Electronics ‘will dominate’ music

Press, 20 February 1986, Page 4

Electronics ‘will dominate’ music

Electronic instruments will dominate future music education and the Christchurch Teachers’ College could play a leading role, says a lecturer at the college, Mr lan Dando.

Mr Dando recently received a scholarship to Germany to further his research into “keyboard laboratories,” a musicteaching technique being developed by the Germans. The < laboratories substitute electric organs for recorders to teach children the basics of music. A laboratory was installed at the college

last year and Mr Dando thinks the idea could go far in New Zealand.

“At the keyboard you can develop concepts of tone, colour and harmony, whereas with recorders you can only use a oneline melody,” he said.

Children found it easier to understand music theory with keyboards than diagrams, he said. When mentioning a concept, such as a dotted crotchet, children could evisage a mental picture of the keyboard and how the crotchet related to it.

New developments in music education will be

studied by Mr Dando during his three-month scholarship late this year. The scholarship from the German Academic Exchange Service is the German equivalent of a Fulbright Award, he says, a number of awards are available to post-graduate applicants in every country which has a German embassy.

Mr Dando has been a lecturer at the college for 18 years and is the “Star” newspaper music critic. He visited Germany in 1980 on a Queen Elizabeth II scholarship and as a guest of the West German

Government to attend the Berlin Festival in 1982. Electronic music would become an increasingly common medium, Mr Dando said.

“Electronics are going to play a role in many facets of music. What I see for the twenty-first century in music education will be a harnessing of Japanese technology to new concepts.”

He said that electronics could and were being married to more conventional instruments. German research into music education could revolutionise the teaching

of music in schools and yet was relatively undiscovered, he said. “Germany has always been the top country for music and research but it has been locked up by its language and its research is not as well-known as American and British research,” he said. Mr Dando thinks that because Christchurch Teachers’ College is the only college to integrate primary and secondary teacher training it has an advantage in spreading the keyboard laboratory technique to all ages of pupils.