This chapter examines the key factors involved in developing mu-sical skills. Initially, the concept of mumu-sical potentiality is explored, followed by an investigation of the specific skills required for learning an instrument.
Finally, a discussion is undertaken of how best to nurture the ability to per-form for an audience. A balance between theory and practice is achieved by referring both to research literature on the psychology of music and music education and to anecdotal evidence and material from teaching manuals.
Though some reference is made to musical learning in other cultures, the focus here is on a child developing the ability to perform within a Western cultural framework.
The relative roles of biology and environment in shaping musical potentiality
There has been considerable interest in the seeming differences in musical achievement among the population in general. Most of the debate has centred on the relative roles of biological and environmental influences on human abilities – the ‘nature versus nurture’debate.1Assessing the sci-entific findings, it seems that genetic factors influence general development in a number of ways:
rmaturational staged development
An example of this is the need to crawl before walking, or in musical terms, the gradual development of the hand and eye dexterity and coordination necessary to enable bow and string synchronisation in violin playing.
rsome physical advantages
For instance, tall, lean-limbed people tend to be better at high-jumping than short, more heavily built ones. In music, people with wide hand spans have a better potential to develop as pianists than those with small hand spans.
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r some mental advantages
Generally, for example, some people can ‘tune into’problem-solving tasks more quickly than others. They may therefore be able to identify musical patterns and thus carry out aural discrimination tasks more rapidly.
A biological component is clearly important, and researchers like Robert Plomin2suggest that it is only a matter of time before a gene will be identi-fied for the determination of musical accomplishments. Nevertheless, if the concept of a ‘normal distribution’3is accepted, it seems that the vast major-ity of people – around 95 per cent of the population – fall within ‘norms’
for both physical and mental capacity and structure, suggesting that more or less everyone has similar potential.4 This applies to the development of musical skills as well, in which the importance of innate abilities is often exaggerated. It would therefore be useful to explore the issues associated with environmental influence on musical abilities.
To highlight the critical role of environment, consider the politically sensitive area of race stereotyping and the various ‘nature versus nurture’
explanations that have been offered to account for musical abilities. Black Africans, for instance, have often been referred to by white people as having
‘rhythm in their veins’, while the Japanese have been perceived as possess-ing naturally high intellectual capacities and displaypossess-ing technical virtuosity in their music-making. Although at some level genetic factors may have come into play, an examination of the respective cultures and social prac-tices indicates that these stereotypes developed from socio-cultural rules of engagement and behaviour. For instance, the Anang Ibibo tribe in Nigeria makes music a part of everyday life. All children are expected to participate in music from birth. By five years of age, the vast majority of these chil-dren have a huge repertoire of songs, dances and drum patterns which they can perform. The notion of being unmusical does not exist. Also, although some individuals are slightly better than others, all are expected to partic-ipate at a high level. Within the culture, the normal distribution principle operates: music is for all, and performing accomplishments are fairly evenly distributed. In Japan, the discipline imposed by society on the individual is far more intense than that experienced in the West. Therefore, children in-vest many hours on homework of all kinds, including music. As there tend to be a more systematic approach to learning and thus more disciplined and structured patterns of associated behaviour, Japanese children acquire a higher level of musical skill than their Western counterparts.
Perhaps one of the best ways to consider the key influence of the environ-ment on the acquisition of musical skills is by examining an individual who at first glance appears to have had no environmental support whatsoever
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but who became one of the most ‘talented’musicians of the Western world:
the jazz trumpeter Louis Armstrong. Born into dire poverty, he spent large amounts of time fending for himself in the street (his mother was a prosti-tute), and he received almost no formal education. It seems remarkable that as a boy he did not even own a trumpet. However, if Armstrong’s biography5 is examined closely, five critically important environmental factors can be identified:
(1) casual but frequent exposure to musical stimuli
Armstrong grew up in New Orleans and was constantly surrounded by jazz.
(2) ample opportunities over an extended period of time for freely exploring the jazz medium and for developing performance presentation skills Armstrong formed and sang in a street-corner choir as a boy, and had opportunities to participate in communal jazz activities where mistakes were tolerated and where he could choose the level of risk and difficulty of his performance. Thus, he was able informally to learn the ‘rules’of jazz harmony, improvisation and performance etiquette.
(3) an early opportunity to experience intense positive emotional or aesthetic states in response to music
It is fair to assume that Armstrong developed a ‘love’of jazz based on some emotional experience allied to the music.
(4) an opportunity to amass large numbers of hours of practice
Armstrong spent his entire day with jazz musicians and could borrow a trumpet to play.
(5) a number of externally motivating factors such as a key adult
Armstrong received informal instruction from the older jazz musicians with whom he spent time, and this contact developed his musical knowl-edge, performance skills and desire to engage with music.
