Schedule

1.30pm – gather and welcome

2pm – get started

–          Jutta’s presentation on current research project-in-progress, on unconducted orchestras.

–          Musical Situations group: Take 5 minutes to say something about our own research project or preoccupations.  One slide, 5 mins. It’s good to prepare but don’t over-think it!

Optional prompt: What have you been finding out already lately, and what would you like to know more about?

–          General discussion

–          Time to plan future meeting dates and topics

5pm – people in Edinburgh:  56 North (West Crosscauseway/Buccleugh St) for drinks or food together

Listening methodologies for qualitative music research

This is a topic that I’m really looking forward to discussing!

Musicians have a particular interest and expertise in listening. Any research that deals qualitatively with musical phenomena – processes, behaviours, cultures, etc – may have to define sensible and robust ways to examine the consequence of the particular ways that people listen to music.  Sometimes those listening experiences are the focus of the research, but usually they are not.

Here are a couple of readings to browse:

• Holmes and Holmes (2013), ‘The performer’s experience: A case for using qualitative (phenomenological) methodologies in music performance research.’ Pretty heavy on the ol’ epistemological stuff. What I think it does well should be to provoke some chat about how to access and report on music-specific experience through qualitative data.
• Lavee and Itzchakov (2023). ‘Good listening. A key element in establishing quality in qualitative research.’ I think this is interesting alongside, because it’s absolutely not music-specific – but there are principles here that apply for any form of qualitative person-interested research. (And if music research isn’t person-interested, I’m not sure what’s the point…!)

Participation and learner engagement in piano performance education 

This is a special session, with a talk from Naomi Kayayan, PhD candidate at Royal Northern College of Music.  Naomi’s PhD research examines student-teacher partnerships and engaged learning practices in a conservatoire setting, particularly looking at piano performance education.  Taking place on Friday 17th November, 11am – 12.30pm at Alison House.

Understanding performance anxiety as a University Music situation

Fascinating discussion today led by Yi.  The majority of research into Music Performance Anxiety is based on a psychological (individual treatment) model of the problem. But social support strategies can and do benefit University music students. Social contexts for learning and teaching are shaped by implicit and explicit pedagogical ideals. How well do University music teaching contexts recognise or reinforce these, for better or worse?  As music performance anxiety research engages more critically with the complex of socio-cultural expectations that music students must work within, there is greater scope to develop social interventions that may alleviate MPA – e.g., [1] and [2].

We noticed that [1]  reports on a very unbalanced sample of male/female participants. This may well be representative of the cohort — but we wondered about the implications for how beneficial the reported coping strategies would be for non-female-(identifying) students?  A reminder that sex and gender differences are often overlooked in research design, study implementation and scientific reporting, as well as in general science communication.

Creativity and the time-pressured situation of musical performance

First meeting of the new academic year!  The processes of improvisation and its relationship to creativity have been theorised in both domain-general and music-specific terms.  When improvisation takes place through musical performance it’s happening in time-pressured circumstances. Both the occurrence and duration of the material events and actions that constitute the improvisation are contingent on an emerging, embodied situation that is indexed in time.  The site of production – the people, the place, the room, the moment – of music improvisation is relevant to the creative expression which unfolds.

Pre-reading for this discussion topic: Linson, Schulkin & Clark (2020), ‘The fast and the curious: Creative improvisation as action-oriented abduction‘.

Topic: Music perception and creativity

This is a special one – Dr Andrea Schiavio will be visiting with us from the University of York, to talk about Andrea and Nikki’s recent paper!

“When we listen to music, as well as to other patterns of sound…” Dowling, 2012.

“The study of music perception encompasses a broad range of phenomena, including the perception of basic attributes of sound such as pitch, duration, and loudness, the principles by which lower-level features are extracted so as to produce higher-level features, the perception of large-scale musical structures, cultural influences on music perception, developmental issues, aberrations of music perception; and so on.” Deutch, 2017.

A huge amount is known about musical perception thanks to scientific research into psychoacoustics, the science of audition.  However, sound is only one dimension of musical experience.

Listening can appear, outwardly, as a passive activity.  The situation and conventions of European classical music performance heighten this illusion. Yet we know that this perspective is not sufficient to explain either the processes or the products of artistically-motivated, human behaviours.  So, how else should we look at things?  Scientific research into ‘music’ is vast. But dominant narratives about musical meaning, function and value do tend to shape the way that evidence is both generated and interpreted.  Perhaps existing evidence already explains the fundamentally expressive and creative character of musical participation?

Reading: Schiavio, Moran, Antović & van der Schyff. (2022). ‘Grounding Creativity in Music Perception? A Multidisciplinary Conceptual Analysis.’ Music & Science, 5.

Topic: Participating in digital (music) education

Digital, online infrastructures influence everyday situations of life and living.  Digital tech and data shape our children’s educational opportunities, and organise the interactions between teachers and learners.  Should music education be any different?

Situations of instrumental tuition are typically 1:1 or 1:2.  What transactions actually occur in these relationship-led sites of learning?   How do these attention-rich, expensive, privileged opportunities relate to classroom music curricula?  How should they relate?

Reading: Virginia Eubanks (2018). Introduction to Automating Inequality : How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor. New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press, 2018.

More reading: Keri Facer and Neil Selwyn (2021). ‘Digital technology and the futures of education – towards ‘non-stupid’ optimism.‘  Background paper for UNESCO Futures of Education initiative. UNESCO.

Topic: Music’s situation in higher education

How do institutional forms of knowledge and culture shape the research we do and the things we say and teach about Music in Universities?  Do institutional hierarchies affect the way that music-interested scholarly communities organise themselves, and who is involved?  (How) do we think this shapes general music education? Public and everyday discourse about music?

Pre-Reading:

• Bull, A. (2018). ‘Uncertain capital: Class, gender, and the “imagined futures” of young classical musicians’. In The classical music industry (pp. 79-95). Routledge.
• Bull, A. L. (2021). ‘Power relations and hierarchies in higher music education institutions’. Research Report.

Topic: Making musical participation happen

What makes musical participation ‘happen’? What does that look like, how does musical action and interaction ‘come out’ in material ways?

Reading DeNora and Ansdell (2017), ‘Music in action: tinkering, testing and tracing over time.‘ Qualitative Research, 17(2), 231-245.

Leadership and taking part in musical ensembles

No set reading. Open conversation to share ideas and suggestions, as responses to work in preparation.

Discussed: What size of ensemble requires a conductor, and why? What happens to presentational music when scores/scripts are taken out of the equation? What is revealed about the conductor’s function when ensembles choose not to appoint a musical director – what organisational model takes shape instead?