The Music Practitioner

Research for the Music Performer, Teacher and Listener

JaneW. Davidson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351542197
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Useful work has been done in recent years in the areas of music psychology, philosophy and education, yet this is the first book to provide a wide assessment of what practical benefits this research can bring to the music practitioner. With 25 chapters by writers representing a broad range of perspectives, this volume is able to highlight many of the potential links between music research and practice. The chapters are divided into five main sections. Section one examines practitioners use of research to assist their practice and the ways in which they might train to become systematic researchers. Section two explores research centred on perception and cognition, while section three looks at how practitioners have explored their everyday work and what this reveals about the creative process. Section four focuses on how being a musician affects an individual's sense of self and the how others perceive him or her. The essays in section five outline the new types of data that creative researchers can provide for analysis and interpretation. The concluding chapter discusses that key question - what makes music affect us in the way it does? The research findings in each chapter provide useful sources of data and raise questions that are applicable across the spectrum of music-related disciplines. Moreover, the research methodologies applied to a specific question may have broader application for readers wishing to take on research themselves.

Chapter 1
Introduction

Jane W. Davidson

In recent decades there has been an increasing interest in the psychology of music, music education, musicology and music philosophy, with publications of books such as The Musical Mind (Sloboda, 1985); Sound and Structure (Paynter, 1992); Music Education: Trends and Issues (Plummeridge (ed.), 1996); The Practice of Performance: Studies in Musical Interpretation (Rink (ed.), 1995); The Social Psychology of Music (Hargreaves and North (eds), 1997); Music in the Moment (Levinson, 1997); Music and the Emotions (Juslin and Sloboda (eds), 2002) and Musical Identities (Macdonald et al (eds), 2002); Musical Performance: A Guide to Understanding (Rink (ed.), 2002); The Science and Psychology of Music Performance (Parncutt and McPherson (eds), 2002). For the most part, these books have been heavily discipline-based. The psychology books, in particular, have largely ignored what practical benefits research can bring to the practical musician. Practical musicians of all descriptions are serious about their profession and are constantly looking for ways and means of assessing their own practices, thus the time seemed ripe for an academic book which is of direct relevance to the music practitioner. The explicit aim of this book is to engage music practitioners and demonstrate the many potential links between research and practice.

The book comprises 25 chapters in which research largely from the academic area of music psychology brings a range of practical questions into focus. In the context of this book, research might be regarded as critical, systematic enquiry into topics of specific interest. The spectrum of topics covered is deliberately broad, with issues ranging from historical performance practice to career choice amongst music graduates. A central concern in this brief introduction is to suggest ways in which the reader may dip in and out of the book. It is suggested that three different aspects become the central focus.

The first aspect to consider is that research questions themselves are of interest, and the findings of each chapter provide a useful source of information. For instance, Anna-Karin Gullberg and Sture Brändström (Part 3, Chapter 13) demonstrate that rock musicians trained in music college compose works that are very different in style and form from those rock musicians who learn in informal contexts, and that listeners with different degrees of formal music education appreciate these different styles of composition in different manners.

The second aspect to contemplate is that research findings can have direct educational or general implications which in all cases the authors in this book highlight. In the rock musician chapter, for instance, critical questions for educators include: what happens to a musical genre like rock music when it is taught at a formal learning institution? What are the specific factors that are influential in the individual development of the musician?

The third relevant aspect to be considered is that the research methodologies applied to specific questions in each chapter may have broader applications which may be of interest to a reader wanting to undertake research him- or herself. For instance, Daniela Coimbra and Jane Davidson (Part 4, Chapter 16) describe a large-scale study in which they designed questionnaires requiring quantitative and qualitative analysis. In the former case, this involved them in asking participants specific questions, usually requiring forced-choice answers. From these questions it was possible for them to calculate statistical interpretations of the responses, such as how many of the participants had a particular behaviour, or which of the participants was rated as being better than the others. Thus, the frequency and/or the likelihood of a behaviour being the product of change or some critical variable could be assessed. Qualitative responses can also be quantified and statistical information extrapolated, but the principal advantage of qualitative data is that participants can be asked open-ended conversational-style questions so that they can determine the interview content themselves, with themes of relevance to them being pursued. The qualitative data generated by Daniela and Jane were richly informative, allowing insights into individual behaviour. Thus, the methodologies are juxtaposed yet seen as complementary. In principle, the difference in the two approaches is that the quantitative data provide information that is generalizable to the group of participants studied, whereas qualitative data provide data about an individual. In summary, the current volume is not focused on explaining the methodological principles of research techniques, but the chapters included in the book contain many different styles of research, and thus show the reader the broad range of approaches that can be adopted.

