JC
How listening to music can help us navigate the darkness – and our English Literature studies!
For a long time now, I’ve been using music in the classroom. I’m an English teacher and I run sessions – at least once a week – for students who enjoy the fact that the songs they love can serve as doorways into ideas that are integral to their Literature studies.
Over the Easter holidays, I’m putting on my first all-dayer. There will be a mix of A-Level and university students in the room – and during the six hours we have together, I will model a journey that begins in shadow, but concludes in a much brighter place.
We’ll launch into the day by listening to songs that start in some kind of negative space and then we’ll do some work on the methods the songwriters employ to articulate that negativity. We’ll think about the contexts within which the music in question was formed and we’ll figure out why it’s so important that we do acknowledge the presence of that murkiness.
From there, the aim will be to start looking for the pinpricks of light – and, once we find those light points, to recognise how there is always light to be found. On an academic level, that process of searching for ‘brightness’ is one we want everyone in the English classroom to become familiar with. Essays that begin in some kind of ‘hole’ and work their way upwards benefit from a sense of purpose and structural soundness.
On a real life level, too, that ability to dig is a more than useful habit. And, at school, it’s critical that we do evidence the possibility – likelihood, even – of positive outcomes. In helping young people to understand – on a real, tangible level – that beauty can be found buried beneath even the most bleak of circumstances, we help them to feel more hopeful and more motivated.
Not that these classes are only helpful to the students. I also benefit massively from the conversations I have in the classroom. When discussing the writing of ‘Houdini’, Dua Lipa said she works hard to make sure that, at the core of her songs, there’s always a life-affirming lyric or hook. If she’s going to be singing something every night, she needs to make sure it’s something that’s going to lift her up.
The focus I keep, in the classroom, on looking for that illumination is vital for the same reason. If I’m constantly asking the students to look through the blackness and to feel excited about the future, it makes sure that I too keep my focus on the things that excite me.
When we’re studying English, it’s especially important that we zoom in on any luminescent details. The themes in the texts we study are pretty heavy, so it’s crucial that we work out how to deconstruct that heaviness, and how to maintain an optimistic frame of mind when life gets tough.
By listening to songs that are three or four minutes long – rather than having to wait until, for example, we have finished reading a long novel – we can shortcut (without over-simplifying) that distillation process and so secure students’ familiarity with it more quickly.
Some time ago, YONAKA’s Theresa Jarvis talked to my Sound of Pen cohort about her writing and she said something similar to Dua Lipa. There are points in her songs when she deliberately chooses softer sounds over harder ones because she knows how important it is to be gentle with herself. If she gets locked into a cycle of playing music that’s overwhelmingly fierce, the act of performing it over and over can become debilitating.
Neither Dua Lipa nor Theresa Jarvis are denying the existence of the dark times that we will inevitably all face – and there’s no point pretending to the young people we know, either, that life is always going to be easy. But if we can constantly offer them evidence of better times ahead and tools which will help them to look after themselves, that’s what we should do.
In my Sound of Pen classes, then, the songs we listen to do enable a deeper understanding of the texts we’re studying – but they also serve as pathways leading us in the direction of good times and sunshine.