Music Camp Research Articles

Becoming Reflective Practitioners in the Music Business

This case study is from the music business production where we have investigated how supervisors at music camps develop as reflective practitioners. We have investigated the process of how the supervisors gradually become aware of their tacit knowledge and are able to make it explicit, following the SECI-model through reflecting. It is also interesting to identify how they maintain a production focus throughout each process of conducting the music camps, but at the same time opens up for reflection and learning. As the lecturers also work at a music production company, and we have sought to unveil how becoming reflective practitioners have made a difference when it comes to executing their profession. Hence, trough qualitative investigations we have interviewed the supervisors and their co-workers in their organization to unveil how this has had an impact in their organization and contributed to enhanced organizational knowledge.

Countering an Appalachian Arts Desert With Music Camp

Countering an Appalachian Arts Desert With Music Camp

When worlds collide: How a classically trained cellist integrates a heavy metal music camp into her learning ecology

The creation of connections between learning spaces is a central dimension of music learning. However, these connections do not arise automatically, but require specific efforts from the learners. In this article, we look at these efforts, focusing in particular on the conflicts that can arise, often due to the association of places with certain genres. As an example, we attend to a classically trained cellist participating in the Wacken Music Camp, a learning space for heavy metal music. Among other things, our findings can help music educators to understand the alienation many students feel from school music lessons, and we also offer perspectives on how to address this alienation productively.

How a small-town enterprise delivers “worldwide” services: a case from the music production industry

In Rena, a small town (approx. 2,500 inhabitants) in a small municipality (approx. 5,000 inhabitants), there is a rather small enterprise that has not only had a national impact, but also attracts international attention. The company has specialized in music production and developing singer/songwriters and are running a substantial number of “music camps” that are sessions lasting either a weekend or a week with different themes. With increasingly better equipment accessible to “everyone” and digital platforms with short access to the public, the competition regarding being spotted on the different music apps is high and increasing rapidly. In our paper, we have investigated how this company has made a living out of facilitating for the development of music. We have used qualitative methods, and primarily focussed on in-depth interviews with the employees and participants, as well as observations during sessions. Our results show that not only their business model, but also the structure and facilitation, is vital for developing products that may be published. The structure and facilitation have been developed over some time. During this time, the founder and colleagues have shown exceptional learning abilities, and not only developed as music producers, but also as facilitators. We have found some explanations for this success, not only from theory on innovation and entrepreneurship, but also in theory on Positive Deviance, which we will present in the paper. The combination of these directions has provided a richer understanding of how this small-town company has a worldwide customer database. The innovation capacity of the company has supported the development of the organization as they have been able to utilize their dynamic skills, hired staff with complimentary skills and through a leadership and management style managed to engage the staff by involving and including them in the strategic development of the organization and what they offer their customers. Their ability to attract and develop competency and their professionalism have contributed towards turning potential disadvantages to a part of what they offer the customers as a support and positive means to finish or enhance their products.

Preparing for work-life through work-like situated learning: A case study

In this paper we investigate how it is to have supervision during a course when the students are to learn to write and compose music during a 12-hour music camps. It is a study that is close to practice as the part of the programme is about the students are to experience how it is to work on producing and developing music in a work life. The connection to work life require that the students establish an understanding of the purpose of the music camps and why they are organized the way they are. We will analyse this approach in the light of the communication principles of Habermas. The role of the supervisor does in a Norwegian setting require equality and symmetry in the relation between the supervisor and student, something that contributes to a psychological safety in the situation. This in turn contribute towards the students being able to forward their own points of views. The supervisors seek to make the students reach an awareness regarding what they will encounter in a work life. Hence, they encounter the concrete situations that occur and either steer or support the students based on their level of maturity and competency level. This can be regarded as an ongoing interaction regarding tacit and explicit knowledge. These are processes that not only support individual learning, but development of new knowledge which can be incorporated in the further development of the music camps. We have developed a conceptual model that has guided us in our analysis which is based on the qualitative investigations we have undertaken. Our conclusion is that the lecturers experience and skills, and work-like approach to the education strongly contribute towards facilitating a way of communicating that imply a sense of equality and symmetry in the communication between the student and lecturers, something they report contribute to a psychological safety that enables the learning not only of theory and skills, but also prepare them for a work-life.

