How Popular Musicians Learn: A Way Ahead for Music Education

251 Pages·2002·0.81 MB·English

by  Lucy Green

HOW POPULAR MUSICIANS LEARN
Popular musicians acquire some or all of their skills and knowledge informally,
outside school or university, and with little help from trained instrumental
teachers. How do they go about this process? Despite the fact that popular music
has recently entered formal music education, we have as yet a limited
understanding of the learning practices adopted by its musicians. Nor do we know
why so many popular musicians in the past turned away from music education, or
how young popular musicians today are responding to it.
Drawing on a series of interviews with musicians aged between fifteen and fifty,
Lucy Green explores the nature of pop musicians' informal learning practices,
attitudes and values, the extent to which these altered over the last forty years, and
the experiences of the musicians in formal music education. Through a comparison
of the characteristics of informal pop music learning with those of more formal
music education, the book offers insights into how we might re-invigorate the
musical involvement of the population. Could the creation of a teaching culture
that recognizes and rewards aural imitation, improvisation and experimentation, as
well as commitment and passion, encourage more people to make music?
Lucy Green is Senior Lecturer in Music Education at London University, Institute
of Education. She is the author of Music, Gender, Education (1997) and Music on
Deaf Ears (1988) as well as contributing many chapters and articles to edited
collections and journals.
For
Bernie Holland, Terry Ollis, Rob Bums, Nanette Welmans,
Brent Keefe, Peter Williams, Will Cragg, Steve Popplewell,
Andy Brooks, Simon Bourke, Michael Whiteman, Emily Dicks,
Richard Dowdall and Leo Hardt
How Popular Musicians Learn
A Way Ahead for Music Education
LUCY GREEN
London University, Institute of Education
ASHGATE
© Lucy Green 2002
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher.
The author has asserted her moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988,
to be identified as the author of this work.
Published by
Ashgate Publishing Limited Ashgate Publishing Company
Gower House Suite 420
Croft Road 101 Cherry Street
Aldershot Burlington VT 05401-4405
Hants GU11 3HR USA
England
Ashgate website: http://www.ashgate.com
Reprinted 2003, 2005
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Green, Lucy
How popular musicians learn : a way ahead for music
education. - (Ashgate popular and folk music series)
1. Popular music - Instruction and study
I. Title
781.6'3'071
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Green, Lucy.
How popular musicians learn : a way ahead for music education / Lucy Green, London
University, Institute of Education.
p. cm. -- (Ashgate popular and folk music series)
Includes bibliographical references andindex.
ISBN 0-7546-0338-5 -- ISBN 0-7546-3226-1 (softcover)
1. Music--Instruction and study--England. 2. Popular music--Instruction and
study--England. I. Title. II. Series.
MT3.E5 G74 2001
781.64'071--dc21 2001033362
ISBN 0 7546 3226 1
Printed and bound in Great Britain by MPG Books Ltd, Bodmin, Cornwall.
Contents
Foreword by Robert Fripp ix
Acknowledgements xi
1 What is it to be musically educated? 1
Research methods 8
Concluding thoughts 17
2 Skills, knowledge and self-conceptions of popularmusicians:
the beginnings and the ends 21
The‘beginnings’ 22
Professional musicianship: the ‘ends’ 28
Some self-conceptions of popular musicians 45
3 Learning to play popularmusic: acquiring skills and knowledge 59
The overriding learning practice: listening and copying 60
Peer-directed learning and group learning 76
Acquiring technique 84
Practice 86
Acquiring knowledge of technicalities 93
Summary 96
4 Attitudes and values in learning to play popularmusic 99
Discipline and osmosis 99
Enjoyment 104
Valuing musicianship 107
Valuing oneself 117
Attitudes to ‘other’music 121
Summary 124
5 Popularmusicians in traditional music education 127
Classical instrumental tuition 127
Traditional classroom music education 135
Summary 148
6 Popularmusicians in the new music education 151
Popular music instrumental tuition 151
The new classroom music education 155
Popular music in further and higher education 167
vi CONTENTS
The musicians’views of popular music in formal education 172
Summary 175
7 The formal and the informal: mutual reciprocity ora
contradiction in terms? 177
The neglect of informal learning practices in formal music education 177
Informal learning practices, attitudes and values: their potential for
the formal sphere 185
What can teachers do? 214
