Presented in this part of the thesis are four chapters that represent the development of the research project. There are descriptions of the data collection process, but more significantly how project design, methodology and engagement with theoretical literature evolved in response to reflection on the data. Each chapter represents a different phase in the research process: a preliminary set of small projects; the primary data collection exercise observing the rehearsal of musicians; an engagement with ideas stimulated by Slavoj Žižek; an attempt to contrive a way to use Lacanian schema as the basis for the analysis of data collected in the primary research phase.
Much of the writing is given in situ, as it was written at that particular time in the research process, to give a clear demonstration of how the researchers thinking, writing and activities evolved. In this way it is in contrast to part 1 that provided a more systematic explanation of the basis and rationale for the research project, written at the end of the research project. Part 3 will go on to consider the resulting analysis and some of the possible implications for music education, before the concluding chapter summarises what might be taken from this research project and how it might contribute to the ongoing debates surrounding popular music education.
Chapter 5 – Music Theory, Music Teachers, Music Classrooms
IntroductionRecent developments in music education have lead to recognition of the need for pluralistic and inter-disciplinary approaches to teaching music (Welch et al. 2004, O’Flynn 2005). The growth of children’s or student’s knowledge and understanding is seen as key to their musical development (Lines 2003, Welch and Adams 2003). In order to design the best possible curricula for achieving this, attempts have been made to account for and to explain musical experience, ranging from the classification of musical activities into performance, composing and listening (Swanwick 1999, Hannan 2006), to the categorisation of musical elements, musical styles and associated subcultures. Research on informal learning styles (Green 2010, Jaffurs 2004) has asked if students are better left to find their own ways of developing skills and repertoire, and new technologies have opened up possible approaches to music-making that defy conventional instrumental work (Savage 2005). How ever the musical experience is understood, the difficulty for music educators lies in deciding how to ensure learning and musical development take place and can be demonstrably measured.
A lot of music education research is focused in schools (Cox and Hennessy 2004, Green 2006) yet in post-compulsory education there is a greater remit for experimentation and flexibility in allowing a diversity of style, here a variety of approaches to music making can flourish. In the further education college in which I work I am struck by the different types of music professionals I work with, their different stylistic and industrial backgrounds. This leads to an environment where a multitude of, often conflicting, conceptions of the purpose of music education are apparent, held together only by the common goals of a specified syllabi and a shared desire to see the best from our students.
This chapter explores some of the research I have been engaged in to discover commonalities and differences between different music education practitioners’ conceptions of the purpose of music education and discover if these conceptions vary significantly between educational sectors of British society. Foremost in my research is the question of pedagogy, how we as practitioners deliver music education and if this is informed by our identities as musicians and teachers. How do we feel if the music student is at the centre of curriculum design but we are meant to be teaching and assessing their musical skills?
The main pieces of research I conducted are a case study of a music theory classroom, a survey of the perceptions of a cohort of music PGCE students and a multi-modal assessment of the ecology of music technology classrooms. These were conducted as part of my studies on a Master of Research programme and lead me to question whether the language we use as music educators takes for granted assumptions about how music should be taught that have been inherited from traditions that are non-pluralistic and are unable to recognise many of the aesthetics that motivates young people to engage in music in the first place. Perhaps this research can contribute to our understanding of possible methods for providing a multi- cultural music education that can include both students and teachers.
I struggled to come to terms with the underlying belief systems that determine my desire to facilitate student centred learning experiences for musicians with a diversity of musical backgrounds. The issue of diversity in musical style is currently important to music education discourse, the questions of what should be taught and what strategies music educators take is widely debated. Through the examples of three research projects I have undertaken I will try and explain how I have come to believe that curriculum design needs to take account of the irreducibility of the musical act leaving a space for individual evocations of its constitution to be defined by learners and teachers during the educational act itself. I rely heavily on
the language of activity theory and explore the implications of the concept of reification, which has lead me to an interest in the master-signifier of Lacanian psychoanalysis as a useful method for symbolising the musical act. In desiring to better understand how to improve the opportunities and methods I use to help people who come to me to learn about music and enhance their musicianship skills I have embarked on an investigation into how music education is perceived. I have come to believe that the ideas music educators possess about the purpose of music education greatly influence the educational processes engaged in and the outcomes of these processes. However, despite the significance that I feel these perceptions of the purpose of music education have, I find many people involved in learning about and teaching music hold firm assumptions about the supposed content of music education processes. Such universally prescriptive approaches to content are often seen to be essential to the process of doing music education and central to the achievement of standards.