The book is divided into five main parts. In Part 1, different ways in which practitioners can use research is explored by authors who are all both performing musicians and researchers. Aaron Williamon and Sam Thompson are both researchers at the Centre for the Study of Music Performance at the Royal College of Music, London, where they specialize in teaching and researching performance from a psychological perspective. Their chapter defines the ways in which psychological techniques and findings can be applied to the practitioner’s work. Kacper Miklaszewski from the recording company DUX in Warsaw is also a music psychologist, and is particularly focused on suggesting ways in which instrumental teachers might benefit from this kind of research knowledge.

John Rink is a pianist and Professor of Musicology at Royal Holloway, University of London, and contributes Chapter 4 of the book. His research over the years has provided critical insights into matters of interpretation, focusing principally on the piano repertoire of Chopin. A central concern for him at the moment is that it may be possible to identify a specific research domain that concerns itself centrally with ‘performance studies’ and he draws the reader’s attention to the elements that such a domain might include. The thrust of the chapter is to suggest that rather than being a specialist single domain, ‘performance studies’ should integrate historical, theoretical and psychological work in order to provide the performer with a many-toned palette on which to construct his/her own interpretation of a work. Rink gives an exciting exposé of his ideas in the presentation of a case study of Chopin’s E minor Prelude Op. 28 No. 4.

Kari Kurkela, Director of Research at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki, makes a case study of the courses on offer at his institution as an example of how practitioners can be trained to undertake relevant and focused research. Initially, he points out that music colleges and conservatoires are ideal locations to investigate practical music. A key feature of this chapter is that he discusses research data that rely on the opinions of the students. In other words, the students provide data about the strengths and weaknesses of their learning environment. Thus, a feature of the chapter concerns what elements of the musician’s education in this institution can be improved upon to advance them as player-researchers. In summary, this first part of the book looks at ways in which practitioners might draw on research to assist their practice, and it also considers ways in which practitioners might train to become systematic researchers.

In Part 2, research approaches that are largely focused around perception and cognition are explored from very different perspectives. Andrzej Rakowski of the Chopin Academy in Warsaw opens the section (Chapter 6) examining how the performer and listener can help the psycho-acoustician to understand how mental operations in perceiving musical pitches might occur. In the following chapter, Peter Johnson from Birmingham Conservatoire presents a highly focused research question about expressive intonation in string quartet playing: What does ‘good intonation’ in this context imply? This is both an important practical and theoretical issue. He discusses an investigation which analyses professional recordings of Beethoven’s String Quartet Op. 135 using the technique of Fourier analysis adopted from physics. In Chapter 8, Bernhard Billeter also enquires into tuning, but from a historical perspective by looking at compositions from the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries. Billeter, from the University of Zurich, notes that there were many difficulties facing musicians at that time and that issues of tuning may well have had an impact on compositional approaches. So, again, his research has significant implications for performers concerned with tuning authenticity. He poses specific questions about tuning related to Bach’s use of ‘well-tempered’ keyboards.

Richard Parncutt of the University of Graz in Austria offers another perspective on musical understanding in Chapter 9, proposing how computer-based teaching might enrich music theory learning. Although speaking about a hypothetical curriculum, Parncutt discusses which elements of music theory can be best explored via these means. Part 2 closes with George Papadelis and George Papanikolaou of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki investigating how the rhythm categories of a piece of music are perceived. They report a detailed study in which participants were taken through a series of rhythm identification and discrimination tasks in order to explore what mental operations were occurring for perception of the rhythmical categories to occur.

Part 3 of the book demonstrates how practitioners have explored their everyday work. Jane Davidson of the University of Sheffield, for instance, is an active opera director and she uses her work – a production of Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas – as an opportunity to assess how the creative process operates. Thus, she turns her regular working practice into a research exercise. Jane Ginsborg from Leeds Metropolitan University is a singer, and as such was intrigued to explore how singers approached the memorization of words and music in a song. Adopting a highly systematic approach she is able to investigate not only what strategies people adopt, but which ones seem more useful. The implications of such a research approach for teaching are obvious. As discussed in the opening of this Introduction, Anna-Karin Gullberg and Sture Brändström from Luleå University in Sweden look at how rock musicians learn, with the implications of the research being highly significant: innovation largely happens in non-formal learning contexts, whereas those rock musicians who are formally taught in music college produce less creative works. Again working in a music college, Allan Vurma and Jaan Ross from Estonia (Chapter 14) use objective spectographic analyses of singer’s tones to investigate what a vocal training actually does for a voice over the course of a vocal training ranging from one to ten years. The major implications of this systematic enquiry are obvious, for it is demonstrated that the singer’s formant (the voice’s spectrum) increases with training, but that timbral qualities of the voices are not altered by training. These results present a conundrum for teachers when singers are often evaluated in terms of their vocal timbres.

