Words and Music
Neil McBeath, Oman
Neil McBeath served as a uniformed education officer in the Royal Air Force of Oman from 1981 to 2005. During that time, he took two Masters degrees and was awarded the Omani Distinguished Service Medal. Refusing to renew contract, he taught at the Technical Service Institute in Saudi Arabia for two years. He has now returned to Oman and is teaching at the Sultan Qaboos University.
E-mail: neilmcbeath@yahoo.com
Menu
Introduction
Activity
Picture 1
Picture 2
Picture 3
Picture 4
Reflection
Reference
What follows is an account of an activity that I saw practiced at a meeting of the English and Translation Society of the Sultan Qaboos University in Oman. It has to be explained that this was an activity devised by the students themselves, although one of the organizers did make a passing reference to the role played by music in Suggestopaedia. I suspect that he might have encountered that approach in a reading from Anderson (2009; 156-157), but it is equally possible that he encountered it on an education course.
The activity itself was extremely simple. Four of the members of the Society, two male and two female, took turns to describe a picture. They each did this twice, firstly without and secondly with a musical accompaniment. The organizer’s theory was that the background music would add to the quantity of spoken discourse, although it is equally likely that, having described their pictures once, speakers would gather confidence and add embellishments on the second occasion.
What the organizers had not anticipated, however, was that the musical accompaniment might actually change the tenor of the description, and in three of the four cases, this is exactly what occurred.
In the first example, a female speaker was presented with what was fairly obviously a caricature of a hospital scene. There is a patient in bed; there are intravenous drips; there is a nurse and there is a doctor, but the overall style of the cartoon does not suggest any high seriousness. The speaker, on her first attempt, described what she saw in front of her, ignoring the colours, and speaking as if she were describing a realistic sketch of a hospital scene.
On her second attempt, the mood altered. The music playing in the background was in the minor key, and the description became immediately more sympathetic. She spoke of the distress that the patient’s family must feel, knowing that he was in hospital. She spoke of the patient’s own worries, and of the concern that the doctor and the nurse would show for him during his stay in hospital.
What was extraordinary about this, of course, was that the visual image contained nothing that could have stimulated such thoughts. On the contrary, the cartoon suggested a light-heartedness rather than any empathy with pain and suffering. The music alone evoked a change of approach.
The first male speaker was shown a picture of two anthropomorphically altered ants, carrying baskets of food. He elaborated on this cue, making them a married couple who were taking groceries home to their children. He extemporized a dialogue between them, but went no further.
The musical background to this picture was an arpeggio and again the speaker picked up the musical cue. He returned to the concept of dialogue, but this time the exchanges had an air of urgency, as if time were short and the ants were anxious to complete their task. A note of querulousness crept into the dialogue, suggesting that the ants found each other’s efforts inadequate. Again, there is nothing in the picture that suggests or supports this interpretation. The music alone was the cue.
This picture was a rather dark political cartoon about Austrian politics. A car has skidded on an S-shaped bend and has run head-on into a tree. In the foreground there is a road sign bearing SS runes, mirroring the shape of the road, and bearing the legend “Danger; Neonazism”. It is only after reading this that the full significance of the severed arm raised in a Hitler salute and standing in a pool of blood; the red and black (Nazi colours) wreckage of the car, and the tiny Austrian flag on the summit of a distant, snow-capped mountain become clear.
The young woman who described this picture missed the cartoon’s political significance completely. This is hardly a surprise. A young Omani woman studying at a local university is highly unlikely to be aware of the debate surrounding the growth of the Austrian Freedom Party, and its alleged links to neo-Nazi circles.
Faced, therefore, with a drawing whose significance she could not understand, she retreated into a schema that made sense from the Omani perspective, and talked about dangerous driving. Working from apparently personal experience, she constructed a story in which a group of young men, distracted by both each other’s antics and loud music, fail to see a camel ambling across the road. They take last minute evasive action and end up crashing into a tree. This scenario is, unfortunately, all too common in the countries of the Arab Gulf.
Even when the music was added, this speaker held to her story. She added some dialogue, but somehow managed to maintain her fiction that camels wandered around in a landscape that was luridly green, and backed by cartoon alps. This gave the impression that she had almost abandoned the idea of using either the picture or the music to assist her, and having composed her own version of events, she was determined to maintain that account.
Nothing could have been more different from the last speaker. Faced with another decidedly jokey cartoon of a man in bed with an extremely bad cold, he initially played for laughs, giving the man the name of one of the members of the English and Translation Society. He then described the scene almost verbatim, trying to find significance in the green sheets and red bed-socks as if he believed that the colours were emblematic.
All this changed when the music began to play. The track was, again, a slightly melancholy piece, reminiscent of film music, and the speaker immediately developed a theme.
Ignoring the thermometer in the man’s mouth, and the ice-pack on his head, the speaker explained that his hero was actually dying from unrequited love. He had met a girl who wanted nothing to do with him, and had now retired to bed, his only companion a faithful cat. This was an astonishing performance, recalling a number of the rather bad French movies produced by auteur-cineasts that used to be shown on British television VERY late at night. The speaker, however, was in complete control of his material, and managed to produce an almost convincing scenario.
So far as the organizer’s original theory is concerned, it is only fair to say that the case remains not-proven. A quantitative analysis might have shown that second performances were longer than first attempts, but it would be rash to assert that the musical background was the cause.
What is beyond dispute, however, is that the addition of music resulted in a qualitative change. In three of the four cases, the second description was radically different from the first. The exception was the young woman who attempted to describe a political cartoon, and who used avoidance strategies to steer herself into an area where she felt comfortable.
One final point, however, must be made. There are many Muslims who distrust the power of music, often to the point of deeming it “haram” – forbidden by Islam. Notoriously, the Taliban of Afghanistan destroyed musical instruments and cassettes of recorded music, but even in Saudi Arabia today, there are students who will walk out of a class if ANY music, even introductory bars, is played in their presence.
Not all Arab Gulf students, of course, subscribe to this narrow interpretation of Islam. A young Omani woman who I once taught on a Summer Course on the Island of Masirah is currently studying musicology at the University of Kuwait, with the full and proud support of her father, a senior officer in the Omani Air Force. In Oman, moreover, every single branch of the Sultan’s Armed Forces has its own band, and an opera house is nearing completion. Sultan Qaboos University offers its own major in musicology, but even so, it was interesting to see that students from the English and Translation Society had voluntarily decided to explore the link between words and music; between language and emotion, and that they had so convincingly demonstrated that the one influences the other.
Anderson, Neil J. (2009) Active Skills for Reading; Book 3 (Second Edition)
Boston; Mass. Heinle Cengage Learning
Please check the Creative Methodology for the Classroom course at Pilgrims website.
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