NMH - Brage (Norges musikkhøgskole)
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Is music really my best friend? : reflections of two maturing women on one's relationship with music
Get PDFThis text provides a unique perspective on the ways young people engage with music by reflecting on one woman’s relationship with music, both as a teenager and into her younger adulthood. Most explorations of this topic seek similarities between the experiences of many people using interview or survey data as the basis for identifying patterns. Whilst the theories and results of these investigations are extremely interesting, they often do not match with any one individual’s experience and can begin to portray simplistic notions where actually there is richness and complexity. In addition, there is a tendency towards describing music as either reliably positive or overwhelmingly dangerous, rather than acknowledging that music might have both positive and negative affordances, and that people appropriate these in different ways at different times. This text has been co-authored by a middle-aged music therapist (Katrina) and a young woman (Kelly) who had participated in music therapy during her adolescence. We engaged in dialogue via instant messaging and posting in Facebook; through face-to-face interviews that privileged Kelly’s contribution but were undoubtedly dialogic; and through the creation of a narrative text that Katrina drafted and that Kelly edited and contributed additional viewpoints. After the first in-depth interview, Katrina analysed her extensive notes and constructed a number of themes that she then considered in relation to a set of risk and protective factors identified around the same time based on a systematic review of the literature (McFerran, Garrido & Saarikallio, under review). Kelly read the drafted article about risk and protective factors and then engaged in a second dialogue about her reaction to that idea and the emergent themes proposed by Katrina. A more specific set of risk and protective factors were then developed based on Kelly’s responses. This progression is narrated between Table 1 and Table 2 below. The result is dual-voiced narrative that weaves the general and the specific, and that potentially reminds us that music and people are complex systems that relate over time in both predictable and unexpected ways
Folk music teaching on violin and guitar and its historical roots
Get PDFHow folk musicians of today learn to play their instruments is an over-all question in this article. One violin lesson and one guitar lesson were observed at Framnäs folk high school. Two research questions were formulated: What do the two lessons have in common? What are their differences? Furthermore, it was discussed how the folk music education of today could be related to the Swedish fiddler movement in the 1920s and other folk music traditions. Theoretically, the interpretation of the results was based on the mimesis theory of Ricoeur. Two teachers and three students participated in the study. The results showed that the lessons were structured in a similar way and dominated by master apprenticeship teaching. The violin teacher showed a more respectful attitude towards the tradition compared to the guitar teacher. Great parts of the manifest ideology of the fiddler movement seem to have become concealed into a latent or frozen ideology in the formal folk music education of today. There seems to be no big methodological difference between learning the music by way of visiting an older fiddler hundred years ago compared to the study of music today at a formal institution.2014-04-3
Meningsfyldte møder. Om norskpalæstinensisk kulturudveksling
Get PDFDenne artikel omhandler et musikpædagogisk projekt i den palæstinensiske flygtningelejr Rashedieh i det sydlige Libanon. Projektet er etableret af norske musikpædagoger i samarbejde med den palæstinensiske organisation Beit Atfal Assumoud, som driver projektet på sit socialcenter i Rashedieh. Musikprojektet tilbyder musik- og danseundervisning til børn og unge i alderen 7–20 år to dage om ugen. En central del af projektet er den kulturelle udveksling der finder sted mellem norske og palæstinensiske børn og unge. Hvert år besøger musiklærerstuderende fra Norges Musikkhøgskole projektet i Rashedieh som et led i deres uddannelse. Tilsvarende har grupper af palæstinensiske unge flere gange i løbet af de sidste ti år besøgt venskabsskoler i Norge og optrådt med og undervist i traditionel palæstinensisk musik og dans. Nærværende artikel er en undersøgelse af disse kulturudvekslingsaktiviteter og er baseret på mine egne erfaringer fra et længere ophold i Libanon, hvor jeg arbejdede som lærer i musikprojektet i Rashedieh. Med inspiration fra etnografiske metoder og antropologisk teori vil jeg forsøge at komme nærmere en forståelse af den betydning deltagelsen i kulturudvekslingen har for de palæstinensiske børn og unge, hvordan de forbinder de oplevelser de får i forbindelse med kulturudvekslingen, med deres liv generelt, og hvilken betydning aktiviteterne kan siges at have i den sociokulturelle kontekst deltagerne lever i
Astonishment as point of departure for research in music education practices
