Why Cantopop Still Has to Prove It Belongs in a Music Classroom
The music a child hears outside school can enter the classroom as a treat, an illustration or a serious object of thought.
A lesson can play a Cantopop recording and leave its hierarchy of taste exactly where it was. It can ask the children to recognise the tune before returning to the music it intends to analyse. It can use the song to illustrate a chord, then forget that someone had to make that chord work with a particular voice. Inclusion in the playlist says something. Permission to change the questions says considerably more.
A Cantopop track makes demands that a worksheet premised on isolating pitch and rhythm may have difficulty hearing. A syllable has a contour in speech. Singing can cooperate with it, lean on syntax to make an unusual setting intelligible, or ask the listener to do some work. There is also the size and brightness of the vocal, the arrangement’s willingness to cover it and the question of whom the listener imagines the singer is addressing. Each of those is a compositional decision with consequences in the recording.
How to tell when the music is being taken seriously
I would look at what the music can make an adult admit they do not know. A teacher may be able to explain how to label the tonic in a piece and have no satisfying account of why a vowel needs all the time a singer gives it. Taking the recording seriously means staying there long enough for the teacher to have a musical question too. A pupil who knows the language and the repertoire may have something to contribute that years of training in a different repertoire cannot supply.
There is a happy alternative to cultural scorekeeping. One can love the achievement of a classical interpretation and be curious about the work of an arranger on a mass-market record. In one room four musicians agree on how to balance a string quartet. In the other someone finds a way to leave the band loud and the words intelligible. Both are accomplished, intricate uses of the ear. The point of inviting more kinds of music into the room is to learn where an existing standard falls short.
Schools may feel pressure to celebrate a local repertoire. Celebration can become another way to keep the work at a polite distance. I’d rather hear an argument about a recording that is good in one respect and bad in another. That would credit the music with enough substance to survive a disagreement.
A student should be able to discover that something they hear in a taxi is hard to understand and worthy of the exacting thought normally reserved for music that arrives with a score.