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ABSTRACT
This article examines documentation from a previously unpublished architectural survey of English comprehensive secondary school music classrooms, conducted between 1976 and 1978 by a team of Department of Education and Science architects led by David and Mary Medd on behalf of a Schools Council music curriculum research project directed by John Paynter. Close readings of the results of the survey and the circumstances leading to its eventual withdrawal guide an examination of the ways foundational child-centred music curriculum research and early musical postmodernism were articulated in relation to the crisis of deindustrialisation and the first experiments in economic austerity. The conclusion examines the later appropriation and transformation of Paynter’s ideas in English music education policy, and argues that music critics and historians are wrong to denounce the postmodern aesthetics of progressive pedagogies as ‘neoliberal culture’, as neoliberal policy’s actual investments have been in an anti-democratic apparatus of canon and competition.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 Cf. Avner Offer, ‘British Manual Workers: From Producers to Consumers, c.1950–2000’, Contemporary British History 22, no. 4 (2008): 537–71; Jim Tomlinson, ‘De-Industrialisation Not Decline: A New Meta-Narrative for Post-War British History’, Twentieth Century British History 27, no. 1 (2016): 76–99.
2 William Reese, ‘The Origins of Progressive Education’, History of Education Quarterly 41, no. 1 (2001): 1–24; Kevin Brehony, ‘A New Education for a New Era: The Contribution of the Conferences of the New Education Fellowship to the Disciplinary Field of Education, 1921–1938’, Paedagogica Historica 40, no. 5–6 (2004): 733–55.
3 See, among many examples, Andrew Hartman, Education and the Cold War: The Battle for the American School (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); Maren Elfert, UNESCO’s Utopia of Lifelong Learning: An Intellectual History (New York: Routledge, 2017); Slava Gerovitch, ‘We Teach Them to Be Free: Specialized Math Schools and the Cultivation of the Soviet Technical Intelligentsia’, Kritika 20, no. 4 (2019): 717–54; Christian Ydesen, ed., The OECD’s Historical Rise in Education: The Formation of a Global Governing Complex (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019); Tom Holert, Politics of Learning, Politics of Space: Architecture and the Education Shock of the 1960s and 1970s (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2021).
4 Mary Jo Deegan, Race, Hull House, and the University of Chicago: A New Conscience against Ancient Evils (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2002); Nils Gilman, Mandarins of the Future: Modernisation Theory in Cold War America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004); Christopher Clews, The New Education Fellowship and the Reconstruction of Education: 1944 to 1966 (PhD thesis, Institute of Education, 2009); Martin Duberman, Black Mountain: An Exploration in Community (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2009); Fred Turner, The Democratic Surround: Multimedia and American Liberalism from World War II to the Psychedelic Sixties (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013); Adam Greteman, Sexualities and Genders in Education: Towards Queer Thriving (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).
5 Stephen Ball, Education Plc: Understanding Private Sector Participation in Public Sector Education (New York: Routledge, 2007); Roger Brown and Helen Carasso, Everything for Sale? The Marketisation of UK Higher Education (New York: Routledge, 2013); Peter John and Joëlle Fanghanel, eds., Dimensions of Marketisation in Higher Education (New York: Routledge, 2016).
6 John Finney, Music Education in England, 1950–2010: The Child-Centred Progressive Tradition (New York: Routledge, 2011); Stephanie Pitts, Chances and Choices: Exploring the Impact of Music Education (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); Lucy Green, Music, Informal Learning and the School (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2012).
7 Cris Shore and Susan Wright, ‘Coercive Accountability: The Rise of Audit Culture in Higher Education’, in Audit Cultures: Anthropological Studies in Accountability, Ethics and the Academy, ed. Marilyn Strathern (New York: Routledge, 2000), 57-89.
8 Stuart Hall, ‘New Labour’s Double Shuffle’, Soundings 24 (2003): 10–24; David Hesmondhalgh, ‘Media and Cultural Policy as Public Policy: The Case of the British Labour Government’, International Journal of Cultural Policy 11, no. 1 (2005): 95–109.