Get PDFThe aim of the present article is to present a procedure for investigation of music education practices using a phenomenological-hermeneutic approach. The philosophical background and its consequences for the empirical methods are described. The investigation procedure is based on a seven step model developed in a course with music teacher students who were going to investigate and discuss a particular music teaching practice. The model was used in an exercise aiming at 1) establishing a research perspective that builds on an open attitude and without a specific research question as point of departure and 2) analyzing the music teaching practice using relevant psychological, pedagogical and music education theories. The concept of ”astonishment” is suggested as a fruitful point of departure for this kind of investigation. In anthropological research the concept is used about the special surprise or wonder in encountering foreign culture. As ”culture” is about human relations aimed at a common goal, also music education practice can be understood as a culture. The investigation procedure includes video observations in a music education practice. An ”astonishing” phenomenon connected with an educational problem may arise from the observation in the situation or later in the study of the collected material. The observed phenomenon is the point of departure of analysis and interpretation. This process deviates from a traditional way of doing research, where the point of departure is a problem defined by the researcher. As a consequence, theories used in analysis are not defined at the outset, but depend on the characteristic of the observed phenomenon.2014-04-3
Less comfortably numb, more meaningfully occupied
Get PDFSteve, a singer songwriter, and Simon, a music therapist, met and worked together at a community mental health centre in London. Some years later, the two of them are sitting on a beach in southwest England, reflecting on the work they did together. It’s the first time they have met up since they worked together and Simon is keen to hear how Steve feels his period of music therapy fitted into his life as a whol
The duty of gamelan. A gamelan pedagogue’s philosophy of work
Get PDFThis article is based on a thematic narrative study of a renowned Balinese gamelan musician’s philosophy of work. The aim of the article is to illuminate a viewpoint towards music and musicking that might enrich basic thinking in Western music teacher education. The philosophy of work of the gamelan music pedagogue in this article is inseparably entwined with principles of Balinese Hinduism. Data for the study were gathered through a six-month stay in Ubud, Bali, and include interviews, video observations and field notes. The final discussion in the article is theoretically-philosophically informed by German philosopher Hans Georg Gadamer’s thinking about sensus communis (Gadamer 2011/1975), German philosopher Martin Heidegger’s thoughts about arts and human beings (Heidegger 2000) and British music philosopher Christopher Small’s thoughts about musicking (Small 1996, 1987).2014-04-3
To practise improvisasion. A qualitative study of practising practices among jazz students, with a particular focus on the development of improvisation competence
No full textAvhandling (Ph.D.) - Norges musikkhøgskole, 2013The thesis To practise improvisation. A qualitative study of practising practices among jazz students, with a particular focus on the development of improvisation competence is aimed at illuminating the motives, goals, objects and modes of actions that distinguish instrumental practising among jazz students, and at increasing the knowledge of how improvisation competence can be developed through practising. The rationale of the study is based on the assumption and potential dilemma that musical improvisation often imply playing something different from what one has practised, in order to create spontaneously in an aural, interactive and unpredictable musical context. The empirical data consists of 13 qualitative, semi-structured interviews with students within higher jazz education in Norway and Sweden, distributed on different main instruments. The interviews were triangulated with a follow-up case study with three of these students, where Stimulated Recall interviews based on individual as well as collective practise sessions were used. The study employs Activity Theory as the basic theoretical framework. Instrumental practise is seen as a cultural-historically developed activity, with its meaning and motives derived from the basic activity of performing in the jazz tradition. Practising practices are determined by the social world constituted by the educational environment and the wider jazz field, including norms, values and the use of cultural tools. The concept of expansive learning is employed to analyze learning activity that is potentially open-ended. The findings show how the participants emphasize the development of a personal “sound” or “voice”. They search for a high degree of autonomy and ownership with respect to the choice and utilization of learning material, and towards the institution and teachers. Objects of practising improvisation span from gaining control of technicalities, such as rhythmic time feel, feeling of form, chords, scales and motor skills; to processual aspects of improvising, such as increasing musical association abilities, letting go of cerebral control in the moment, etc. Practising can involve experimenting with musical conventions and instrument norms connected to a traditional division of labour in band contexts. The concept explorational practise is launced to capture these experimental and improvisational aspects, as supplement to the scholarly established concept deliberate practise. Findings also point to how collective music making practices such as playing in bands motivates and give meaning to individual practise. Practising in bands is thus considered as a necessary learning arena for developing abilities specific to the interactive situation, such as responding to each other and developing ideas collectively
