Young Musicians Research Articles

Adémar de Chabannes (989–1034) and Musical Literacy

Abstract In the second half of 1027, Adémar de Chabannes contributed the musical notation to the production of an elaborate liturgical manuscript (currently Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS latin 1121) at the scriptorium of Saint Martial in Limoges. While doing so, he introduced the innovative technique of placing the neumes in strict alignment along the vertical axis of writing in accordance with their relative pitch. The accurate heighting of the neumes revolutionized the teaching of music at Saint Martial, and eventually throughout Aquitaine. Instead of relying on the rote communication of melodies from more experienced singers, younger musicians could turn to the visual transmission of chant through the medium of notation, now made more transparent by the use of accurate heighting. This article investigates the musical and intellectual context in which Adémar introduced the innovation of accurate heighting to the scriptorium at Saint Martial, the role of tonaries (now equipped with precise intervallic information) in musical pedagogy, and the impact of these devices on musical practices at Saint Martial through the eleventh century.

Conceptions of Nation and Ethnicity in Swedish Children's Films

Swedish children's films frequently deal with issues of nation and ethnicity, specifically with “Swedishness”. This may be most obvious in films based on the works of Astrid Lindgren, which abound with nostalgic images of the national culture and landscape. However, films about contemporary Sweden, such as Kidz in da Hood (Förortsungar, 2006) address these issues too. Kidz in da Hood is about children in the ethnically diverse suburbs of Stockholm and it tells the story of a young fugitive, Amina, who is cared for by a young bohemian musician. It is, interestingly, a remake of one of the first Swedish children's films, Guttersnipes (Rännstensungar, 1944). In this article I argue that Kidz in da Hood is a contradictory piece, in the sense that it both celebrates and disavows “Swedishness”, as it substitutes the class conict of Guttersnipes for ethnic conflict.

Approach to Effective Practice Strategies in Music David Benders

The practice of practicing music should be a meaningful experience that produces musicians with a lifelong love of music. The use an organized practice system that includes goal setting, specific practice strategies, self and teacher assessment, and the development of intrinsic motivation, lays a foundation for musical success. In the classroom, teachers model efficient practice techniques and establish classroom routines that encourage cooperation, and reward individual progress instead of competition. Evidence provided by research demonstrates the need of teachers to abandon the practice of time served and recorded, to training young musicians to systematically practice.

The world with us: Sight and sound in the “cultural flows” of informal learning. An Indigenous Australian case

Abstract Studies of informal learning have tended to take for granted the success of youth in acquiring expertise with digital media. However, the pace of change in technologies increasingly requires individuals to learn on their own or in “unofficial” communities of learners. Examined here is a case of such learning within remote Indigenous communities of Australia. Based on a three year ethnographic research project investigating Indigenous youth learning in community-based learning spaces, this paper focuses on the learning of digital media technologies by adolescent and young adult male musicians. Revealed here is the manner in which long-standing social interactional patterns integrate with visuospatial and embodied modes employed by youth to bring digital media into their lifeways.

Transposition ability in a young musician with autism and blindness: Testing cognitive models of autism.

Although researchers have investigated absolute pitch and musical memory in individuals with cooccurring autism, congenital blindness, and exceptional musical ability, relatively little is known about other aspects of their musical talent. While anecdotal evidence suggests that these individuals possess an enhanced ability to reproduce heard melodies in different keys, transposition ability has yet to be tested experimentally. We compared the transposition skills of a 17-year-old autistic and congenitally blind pianist (GN) with those of a group of typically developing sighted controls with similar level of musical expertise. Participants were presented with a simple piece of piano music for learning and 1 week later were asked to perform the piece in its original key (C major) and in transposition. All transpositions were recorded and scored for accuracy and fluency. In contrast to the control group, who showed highly constrained transposition skill, GN was able to transpose across a wide range of keys with a constant level of fluency. Our study is the first to our knowledge to systematically investigate and demonstrate enhanced transposition in a musician with autism and congenital blindness. Our results are discussed in the context of enhanced perceptual functioning (Mottron et al., 2006) and hyper systemizing (Baron- Cohen et al., 2009) accounts of exceptional skills in autism.