The five factors that seem critical in the determination of Armstrong’s musical interest and engagement have been fairly systematically studied by music psychologists and have now been identified as key factors in the devel-opment of musical skills.6These will be traced in depth below, and some sug-gestions will be made as to how performance skills might best be promoted.
Early opportunities for musical engagement
There is increasing evidence that the environment starts to influ-ence individuals before birth. For instance, the foetus is able to hear music and speech several weeks prior to birth and to recognise that music after
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birth,7meaning that some learning must have occurred. It is also possible to deduce that the foetal experience is largely ‘musical’in that the foetus feels the rhythms of the mother’s body and hears the inflections – the melodic contours – of external noises including speech and music. It could be that pre-natal stimulation is one of the most important of all environmental experiences and that infants stimulated in such a manner receive benefits in terms of their overall education as well as their particular musical develop-ment. If nothing else, the commercial music market assumes the viability of the pre-natal learning environment, thus offering pregnant women a variety of special music programmes which supposedly have a positive effect on the unborn child.
It has been demonstrated that in infancy, ‘motherese’8is the basis for the development of turn-taking skills.9Gestural communication is also crucial, with the rhythm, tempo and dynamics of interactions10being determined by playful movements and actions such as clapping. ‘Motherese’and ges-tural play are developed to communicate basic emotional states and needs.
Thus, the link between emotion, physical gesture and musical meaning is formed. An expressive musical feature like rubato may demonstrate a link to early infant experience. For instance, slowing occurs in physical and vocal interactions when they are about to end, and so when playing music, this idea is abstracted further as a means of anticipating and prolonging the musical ending. Quasi-musical interaction between guardians and infants in the course of childcare thus leads to the almost incidental development of musical meaning and some performing competencies.11
Early and frequent exposure to music has long-term investment potential in terms of engaging the child’s interest in and commitment to learning. For instance, researchers12 have discovered that children who later developed high-level musical skills were sung to and engaged in musical play during a critical period from birth to two years of age. This very early engagement was not structured or formalised, however. The children were allowed to explore the musical instruments in their home or to listen to the music playing on the hi-fi. The children who gave up music, by contrast, tended not to have much musical stimulation before two years, and when it did occur, it either appears to have been too infrequent to amount to an influence or was thought to be intimidating by being formally structured. For instance, one boy had a violin teacher who came to his house from the age of two, and he was so fearful of the experience that he would run and hide under his bed.
Thus, available data suggest that informal, free engagement with musical stimuli at a very early age is of great importance for future development. It seems to enable the child to build up a knowledge and an understanding of musical communication.
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The power of music: emotional experience as a
prerequisite for committed engagement with learning Jeanne d’Albret, the mother of Henri IV of France, had court musi-cians play to her during pregnancy in the hope that her child would develop a mild manner from hearing the ‘sweet’sounds. Interestingly, chroniclers of the day reported on the King’s calm nature. This anecdote reveals a possible link between physiological arousal, emotional response, music-liking and temperament. Anthony Kemp13has written about this issue at some length, discussing whether it is the music which attracts certain personalities to en-gage with it or the personalities which are shaped by the music. There can be no firm answer, but it is now fairly well established that musical engagement has some positive emotional effect. Indeed, those working in the domains of music therapy14and music education15explore music as a means of calming, soothing and invigorating individuals. Some of the results are impressive: in one case, a class of unruly children with ‘special educational needs’worked better and achieved more by listening to Mozart in the background of their science lessons.
It has been argued that an emotional response to musical content is a key trigger to intrinsic musical motivation.16One study17revealed that individuals with a lifelong commitment to music were far more likely to report key emotional experiences in response to musical content during early childhood than those who never learned a musical instrument beyond an initial stage. For example, one woman described hearing classical clarinet music for the first time at seven years of age; the instrument sounded ‘liquid’
and ‘beautiful’to her, causing her to feel ‘tingles’through her body.
It is important to note that in addition to musical content, musical context is a key motivational stimulus. For instance, being with a close friend when hearing a particular piece might encourage future engagement with such music, whereas, conversely, music heard in a distressing situation is likely to be avoided thereafter.
Practice to make perfect
A number of studies have shown that the most directly effective ac-tivity for acquiring skill is deliberate practice.18In music, a clear relationship has been found between the accumulated hours spent engaging in ‘formal’
practice (scales, technical exercises and repertoire) and achievement. For in-stance, in a study of student violinists,19K. Anders Ericsson et al. discovered that the best students had amassed almost 10,000 hours of formal practice by the age of twenty-one, whereas students of far lesser achievement had accu-mulated under half that total. Additionally, a study by John Sloboda et al.20
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revealed that not only did students with higher achievements engage in much more practice than their less successful peers, but there was a direct correlation between the amount of practice done and the quality of per-formance in musical examinations. The researchers studied five groups of young people ranging from those who had given up music after less than two years of learning to those who were receiving a specialist musical education with a view to professional careers in music. They found that the students in specialist education advanced much more quickly through the practical musical examination system than the other students. Yet when the hours of practice were calculated, they discovered that it took all students, irrespective of group, exactly the same total practice time to achieve a particular grade.
