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Abstracts of Papers
Andy Arthurs and Jennifer Radbourne. The orchestra re-imagined.
The authors of this paper are completing an Australian Research Council (ARC) Linkage Grant investigating sustainable models for the 21st Century Orchestra. This research was conducted in collaboration with Queensland University of Technology (QUT), the Brisbane Festival, The Queensland Orchestra and the management team of the Ten Tenors. This is predicated on widely held concerns that orchestral audiences are ageing and declining, which is impacting on the economic viability of orchestral performance. By addressing the challenges of repertoire, entertainment competition, technology, and audience relationships, new models of artistic and economic sustainability are described.
The findings of this cross-disciplinary research (music and business) have the potential to inform Australian tertiary music culture and curriculum, amongst others. This is particularly relevant in the area of string players and their relationships to i) other musicians ii) the repertoire and iii) performance practices. More broadly it looks at the inclusion of digital music and images into traditional musical forms, and the changing skill-sets needed for a 21st century music academic.
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Judith Brown and Kim Kirkman. The role of tertiary music academics in facilitating cultural capital in community music organizations: a case study.
This paper considers the important role the tertiary music institution has as an arts organization within its community. It will focus primarily on the role of the professional musician, employed at the tertiary music institution, and the artistic contribution they make to amateur music organizations. Community music can bring enormous pleasure for those who make and hear it, yet its purpose in relation to the arts industry is unclear. Therefore these arts organizations often fall outside of government funding guidelines and appear as "second cousin" to other arts activities that appear under the "community" umbrella. Many community organizations can benefit from carefully targeted help and support beyond the obvious provision of grants and funding. This shortfall of formal government support can be provided through collaborations with tertiary music institutions. This paper considers a case study of one such collaboration and the way this has produced ongoing benefits for both the tertiary institution and the community music organization. These benefits have continued to multiply for both partners providing the community at large with greater opportunities to enjoy arts events either as participants or observers.
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Rosie Burt, Helen Lancaster, Don Lebler, Gemma Carey, Matt Hitchcock. Shaping the tertiary music curriculum: What can we learn from different contexts?
This paper arises from collaboration between colleagues at ISME's Commission for the Education of the Professional Musician 2006, in which we seek to understand the learning of music students in different contexts and how tertiary education can best prepare students for a career in music. The research is based on Learning to Perform, a four-year project investigating musical learning at a UK conservatoire that educates western classical musicians. Learning to Perform aims to understand how musicians learn, how this can be improved, and to build theory of musical expertise. Since 2004, Learning to Perform has run biannual structured and semi-structured questionnaires on students' career aims, identity, attitudes to instrumental teaching and transition into the conservatoire.
This paper extends Learning to Perform research to three Australian contexts encompassing one traditional conservatoire setting, popular music and music technology. Learning to Perform questionnaire items were administered in these institutions from March 2007. Results from this round of data collection will determine the second stage of the collaboration. Here, we consider preliminary differences and similarities between cohorts, working towards an enhanced understanding of tertiary curricula across contexts.
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Gemma Carey and Scott Harrison. The practice of pedagogy.
Despite its relatively short history in Australian musical academia, a recent survey indicates that over half of Australian music institutions now offer Keyboard/Vocal/Instrumental Pedagogy as a formalised course in their institution at either Undergraduate level or Post-graduate level. While it is clear that the imperative to raise the standard of teaching through formal tertiary training has been addressed by some music institutions in Australia, many pedagogy courses/programs are however restricted to lecture type classes, in abstract form or with artificially created practice teaching exercises. Consequently, young professional musicians are still emerging from their advanced study more often than not better prepared as performers than as teachers.
Some researchers argue that the real crux of a successful piano pedagogy program or even one pedagogy course, is and always will be the practical training of current and prospective teachers and this can only be accomplished by a large and successful measure of practice teaching.
This paper examines one pedagogy program currently being offered in an Australian tertiary institution. The aim of the paper is to ascertain the effectiveness of the intern program and whether or not the success of the program lies in the practical training of current and prospective teachers that can only be accomplished by a large and successful dose of practice teaching.