Mick Moloney (1944–2022)

Mick Moloney (1944–2022)

Universal Design for Learning in a Music Camp: Perspectives and Musical Self-Efficacy of Children With Disabilities

The purpose of this qualitative study was to evaluate a summer music camp, designed using principles of Universal Design for Learning, for children with disabilities. Data included one parent–child group interview, a children’s musical self-efficacy rating scale, children’s drawings, and children’s explanations of their drawings. Participants were elementary school children with disabilities ( n = 4) and their mothers ( n = 4). The children were all male, aged 5 to 8 years. Three children had Autism Spectrum Disorder; one had a diagnosis not specified by his mother. Three themes for children’s perceptions of the camp (social interaction/play, enjoyment of making music, and positive representation) and three themes for parents’ perceptions (camp structure, camp teachers, and benefits for the children) emerged. Musical self-efficacy ratings did not change, but the children’s explanations of the sources of musical self-efficacy indicated that two children may have experienced positive changes in musical self-efficacy.

The Extra-Ordinary Music Camp: An informal online distance learning approach for children with intellectual and physical disabilities and learning disorders

In summer 2020, 25 children aged 8–17 with intellectual and physical disabilities and learning disorders participated in a research project called the Extra-Ordinary Music Camp. The objectives were to (1) provide an adapted environment where extra-ordinary children could develop musical creativity; and (2) examine the impact of informal, inclusive, participatory, and adapted creative music activities on specific development areas. Individual 20–40-min online sessions were delivered at a distance biweekly for 7 weeks. Mixed methods analysis was used to determine the effects. Results show shared improvement across the communication and social skills measures, and improvements for all participants in community use, musical skills, autonomy, and technology skills. Notably, the improvements in community use (ABAS-II) and communication (specifically developed questionnaire) were significant.

Perspectives of three Black students attending a predominantly white summer music camp in the United States

ABSTRACT The purpose of this case study was to examine the perspectives of three Black instrumental music students related to their experiences attending a predominantly white summer music camp for high school students in the United States. Analysed through a conceptual model of culturally responsive teaching in music, data sources included semi-structured interviews with individual participants, a focus group session with all participants, and researcher field notes. Participant stories revealed contrasting home and summer camp environments, racial identity development, and a desire for broader experiences beyond the European classical tradition. Findings explore a variety of barriers and supports for music learning for underserved student populations that may be transferable to similar high school music camp settings.

“We’re in the defining moment where we’re able to figure out what the digital norms are going to be”

Cellist Mike Block (Silkroad Ensemble), here interviewed by Laura Risk, describes the work of moving his music camps online and the transition to teaching virtually in a conservatory setting. He discusses the challenges of learning to teach and perform online, and finding new ways to generate revenue in the digital realm.

"Your network bandwith is low"

My contribution is a personal account about my experiences with online participatory music-making in the first few months of the pandemic. As an old-time fiddler, I anchored a local Zoom jam and attended a Zoom-based music camp. As a Sacred Harp singer, I participated in regular singings via Facebook Live.

Gould and Liberace, or the Fate of Nineteenth-Century Performance Culture

ABSTRACT Two of the most famous pianists of the 1950s, Glenn Gould and Liberace occupied opposing esthetic and cultural positions. Liberace’s style of performance and self-presentation was by and large consistent with his late nineteenth-century pianistic models; however, emerging television esthetics, among other factors, made this style increasingly incomprehensible, except as an extreme brand of musical kitsch or camp (the mode for which he became notorious). Meanwhile, Gould’s studied neutrality, which energetically deployed the period’s new media forms to cultivate a radical denial of the performing mechanism and the performing body, interpellated a generation of listeners who were not addressed by a musical rhetorician as much as they were invited to eavesdrop on, and to make their own, a self-possessed sound object. The story of Gould and Liberace thus not only sheds light on the new austerity of 1950s performance practice, but has something important to teach us about the ideological fate of nineteenth-century performance cultures since the late twentieth century.

Making Light: Haydn, Musical Camp, and the Long Shadow of German Idealism. By Raymond Knapp

Making Light: Haydn, Musical Camp, and the Long Shadow of German Idealism. By Raymond Knapp

Niels H. Andersen

Niels H. Andersen, 76, died on Dec. 20, 2019, in Seattle. “Niels and his wife, Susan, immersed themselves in all things dulcimer and ukulele, attending innumerable music camps and publishing music ...