Foreword: To music’s health
Get PDFForeword to "Musical life stories : narratives on health musicking". -
Musical Life Stories makes an important and significant contribution to thes refreshing and remembering of practice and theory that is currently taking place in the area of music, health and wellbeing. Its contributors are about half music therapists, and half other professionals (musicologist, educationalist, nursing researcher, psychologist). Together they present crucial empirical confirmation of key dimensions of the broader picture that is rapidly assembling, which could be summarised as showing how:
• Music is intensely personal for most people – they experience music (in relation to their personal preferences and activities) as infusing, accompanying and guiding their everyday lives in temporal, spatial and action-based dimensions. In short, music is often the soundtrack to a life, and therefore a means of ‘giving voice’ to, performing, and narrating a life.
• Because of this intimate personal link, for many people music is quite naturally linked to wellbeing (whether they are ‘well’ or ‘ill’ in an objective sense, or somewhere between – as indeed most of us typically are most of the time).
• People often personify music in this way as a kind of ‘lay-therapist’ within their everyday lives – or, alternatively, they themselves are the lay music therapist using music as a tool for their own self-care in areas of energy and motivation, emotion and emotional regulation, identity, relationship, socialisation, restorative ‘asylum’, and self-reflective work in relation to everyday problems and challenges.
• Music is therefore as much a health-promoter and illness-preventer as a ‘treatment’.
The key importance of Musical Life Stories is that this people-music-health link is presented not as theoretical speculation, but as something established and substantiated through a ‘delicate empiricism’ consisting mainly of ethnographic-style studies that
search for, identify, trace, and follow the link within specific actions and occasions (this is the vital lesson that Tia DeNora, Bruno Latour and the ethnomethodologists have drummed into us – show the links at work!). And this is just what the authors of
this compendium try to do. These studies, and other converging research now available, seems to me to be providing a new broad-based practical and theoretical platform from which we can begin to talk more usefully about both interdisciplinary and inter-professional differences and shared agendas and concerns
Evaluation of community music therapy: Why is it a problem?
Get PDFHow does evaluation work in a Community Music Therapy setting? The professional obligation of evaluation operates within a large network of complex relationships, but what exactly is that network, and how does it cope with the flow of knowledge and information across its many levels? And why do practitioners report it to be problematic? The case study is an account of Pam’s music therapy process in a care home, starting with the choices that developed her music therapy from improvisation, piano exercises and songwriting, into a project involving members of the whole organisation, culminating in a theatrical performance. The diversity and also the reach of these music therapy formats creates a widely dispersed style of practice, challenging the standard professional requirement of evaluation, and illustrating the impact of ecological approaches to music therapy. The case study traces how the evidence of music therapy in everyday working life changes throughout a complex network, incorporating an originating sense of musical purpose into thought, word, song, plot, performance, corporate morale, DVD, training resource and printed communications. The case study is prompted by my experiences as a practitioner in evaluating music therapy experiences in this context, illustrated by Pam’s process. I summarise these as problems of what, who, when and how to evaluate. I ask what to evaluate because the practice of Community Music Therapy creates a frame in which any music-making, or any activity connected to music-making, can be harnessed for health benefit. There is no rule within the literature on Community Music Therapy that marks out the territory of what counts as an acceptable mode of practice, except what falls within safe conduct according to the professional and registering bodies and the judgment of the practitioner
Musical modernization : Pauline Hall as composer, theatre woman and leader of Ny Musikk
No full textAvhandling (Ph.D.) - Norges musikkhøgskole, 2013. - På grunn av opphavsrettslige spørsmål er innholdet på de tilhørende CDene ikke tilgjengeliggjort her.Astrid Kvalbein’s Ph D project explores the work of Pauline Hall (1890-1969) as classical composer, theatre woman and leader of Ny Musikk, the Norwegian Section of the International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM). Hall’s work is explored and discussed in relation to different conceptions of modernization, modernity and modernism through a combination of biographical, performance and discourse-oriented appoaches.
