Contemporary side to traditionalist music teacher

By GREG DIXON

Christopher Maubach is letting me into a secret. "Music teachers are traditionalists," says the Australian music education lecturer in near hushed tones.

As revelations go it's not a terribly big one. Those of us who've had our fingers rapped - fortissimo and veloce, of course - during piano lessons know music teachers can be fussy about things being done the way they've always been done.

Maubach, however, admits he's a touch on the conservative side himself but his confession is part of the reason he is here to speak: not to trash tradition but to talk different ideas with music teachers at last week's centenary conference of the Institute of Registered Music Teachers of New Zealand.

Such events are important, he says, because we need to stay contemporary.

Which is a curious comment in itself. German-born Maubach, who lectures at the Australian Catholic University in Melbourne, is an expert in methods of music education that are a little long in the tooth.

Trained at the Orff Institute in Austria, he is a authority on composer Carl Orff's formula for teaching music to groups of children, a method developed in the 1940s and 50s.

As well, he is a specialist in the group teaching methods developed in the 1920s and 30s by Swiss teacher Emile Jaques-Dalcroze (which uses movement to teach music learners tempo and rhythm) and in an extraordinary method for teaching sight-singing to children developed by Hungarian Zoltan Kodaly before the Second World War.

Yet even by today's standards these methods have a modern radicalism about them.

The Orff method fosters a holistic approach to music education, integrating singing, speech activities, movement, folk dance and playing percussive instruments to encourage active music making.

"I do believe there is an element of radicalism in Orff's method. It really sincerely asks for the person involved in music learning to bring out their own creative ideas," says Maubach.

It is however the Kodaly method which has as its foremost goal to teach music literacy that seems most radical to the layman.

The approach uses hand signs together with printed music and repetitive singing to teach sight singing.

"There is a sequence of events. They start with very simple things - simple songs that have two notes at first. Then the next sequence is three notes. Three hand signs, three notes. The children see the visual aspect on two then three lines."

Maubach says it's the sequence from simple to complex - two notes, three notes, five notes, seven notes, major scale or minor scale - and the drill effect of regular classroom singing which leads rather quickly to success. "Children [of 5 or 6] can achieve three to five note songs at the end of their first year, if the method is done constantly. It is an imitation method, a parrot approach if you like."

Maubach says all three approaches he specialises in are complementary and successful, but what seems more important to him is that children are taught music at all.