Music & Camp ed. by Christopher Moore and Philip Purvis

Reviewed by: Music & Camp ed. by Christopher Moore and Philip Purvis Kevin Schwandt Music & Camp. Edited by Christopher Moore and Philip Purvis. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. [xvi, 263 p. ISBN 9780819577818 (cloth), $85; ISBN 9780819577825 (paperback), $27.95; ISBN 9780819577832 (e-book), price varies.] Music examples, illustrations, bibliography, index. Because the study of camp aesthetics has typically been reserved to visual arts and narrative, a collection of studies focused on music and camp is welcome. Christopher Moore and Philip Purvis's edited volume Music & Camp makes a valuable contribution both to the broader, interdisciplinary study of camp and to popular musicology. The book is organized in three sections: "The Saccharine and the Sacred," "Flaming Lips and Flaming Hips," and "Gender and Genitals." Despite this organization, the individual chapters offer distinct conceptual perspectives. The chapters span discussions of Francis Poulenc to analysis of Christina Aguilera, a range that is appropriate for the subject. While the individual readings are engaging for the most part, the real advantage of this collection is the diversity of theoretical approaches and definitions of camp. Camp is notoriously difficult to define, which is arguably a significant part of its cultural power. In the opening chapter, "On Fairies (and Mothers): Beatrice Lillie Sings," Mitchell Morris explains that "the term camp may be taken as a rubric under which an assortment of complex attitudes and responses to art objects and performances are grouped" (p. 9). Central to the aesthetic is a kind of subterfuge, necessitated by the danger of open communication and art among marginalized groups, traditionally but not exclusively defined as the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer or questioning, intersex, and asexual or allied communities. Therefore, writing about camp often requires individual authors to lay out theoretical parameters repeatedly rather than relying on the frameworks of previous writings. Having such a wide range of perspectives is a strength of both camp and this volume. Chapters by the editors, taken together, demonstrate the value of differing methodologies when approaching this subject. Both discuss the camp implications of the cultural production of Poulenc. In "Camping the Sacred: Homosexuality and Religion in the Works of Poulenc and Bernstein," Moore develops a convincing conceptual context of Poulenc's camp and challenges traditional perspectives on the composer's work before engaging in an effective cultural analysis of the campiness of Roman Catholicism within the composer's work. Moore then uses the campiness of Leonard Bernstein to further contextualize the broader theoretical frame. In "Poulenc's (Sub)urban Camp: L'embarquement pour Cythère" (p. 181), Purvis focuses more on biography to further develop the framework before offering music analysis of the piece, arguing for understanding it as an act of performative subversion. Taken together, the two chapters offer unique perspectives not only on Poulenc's output and life, but more important, for [End Page 308] approaching cultural analysis from unique positions and methods. This is especially important for analyzing a form of production that is predicated, at least in part, on hidden meanings, subterfuge, and simultaneous seriousness and playfulness. Freya Jarman takes another novel approach that provides both history and analysis in "Watch My Lips: The Limits of Camp in Lip-Syncing Scenes" (p. 95). Jarman examines a number of film and television scenes to conceptualize a sophisticated framework. This demonstrates the adaptability of campy thinking. Ultimately, Jarman discusses how the disconnect between the voice and the body in such scenes produces "a fragility that means the object must be treated with some care; given a willing viewer positioned at the right angle, it could be true that even the least obviously camp of these scenes has camp potential, despite appearances" (p. 110). This could be the thesis not only of this collection of essays but of camp itself. While Jarman's argument encourages the audience or scholar to expand traditional or obvious examples of camp, several chapters engage with cultural production that has traditionally been associated with camp. Lloyd Whitesell's "The Uses of Extravagance in the Hollywood Musical" (p. 16) and Stephen Pysnik's "Musical Camp: Conrad Salinger and the Performance of Gayness in The Pirate" (p. 31), for example, both approach the classic Hollywood reception that is often seen...

Learning Habits and Attitudes in the Revivalist Old-Time Community of Practice

Abstract The revivalist musicians who participate in the old-time music scene constitute what Lave and Wenger (1991) term a “community of practice. ” This study seeks to analyze the learning habits of revivalist old-time musicians from the perspective of Lave and Wenger and to explain how their approaches to and attitudes toward learning can serve to position cohort members within this community of practice. To do so, the study provides a framework for positioning individuals in the revivalist community of practice, establishes the criteria for “full” and “peripheral” participation in that community, examines the learning approaches and attitudes reported by revivalist old-time players, and demonstrates that approaches to learning are tied to community position. The data for this mixed-methods study was collected in 2017 at 5 old-time music festivals and camps in the Southeast United States, where 100 adult musicians completed a questionnaire containing demographic items, Likert-type items, and open-ended questions. This study concludes that the most significant marker of full participant status in the community of practice is a strong aversion to the use of notation and tablature, while a preference for learning from field and historical recordings, a tendency to learn tunes at jams, the possession of historical knowledge about tunes, and the ability to identify regional playing styles are also markers of full participant status.