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Ryan Daniel. Engagement with music communities: A case study of practice in regional Australia
Tertiary music departments or schools within institutions of higher education are key exponents of community engagement, despite the fact that on many occasions these links are often informal and undocumented. While there is arguably a wealth of activity, published research that deals explicitly with this area is very limited, with few documented case studies of practice or research that underpin and/or define the nature of community engagement as a third stream activity. This paper provides an overview of the manner in which a small group of full-time staff from a regional institution have attempted to incorporate community engagement initiatives within academic workloads. It then documents a case study of practice, where one academic as researcher established a formal engagement with a key community resource in the form of an internationally renowned music festival, and which sought to establish mutual benefit for all participants. The data presented within this paper offer insights into the ways in which academics working in a regional area undertake and address community interaction, both broadly speaking and specifically through the case study analysis.
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Jane Davidson. From professional practice to research and curriculum development for the music practitioner in the tertiary sector: Three case studies.
My volume entitled The Music Practitioner (Ashgate, 2004) aimed to communicate empirical research results to performers and teachers for application in practical professional contexts. In 2006, the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, London, hosted a conference in collaboration with Society for Education, Music and Psychology Research (SEMPRE) entitled The Reflective Conservatoire in which the interface between theory and practice was interrogated. These were positive moves about the dissemination of knowledge about practice. Much of this knowledge had been generated through traditional science-based empirical research. Whilst valid and productive, these two initiatives were in part bound up in British tertiary-level concerns over the interface between musical performance and creative composition teaching and learning work and academic research activity has been at the forefront of the teaching/research agenda since the early 1990s when the British Universities' Research Assessment Exercise was implemented. At that point, specialist practitioners such as concert pianists, studio producers, music teachers and composers who all worked in the tertiary sector were asked to present work for assessment with guidelines that were consonant with a model of academic scientific research. This was highly problematic and after more than a decade of staffing changes, re-direction in profiles and amendments to programmes of study, institutions are still grappling with the difficulties of reconciling professional practice with academic research. In this paper, I wish to assess how my personal adoption of the concept of reflexivity has been of use for the practitioner in order to produce research product which fits into the broad conception of research that we may hope to have recognised in tertiary institutions. This is of salience given the emergent Australian Research Quality Framework assessment criteria and indicators of quality and impact. I shall draw on three case studies to demonstrate how I have aimed to interface practical teaching and learning concerns with the acquisition of more traditionally recognised definitions of research to produce salient and productive applied research outcomes. The cases I shall describe include: the editing, rehearsing, production and performance of a Spanish Baroque opera in collaboration with a professional performer, top academics and students; the development of a research protocol to investigate assessment criteria used in tertiary-level vocal examinations; the development and implementation of a post-graduate course of study.
(Paper presented but not available in published form)
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Paul Draper. Students doing the driving: How undergraduates use ICT to enhance reflective practice, peer review and collaborative learning.
The Internet offers 21st century artists new modes of production and dissemination. In higher education however, limitations are imposed upon the creative use of information and communication technologies (ICT) through policies and products which are often in conflict with innovation by university arts faculties. This paper examines the ways in which a music technology department intervenes to allow undergraduates to take a central role in the development of, and responsibility for their learning. They do so in a learning ecology which supports collaboration, peer review and Internet distribution of original musical compositions, sound productions and self-reflective radio-styled programs. Rather than position students purely as receptors of teaching-as-delivery, here, "e-learning" is understood and leveraged in ways which acknowledge students as creators of content, owners of intellectual property, and drivers of their own learning.
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Stephen Emmerson. Around a rondo.
Musical performance is a fundamental part of human existence, yet even the most experienced performer, teacher or scholar can fail to appreciate what lies behind it. It is well known that a performance in public usually represents untold hours - indeed many years - of learning and preparation, but how interpretations are put together, on what basis and with what effect may be less widely understood. What makes some performances come across as "musical"? Should one try to honour the composer's intentions, and if so how can they be ascertained? What is the relation between the score, the musical work and the performances they give rise to? ... Questions like these are often in the back of the performer's mind, not to mention the minds of their teachers, but until now it has been difficult to find compelling answers. For too long musicians have had to resort to tradition and intuition for the solutions and, important as those undeniably are, they are not always enough. The burgeoning academic literature on performance from recent years has offered little in the way of practical assistance: targeted at a highly specialized readership and generally written in somewhat impenetrable language, it has tended to neglect the concerns of performers themselves despite the need for clear and engaging writing on topics such as practice, memorization, stage fright, analysing music for performance and the modern performer's historical "responsibilities". The fact that more and more universities and conservatoires now offer courses encouraging the interaction of theory and practice, rather than their traditional separation, and that professional performers increasingly present themselves and "doers" and "talkers" (Joseph Kerman's terms) makes the lack of appropriate material all the more regrettable. (Rink, 2002, p.xi).
