Music Participation Research Articles

The Agency of Music in Industrial Society: A Comparative Study of the Royal Manchester Institution, Manchester Athenaeum and Manchester Mechanics’ Institution, 1834-1860

Abstract Three institutions dedicated to education, rational recreation and moral improvement existed concurrently in early Victorian Manchester: the Royal Manchester Institution, the Manchester Mechanics’ Institution and the Manchester Athenaeum. Their archives reveal the prominent place of music within each institution’s programmes, in the form of lectures, classes and concerts, yet so far the significance of such music has been overlooked. Alarmed by civil unrest and radical activism, the industrial elite of Manchester – frequently described as the world’s first industrial city – hoped to shape the ‘lower orders’ to align with existing societal ideals. Music, through the institutions, was frequently employed as an agent of ideology and social control. But the intent behind the institutions’ musical programming did not always reflect how the music was used or received in practice. This article asks what the institutions aimed to achieve and how music acted in ways not always envisaged by the organizing committees. It critiques existing literature that views these institutions as primarily a means of social control, arguing that such an approach risks diminishing the experiences of those involved and obscuring more nuanced reasons for the promotion of and engagement with music. Exploring the activities and musical participation of protagonists within these institutions and in their wider lives affords new understanding of the agency of music in industrial society.

Shared cognitive resources between memory and attention during sound-sequence encoding.

You are on the phone, walking down a street. This daily situation calls for selective attention, allowing you to ignore surrounding irrelevant sounds, while trying to encode in memory the relevant information from the phone. Attention and memory are indeed two cognitive functions that are interacting constantly. However, their interaction is not yet well characterized during sound-sequence encoding. We independently manipulated both selective attention and working memory in a delayed-matching-to-sample of two tone-series, played successively in one ear. During the first melody presentation (memory encoding), weakly or highly distracting melodies were played in the other ear. Detection of the difference between the two comparison melodies could be easy or difficult, requiring low- or high-precision encoding, i.e., low or high memory load. Sixteen non-musician and 16 musician participants performed this new task. As expected, both groups of participants were less accurate in the difficult memory task and in difficult-to-ignore distractor conditions. Importantly, an interaction between memory-task difficulty and distractor difficulty was found in both groups. Non-musicians presented less difference between easy and difficult-to-ignore distractors in the difficult than in the easy memory task. On the contrary, musicians, with better performance than non-musicians, showed a greater difference between easy and difficult-to-ignore distractors in the difficult than in the easy memory task. In a second experiment including trials without a distractor, we could show that these effects are in line with the cognitive load theory. Taken together, these results speak for shared cognitive resources between working memory and attention during sound-sequence encoding.

The Musical Experiences of Adults with Severe Sight Impairment: An Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis

Research has shown that having a sight impairment (SI) may impact on participation in recreational and social activities. Yet, the musical lives of these individuals have seldom been explored, despite evidence of the importance of music to the lives of many, and the well-being benefits associated with musical engagement. The current study used semistructured interviews to explore the musical lives of 20 individuals living with a severe SI (SSI). Interpretative phenomenological analysis of interview transcripts identified four main themes: The importance of music and sound; Accessibility and inclusion in musical experiences; The impact of changing sight and changing perceptions on musical experiences; and Establishing identities in music. The study offers detailed insight into the musical lives of participants, identifying physical, social, and individual factors which impact on their musical engagement. Participants’ accounts highlighted the importance of music to their lives, as well as challenges experienced in relation to activities such as music listening, music-making, and attending live events. Findings demonstrate that while music may fulfill important functions in the lives of individuals living with SSI, musical participation may be impacted by issues of accessibility.

Review essay: Between the Material and the Ephemeral

Review essay: Between the Material and the Ephemeral

The educational backgrounds of DIY musicians

In this qualitative, exploratory study we examined the music education backgrounds and current creative practices of thirteen self-described do-it-yourself (DIY) musicians from around the United States. A growing community of scholars within and outside of education have noted the relative inclusionary nature of DIY communities as compared to mainstream society. Several themes have emerged in DIY music participation literature, including social influences and isolation, and music making for self care and self expression. DIY music-making can offer a potentially liberating space for those marginalized by traditional schooling, providing students with social, educational and musical opportunities they could not find or participate in at school. Through an analysis of interviews and participation-observations of creative practices such as band rehearsals and improvisation sessions, we found that similar themes emerged in our own data. Implications for music education include the importance of more individualized instruction and opportunities for self care and self expression.