9 Jim McGuigan, ‘Neo-Liberalism, Culture and Policy’, International Journal of Cultural Policy 11, no. 3 (2005): 231; David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); David Hesmondhalgh, Melissa Nisbet, Kate Oakley and David Lee, ‘Were New Labour’s Cultural Policies Neo-Liberal?’, International Journal of Cultural Policy 21, no. 1 (2015): 97–114.
10 See Aled Davies, Ben Jackson and Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite, eds., The Neoliberal Age? Britain since the 1970s (London: UCL Press, 2021).
11 Timothy Taylor, Music and Capitalism: A History of the Present (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 46–47; cf. Eric Drott, ‘Rereading Jacques Attali’s Bruits’, Critical Inquiry 41, no. 4 (2015): 721–756; Christina Scharff, Gender, Subjectivity and Cultural Work (New York: Routledge, 2017).
12 See David Clarke, ‘Elvis or Darmstadt, or Twentieth-Century Music and the Politics of Cultural Pluralism’, Twentieth-Century Music 4, no. 1 (2007): 3–46; Tim Rutherford-Johnson, Music after the Fall: Modern Composition and Culture Since 1989 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017); Seth Brodsky, From 1989, or European Music and the Modernist Unconscious (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017).
13 Marianna Ritchey, Composing Capital: Classical Music in the Neoliberal Era (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019), 4–5.
14 David Blake, ‘Musicological Omnivory in the Neoliberal University’, Journal of Musicology 34, no. 3 (2017): 327.
15 Prasad, The Politics of Free Markets: The Rise of Neoliberal Economic Policies in Britain, France, Germany and the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 5; to distinguish between approaches neoliberalism on the Left and the Right see also Stephanie Mudge, ‘What is Neo-Liberalism?’, Socio-Economic Review 6 (2008): 703–31.
16 Povinelli, Economies of Abandonment: Social Belonging and Endurance in Late Liberalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011); cf. Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism (London: Verso, 2005).
17 Cf. Drott, Rereading, 246–7.
18 See, e.g., Taylor, The Sounds of Capitalism: Advertising, Music, and the Conquest of Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 232–9.
19 On the various reproductive concerns at stake in neoliberal economic policy see Melinda Cooper, Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism (New York: Zone, 2017); Marie Thompson, ‘Sounding the Arcane: Contemporary Music, Gender and Reproduction’, Contemporary Music Review 39, no. 2 (2020): 273–92.
20 Bob Jessop, ‘Authoritarian Neoliberalism: Periodization and Critique’, South Atlantic Quarterly 118, no. 2 (2019): 343–61; Quinn Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), 2; Jason Hickel, ‘Neoliberalism and the End of Democracy,’ in The Handbook of Neoliberalism, ed. Simon Springer, Kean Birch and Julie MacLeavy (London: Routledge, 2016); 142–52; Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (New York: Zone Books, 2015).
21 Cf. Stephen Ball, ‘The Teacher’s Soul and the Terrors of Performativity’, Journal of Education Policy 18, no. 2 (2003): 215–28.
22 Schools Council, ‘Schools Council Projects, August 1973, Index to Research and Development Projects’, Box G, Paynter Collection, Borthwick Institute for Archives, University of York; David Medd, ‘Schools Council Project – ‘Space for Music: Summary of Events since April 1976’, Appendix A to meeting note of October 25, 1979, ME/H/7, David and Mary Medd Collection, Newsam Library and Archives, Institute of Education, University College London. See also John Paynter, Music in the Secondary School Curriculum (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 155.
23 David Medd and Derek Poole, Presentation Notes for MSSC Schools Council Project Conference ‘Room for Music’, September 23, 1976, ME/H/5, Medd Collection.
24 ‘Schools Council Project: Music in the Secondary School Curriculum’, Box G, Paynter Collection.