What High School Students Want to Know about Music: An Information Literacy Instruction Course for a High School Music Camp

ABSTRACTThe SEMINAR High School Summer Music Camp at Western Michigan University provided an opportunity to offer intensive music related information literacy instruction to a small group of high school students over a two-week session. These students participated in an assessment study in which they provided answers to questions related to information literacy learning outcomes before and after the course of instruction. This case study presents a model for lessons and curricular structure for an information literacy course in music for high school students.

The Greatest Band That Never Was: Music, Memory, and Boomer Biography

ABSTRACTThis paper explores the meaning of rock music to the definition of the North American baby boomer generation. The central argument is that postwar rock and roll, since the 1950s, has become associated with a timeless and ageless narrative animating postwar identity, style, and sociability. For the boomers in particular, the emotion, time, money, and fantasy invested in rock music has strengthened both the music’s biographical appeal and its intergenerational reach, as manifested through various technologies and commodities of memory such as classic-rock musical formats, vintage musical instruments, musician biographies, reunion concerts and festivals, nostalgia clothing, and concert memorabilia. Less attention has been paid, however, to the importance of amateur performance as a Bergsonian enactment of boomer memory that collapses the past into the present, especially within music clubs and camps, which this study addresses, supported by the author’s experience in an amateur music club.

Eclectic Styles and Classical Performance: Motivation and Self-Efficacy Belief at Two Summer Music Camps

String teachers and scholars have suggested that classically trained students may be motivated to engage in eclectic (e.g., rock, pop, jazz, groove, folk) styles. However, we do not fully understand the ways in which students’ motivation to engage in new styles might be influenced by their perceptions of their ability to perform in those styles. In this mixed-method study, we draw upon quantitative, qualitative, and arts-based data from 120 middle and high school students at two camps (one emphasizing classical music, the other emphasizing eclectic styles), to explore various ways in which students develop self-efficacy beliefs and motivation to perform in a variety of musical approaches. According to analysis of all data, students at both camps generally expressed having positive musical and social experiences. Negative experiences, while less common, stemmed from confusion or frustration with music learning, boredom with music that was too easy or not interesting, and competitive comparison with others. Based on findings from qualitative and arts-based data, we suggest that these students may have benefited from additional teacher support when encountering new musical techniques.

Rhythm and Melody Tasks for School-Aged Children With and Without Musical Training: Age-Equivalent Scores and Reliability.

Measuring musical abilities in childhood can be challenging. When music training and maturation occur simultaneously, it is difficult to separate the effects of specific experience from age-based changes in cognitive and motor abilities. The goal of this study was to develop age-equivalent scores for two measures of musical ability that could be reliably used with school-aged children (7–13) with and without musical training. The children's Rhythm Synchronization Task (c-RST) and the children's Melody Discrimination Task (c-MDT) were adapted from adult tasks developed and used in our laboratories. The c-RST is a motor task in which children listen and then try to synchronize their taps with the notes of a woodblock rhythm while it plays twice in a row. The c-MDT is a perceptual task in which the child listens to two melodies and decides if the second was the same or different. We administered these tasks to 213 children in music camps (musicians, n = 130) and science camps (non-musicians, n = 83). We also measured children's paced tapping, non-paced tapping, and phonemic discrimination as baseline motor and auditory abilities We estimated internal-consistency reliability for both tasks, and compared children's performance to results from studies with adults. As expected, musically trained children outperformed those without music lessons, scores decreased as difficulty increased, and older children performed the best. Using non-musicians as a reference group, we generated a set of age-based z-scores, and used them to predict task performance with additional years of training. Years of lessons significantly predicted performance on both tasks, over and above the effect of age. We also assessed the relation between musician's scores on music tasks, baseline tasks, auditory working memory, and non-verbal reasoning. Unexpectedly, musician children outperformed non-musicians in two of three baseline tasks. The c-RST and c-MDT fill an important need for researchers interested in evaluating the impact of musical training in longitudinal studies, those interested in comparing the efficacy of different training methods, and for those assessing the impact of training on non-musical cognitive abilities such as language processing.