Music in the school life of newly arrived migrant children: potential paths to participation and belonging

ABSTRACT This article addresses migrant children’s entries into new education systems from the vantage point of musical participation. Through an ethnographic study of one Norwegian primary school, it investigates what scope for musical participation is available to newly arrived migrant children in a dedicated introductory class, and how their engagement with music contributes to a sense of belonging. Four themes emerged: (1) Self-presentation and creativity; (2) New roles; (3) Memories of family and home; and (4) Belonging. The experiences in this study highlight that intercultural music education is about far more than content. The importance of relational competences developed through group musical activity and social interplay was continually to the fore, as well as the need for teacher reflexivity over the lack of neutrality of (musical) knowledge and skills in the classroom. Musical participation in schools then requires the fostering of intercultural competence among teachers, pupils and the entire school culture.

Paul Hindemith’s Cantata “Frau Musica” in the Context of the Participatory Musical Art Development

The article analyses the cantata “Frau Musica” by the German composer P. Hindemith. This work has come to be widely understood as an example of Gebrauchsmusik in the works of O. Leontieva, K.-D. Krabiel, M. Breivik. Gebrauchsmusik is often identified as utility music, which means that it is created for some specific purpose; but the purpose does not have to be utilitarian. In order to assess the profoundness of the composer’s concept and to clarify specifics of the descriptive term, it is necessary to go back to the basics of the theoretical debates about the social role of art that unfolded in the 1920s. Their main participants were H. Besseler and T. Adorno. A valuable source of information is the programs of music festivals in Donaueschingen and Baden-Baden, where Gebrauchsmusik was evolving as a multi-genre artistic experiment. Hindemith played the leading role in this process. It is also important to understand the reasons that prompted the composer to use M. Luther’s text in the cantata “Frau Musica”.Today the Gebrauchsmusik’s ideas — revitalization of the audience, expanding access to musical education and practical musical activities that evolve collaborative work — have gained the most relevance. According to the author’s hypothesis, “Frau Musica” can be regarded as an illustrative example of a work that combines different views on the nature of musical participation: a spiritual act, a collective work, the highest level of musical accessibility. In this particular composition, Hindemith intuitively found the most promising ways for the development of creative interaction between the composer and the listener, which subsequently led to the creation of a whole corpus of participatory works, including Tod Makover’s “City Symphonies”, Alexander Radvilovich’s “Baltic Music”, Paul Rissman’s “Supersonic”.

Music for a Lifetime: How Are We Doing? A Review of Literature on Adult Participation in Large Community Music Ensembles

A common rationale for the continued existence and support of music education in schools has been the development of skills and attitudes leading to a lifetime of music-making for all students. Therefore, the purpose of this review of literature was to examine previous research on adult participation in large ensemble (i.e., band, choir, or orchestra) community music settings. The research literature included in this study was summarized and presented according to three broad categories: (a) status studies of both demographic information and the music backgrounds of large ensemble community music participants; (b) the motivations encouraging or discouraging such participation; and (c) potential issues, both concrete and philosophical, in what Jellison (2000) termed the transition between school-based music and that of the adult world. Implications for music educators and potential ideas for future research are discussed.

Fostering Meaningful and Creative Connections in Higher Education: Contributions from Music Education

This paper focuses on contributing to the reflection on the importance of providing opportunities to foster meaningful and creative connections in higher education. In a context of growing plurality, heterogeneity and diversity of backgrounds, languages, cultures, identities, roles, and purpose influences the sociocultural relations and professional interactions that occur and are formed within higher education communities of knowledge and learning, which are explored from the perspective of music education. A narrative approach on participant’s views about their participation in an elective music program was developed inside the framework of informal education. Issues that were discussed the most across the datasets by participants individual accounts are expressed through themes that fall into three broad areas: previous musical experiences, significant influences for music participation, and perceptions of the participation in the music program. Results suggest that the informal music program provided participants with a context for a safe emotional, social, cultural, and musical experience, and thus heterogeneity and diversity are seen as enriching factors. Some considerations are made on the ways through which music can help to foster connections and sense of humanity in higher education. This provides some insights into the relevance of fostering musical participation as part of the cultural responsibility of higher education institutions for participants.