25 Catherine Burke, ‘“Inside out”: A Collaborative Approach to Designing Schools in England, 1945–1972’, Paedagogica Historica 45, no. 3 (2009): 421–33; Alison Clark, ‘“In-Between” Spaces in Postwar Primary Schools: A Micro-Study of a ”Welfare Room” (1977–1993)’, History of Education 39 (2010): 767–78; Geraint Franklin, ‘“Built-In Variety”: David and Mary Medd and the Child-Centred Primary School, 1944–80’, Architectural History 55 (2018): 321–67; Catherine Burke, A Life in Education and Architecture: Mary Beaumont Medd (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2013); Paula Lacomba Montes and Alejandro Campos Uribe, ‘From Classrooms to Centres: Mary and David Medd’s Contribution to Post-War School Design in Britain’, arq: Architectural Research Quarterly 24, no. 3 (2020): 251–64.
26 Burke, ‘“Inside-Out”’, 427–8.
27 Aoife Donnelly and Kristin Trommler, ‘The Democratic Design of David & Mary Medd’, e-flux Architecture (March 2020), https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/education/322671/the-democratic-design-of-david-mary-medd/ (accessed December 20, 2022).
28 Pitts, A Century of Change in Music Education; Finney, Music Education in England; Pauline Adams, Post-War Developments in Music Education: An Investigation of Music Education Policy and Practice as Implemented within Three Local Education Authorities during the Period 1933–1988 (PhD thesis, Institute of Education, 2013).
29 Piers Spencer, ‘John Paynter, 1931–2010: An Appreciation’, British Journal of Music Education 27, no. 3 (2010): 221–3.
30 John Paynter and Peter Aston, Sound and Silence: Classroom Projects in Creative Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 344–9.
31 See John Shepherd, Phil Virden, Graham Vulliamy and Trevor Wishart, Whose Music? A Sociology of Musical Languages (London: Latimer, 1977); Richard Orton, Electronic Music for Schools (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); and Graham Vulliamy and Ed Lee, Pop, Rock and Ethnic Music in School (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).
32 Letter from Malcolm Ross to Wilfrid Mellers, February 3, 1970, and letter from John Paynter to Malcolm Ross, February 11, 1970, Box G, Paynter Collection.
34 On the latter see Jonathan Bignell, ‘Children of the World on British Television: National and Transnational Representations’, Strenae 13 (2018), https://journals.openedition.org/strenae/1966 (accessed December 20, 2022). On Stenhouse’s work for the Schools Council’s experimental ‘Humanities Curriculum,’ see Brian Simon, Education and the Social Order (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1991), 317–18.
35 The Canadian R. Murray Schaefer was also invited but could not attend. Roberta Meier and W. M. Colleran, ‘Report on New Music in Action 1973,’ and passim, Crate Q, Music in the Secondary School Curriculum Collection, Borthwick Centre for Archives, University of York.
36 Simon, Education, 313–14.
37 Ibid., 275–6; Janet McKenzie, Changing Education: A Sociology of Education since 1944 (London: Prentice-Hall, 2001), 201.
38 Simon, Education, 212–18.
39 Ibid., 275; Schools Council, Schools Council: A Brief History (London: Schools Council Publications, 1973).
40 Schools Council, Schools Council; Simon, Education, 314.
41 Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite, ‘Neo-Liberalism and Morality in the Making of Thatcherite Social Policy’, Historical Journal 55, no. 2 (2012): 497–520; Jon Agar, Science Policy under Thatcher (London: UCL Press, 2019); Simon, Education, 425; Kevin Brehony and Kristen Nawrotzki, ‘From Weak Social Democracy to Hybridized Neoliberalism: Early Childhood Education in Britain since 1945’, in Children, Families, and States: Time Policies of Childcare, Preschool, and Primary Education in Europe, ed. Karen Hagemann, Konrad Jarausch and Cristina Allemann-Ghionda (New York: Berghahn, 2011), 237–56.
