As described by professional bassist, Victor Wooten in the video below, musicians, music teachers, and scholars frequently compare learning music to learning a language (Ted-Ed, 2012).

(TED-Ed, 2012, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3yRMbH36HRE)

Music, whether written or aural, contains many of the same elements as written and spoken language. Musical notes, like phonemes, are the basic building blocks of music. Musical ideas like rhythm patterns or melodic patterns are like morphemes. Musical phrases are like syntax, creating meaning out of notes and musical patterns.

David Wish, teacher and founder of the popular music education program, Little Kids Rock, developed a framework that compares learning music to learning a language (Wish, 2014). This framework below:

(Wish, 2014, http://www.littlekidsrock.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/MusicAsALanguageAndModernBand.pdf)

In the framework, Wish (2014) compares the stages of learning music to the stages of learning a language. Interestingly, while Wish notes that in language learning to read and write at age 6 and up, musical literacy happens in high school or never. This goes against much of what music teachers are taught in university music education courses. Music teacher preparation programs place great emphasis on teaching teachers how to teach traditional musical literacy (learning to read and write with traditional music notation) from the earliest stages of musical learning.

Wish’s framework also contradicts how I taught middle school band for the first part of my teaching career. When I taught middle school band, I instructed students to get a method book that introduces students to reading traditional musical notation simultaneously to learning the sounds of the notes. I questioned this approach as I gained more experience teaching and noticed the more time I spent working with my students on listening skills, the more their overall musicianship improved (including their musical literacy).

My experience teaching music led me to think about traditional and new approaches to teaching music literacy and how pedagogy around music literacy is changing. Foremost, I taught a Rock Band class in which I utilized popular music pedagogy and the ideas in Wish's framework to teach my students how to play music. At no point in the class did we focus on traditional musical notation. However, the students were able to play, perform, and compose in musical genres that were important to them. My experience teaching Rock Band fundamentally changes my views of musical literacy. This literature review will examine past musical literacy practices and the issues they raise in today’s music educational landscape. I will also explore new methods for teaching music literacy through a multiliteracies approach.

(Sonnen, 2017, https://www.liturgicalartsjournal.com/2017/11/gregorian-chant-in-parish-music-as-art.html)

The earliest forms of written music notation came from the Roman Catholic Church in the form of chants. Before they were written down, chants were transmitted orally. Writing down chants allowed a uniform way of transmitting chants to churches across Europe (“Gregorian Chant,” 2020). It was not until the invention of the gramophone in 1877 that music was available to learn in ways other than written or oral transmission (“Phonograph,” 2020). In Western culture, this meant reading musical notation was the most efficient way to learn new pieces of music (classical or popular). Thus music education’s main goal became to produce musically literate pupils (those who could read musical notation).

In the early 20th Century, musicians Carl Orff and Zoltán Kodály streamlined early childhood music education with the development of the Orff Schulwerk and Kodály methodologies, respectively. Both methodologies place emphasis on “sound before symbol,” or learning what music sounds like before learning what it looks like. This ideology follows what Wish (2014) suggests in his comparison to music as a language. Students need to first hear and imitate music before they can read or write. However, Benedict (2009) suggests that implementations of the Orff Schulwerk and Kodály methods have strayed too far from their original intentions and that the method itself has become more important than the results. In other words, music educators that implement Orff or Kodály use the methods to quickly advance students to reading notation rather than let them explore music-making to it’s fullest extent before introducing notation. Nelson et al. (2017) echo this sentiment, explaining that once written notation is introduced in the Orff method, other elements of music-making like critical listening and improvisation are marginalized in the music classroom.

In the United States, Orff and Kodály are traditionally used in primary general music education classrooms. In secondary instrumental music education, where the large ensemble (band and orchestra) is the dominant form, the method book dominates music literacy teaching. Compare a method book to a textbook in science class. Concepts and lessons are laid out in a compact and concise manner. Method books serve as an efficient way for music teachers to quickly get their students to written music literacy. However, as Cohen (2017) notes, method books are exercise-heavy and students are easily disengaged in learning the mechanics of music. Students join music classes to learn music, not to play exercises (Cohen). Likewise, Strick (2017) suggests that the instrumental music method book places too much emphasis on visuals and teaches students that all the need to do is see the music rather than listen to the music.

The emphasis on traditional music literacy (learning to read and write music) has received backlash from the music and music education communities. This is in large part to a recognition that there is more than one way to be literate in music. The next section will explore these issues.

As music making changed over the past century, music educators and researchers questioned what it means to be musically literate. The idea that there are many ways to be musical started with musicologist Christopher Small and what he defines as musicking. He states:

The act of musicking establishes in the place where it is happening a set of relationships, and it is in those relationships that the meaning of the act lies. They are to be found not only between those organized sounds which are conventionally thought of as being the stuff of musical meaning but also between the people who are taking part, in whatever capacity, in the performance; and they model, or stand as a metaphor for, ideal relationships as the participants in the performance imagine them to be: relationships between person and person, between individual and society, between humanity and the natural world and even perhaps the supernatural world (Small, 1998, p. 9).

Musicking is the act of participating in music in any way, shape, or form. Small’s definition of musicking applies to musical performance however, some music scholars have taken the idea of musicking and applied it to musical literacy. In her groundbreaking research on popular music-making, Greene (2002) notes that the great majority of popular musicians have no formal training in reading music. This is not to say that popular musicians do not create musical products that are worthy of artistic measure. On the contrary, many popular musicians are groundbreaking social, political, or artistic figures of their time. Who is to say that the vast canon of the Beatles (who could not read music) is anything less than Bach or Beethoven? Likewise, Greene’s (2008) research on informal music learning in school settings found that students were able to come to equally deep and purposeful musical meanings while learning music through recordings and working collaboratively. Green’s research indicates a shift towards musical literacy that is deeper than reading the music notes on the page. Her informal learning pedagogy emphasizes aural skills through listening, collaboration, and creating before learning written music- all skills that popular musicians use when creating music.