Musical engagement and identity: exploring young adults’ experiences, tastes, and beliefs

ABSTRACT Our study explored how adolescents’ experiences and musical preferences might relate to musical identity, and the likelihood of engaging in musical activities as adults. Participants were 170 first-year university students, both music majors and non-music majors. A questionnaire collected participants’ responses regarding beliefs about music, as well as self-reported ratings of musicality and the likelihood of engaging in musical activities. Results indicated that music majors, compared to non-majors, had significantly more school music experience, higher self-ratings of musicality, and greater likelihood of engaging in musical activity. Among all participants, there was a correlation between preference for certain musical genres and appraisal of the genres’ quality (e.g. they thought that the music they like is good). Among non-music majors, school music experience was a good predictor of musicality self-rating, but at least six years of school music experience was needed for participants to consider themselves musical. The results of the study have implications for educators wishing to stave off student disengagement from music participation.

A PRISMA review of expectancy-value theory in music contexts

In this article, we systematically reviewed the research literature dealing with expectancy-value motivation theory within music contexts. Employing the PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses) approach, a total of 1,120 records were retrieved and examined, with 110 eventually included in the analyses. Frequencies/percentages were generated for research output in 5-year time periods, type of publication, sampling locations, and methodologies. Summaries of all 110 records were provided; content analyses on topics covered were also conducted. Findings indicated a clear increase in research interest over the past 15 years with quantitative methodologies being twice as prevalent as qualitative approaches. While the vast majority (97.7%) of quantitative research employed self-report questionnaires, the most common form of qualitative data collection was interviews (59.1%). Salient topics covered included students’ expectancy-value beliefs across music and other school subjects, continued music participation, intentions to pursue a career in music, and parental influences.

Music Activities and Mental Health Recovery: Service Users' Perspectives Presented in the CHIME Framework.

Internationally, mental health service developments are increasingly informed by the principles of recovery, and the availability of arts and creative activities are becoming more common as part of provision. Mental health service users’ experiences, reflecting on the complex nature of using music participation in recovery are, however, limited. This essay considers literature that explores how music can support mental health service users in a recovery process. We have selected studies that include a broad spectrum of music activities, as well as literature considering various concepts about recovery. The conceptual recovery framework CHIME, that includes five important components in the recovery process, is used as the backdrop for exploring music activities as a contribution to recovery-oriented practice and services in mental health care. Eleven key components are identified in which music can support the recovery process: Feelings of equality; Social and emotional wellbeing; Tolerance; Hope and social agency; Triggering encounters; Redefining and reframing; A social practice; Moments of flow and peak experiences; Moments of meaning; Continuity; and Potentials instead of limitations. This essay concludes that the experiential knowledge of music activities from service users’ perspectives is essential knowledge when developing and using music activities in mental health recovery services. While this essay acknowledges that music activities can also produce unintended negative outcomes, the focus is on the positive contributions of music to mental health recovery processes.

A National Analysis of Music Coursetaking, Social-Emotional Learning, and Academic Achievement Using Propensity Scores

The purpose of this study was to examine the association between curricular high school music participation, academic achievement, and social-emotional learning. The analysis involved a “doubly robust” approach combining propensity score weighting and nested multiple regression using data from the nationally representative High School Longitudinal Study of 2009. Results of the study were mixed. Preliminary tests revealed many significant differences between the choral and instrumental students and the control group, but the propensity score weighting moderated almost all of these effects to nonsignificance. The only unambiguously positive finding was that instrumental music students had higher reading scores than comparable students who did not enroll in music. Yet, subpopulation effects emerged for certain categories of music students based on factors such as race, sex, and prior school achievement. Although the lack of widespread main effects in this study coheres with prior research, the results for certain subpopulations suggest intriguing future directions for research on potential extramusical benefits of music education.