Appendix: Summary profiles of the musicians 219
Bibliography 221
Index 233
General Editor’s preface
The upheaval that occurred in musicology during the last two decades of the
twentieth century has created a new urgency for the study of popular music
alongside the development of new critical and theoretical models. Arelativistic
outlook has replaced the universal perspective of modernism (the international
ambitions of the 12-note style); the grand narrative of the evolution and
dissolution of tonality has been challenged, and emphasis has shifted to cultural
context, reception and subject position. Together, these have conspired to eat
away at the status of canonical composers and categories of high and low in
music. A need has arisen, also, to recognize and address the emergence of
crossovers, mixed and new genres, to engage in debates concerning the vexed
problem of what constitutes authenticity in music and to offer a critique of
musical practice as the product of free, individual expression.
Popular musicology is now a vital and exciting area of scholarship, and the
Ashgate Popular and Folk Music series aims to present the best research in the
field. Authors will be concerned with locating musical practices, values and
meanings in cultural context, and may draw upon methodologies and theories
developed in cultural studies, semiotics, poststructuralism, psychology and
sociology. The series will focus on popular musics of the twentieth and twenty-
first centuries. It is designed to embrace the world’s popular musics from Acid
Jazz to Zydeco, whether high tech or low tech, commercial or non-commercial,
contemporary or traditional.
Professor Derek B. Scott
Chair of Music
University of Salford
Visit Project Pop: http://www.salford.ac.uk/FDTLpop/welcome.htm
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Foreword
May we trust the inexpressible benevolence of the creative impulse.
The formal musical education available to one of my generation (born 1946)
was clear: the music of Old (preferably Dead) White Guys From Europe was the
only music to be taken seriously. In the 1960s, to wear long hair signified proof
of delinquent musical talent, aberrant moral values and an implicit threat to
society; the electric guitar was not quite a proper musical instrument; and
improvisation – or ‘making it up as you go along’– not quite an intentional
musical act.
Today, the world of music is a world of musics, each with their own traditions
in the transmission of musical discipline, performance conventions, repertoire
and usages of music, both sacred and secular. Customarily, the aspirant player
seeks an ‘elder’in their tradition for instruction, whether formal or informal.
The European conservatory is only one form of response, at a particular time in
a particular culture, to addressing this need.
Dr Lucy Green’s work deserves a wider readership than academics and music
educators. Her first two books are directed primarily towards an academic
readership, but they are also valuable to a working player willing to engage with
the vocabulary of academe. I read Music On Deaf Earsin the Starbucks opposite
the Beverley Center, Los Angeles, while on tour with King Crimson in June
1995; and Music, Gender, Education in the coffee shop of the University Hotel
in Seattle during May 1998, while recording Bill Rieflin’s ‘Birth Of AGiant’
and Rieflin-Fripp-Gunn’s‘The Repercussions Of Angelic Behaviour’.
Dr Green’s arguments on fetishization in those books have since moved into
Crimspeak. On the US G3 tour of 1997, in the staff restaurant of the Las Vegas
Hard Rock Hotel, engineer and producer R. Chris Murphy learnt this wonderful
phrase: ‘Why do you feel the need to radically fetishize the inherent and
delineated meanings of Robert’s music?’Chris would, on occasion, approach
fans who were more interested in autography than music, and present his
question. This present book is more immediately inviting, available and of direct
practical interest to the working player in popular music, particularly those who
also instruct students.
Music is a quality organized in sound and in time. The musicness of music is
eternal, the forms of musical organization evolve within a culture. How we
acquire a taste for music is largely determined by our cultural environment,
including our educational institutions. But fundamentally, we are called by the
music that calls to us. Music works where it will, where it can, where it is
welcomed. The musician, with discipline, creates a bridge for music to enter our
world. Some of the bridges are funky, some constructed from the vernacular,
some are superb statements of form which persist through time, some are