42 Simon, Education, 429–30; Alan Kerckhoff, Ken Fogelman, David Crook and David Reeder, Going Comprehensive in England and Wales: A Study of Uneven Change (New York: Routledge, 1996).
43 Letter from C. J. Brooks, Schools Council, to HMI Music Committee C14, December 14, 1972, Box G, Paynter Collection.
44 Simon, Education, 449–50; McKenzie, Changing Education, 215–16.
45 Britain’s bailout agreement set a new standard in that it did not entail provisions to strengthen the welfare state or return to full employment. See Margaret Garritsen de Vries, International Monetary Fund 1972–1978, Cooperation on Trial, Volume 1: Narrative and Analysis (Washington, DC: International Monetary Fund, 1985), 461–75; Douglas Wass, Decline to Fall: The Making of British Macroeconomic Policy and the 1976 IMF Crisis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); and Chris Rogers, ‘The Politics of Economic Policy Making in Britain: A Re-assessment of the 1976 IMF Crisis’, Politics and Policy 37, no. 5 (2009): 971–94.
46 Minutes of HMI Music Committee C14, September 11, 1978, ED 213/31, National Archives.
47 Simon, Education, 444–6.
48 At least in so far as it merited the attention of the influential Gulbenkian Foundation, whose 1978 report ‘Training Musicians’ treats the popular record industry with considerable disdain. See Training Musicians (London: Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, 1978).
49 McKenzie, Changing Education, 236.
50 Quotes from Medd’s descriptions of Brookside, Marple Hall and Woodberry Down. Unless otherwise specified, all citations in this section are found in ME/H/4, ME/H/6 and ME/H/8, Medd Collection.
51 Piers Spencer, ‘Reflections on My Time as a Joint Editor’, British Journal of Music Education 25, no. 3 (2008): 245–52.
52 Medd’s comments may betray older prejudices, but the two-tone movement was very quickly to be enshrined in British national memory as a positive emblem of post-industrial working-class cultural life. See especially Vron Ware and Les Back, Out of Whiteness: Colour, Politics, and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 106; Paul Gilroy and Errol Lawrence, ‘Two-Tone Britain: White and Black Youth and the Politics of Anti-Racism’, in Youth Questions: Multi-Racist Britain, ed. Philip Cohen and Harwant Bains (London: Macmillan, 1988), 121–55. Bad Manners formed at Woodberry Down in 1976 and dedicated their second album to the school’s closing. See Bad Manners, Gosh It’s … Bad Manners, Magnet Records MAGL 5043.
53 Cf. Paynter, Music in the Secondary School Curriculum, 158.
54 See also Grenville Hancox, ‘Tribute to John Paynter’, British Journal of Music Education 28 (2011): 29–31.
55 John Davis, ‘The Inner London Education Authority and the William Tyndale Junior School Affair, 1974–1976’, Oxford Review of Education 28, no. 2/3 (2002): 275–98.
56 Margaret Thatcher, The Downing Street Years (London: HarperCollins, 1993), 562; Anne Beauvallet, ‘Thatcherism and Education in England: A One-Way Street?’, Observatoire de la société britannique 17 (2015): 97–114.
57 Simon, Education, 472–88.
58 Conservative Party education critics had already been gunning for the Schools Council in the months prior to the 1979 election; Simon, Education, 488–98, 522 n. 488; John Mann, ‘Week by Week’, Education, July 2, 1982, 3–4.
59 Memo from Peter Rattenbury, Department of Education and Science, April 7, 1982, and exchange of letters between David Medd, Jean Sturdy and Toby Proctor, April 28 to May 19, 1982, ME/H/7, Medd Collection.
60 Letter from John Paynter to David Medd, February 5, 1979, ME/H/7, Medd Collection.
61 Paynter, Music in the Secondary School Curriculum, 154.
62 Ibid, 158.
63 Ibid.
64 Ibid, 159.
65 Department of Education and Science, Building Bulletin 30: Drama and Music (London: HMSO, 1966), ME/R/3/30, Medd Collection.