The Musical Ludo Mix of Taiko no Tatsujin

This paper analyzes the Taiko no Tatsujin (Bandai Namco 2001/ 2018) franchise and the musical literacy it conveys. While previous accounts of game musical literacy have focused on the competence necessary to interpret references across media (van Elferen 2016), this paper expands on the concept, and includes the discussion of live performances and oral traditions.The musical compositions included in Taiko no Tatsujin pertain to the Japanese phenomenon of media convergence known as media mix (Steinberg 2012), as they have been previously popularized by anime and geemu ongaku (or game music) (Yamakami and Barbosa 2015). However, the musical participation initiated extends its references to the practice of Japanese taiko drumming, a largely oral, non-notated musical form, which cannot be reduced to a musical repertoire. The resulting, emerging ludo mix, a form of media mix centered around digital games (Blom 2019; Bjarnason 2019; Picard and Pelletier-Gagnon 2015; Steinberg 2015), presents original musical characteristics, representing and synthesizing a dynamic musical culture.The conclusions show that game musical literacy is based, not only on competence with previous media forms, but also with various different forms of participation in musical performances, or musicking (Small 1998), which concur in constructing game musical literacy. The musical side of the ludo mix can therefore be expressed through a large variety of musical practices.

Characterizing prototypical musical instrument timbres with timbre trait profiles

This paper offers a series of characterizations of prototypical musical timbres, called Timbre Trait Profiles, for 34 musical instruments common in Western orchestras and wind ensembles. These profiles represent the results of a study in which 243 musician participants imagined the sounds of various instruments and used the 20-dimensional model of musical instrument timbre qualia proposed by Reymore and Huron (2020) to rate their auditory image of each instrument. The rating means are visualized through radar plots, which provide timbral-linguistic thumbprints, and are summarized through snapshot profiles, which catalog the six highest- and three lowest-rated descriptors. The Euclidean distances among instruments offer a quantitative operationalization of semantic distances; these distances are illustrated through hierarchical clustering and multidimensional scaling. Exploratory Factor Analysis is used to analyze the latent structure of the rating data. Finally, results are used to assess Reymore and Huron’s 20-dimensional timbre qualia model, suggesting that the model is highly reliable. It is anticipated that the Timbre Trait Profiles can be applied in future perceptual/cognitive research on timbre and orchestration, in music theoretical analysis for both close readings and corpus studies, and in orchestration pedagogy.

The dynamics of musical participation.

In this paper we argue that our comprehension of musical participation—the complex network of interactive dynamics involved in collaborative musical experience—can benefit from an analysis inspired by the existing frameworks of dynamical systems theory and coordination dynamics. These approaches can offer novel theoretical tools to help music researchers describe a number of central aspects of joint musical experience in greater detail, such as prediction, adaptivity, social cohesion, reciprocity, and reward. While most musicians involved in collective forms of musicking already have some familiarity with these terms and their associated experiences, we currently lack an analytical vocabulary to approach them in a more targeted way. To fill this gap, we adopt insights from these frameworks to suggest that musical participation may be advantageously characterized as an open, non-equilibrium, dynamical system. In particular, we suggest that research informed by dynamical systems theory might stimulate new interdisciplinary scholarship at the crossroads of musicology, psychology, philosophy, and cognitive (neuro)science, pointing toward new understandings of the core features of musical participation.

Reminiscence and Music Participation Among Older Adults

Abstract The purpose of this directed qualitative content analysis was to explore the ways in which older adults reminisced about music participation over the course of their lives. Using Wong’s (1995) Taxonomy of Reminiscence as a theoretical framework, six community musicians participated in interviews and completed Meltzer’s (2007) Self-Discovery Tapestry, a life review tool for remembering the past. A total of 225 reminiscences were coded against Wong’s a priori taxonomy categories, which delineate successful and unsuccessful aging. Overall, coded reminiscences reflected healthy aging and satisfaction, including instances of self-acceptance, valuable life lessons, and the reconciliation of life events; however, some participants were troubled by strained parental relationships and bittersweet associations with music. Interruptions in music participation reflected a recurrent, evolving process in music identity renewal. Implications include reinforcing life reviews as a healthy aging practice, examining generational trends across time, and cultivating among music teachers a greater awareness of gerontological tenets.