Likewise, Kratus (2007), in his article discussing the state of music education and its decline in public schools, states that “school music has drifted too far from out-of-school music” (p. 46). This, he argues, is partly due to the fact that out-of-school music is learned differently than in-school music. The chart below elaborates:

(Kratus, 2007, p. 47)

The more intimate and creative affordances of out-of-school music make it more appealing to students who want to create more meaningful experiences from their music-making.

Finally, while Green’s (2002) work focused on pop and rock musicians, Kruse (2016) evaluated the role of in-school music experiences from the perspective of a hip-hop musician. Kruse found similar themes in the attitudes of hip-hop musicians towards music. The musicians Kruse interviewed felt a strong connection to hip-hop vernacular and took their music-making very seriously. Although traditional music literacy as defined by Western classical music was not a part of their music experiences, they were deeply literate in the meaning-making associated with hip-hop music.

Greene (2002), Kratus (2007), and Kruse (2016) all argue for the expanded view of music-making and meaning in music education. However, none of them argues for the abandonment of teaching music notation. What they do promote is an expanded view of music literacy- one that includes all forms of musical meaning-making including and not limited to reading and writing traditional music notation. A multiliteracies approach to music literacy might help guide this expanded meaning.

As Cope and Kalantzis note in their work on multiliteracies, the changing world of multimedia requires an expanded view of literacy and meaning-making (Education at Illinois, 2016a, 0:30). This expanded view of literacy suggests there are multiple modes of meaning-making and that modern meaning-makers switch constantly between these modes (Education at Illinois, 2016b, 1:17). While Cope and Kalantzis take a birds-eye view of literacy and apply it to all forms of meaning-making, the following discussion will focus specifically on meaning-making in music and how a multiliteracies approach can benefit music educators and students.

A growing body of research from music educators is dedicated to the idea of multiliteracies in music education (Benedict, 2012; Skerret, 2018; Torres & Souza, 2008; Tremblay-Beaton, 2015; Walker, 2005). All agree that a multiliteracies approach, one that creates musical meaning-making through a variety of modes, is best for students. For example, Tremblay-Beaton (2015) notes that multiliteracies “gives space for students to incorporate their varied meaning-making practices from home, popular culture, technology, sports, and culture into making music in the classroom” (p. 2579). By allowing students to make music that is relevant to them, they are more engaged in the process and are more likely to continue making music. However, Benedict (2012) asserts that this does not mean music students have free reign of the music classroom. Instead, she suggests that music “pedagogy and curricular goals would take into account small group engagements, generative repertoire, the use of multiple literacies in outreach and community research, composition and production projects” (Benedict, 2012, p. 157). In other words, music classes would encourage a collaborative and connected approach where “winning the band festival” is replaced by “what can we do with our music to make an impact on our community?”

Another theme to emerge from the literature on multiliteracies and music education is the role of creativity. Creativity is touted as a pillar of arts education but some music education scholars have questioned how music teachers often prioritize performance ahead of creativity (Sovansky et al., 2016; Wall, 2018). Torres and Souza (2008) found that a multiliteracies approach to composition where students were encouraged to incorporate scenes from their everyday life into their works resulted in an engaged and meaningful experience with writing music. Likewise, Harrop-Allin (2017) found that children engaged in multimodal musical game-playing had an increased capacity to design and be inventive in the games they were creating. When afforded the chance to use multiple ways of creating and playing music, students can develop deep, meaningful experiences with music that hopefully lead to its lifelong appreciation.

So what does this mean in practice? Cope and Kalantzis suggest that a multiliteracies approach takes into account written, visual, spatial, tactile, gestural, audio, and oral meanings (Education at Illinois, 2016b). The video below demonstrates how a high school music program is transformed by using these multiple modes. They use technology to visually represent music through Digital Audio Workstations like Garage Band and Pro Tools. They gain hands-on, tactile experience by experimenting with and playing different music tech tools like Ableton and digital drum machines. They communicate their musical creations through audio and oral representation. 

(Education Week, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=16&v=qRHeGxcDR2U&feature=emb_title) 

These students are engaged in music-making that is lasting and meaningful. They are not just reading notes from a page of music and interpreting someone else's music. They are actively engaged in creating music. By leveraging a multiliteracies approach in a program like this, students become musically literate on many different levels. 

Learning music is like learning a language as described by Wish (2014) in his “Music as a Second Language” project. However, a musically literate student does not necessarily need to be proficient in reading traditionally notated music. By taking a multiliteracies approach to teaching music, teachers can help students access deep meaning in music learning through a variety of modes. This might mean composing a song by creating a graphic score (see photo below) for the musicians to play from or by composing digital music with the use of a Digital Audio Workstation.

Graphic score composed by students at the International Contemporary Ensemble in the Bronx (International Contemporary Ensemble, 2018, https://www.iceorg.org/blog/2018/4/9/graphic-scores-at-upbeat-in-the-bronx)

Scholars agree that traditional notation should not be thrown out in favor of alternate ways of musical meaning-making (Green, 2008; Benedict, 2012). Reading traditional notation is a valuable tool that all music-makers benefit from. However, musical literacy should be expanded to include diverse ways of meaning-making in music.

My experience teaching Rock Band led me to question traditional ways of teaching musical literacy. My students were able to create meaningful musical experiences learning music by ear, performing with their peers, and composing new music without knowing anything about musical notation. My experiences support what current research in multiliteracies and music education literacy has found.