The Cats of Music Education Series: John Paynter - Creative Music Mover & Shaker

John Paynter is a Cat of Music Education.

If you watched the video first and you’re not aware of Paynter’s work in music education or as a composer, you might be wondering what the heck’s going on. Hopefully, the video will make more sense after you’ve read the blog.

According to the foreword to a collection of his writings (which Brad thought he owned until he pulled it out to write this post and noticed James Humberstone’s signature inside the front cover - sorry James) which we’ll list below, Paynter directed the Music in Secondary Schools project in the UK from 1973 to 1982. The work informed what became the music component of the National Curriculum and the GCSE and also had “influence upon school musical education in other countries”. One of those “other countries” happens to be Australia and, of special importance to Brad and Pete, New South Wales. Paynter along with other composer-educators was a leader in a revolution in music education called the “Creative Music Movement”.

It might sound weird to young people that we’d need to have a “movement” for creative music. Isn’t that an oxymoron? Good point young grasshoppers, but not everyone saw it that way back in the day, and many music teachers who teach “as they were taught” still don’t see music education as Paynter did. Let’s break down why Paynter is on the Gig Based Learning List and why you should know as much about him as you can gather.

It’s pretty simple really, check this out:

“John Paynter has maintained the view that … whatever is done in the name of music in schools should be musical; that is, concerned with the essence of music itself and not merely ‘about’ music.”

Sound familiar? We hope it does, we’ve been shouting it from the mountaintop for the last decade and it’s at the core of the praxial philosophy of music education embedded within the Gig Based Learning Approach.

Paynter wrote the groundbreaking Sound and Silence with Peter Aston in 1970 (yes the year Bennett Reimer released his seminal book - see our blog post on him too). That might help the penny to drop about the video we’ve embedded above. Paynter and Aston’s approach was to send students on “creative experiments” (isn’t that cool?), often adapting “certain experimental strategies” of the avant-garde to “engage the enthusiasm and imagination of their pupils”. He updated the approach, going it alone in 1992 with Sound and Structure.

We think a great place to start with the Creative Music Movement is Thinking and Making: Selections from the Writings of John Paynter on Music in Education and we’ve also linked to a podcast episode Dr James Humberstone recently released on the topic (partly to make up for not giving the book back).

Thanks for your vision, passion and creativity John Paynter, you are a Cat of Music Education!

Book: Thinking and Making: Selections from the Writings of John Paynter on Music in Education

Podcast: Music Zettel Ep. 6 – The Creative Music Movement

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