We are also music lovers: Testing vocal tastes in higher musical theater education

Abstract

This article explores taste processes within a group of musical theater students and their voice teacher, the latter also acting as researcher, while working with an aesthetically broad repertoire in a higher education setting in Norway. The study is designed using an action research approach, and the collected data—students’ reflection notes, the researcher’s field notes, and workshop recordings—are analyzed through Antoine Hennion’s theoretical framework of taste as a performance that acts, engages, transforms, and is felt, and which involves skills and sensitizing. In the social sciences, taste is commonly regarded as a matter of cultural consumption. This article argues that tastes are also part of cultural production: musicians, here musical theater performers, are to be seen as music lovers, performing tastes that stabilize or challenge established taste patterns in the form of styles, genres, or traditions. Accounting for situations where tastes are performed, tested, and negotiated, this article argues that tastes have a history but are brought into a negotiating presence, producing implications for the future; in this case, tastes form vocal behaviors and vocal behaviors form tastes. Hence, in musical theater education, taste, taste-making, and taste-testing are part of systematic and formal pedagogics and students’ ongoing vocal training.