Part 4 of the book presents research which has focused on how being a musician impacts on an individual’s sense of self and how others perceive them. In Chapter 15, António Salgado from the Universidade of Aveiro in Portugal considers the issue of self-identity for opera singers. The research question is of critical importance because of the strong personal identification between musical instrument (the singer’s own voice) and their sense of self (who they are as a performer). The research technique adopted is in-depth qualitative interviewing which shows how rich such data can be. Daniela Coimbra and Jane Davidson of the University of Sheffield present the findings of a large-scale investigation of how young opera singers are evaluated in a music college setting in Chapter 16. Their largely exploratory approach reveals intriguing results: singers are principally evaluated in terms of attractiveness and presentation of ‘a performing personality’, rather than in terms of their vocal characteristics. Evident contrasts and parallels can be drawn between the findings of Chapters 14, 15 and 16 and should stimulate personal reflection for the reader in the contradictory and unexpected findings these systematic enquiries produce.

In Chapter 17, Stephanie Pitts of the University of Sheffield investigates the life transition of music students from school to university. Not only does her study demonstrate how to undertake detailed qualitative enquiry, this kind of research also shows that a gulf exists between what school and universities know and understand of their students Working in the same university as Stephanie Pitts, Karen Burland and Jane Davidson consider a larger time-scale life transition, that from school to professional musician life. In an eight-year longitudinal study they demonstrate that key environmental factors seem to discriminate out those students who will go on to a professional performing career as opposed to those who will either give up music altogether or keep it as an amateur interest. Although their study is exploratory, requiring further data to validate their findings, it does demonstrate the power of research in pinpointing factors that may contribute towards a particular outcome. Part 4 of the book closes with Daina Langner of the University of Paderborn exploring what personality characteristics are displayed by musicians, and in particular what differences exist between a soloist and a group player. She makes some intriguing points concerning training and the selection procedures for various roles within the current music profession.

In Part 5, innovative research methodologies are used to illustrate that creative researchers can find ways of enquiry which provide new types of data for analysis and interpretation. In Chapter 20, computer-based research is discussed as a means of reducing the researcher’s cultural biases in the assessment of phenomena in the experimental context. The topic is children’s singing and the research is undertaken by Stefanie Stadler Elmer and Franz-Josef Elmer from Switzerland. Ingrid Maria Hanken of the Norwegian State Academy of Music raises important issues in Chapter 21 about how to undertake research that is both useful and ‘acceptable’. Working in collaboration with her students, she looks at how student evaluation can be developed as a means of improving the quality of instrumental teaching. Similarly working alongside individuals, Nicholas Bannen from the University of Reading examines a method for teaching general musicianship. The particular emphasis of the chapter is on the action research method used. In this technique, a spiral of cycles of planning, acting, observing and reflecting are put into operation. This means that the devising of a general musicianship syllabus becomes an act of research, and so again the appropriateness of the methodological approach for the teacher/practitioner is to be emphasized. In Chapter 23, Heiner Gembris of the University of Paderborn in Germany discusses how a longitudinal study was devised and analysed, and, most importantly, discusses the findings which examine what music graduates go on to do in their future lives. The section closes with a provocative chapter by Matthew Lavy of the University of Cambridge in which he notes that existing studies can only take us only so far in our explanations of phenomena. He considers how music elicits emotional responses in us and suggests the extent to which we can explain this through empirical enquiry.

We close the book with a final note from Jerrold Levinson of the University of Maryland. This chapter is juxtaposed next to Matthew Lavy’s work as it also looks at emotional response, but we use it to conclude the book, for it tackles the most over-arching question of all: What makes music affect us as it does? The writing allows the reader to reflect on empirical work and philosophical induction and what each approach can offer. More specifically, it engages us in the debate of how something experienced as essentially physiological (tingles down the spine, for instance) can have an aesthetic value which may be regarded as a refined and culturally determined cognitive act. So, in the end we are reminded of the objective and subjective elements which need to be considered in order for critical insight to be gained.

Looking over the broad range of work contained in these 25 chapters, we know that this book will provide the reader with an engaging and important exploration of music research relevant to the music practitioner and demonstrate several different empirical approaches to collecting and analysing data. Readers are encouraged to take from it as much as possible and apply its theories and methods and results to their own everyday musical concerns. We hope the reading and reflecting is enjoyed by all!

References

Hargreaves, D.J. and North, A.C. (eds) (1997) The Social Psychology of Music, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Juslin, P. and Sloboda, J.A. (2002) Music and the Emotions, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Levinson, J...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• List of Music Examples
• Notes on Contributors
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• Part 1: The Practitioner and Research
• Part 2: Theory and Experimentation: Understanding Pitches, Tuning and Rhythms
• Part 3: Practitioners Investigating their Daily Work
• Part 4: Researching Musician Identity and Perception
• Part 5: Adopting Innovative Research Approaches
• Part 6: A Final Note
• Index