1. Background: what's it all about?

In the world of whole-person education, Georgi Lozanov proposes that a teacher reads new material to music in two specific ways; the approach has been most-widely developed in language learning, but is just as valid in the learning of any other subject: and the approaches which use it are known under a variety of names, including Suggestopedia, Accelerated Learning, Integrative Learning, SuperLearning.

When I first came across Suggestopedia, at workshops run in Sweden by Charles Schmidt and by Lonny Gold, I was struck by how the first 'concert-reading' was essentially the same as what renaissance and baroque composers were doing, but in reverse, almost 'viewed through the wrong end of the telescope', and I thought it would make things so much simpler if people understood the connection and could reverse the telescope again. My own work outside of formal Suggestopedia has been with a whole-person approach to musical education under the theme of Musica Humana, inspired by the thinking of renaissance composers to show people how - in life as in music - harmony is the resolution of consonance and dissonance, how you need to hold your own voice while interacting with others producing a harmonic whole even though you are 'saying' different things - and experiencing a far greater richness just because you're saying different things. Each person has a number of voices within them, often conflicting, and you need to first recognise that conflict to be able to resolve it to a harmonic whole, an idea which might be familiar to those who have met psychosynthesis. Then when two people meet and interact, if the notes they sing, the music they make, are only pleasant (consonant) the music of life is experienced as pretty boring; so there has to be unpleasantness, dissonance: but it can experienced in a 'safe' way, each part taking account of the discomfort of the other and helping to resolve it to comfort, 'consonance'.

At each period there have been those who codify the current practice and teach it to others, and there have been those who ignore the 'safe' tenets established by the pedants to create something new, causing alarm and despond among those who long for the established order: but the Monteverdes and the Schoenbergs and the punk-rockers have simply had a wider view of what was acceptable, and sooner or later the theoreticians have caught up the practitioners and learners have been taught a new philosophy or explanation which serves until they feel the need to burst that bubble and create a new world-view.