Everything is Song (If we Care to LISTEN OTHERWISE)
FOREWORD TO SOUND PEDAGOGY: RADICAL CARE IN MUSIC
EDITED BY Colleen Renihan, John Spilker, and Trudi Wright
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS
FORTHCOMING 2024
EXCERPT
What is song? For many students in my college classes, song is a catch-all word for any discrete work of music. “Bohemian Rhapsody” is a song. But so might be a film score or a video game soundtrack, a Chopin piano étude or a Mozart string quartet, a pop anthem and or a bloopy ringtone. Everything is said to be song until someone says otherwise.
I have been that someone. As their dutiful instructor, I’ve explained to students, “No, no, this violin sonata isn’t really a song. It’s a piece of music. Songs are sung and typically feature voices and lyrics (or voice-like and lyrical qualities). All songs are pieces of music, but not every piece of music is technically a song.”
On the surface, this is a matter of precise vocabulary and taxonomy. Students should find it useful to distinguish songs among musics writ large, just as they learn to distinguish mammals among animals, or haikus among poems. Yet my lexical corrections must also lead students to realize they’ve been misusing a basic four-letter word their entire lives. Song, once so familiar and capacious, now defamiliarized and wreathed with rules anew.
Aside from professional music scholars and performers, do most people recognize (much less insist on) semantic disambiguations between pieces of music that are songs and pieces of music that are not songs? To what extent are people today relying on flattened nomenclatures adopted and propagated by commercial streaming services such as Apple Music (whereby a Machaut motet and a Yebba ballad alike are labeled as songs or, when part of an album or playlist, as tracks)? What am I doing when I cross out erroneous instances of song on a student essay and scrawl alternatives in the margins?
None of these questions would have occurred to me had I not received, a while back, a sneak peek of Sound Pedagogy. Every chapter here pulses with accessible, actionable wisdoms into not just how we teach music but also why we still teach this thing called music at all, what with our world on literal fire and our species at neverending war. Why care, why now? If we choose to care, then how? The authors have answers for us. I am profoundly grateful to these colleagues for even daring to dream up affirmative, radical, topsy-turvy configurations of the music classroom and its normative hierarchies.