The contemporary academic climate creates room to redefine the process leading to performance in terms of creative research. In this process, the musician is a researcher . . . He consults a vastdatabase of information, partly external in scores, books, colleagues, and other sources, but largely internalised in the form of an 'aural library' created by many years of practice and experience. This research determines the choices the musician finally makes. In other words: the performance . . . represents the outcome of the research. The aim of these projects is to make an important step in making the choices . . . and the processes underlying them explicit, and in that way increasing our understanding of the creative process as a whole. (Queensland Conservatorium Research Centre website)
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Jon Fitzgerald. Tertiary popular music studies in the 21st century: Some perspectives from eastern Australia and eastern Canada.
This paper presents early reflections from a recent study comparing tertiary popular music education at selected universities in eastern Australia and eastern Canada. The study includes ten institutions in each country, and covers circumstances ranging from those in which "popular music studies" represents a very small add-on element (to various disciplines/departments) to those in which popular music studies forms a coherent degree program. The project draws on analysis of web-site information, discussions with Australian and Canadian academics and students, plus personal observation of teaching and learning activities, facilities, and resources. Research into Canadian institutions included a three-month research trip to Canada in 2006.
The paper provides examples of differing approaches to teaching and learning, and discusses some common issues facing popular music educators - relating to areas such as practical music education, music technology, music theory and notation, contextual studies, Australian/Canadian content, and business and career education. The paper focuses on the undergraduate curriculum - where it has proven most difficult for popular music studies to establish anything more than a peripheral presence.
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Gillies, Malcolm. Finding a career, having a life in tertiary music. (Keynote)
Malcolm Gillies reviews six developments in Australian music and music education in the decade since he was the Chair of NAC(H)TMUS, before considering three propositions about the focus of music education in the twenty-first century. Those propositions are: that profession and career do not, and should not, mean the same thing; that having high levels of musical skill does not necessarily mean someone will, or should, become a musician; that we place more emphasis on how music trains imaginative and talented citizens. Gillies concludes with some thoughts on the future role of tertiary music education, from specialist training programs to “taster” courses in broad arts and science programs.
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Catherine Grant. Beyond prevention: Addressing the needs of tertiary music students with a playing-related injury.
The discourse within Australian tertiary music institutions on playing-related injury is slowly developing. The high incidence of injury in students is gradually being acknowledged, and awareness of prevention strategies is increasing. In late 2005, a Queensland Conservatorium Griffith University presentation introduced staff, students, and the public to a project collaboratively undertaken by the Guildhall School of Music and Drama and ESMUC (Escola Superior de Música de Catalunya), Barcelona, aiming to dissolve taboos on playing-related injury among both music studentsand professionals. A publication on the project is due for release in mid 2007.
In one aspect, however, the current discourse is critically inadequate. In focusing on injury prevention and physiological management, it overlooks the psychological, emotional, social, and financial repercussions of injury. What impact can an injury have on a tertiary music student? What are the needs of students who suffer injuries? What systems are already in place within tertiary music institutions for those students, and what can be done to address the deficiencies? From the perspective of my own experience, this paper makes suggestions for strategies that address the needs of tertiary music students with a playing-related injury.
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Scott Harrison, Julie Ballantyne, Margaret Barrett, and Nita Temmerman. Building communities of music education practice: Peer collaboration in music teacher education.
Isolation is a theme that is synonymous with Australia's demography and geography, with its population concentrated in clusters and separated by large distances. The distribution of the tertiary music education community in Australia tends to reflect aspects of the country's physical make-up, specifically the separation of individuals or small groups of academics by vast distances. Consequently, music teacher education in Australia suffers from a sense of solitude. Academics in the field typically work alone in institutions and their students, beginning music teachers, also suffer from the experience of being alone in their work environment. In a funded cross-institutional project, aspects of mentoring and peer collaboration have been explored to address this phenomenon.
This paper reports on the initial stages of the project. Problem-based learning through virtual learning sites and discussion groups has been employed in the project design. These strategies have been employed as project participants endeavour to construct a music education community that reaches out across these vast distances, and contributes to academic development and collaboration.
Models aimed at minimising barriers between teacher education course structures and academic experiences across Australia have been implemented. The findings of the pilot stages are revealed through the voices of academics, tertiary students and the public speaking about their involvement with innovative approaches to music teaching and learning.
