiences. She describes the challenges and rewards of composing, the asking of questions and the resulting problem solving.
Despite Quinn’s own personal leanings, she describes her classroom setting as one that balances the teaching of different Musics. She strives to demonstrate to her students the value of all Musics and exposes them to musicing exercises in all of them. She perceives music technology as a tool to engage students, “music technology offers a way into music, specifically composition, which is potentially free from traditional constraints and makes the study of music more accessible to more students” (p. 28). Like Finney (2007) she is skeptical of the efficacy of traditional music teaching,
I am left wondering about how students without the kind of privileged background that I had can be expected to use classical traditions creatively. Many of the schemes of learning devised for the first three years of secondary school are in danger of becoming less and less artistic as we strive to pass on the beacon of traditional knowledge to a generation for whom rondo, the concerto, and phrase lengths have little relevance or meaning. Standardized curricula seeking standardized outcomes are likely to be disturbing to the creative professional musician (p. 28).
I appreciate Quinn’s frank honestly, but if all Musics are to be treated equally in a classroom environment, then music educators need to find ways to make music deemed “traditional” relevant to students. It should be acknowledged that electronic music has constraints, while it may seem to be free of form, the method in which it is constructed is inherently limiting and this issue will be discussed in the following section. Both Finney (2007) and Quinn (2007) emphasize the importance of music in action which aligns with Elliott’s view of musicing (1995). Despite their biases towards electronic compositon, they give a voice to a Music that is underrepresented in most school music programs. A Music that music educators should be utilizing in composition activities. Through composing in the style of electronica students can gain valuable musicing skills.
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