Power and Choice in the Teaching and Learning of Music
This chapter opens a critical dialogue about the relationship between technology and the teaching and learning of music, with key emphasis on notions of power and choice. Discussions revolve around technology as provisions for: i) access to the musical world as sound through digital forms/formats, ii) greater opportunities for the most basic beginner in music to explore and experiment with sound, iii) wide/r choice and variety in listening, performing and creating for both the ‘trained’ and ‘untrained’ musician, iv) compressed time and space in musical experiences and environments, and v) questioning what constitutes musicality, a musician and skill acquisition. Music educators need to draw closer links between the widening gap of school music with learners’ daily musical-technological experiences and become more cognizant of the multi-media and multidisciplinary space which the digital native learner is engulfed in to further notions of creative work within the music classroom that might include these experiences.