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Julian Knowles. A survey of Web 2.0 music trends and some implications for tertiary music communities.
Over the past five years, we have seen the emergence of a new kind of website, built and populated with content in a collaborative fashion by its users, who are able to upload, tag, classify and comment content, which is subsequently submitted to a searchable online database. Such sites span the fields of music and visual media, and encompass outcomes as diverse as social networking sites, personalised Internet radio stations and encyclopaedias. Those closely involved in Internet communities have used the term "Web 2.0" (O'Reilly, 2005) to distinguish such sites from traditional websites which are "read-only" from a user perspective and have identified a trend towards a design principle based on the architecture of participation (O'Reilly, 2004) and a harnessing of the intellectual resources and creative outputs of the user base. These developments have not only transformed the user experience of the web, but have provided a significant vehicle for artists to find and grow global audiences outside traditional distribution channels. This has facilitated the growth of the "long tail" music market (Anderson, 2006). This paper provides a survey of some significant recent trends relevant to music practice, and identifies some key questions and challenges that arise in music teaching, learning and research contexts.
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Helen Lancaster. Hitting a moving target: Developing effective leaders for music institutions. (Keynote)
Leaders of music institutions worldwide constantly confront moving targets: music is continuously evolving, as are the political and economic environments in which leaders operate. The Higher Education Policy of 1988 decided that Australian leaders would confront such targets from within the university sector. Previously conservatoria were mostly independent, free from academic constraints, focused on performance, flexible in practice, and desirous of (yet susceptible to) high profile leadership. Now within universities, music institutions and their leaders face new forms of governance and different expectations.
Traditionally selected for their artistic profile, leaders of music institutions once made artistic considerations, not strategic decisions. Whilst leading the institution, they maintained roles as conductors, performers, composers, or musicologists. Now, often without appropriate professional development, leaders are expected to provide varying mixes of artistic direction, academic leadership, curriculum design, administration, financial and facilities management, event production, marketing, public relations, and community liaison.
Using data from leaders worldwide (42% Australian), this paper examines the impact of these challenges as they appear to leaders in specific examples, shedding light on factors which haveshaped particular music institutions. It demonstrates the significance of individual context and the consequence that leaders need to understand how to adjust their approach as the setting evolves. This research supports findings that purposive preparation is crucial for leaders of music institutions, to give them the diversity of skills required, together with flexibility to adapt to changing circumstances. The data suggests pathways for developing an understanding of leadership appropriate to the role.
Each leader's individual capacity for leadership and interpretation of the specific institution's wider positioning are essential to realising each organisation's unique potential. This research sheds light on how these factors work together in real examples.
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Helen Lancaster. Music from another room: Real-time delivery of instrumental teaching.
Delivery of music instruction across distance challenges traditional learning systems, assessment and quality management. Study by distance education has thus far avoided performance-based study, eliminating the option for off-campus students, and isolating on-campus students from access to advanced opportunities for tuition and mentoring across international borders.
Current innovative approaches offer wider access to music training and performance by employing technology in practice-based studies, making possible the application of real-time delivery across the huge distances of such places as Australia and Asia. Because students access interactive media outside the university, real-time delivery represents a challenge which is perhaps greater for the institutions than for the students.
This paper examines some current examples of distance learning in instrumental music at tertiary and pre-tertiary levels, outlining the more challenging implications for student and staff mobility, student recruitment, and faculty development.
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Christine Logan. "In the balance": The tertiary music curriculum for the future.
Taking account of recent scholarly debate in Australia and abroad, this paper will consider directions in curricula in Australian tertiary music programs. While all tertiary music institutes want to produce graduates who are confident, versatile and skilful musicians, the ways to achieve that goal are disputed. With the support of graduate comment, a case will be made for the importance of a flexible, options-based approach to curriculum. At a time when institutional, economic and other external constraints are pressing, we must ask ourselves, “What is non-negotiable in the training of undergraduate musicians?” Are these non-negotiable aspects ultimately linked to i) refined, critical listening skills based on scholarly knowledge and ii) specialist expertise in at least one area of music study? An underlying premise of the paper is that the development of further cooperative links and greater support between institutions as well as increased awareness and understanding of the differences between tertiary music curricula across Australian institutions is critical to preserving the sustainable diversity of Australian tertiary music programs into the future.
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Sally Macarthur. Gender and the tertiary music curriculum in Australia.
