The Known and Unknown

Can music education transform society?

Welcome new subscribers! This piece is a conversation about ideas from the past weekend—on pedagogy, society, and of course, music. I hope you enjoy.

Standing tall at the lectern in a large room of wood and glass, scholar-musician Dr. Nduduzo Makhathini rested his left hand on its edge and spoke about the relationships music teachers have with knowledge in the form of their curricula.

Music is notoriously difficult to talk about—in other words, it is challenging to conceptualize and put into language. Our attempts over the course of history to define music, to capture it into a formal system of harmony or musical theory, bear the scars of those difficulties. This shows up in the way music is taught in universities, and by extension the k-12 music class. 

The music that has been formalized into a curriculum often does not and cannot relate to the local communities that surround the institutions that teach the music curriculum. Over time, this creates a huge disparity between the types of knowledge passed down in a formal structure and the knowledge that exists within the local communities that have not been formalized and are therefore not seen or taught in the music classrooms. 

This scenario, which was true in South African jazz over the past century¹ and is true in the contemporary public school classrooms in America, begs for the music educator to take a critical look at his or her own relationship with the ways of knowledge that are present within their classrooms and learning environments.

Knowledge shapes our culture, so what better place to enhance a culture than places of learning? Can we reimagine our classrooms as places of flourishing?

Our relationship with musical knowledge matters.

A good place to start reimagining is with music itself. Knowledge, whether of music or something else, is dynamic and lives within the learner. 

Knowledge is alive, Nduduzo said to the teachers, but when it becomes formalized into a curriculum, or made into one view, or one way, it dies. Just as a thing needs to die before it can be studied in a lab, a formalized curriculum captures a shadow of what was once there. 

The way harmony is taught in university courses—as a set of rules and propositions to follow—is something like a thin slice of an organism under a microscope. It is a squashed version of the real thing. For example, part writing is often taught through rule memorization. Make sure the seventh resolves down, and avoid consecutive perfect intervals. We do not get a feel for why this is and why every other “rule” harmonizes with the natural laws that account for what sounds good to us. Instead of discovering our laws of music, we learn the rules of legacy traditions. This way puts a formalized structure over processes that are ancient in origin and deeply unconscious. The curriculum fixes something that was alive before. 

Music transcription is a great place to see this fundamental problem in a dynamic setting.

Every musician who writes music down immediately knows about the loss of fidelity when musical sound becomes a dot and symbol on the page. Just as transcription kills the richness of musical detail, or of what was, and turns it into something flat and two-dimensional, formalized music theory flattens the culture’s present understanding of harmony as an emotional and spiritual language.

The deadening has become the driving force behind what we see in our culture: a loss of musical luster. How can we solve this? How can we reshape our relationships with the score, and with formalized knowledge, so that it instead becomes a source of life? 

The process of formalizing knowledge

At the lectern, Nduduzo observed that formalized knowledge is knowledge that has moved from the known to the unknown to allow for new knowing. He cast a light on the movement, or translation, of knowledge into a curriculum. To see the origins of formal knowledge, and sense of what is lost, we can look again to transcription.

When I was transcribing a violin improvisation by composer Jessie Montgomery, I had to capture something that exists within and nowhere else in the external world: the music she was playing on her violin. 

The recording was the first material manifestation of something spiritual—rhapsodic and free, refusing to be pinned down.

My first task in writing it down was to establish where the downbeat was. The first fixture. Then, a time signature overlays a Cartesian grid over the sound. 

Jessie played beautifully dynamic rhythms that inspired me to notate using odd bars of 9 and 11 sixteenth notes, interspersed with bars of 3 and 4 quarter notes. I remember having to subdivide one measure down to the 32nd note to fix to the page what I heard in the sound. What’s left after this process is rhythm on a score: a representation of something meant to be a living reality. 

The colossal benefit of a score is the possibility for another musician to rediscover the music within, allowing it to be re-performed in a new setting. Performance is a kind of new knowing. Transcription formalizes musical knowledge, transforming familiar music into something unknown for the learner, leading to a new knowing of what was once known.