66 Paynter, Music in the Secondary School Curriculum, 16–19.
67 Ibid., xiii.
68 Christopher Small, Music, Society, Education (London: Calder, 1977), 183; Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), 5.
69 Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies Education Group (Steve Baron, Dan Finn, Neil Grant, Michael Green, Richard Johnson), Unpopular Education: Schooling and Social Democracy in England since 1944 (Birmingham: Hutchinson, 1981), 92–3.
70 Michael Behrent, ‘The Origins of the Anti-Liberal Left: The 1979 Vincennes Conference on Neoliberalism’, French Politics, Culture and Society 35, no. 3 (2017): 50–1; Romuald Normand, The Changing Epistemic Governance of European Education: The Fabrication of the Homo Academicus Europeanus? (Cham: Springer, 2016); Jenny Andersson, ‘The Future of the Western World: The OECD and the Interfutures Project’, Journal of Global History 14, no. 1 (2019): 126–44.
71 David Looseley, The Politics of Fun: Cultural Policy and Debate in Contemporary France (Oxford: Berg, 1997); Jacqueline Bruckert, ‘Le message schaefferien dans les Cfmi’, in Sylvie Dallet and Anne Veitl, Du sonore au musical (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2001), 101–13.
72 Bruckert, ‘Le message schaefferien’; cf. Antoine Hennion, Comment la musique vient aux enfants: Une anthropologie de l’enseignement musical (Paris: Anthropos, 1988), 201–18.
73 Angès van Zanten, Les politiques de l’éducation (Paris: PUF, 2004), 11–13.
74 Simon, Education, 508–9.
75 Vic Gammon, ‘Cultural Politics of the English National Curriculum for Music, 1991–1992’, Journal of Educational Administration and History 31, no. 2 (1999): 130–1; Department of Education and Science, Music from 5 to 16: Curriculum Matters No. 4 (London: HMSO, 1985).
76 Draft Interim Report MWG (90)26, ED 183/323, National Archives.
77 Note by the Department (DES), May 1991, ED 183/446, National Archives.
78 See for example the assessment in John Shepherd and Graham Vulliamy, ‘The Struggle for Culture: A Sociological Case Study of the Development of a National Music Curriculum’, British Journal of Sociology of Education 15, no. 1 (1994): 27–40.
79 Angela Rumbold, Draft Minute to the Prime Minister, November 29, 1989, ED 269/389/1, National Archives; Music in the Curriculum, MWG(90)7, ED 183/322, National Archives.
80 Department for Education, Model Music Curriculum: Key Stages 1 to 3 (London: HMG, 2021).
81 Ibid, 61.
82 Ibid, 8–9. Although they place the expression in quotation marks, the writers of the curriculum have neither cited nor made further use of ideas from Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory, leaving one to wonder if they too appreciate the irony.
83 Department for Education, The Power of Music to Change Lives: A National Plan for Music Education (London: HMG, 2022).
84 Ibid, 3.
85 Ibid, 25–6.
86 Ruth Wright, ‘Music Education and Social Reproduction: Breaking Cycles of Injustice’, in The Oxford Handbook of Social Justice in Music Education, ed. Cathy Benedict, Patrick Schdmit, Gary Spruce and Paul Woodford (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 339–56; Lucy Green, Music, Informal Learning and the School.
87 Cf. Kwame Anthony Appiah, ‘Is the Post- in Postmodernism the Post- in Postcolonial?’, Critical Inquiry 17, no. 2 (1991): 336–57; Povinelli, Economies.
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Patrick Valiquet
Patrick Valiquet is a writer, translator and musician specialising in the history and philosophy of contemporary musical knowledge. Between 2010 and 2021, he held research studentships and fellowships from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Fonds de Recherche du Québec, the Institute of Musical Research, and the British Academy, as well as working as Associate Editor of Contemporary Music Review. His writing is also published in the Journal of Popular Music Studies, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, Music & Letters, Organised Sound, The Senses and Society and Twentieth-Century Music.