The paper argues that women's music continues to be excluded in tertiary music curricula, translating into the virtual absence of their music on concert platforms. Data from previous studies and a recent survey of six tertiary music institutions in Australia supports this claim. The paper also draws on a pilot study which showed that tertiary music students were unable to tell the difference between women’s and men’s music in a blind listening task and judged women’s music to be more innovative than the men’s. In view of these findings, tertiary music education is confronted with the challenge to include more women’s classical music from all historical periods and from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in theoretical subjects of the curricula. It is argued that when music students become familiar with women’s music through their training they will go on to reproduce this music in their later careers as educators, arts administrators and concert-goers. The long term result of positive discrimination for women's music would be a more equitable distribution of music according to gender in concert hall music programs.
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James Nightingale. Reframing the musical landscape: Music networks and creative industry in Australia.
The conception of employment for music graduates has been changing as the scarcity of permanent jobs for musicians is balanced by growing opportunities for entrepreneurship, particularly among classical musicians. The flattening of musical hierarchies, whereby classical music is no longer considered more important than other musical forms, has further pushed classical musicians toward self-employment and portfolio careers. Within typical tertiary music curricula there is, therefore, a growing need to address the acquisition of informally learned skills, such as networking and entrepreneurship. Using the Flinders Quartet as an example, this paper reframes the activities of early career classical musicians within a network, highlighting the musician’s role within the creative industries, and providing a useful tool for planning and analysis. This process highlights issues of globalisation and localisation, intellectual property, government assistance and industry development within the music field.
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Peter Roennfeldt. The genealogy and anatomy of the Australian tertiary music sector - how far have we come and where are we going?
2007 sees some significant landmarks including the 50th anniversary of the foundation of Queensland Conservatorium. The tertiary music sector has since then grown and diversified to an extent that could not have been predicted in 1957. It is thus timely to review the sector, particularly various a number of national reviews have occurred recently, such as that of school music. Various spokespersons have suggested a similar review of Australia’s tertiary music sector might also arise in the near future, but it is unlikely that NACTMUS could instantly muster the evidence to successfully address such an inquiry, since much of the relevant information is only disparately available. This paper draws parallels between the perceived status and identity of Australian music schools in previous decades and now in the early 21st century after several decades of immense changes. It is incumbent upon NACTMUS to facilitate dissemination of evidence of our sectors’ collective contribution and aspirations, despite the challenges of geographical dispersal. The challenges looming for the sector will be met with confidence if it can develop greater awareness of its own genealogy and anatomy, something that would better inform its relationship to the plethora of stakeholders it is ideally expected to serve.
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Huib Schippers. Curriculum and the realities of cultural diversity: Towards a model for understanding learning processes across genres and cultures.
Over the past five decades, conditions for the world of higher music education have changed significantly. Developments in travel, migration, and media as well as social changes have brought about significant variations in the use, dissemination, and variety of music. This challenge is not limited to the musical sounds themselves: the very concept of music as “rooted in a specific corpus of musical works, and through that in a specific time and place,” (Cook, 1998, p.15) is no longer tenable. Such a shift of position has major implications for the way musical skills and knowledge are perpetuated, and the formal organisation of music learning and teaching. This holds true especially for tertiary institutions, with their strong tradition and focus on European classical music.
Cultural diversity in music education has developed drastically in scope and intensity in terms of 1) participants from a broad variety of backgrounds; 2) new contents from many cultures; and 3) methodologies that do justice to different ways of learning and knowing. Each of these has far-reaching implications in terms of educational and pedagogical approaches. These could partially account for the challenges in terms of modes of learning encountered by Asian students coming to study in European-style conservatoires; for the transformation of jazz from anarchic and counter-culture to a demure, ‘heritage’ style in many instances; for the frequent problem of accommodating the specific needs of popular music degrees; and for the many questions on curriculum and pedagogy arising from the inclusion of world musics that have had a tradition of hundreds of years outside of European tertiary education. Some of these time-honoured approaches are surprisingly aligned with contemporary educational philosophies that have abandoned the idea of a single, rigidly defined teaching path for all in favour of a central position for the learner, whose process of constructing a (musical) identity has to be facilitated.
Music education research presently lacks a transparent frame of reference that makes explicit the crucial choices that are made at the level of approaches and methods of music teaching and learning in diverse environments. This paper explores contemporary realities in Western classical music, jazz, pop, and world music traditions, aiming to arrive at a descriptive model of settings for teaching and learning that does justice to the growing cultural diversity in the sector, and can inform the education and training of future generations of performers and teachers.
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