The students in the specialist education advanced far more quickly because they were practising in a more concentrated way than the other students.
In addition to formal practice, Sloboda et al. also found that students who advanced quickly were those who engaged in informal practice, which involved improvising and playing familiar tunes by ear. Thus, in addition to acquiring the technical skills to control both instrument and repertoire, the successful students were also investing time and effort in exploring how musical structures function. As in the case of Armstrong, there was consid-erable opportunity for trial and error, allowing an understanding of musical structure and expression to emerge.
The style and structure of practice also have a significant bearing on how a student advances in learning music. For instance, separate projects by Linda Gruson21and Kacper Miklaszewski22revealed that fragments of a piece would initially be worked on for extended periods of time, and as these fragments became more fluent, larger sections would gradually be studied, at first in a serial manner until a holistic strategy evolved. Susan Hallam23demonstrated that serial and holistic strategies are two broadly different approaches to practice, with some individuals preferring one over the other. Her detailed studies showed that practising strategies are highly idiosyncratic, with no simple correspondence between a single strategy and success.
While practising is significant to skill acquisition, as the case of Louis Armstrong attests, finding sources of motivation for musical engagement is also very important.
Motivation for learning
Without doubt, people’s drives, arousal, anxiety levels, and thoughts and beliefs – in other words, their individual characteristics – have critical roles in shaping how they approach a task such as learning music.
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In particular, self-esteem and self-awareness have profound impacts on the development of personal goals and aims.24A number of theories of moti-vation have emerged, and one which effectively explains why some young people find it more rewarding than others to engage in musical activities is
‘expectancy-value theory’.25This argues that people learn tasks if they value the activity or product or anticipate being successful. Value depends on a number of types of motivation:
rextrinsic (when tasks are carried out because of some external reward potential such as passing an examination)
rsocial (a wish to please or fit in with others)
rachievement (for enhancement of the ego, to do better than others) rintrinsic (interest in the activity itself, engagement for simple personal
enjoyment).
Existing research into how children engage with music suggests that the three external sources of motivation – extrinsic, social and achieve-ment – often precede and develop into intrinsic motivation. Earlier in this chapter, when the power of emotional responses was considered, intrinsic motivation was shown to be the type of motivation that facilitates long-term commitment to music. Hallam26has written at length about how to help develop intrinsic motivation, and she suggests the following teaching strategies:
(1) students should be exposed to many different types of music in a free manner, in order to open the possibilities of emotional response to music (2) students should be involved in making decisions about the style and difficulty of music to be learned and whether or not to perform in public or enter for examinations
(3) to stimulate the learners, teachers should generate surprise, perplexity, contradiction and debate.
In other words, the musical tasks need to be meaningful to the learners and at an optimum level of complexity which is both challenging and manageable. Hallam’s strategies have evolved by observing many students but also by examining the biographical characteristics shared by successful musicians.27
As for external motivators, it seems that social reinforcers are the most common – for example, friends, family and teachers. These individuals can and do use material reinforcers such as sweets, money, tokens, treats, hugs and smiles to encourage, but their presence and involvement with the learner are most critical for progress in learning.
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Social reinforcement and learning
In addition to the early stimulation of musical interest that goes on in ‘motherese’and gestural play, later, once an instrument has been taken up, parents or guardians can have a critical role in developing skills of en-gagement. A large-scale psychological investigation28demonstrated that it was not uncommon for children to give up learning a musical instrument because they did not receive sufficient parental support. Two hundred and fifty-seven children between the ages of eight and eighteen who had in-strumental lessons and performed with varying levels of achievement were interviewed with regard to the role that parents and teachers played. The highest-achieving group was supported the most frequently and consistently by their parents, with the adults often attending lessons and making notes as to what their children had to practise at home, and then, once home, sup-porting them either by regularly sitting in during or listening to the practice activity itself.
Parents therefore need to establish certain attitudes towards music.
Siblings can also enhance the learning environment, as can role models.
In Louis Armstrong’s case, other jazz musicians provided a safe and sup-portive environment where praise and success had reinforcing roles. In that regard, they were like teachers within the more conventional Western music-learning framework.
The role of the teacher
Research29 has shown that students with high achievements in music found their teachers to be entertaining and friendly as well as pro-ficient musicians, whereas the low-achieving students remembered their teachers as unfriendly and incompetent. With increasing age, this combina-tion of teacher characteristics did not change for the lowest group, but the higher achievers started to distinguish between professional and personal
Research29 has shown that students with high achievements in music found their teachers to be entertaining and friendly as well as pro-ficient musicians, whereas the low-achieving students remembered their teachers as unfriendly and incompetent. With increasing age, this combina-tion of teacher characteristics did not change for the lowest group, but the higher achievers started to distinguish between professional and personal