This research has been exploratory, pertaining to both the actual activities that take place in sites of music education and to the belief systems and underlying linguistic and philosophical structures that support the actions of music teachers and learners. This chapter reflects upon my research activities and identifies important questions that will direct future work. I outline three specific research projects I have undertaken and define how these can serve as the basis for generating future data that helps me better understand how music education is perceived, both in the commonalities and differences between my belief about its purpose, and the beliefs of other teachers, learners, musicians and policy makers.
I am aware that my experiences as a music educator, not to mention as a musician, are located in specific contextual spaces and that these environments are formative of my ideas of the constitution of ‘good’ and
‘bad’ music education. In attempting to define some of these environments I am aware that the influence of aesthetic, ethical and institutional factors will differ from others that work in differing environments. In trying to locate commonalities and differences in attitudes to music education, important philosophical debates are seen to be relevant to the social and psychological dynamics of any understanding created. However, I have come to believe that music education is a good medium in which to explore some of these wider debates that can often appear abstract and elusive. Central to my investigations are questions of relative meaning and importance, that can clearly be illustrated with examples of musical style and culture, and pertain to anti-foundational philosophies found in debates about the role and content of education in general.
It is my argument that it is not possible or desirable to fix the proposed content of educational processes, that such content is defined by the actors and the tools (Wertsch 1998) they use when engaging in such processes, but that how music students engage in musical process is dependent upon the language used by music educators and therefore affects how the successful achievement of proposed outcomes is perceived. The language that is used, not just for doing music education but also for thinking about music education, is both given to and created by music educators and is contradictory, directional and representational of particular concepts of music. Music educators are required to achieve objectives that are in themselves defined by such language and therefore are impossible to apply universally. How music educators deal with such objectives is central to the process of doing music education and the psychological and linguistic tools they adopt is central to how successful they feel they have been.
The argument made here is that music educators who adopt ideas of the universality of the content of musical processes can disempower and exclude learners who possess differing ideas of what the essence of music is. This is not to say that music educators cannot employ specific language
dependant tools for the achievement of outcomes, but that the recognition of the purpose and nature of these tools is important. Ensuring that any person wishing to engage in music education has the opportunity to have a part in defining and contributing to the language they employ in learning about music is key to their sense of satisfaction and achievement of any given outcomes.
Musicians are people who create and manipulate sounds in order to create meaning for their audiences. When musicians want to discuss describe or define the ways they create and manipulate sound they need to use words that they can associate with the sonic phenomena experienced when music is heard. The words musicians use influences the way they understand what music is, its purpose and function in their own lives and that of others. Music teachers also need to be aware of, not only their own ways of understanding music, but the different ways their students may understand the activities they engage in. The language each musician uses, whether it be in recreational, professional or formal educational contexts, will depend on a mixture of their cultural influences, types of instruction they may have received and personally developed conceptions that have helped them develop their skills and methods of working.
In traditional music education contexts there are particular sets of conventions that are taught as the correct methods to compose and perform music, however contemporary music classrooms need to be more responsive to the different ways different music cultures produce and understand music. The centrality of language to the communication between different musical cultures is significant interpreting how musicians interact and learn from each other.
As a keen musician and music teacher the researcher has been concerned with the impact particular uses of language by musicians may inhibit their confidence in forming understandings about their music making activities. This has provoked him into thinking about the differences in
language used by different musicians and more importantly the deceptive apparentness of commonality of meaning assumed to exist in technical lexicon used by musicians and referred to in broader social contexts.
Presented here is a discourse analysis focusing on the way musicians use language, the ambiguity of meaning in the words used by musicians and the way music is identified with to create symbolic meanings that can help us interpret the activities of musicians. Case studies explore the comparisons between music used in formal educational contexts and the work professional musicians do in rehearsing musical material in preparation for performance. One output of this research is the development of a model for analysing the activities of musicians that has taken its structural inspiration from Lacanian psychoanalysis. A thinking frame that may be of use to popular music educators, which the researcher has named The Musician’s
Dialogue.
The researcher is aware that he is a participant in the research he conducts working as a musician and music teacher. It is the explicit intention of this research to generate tools for music teachers to facilitate their work and the primary challenge the researcher has faced is presenting some of the philosophical ideas he has encountered in educational research, as well as the psychoanalytic influence explored within the thesis, in such a way that it can be useful to other music teachers. Taking a case study approach to applying a participant research model has allowed data to be collected from two fields: the working environment of the professional musician, most explicitly when rehearsing in an ensemble; the music classroom where many discourses are at work and the activities of professional musicians are imagined, simulated and aspired to.