The main chapters 3, 5 and 6 consist of three parts: a biographical outline, a discussion of possible modern aspects of Hall’s work in relation to the different “roles” - as classical composer, theatre woman and leader of Ny Musikk - and a concert performance by Kvalbein and co-musicians documented in writing and on enclosed CDs. Chapter 3 presents Hall’s family background, her studies - partly in Paris - and her early career as a composer, from the debut in 1917 until the premiere of her major orchestral work, the Verlaine-suite, in 1929. The artistic exploration of Hall as a classical composer is a “reconstruction” of her debut concert, which included solo pieces for piano, a violin sonata and several songs. The final part of the chapter discusses the reception of Hall’s early works, focusing on how supposedly feminine and “modern” French-impressionstic features are commented on.
Chapter 4 briefly discusses some possible reasons for Hall’s “shift of roles” from classical composer to theatre woman and music critic. While some reasons for this may be economical, Kvalbein also suggests that Hall’s years as correspondent for the daily paper Dagbladet in Berlin in 1926-32 gave her artistic inspiration.
Chapter 5 explores Hall’s reports and reviews from the city’s theatres and opera houses, in which she clearly reveals interests in modern(ist) expressions other than the early French. She writes entusiastically about Piscator’s political theatre, Brecht and Weill’s “Zeitoper,” and new operas by e. g. Berg and Milhaud. In 1930 Hall translated, conducted, and directed The Threepenny Opera in its Oslo premiere, and her version was played seve ral times until 1955.
In the 1930s the direction of her own work as a composer also shifted toward the stage. From around 1935 to 1965 she completed between 30 and 40 scores for theatre, ballet and film. This work, as well as Hall’s statements about jazz and “exotic music”, are discussed as possible components of a vernacular modernism as well as what in Scandinavian countries is called “cultural radicalism”, a liberal, partly left-wing movement which had it champions less in the musical field than in the theatres and in Dagbladet. A concert consisting of Hall’s “Berlin songs” – in which inspiration from Weill is audible - as well as songs she wrote for cabarets and settings of American poetry, influenced by spirituals and ragtime, documented the performing investigation of Hall as a woman of the theatre.
In 1938 Hall founded the Norwegian Section of ISCM, where she held the position as chair until 1961. Chapter 6 explores her work in the organization from two main perspectives: establishing and running the operation in Norway - through many challenges - and her efforts in ISCM internationally, which culminated with the success of the world music days in Oslo in 1953. In 2011, Kvalbein sang and presented a few representative works from this era in Ny Musikk and ISCM - from Anton Webern through Fartein Valen and Matyas Seiber - at a lecture-performance, which also included her interpretation of Hall’s neoclassical-theatrical Fire tosserier for soprano and winds. Hall’s reports to Dagbladet from fifteen ISCM festivals between 1938 and 1959 are discussed in a separate section, in order to extract some characteristics of her views on the different modern(ist) music presented.
Theoretical and methodological outlines of Kvalbein’s research as biographical, artistic/performing and discourse oriented, are given in chapter 2, and chapters 1 and 7 respectively introduce and sum up the presentation of Hall’s modern life