This phrase “new knowing” stood out to me when I first heard Nduduzo mention it for four reasons. It smiles at the idea that music is participatory and dialectical, not fixed. It acknowledges that confronting the unknown is central to a learner’s experience. And it captures the optimism of a new and living way of human being. The reality of new knowing contains the noble belief that knowledge is something meant to be lived, and not merely known. 

The transformative arc of knowledge

The final and perhaps strongest reason is that the structures of great works of art reveal connections between new knowing and personal transformation. 

The story of formalized knowledge—from the known to the unknown towards new knowing—analogizes to the hero myth and beyond, including the structures of songs and sonata forms. The patterns are embedded within one another. The old hero inhabits the known before receiving the call that leads him to the great unknown to face a danger, win a treasure, and return home hopefully utterly transformed. This is a curious connection: why should the behavior of knowledge mimic the spine of our central myths and stories? 

It goes even further. The triangular narrative behind our stories—the rising action, climax, and falling action or resolution—also mirrors the alchemy of institutionalized knowledge. The narrative structures of personal transformation even show up in symphonic music alone. We can see a similar arc in sonata forms with their exposition, development, and recapitulation of musical themes. Bridget Barkan, a songwriter who led a workshop this summer for music teachers at Carnegie Hall, introduced my favorite new model for this universal arc. Imagine a monomyth as a beginning, an ending, and a re-beginning. I thought her teaching was brilliant. The idea that the return home in a sonata represents a new beginning conveys the sense of hope and familiarity we feel as the piece approaches its end.

This three-step process is so foundational to how we interpret reality that it can be found in the atoms of tonal-musical experience: the relationships between intervals and modulations. Here, A and C are two notes or keys, and B represents the unique inner connection between them. The pattern, which occurs in all of the arts of time, is a key to understanding that knowledge is meant to be transformational, and not static, not fixed.

Knowledge sharing must focus on the human learner.

Is this universal arc enough to bring life back into our curricula? Maybe not. Maybe there is a problem with the concept of universality itself. 

Knowledge, whether formal or informal, contains the seeds of personal transformation. We saw that in the art of transcription, and see it in the way we must participate openly with what we study in order to learn. 

The informal knowledge of the local communities is missing from formal curricula. Every young person in the class, every listener in the concert hall, every citizen in the community is each their own universe of perspective, each a sacred point of view. Okay, so how can we find unity from this multiplicity? 

In Butterflyz by Alicia Keys, each musician’s contribution is part of something greater—a harmony that transcends individual performances, creating a “pluriverse” of sound. Each part builds toward a whole; the song exists beyond any single performer, growing from their shared energy. The question of where the music itself resides becomes political—challenging us to envision how a pluriverse might thrive within a unifying structure. Music teaches us that unity is not achieved through material means, but through a shared spirituality that offers us all something to aim at.

First, we recognize that public spaces are pluriversal. In a pluriversity, the learners’ lives are central to the endeavor. Proclaiming from the lectern amid sounds of agreement from the audience, Nduduzo stated that knowledge is not one-size-fits-all. A pluriverse contains many universes and maintains many points of view. A university curriculum is connected to this idea of a singular and “dead” source of knowledge, and one powerful way to decentralize the dead and revivify the curriculum is to place the priority on the transformations of the learners.

What does that look like in the place of learning? Educators empower students by giving voice to the inner transformations that occur during the learning process, requiring some vocabulary to express the informal. This, of course, is a creative challenge. Experience itself often transcends words. Plus, does expressing our inner experiences in language not formalize them? By labeling our feelings, are we not flattening our experience? This is something I struggle with sometimes while thinking about music. The words never seem to capture it fully.

One way to expand vocabulary is to look beyond the legacy traditions. This is easier said than done but it is a place to start. I’m not sure what it would look like on a large scale, but I feel that Nduduzo’s idea of the pluriverse within the university is true and ripe and amplifies educators’ need to embrace the unknown.

So the question here remains: can there be harmony within the pluriverse? Let’s again look to music. Musical scores represent a sonic pluriverse. They always have. Each musical note is itself a universe, as you know.