Background
The project is inspired by the researcher’s experiences of problems some young adults encountered as they progressed through a UK college music department in which he taught. Students from particular cultural
backgrounds found it far harder to adapt to the learning and music making practices they were expected to adopt as they studied increasingly higher level qualifications.
One prominent issue in this environment is that of music theory, something seen as essential to becoming a better musician, but also an intimidating new language to be acquired for many musicians that were not schooled in a conservatoire tradition since childhood. The relevance of music theory to the learning of musicians is called into question when looking at the practices of many popular musicians, for whom there are many different traditions and cultural backgrounds. For many popular musicians, theory plays a less dominant role in their activities, music theory’s purpose is more ambiguous than those traditions where reading music is the primary form of communication between composer and performer.
Music teachers in UK schools, colleges and university encounter students with different interests, aptitude and abilities. When they design their curricula the question of music theory may be one that is important, how relevant is the development of music reading skills, how does this balance with other skill sets requiring development and how best to equip students with these skills?
These are issues that have been addressed in literature and often lead to dichotomous juxtapositions such as the term formal/informal learning referring to the conservatoire music reading techniques as opposed to the aural interpretations common to popular musics. It is argued here that the relevance of any technique that is applied to the music learning process is relative to the musical context. This implies that it is impossible to design a comprehensive music curriculum without first defining and limiting the music that is going to be learnt.
When the researcher was in school, he was lucky enough to have a few music teachers that recognised that he might have an interest in jazz
and popular music. Their teaching began him on a journey of fascination with music, one that has frequently been disrupted by ideas of what music should be and how music should be learnt.
As the researcher began teaching popular music to school leavers and adults he soon became aware that only certain types of music seemed to flourish in the institution where he worked. He understood that the popular music courses that he delivered (and those on which he had previously studied) were predicated on and emerged from an academic and cultural history that had struggled to allow a voice for popular musicians. Popular musicology had begun to create a platform that stated not all musics could be described or learnt through the conservatoire methods that dominate western European classical music. As Jazz music had found a way to engage with the establishment, the counterculture of the 1960s had similarly opened a space in academic discourse and had claimed Rock music’s position as a valid means of expression and a worthy subject for the academy.
As he began to teach at the beginning of the 21st century new forms
of music had evolved different from the popular musics of the 1960s, which by this time were seen as very relevant to British cultural values and economic exports. Urban musics and post-Rave culture rippled through commercial and underground music scenes and it is in this context that he engaged with the local community, training young musicians who wanted the skills to express themselves in the modern world.
Each step change in what was included in 20th century musical syllabi,
from a conservatoire tradition, to include Jazz, then Rock music was preceded by a rejection of those musics as somehow being inferior and as each tradition was introduced it claimed a place as a different but equally valid tradition. School and University curricula have filtered these changes into subjects of study, yet the criteria by which music students are judged
still sit in a linguistic framework that assumes certain practices, practices built on the conservatoire tradition.
In schools and universities teachers of music are recruited from a range of traditions, even though the conservatoire still dominates popular music courses such as those the researcher teaches on, bringing with them views on the standard to which music should be learnt and played.
The researcher faced a dilemma in his workplace: many applicants to his courses were interested in post-Rave and urban musics, musics that did not necessarily place a musical instrument at the centre of their activities. He endeavoured to find ways to help students create evidence that would meet the criteria set down to recognise the skills of guitarists, drummers, keyboard players, singers etc. but not the skills of rappers, MCs, DJs and electronic music producers. More recently teaching syllabi have increasingly acknowledged the place of these musicians and their role in the music industry.
The researcher began a journey, culminating in this research project, which lead him to ask: How does music education engage people that want to be musicians? And how can it be designed so as not to exclude people whose interests in music may be different from those who are delivering it?
The researcher realised that these are not easy questions to answer. Firstly, it is important to gain recognition for musics not currently included in the lexicon of musical syllabi. But this requires a definition of music that would need to encompass not only new and contemporary musics, but also future iterations of musical expression, which any single definition could not hope to predict. Secondly any attempt to include forms of music previously excluded needs to be careful not to reject or ignore those established conventions that are important to the musical traditions that currently dominate, despite the apparent lack of acceptance of alternative forms of