Should knowing how to read music be an essential requirement for children learning music? A response. . .

The National Association for Music Education recently shared the following twitter message (tweet) via its twitter account:

Should knowing how to read music be an essential requirement for children learning music? http://t.co/mGB7ptrotE #musiced via @SinfiniMusic

— NAfME (@NAfME) February 18, 2015

I offer an extended excerpt from my chapter Learning with digital media and technology in hybrid music classrooms in the forthcoming book Approaches to Teaching General Music: Methods, Issues, and Viewpoints, edited by Carlos Abril & Brent Gault,  as one possible answer:

The heading for this part of the chapter is “Music Literacies”

The broad range, blurred lines, and overlapping nature of music and musical practices supported by technology and digital media, calls for broader conceptions of music literacy than reading and writing standard notation or discerning related musical attributes. Warschauer and Ware (2008) emphasize how the historical view of literacy as the ability to decode print-based texts was limited in its ability to account for how people make meaning of, use, or analyze texts even prior to a digital era. Barton and Hamilton (2000) stress that literacy is situated in practices and can differ depending on context. This means that varied literacies exist. Given the multiple musical practices connected to technology and digital media, a hybrid approach demands inclusive and expansive perspectives of multiple music literacies (Tobias, 2012b).

To account for music literacies encompassing diverse musical practices music educators might adopt Barton and Hamilton’s (2000) propositions about the nature of literacy, modified for music education contexts:

• [Music] Literacy is best understood as a set of social practices; these can be inferred from events which are mediated by [musical] texts
• There are different [music] literacies associated with different domains of life
• [Music] Literacy practices are patterned by social institutions and power relationships, and some [music] literacies are more dominant, visible and influential than others
• [Music] Literacy practices are purposeful and embedded in broader social goals and cultural practices
• [Music] Literacy is culturally situated
• [Music] Literacy practices change and new ones are frequently acquired through processes of informal learning and sense making (p. 8)

In contrast to music literacies reflective of these propositions, narrow conceptions of literacy may result in excluding or constraining the musical practices described throughout this chapter or inappropriately focusing on musical aspects specific to standard notation that ignore or misrecognize others (Swanwick, 1999.) Limiting the scope of literacy as solely encoding and decoding standard notation can also lead to inappropriately focusing on or treating technology and media as tools limited to related tasks (Snyder & Bulfin, 2007). For instance, though a mobile device allows for manipulating and performing sound in unique ways, one might limit its use for students to practice identifying intervals or read sheet music. This perspective is insufficient for this approach.

Music educators who acknowledge and address multiple music literacies can help students develop fluency, which is the ability to engage musically with others in varied contexts (Swanwick, 1999). For Swanwick (1999), focusing on fluency emphasizes engaging with sound over reading written music. Supporting students’ development of multiple literacies can cultivate their fluency in diverse musical contexts, including those enabled by or specific to digital media. Music educators ought to consider the literacies and fluency they help students develop in relation to musicking with technology and digital media and how this supports students’ lifelong musical engagement.