But the wonder of a musical score is that there is something higher than the written notes themselves. There is a built-in structure of value that comes from the way the notes resonate and feel within our body: the core of harmony. Consonances and dissonances are more than theoretical labels laid upon the various musical intervals and chords over the ages. Musical theory speaks to the feelings in our resonant chambers: our inner ears and lungs and hollow bones. Musical theory, when understood as sensory, transcends being merely an imported set of socially constructed descriptions about musical phenomena, just as the light from the sun is more than a socially constructed phenomenon. Viewing music as sensory reframes its theory into an evergreen vocabulary for understanding how sound resonates with our senses and emotions. (I wonder if this way of reframing could extend beyond music and into other disciplines.)

Knowledge is alive, it lives in each of us, and a curriculum should be seen as an invitation for us to recollect and draw out what we know and what is true in and common among our universes. Formalized knowledge does not need to kill understanding; it can serve as a means for us to inhabit a new being. 

Far away from the idealism and harmony of the musical score is the reality of the American classroom. Can we honestly say these ideas can enhance the classroom environment? I think they can, but not in a top-down sort of way. We have to continue asking questions about the relationships we have with knowledge and with learners, knowing that the solutions are going to be unique.

At the end of his talk, reflecting on the connections between our institutions and our communities, Nduduzo said something that touched the heart of it all: “Forgiveness is only forgiveness when we forgive the unforgivable.”

It is this audacious claim that makes possible the dream of a flourishing society. 

Postscript: The need to reimagine our culture

At Carnegie Hall’s opening night this year, I confessed. It was so dull. Everyone I spoke with said the same: the show lacked luster. 

Perhaps the orchestra was uninspired because of an impossibly difficult touring schedule, or the fact that the conductor probably only had a day or two to work on the pieces with them, and because of that schedule, can hardly lift the performance toward anything higher than the eighty-plus musicians reading the notes off the page at the same time. Perhaps it’s because the musicians themselves are used to this, day in and day out, conductor in and out, rotating through piece after piece and noticing, possibly over time, the spark of music dimming within themselves. 

Sadly, in orchestral music performed nowadays, the goal seems to be a combination of random techniques or effects or reconstructed traditions, having fully lost sight of the largest possible vision for how the piece unifies into a singular articulated experience of musical sound. The musicians, professional and esteemed as they are as individuals, are not participating in the kinds of ensemble music making they know and I know are possible. An orchestra that plays together toward some common goal, the music in the score, can bring the audience with them towards transcendence. There is a crystalline charge in the air when (any kind of) music is performed well, and this experience has been all too rare in American classical music.

It is such a tragedy when hundreds and thousands of souls show up to a concert hall and not be gripped by a force of profound beauty that heals and tunes them up, only to walk away as they would after seeing something in an outdated museum. The culture of music making at the highest level has in its own interests the need to be in the interest of the human beings it serves, and appropriately honor the rare and universal capacity of music to inspire transformation.

Music teachers and educators can help solve this problem by creating a more empowering classroom and instilling an unshakable musicality in their students. In enough time and with enough energy and trust, one or two or several many students will graduate and lead us toward the kinds of outstanding performances that affirm the emotive power of our music and demonstrate new knowledge of the fruits of our shared humanity. We must lead by example.

Acknowledging that change is hard, we can take steps toward honest renewal by first reimagining the relationships we have with the living knowledge that ultimately shapes our cosmopolitan culture. When joy is possible in the classroom, our culture steps toward that reimagined flourishing.

Thank you, Dr. Nduduzo Makhathini, for your inspiring ideas that weave throughout this piece. And thank you reader, for taking the time to engage with it.

If you liked this piece, I would be grateful if you could show your appreciation by giving it a heart at the bottom of the page.

Song copyright

Keys, Alicia. “Butterflyz.” Songs in A minor, Spotify, Universal Music Publishing Group, 2001. 

1. Makhathini, Nduduzo. (2021). Jazz in Postcolonial South Africa: Tracing the Politics of “Formal” and “Informal”. Jazz & Culture. 4. 1. 10.5406/jazzculture.4.1.0001.