Promoting a musical lifecourse towards sustainable ageing: A call for policy congruence

Today, individually perceived quality of life for a growing ageing population could be said to be significantly dependent on meaningful life experiences, social connectedness and a sense of purpose. In this article, we argue for a wider theorization of policy and the politics of ageing. The central aim is to reflect on understandings of ageing within music education and musical participation, and, in particular, shift the focus from active ageing – and the ways it might support the narrow agenda of music for older adults – to the potentials of holistic and sustainable learning and participation in music. To do so, we draw from the concept of policy congruence, presenting a vision of policy as a critical catalyst that may amplify parameters for concerted initiatives among multiple constituencies within music education. We argue these amplified parameters may afford renewed efforts towards transdisciplinary action that can support the actions of community musicians and strengthen their role as networked actors labouring in consonance with others in the growingly significant areas of lifelong learning and ageing populations. Our stance is that, if we can assume that music education and musical participation have a serious contribution to make in the lives and well being of individuals across the lifespan, including older adults, then we ought to consider how systematic policy engagement may actively contribute to appropriate allocation of resources and renewed pedagogical and organizational framings, which more directly use lifelong learning to support sustainable ageing.

Sistema-inspired music education as an agent of change in and beyond the musical lifecourse: Perceptions of the transferable skills and transferability

Within Sistema-inspired music education initiatives, claims have been made relating to the ways in which these experiences may contribute to the musical lifecourse, having lifewide and lifelong implications for young people. For example, a commonly held aspiration amongst Sistema-inspired programmes around the world is to foster participants’ well being, personal development and enhanced academic engagement. This article explores perceptions relating to the wider, transferable competencies derived from participation in one such programme. The National Orchestra for All (NOFA), an inclusive youth orchestra residential programme targeting under-served young people who face diverse barriers to musical participation, seeks to function as an ‘agent of change’ within participants’ lives. NOFA aims to improve the life chances of the young participants using music as means to support the development of personal, social and citizenship skills, their objective being to equip young people for achieving their potential within education, work and community. Our aim in this article is to address whether, and how, a short-term residential orchestral programme is perceived to function as an agent of change in the areas of personal, social or citizenship skills, and whether those skills are thought to be transferable beyond the programme context. Drawing on interviews and focus groups carried out over the course of three years, we present a thematic analysis representing participant perceptions. Overall, a number of transferable ‘life skills’ emerged. However, while some participants indicated that their experiences in NOFA did have an influence that transferred beyond the programme itself, others described persistent challenges that remained outside of the influence of any new skills or competencies gained within NOFA. These findings have implications for developing nuanced understandings of the role that intensive, inclusive orchestra programmes may have in nurturing transferable competencies and wider benefits in the lives of their participants.

Music Education Opportunities in Ohio K–12 Public and Charter Schools

The purpose of this study was to examine which Ohio schools offered curricular music courses and the rates at which students participated in those courses. The analysis involved descriptive statistics, analysis of variance, logistic regression, and partially nested multilevel modeling using data from the Ohio Department of Education ( N = 3,222 schools). The investigation revealed that charter schools offered music courses far less often than public schools. However, in charter schools that did offer music, students participated at higher rates than those in public schools. Nearly all public schools featured music classes. The exception was high schools in the highest poverty urban neighborhoods, 31% of which had no curricular music. Students identified as Black, Hispanic, or indigenous were more likely to attend schools without music programs. Elementary students enrolled in an average of 1.00 music classes per year, whereas middle and high school students enrolled in 0.67 and 0.35 music classes per year, respectively. Suburban districts saw the greatest decline in music participation as students progressed to high school. Urban schools with greater percentages of white, non-Hispanic students had higher music enrollment rates.