Modeling Music Education: Britain and Kenya

Abstract

The problem with models is that they almost always break. At some point, new information or new theoretical perspectives arrive and the model is rejected, or at best put aside and referred to occasionally for its historical interest. This article looks at my perceptions of music education in Britain and Kenya over the past 30 years or so using a range of models, precisely because it is in their “breaking” that one learns what is most significant. I have taught in both countries, at all levels of education, and part of the reason for writing this is to unpick my own agendas. Models drawn from the work of Brocklehurst and Hart in the 1970s and Swanwick and Boyce-Tillman in the 1980s and ‘90s will be reconstructed in the Kenyan situation and allowed to declare their incongruity, incompatibility, irrelevance, complementarity, or transformation. My choice of models may well seem eccentric, but they are the models that have had the most impact upon me. In that way, they make the understanding of my own role clearer, and so the collection of models becomes egocentric. Britain is the starting point, as that was both my starting point and the historical background to formal Kenyan music education.