Specialist young musicians' role models: whom do they admire and why?

Previous research into adolescents' musical role models has shown that young people are more likely to identify a celebrity figure due to their image and perceived fame, than because of their musical ability. The current research is a development of Ivaldi and O'Neill's (Adolescents' musical role models: Whom do they admire and why?) study by exploring the role models of young dedicated musicians to see who they admire and why. One hundred and seventeen adolescents, aged 13–19, took part in a questionnaire study, drawn from both conservatoire (n=60) and county service (n=57) environments. Both famous and non-famous figures were identified, with the reasons relating to image, higher achievement and dedication. Adolescents' beliefs and values for music were also explored in relation to their attainability and aspiration beliefs for becoming like their role model. The differences between the two studies are discussed in general, and the current picture of adolescents' musical role models is presented.

South Indian Solkattu and Western Music Pedagogy

Part of the classical music tradition of South India, solkattu reinforces the statement “If you can say it, you can play it.” This system of percussive syllables can help young musicians approach rhythm training in a way not usually available to students in Western countries. This article offers applications for a music curriculum. The approach can help students be more accurate in both their sense of rhythm and their rhythmic performance.

The Influence of Lifelong Musicianship on Neurophysiological Measures of Concurrent Sound Segregation

The ability to separate concurrent sounds based on periodicity cues is critical for parsing complex auditory scenes. This ability is enhanced in young adult musicians and reduced in older adults. Here, we investigated the impact of lifelong musicianship on concurrent sound segregation and perception using scalp-recorded ERPs. Older and younger musicians and nonmusicians were presented with periodic harmonic complexes where the second harmonic could be tuned or mistuned by 1-16% of its original value. The likelihood of perceiving two simultaneous sounds increased with mistuning, and musicians, both older and younger, were more likely to detect and report hearing two sounds when the second harmonic was mistuned at or above 2%. The perception of a mistuned harmonic as a separate sound was paralleled by an object-related negativity that was larger and earlier in younger musicians compared with the other three groups. When listeners made a judgment about the harmonic stimuli, the perception of the mistuned harmonic as a separate sound was paralleled by a positive wave at about 400 msec poststimulus (P400), which was enhanced in both older and younger musicians. These findings suggest attention-dependent processing of a mistuned harmonic is enhanced in older musicians and provides further evidence that age-related decline in hearing abilities are mitigated by musical training.

To amuse the muse of the brain by heart

To amuse the muse of the brain by heart

The Young Musicians of Motown

This article focuses on the music education and enculturation of Motown musicians who grew up in greater Detroit. The early musical lives of Motown musicians are described—in the home environment, in schools and in black urban neighborhoods. Schools are shown to be spaces of musical nurturance, both in the context of the formal curriculum and in the school culture at large. The story provides a positive example of urban music education that can inform and inspire music education today. It helps identify factors that strengthen relationships between school and community; it highlights the ecological nature of school music located within a complex network of social and cultural institutions that contribute to music education; and it illustrates how schools and individual teachers can provide a space for students to perform music of popular idioms. It also provides evidence of the power of music in the lives of students as well as of the capacity of young people to generate and contribute to musical culture and to effect social change through their music-making.

Music, Movies, Meanings and Markets: Cinemajazzamatazz by Morris B. Holbrook (review)

Music, Movies, Meanings and Markets: Cinemajazzamatazz. By Morris B. Holbrook. (Routledge Interpretive Marketing Research, 14.) New York: Routledge, 2011. [xxiv, 382 p. ISBN 9780415893138. $125.] Bibliography.The eminent consumer psychologist-jazz pianist Morris Holbrook has given us a wonderful new book that not only informs and entertains, but also philosophizes and criticizes the several roles of jazz in the movies. This book should be in every library. It is a multipurpose work that will appeal to a number of different audiences:*readers seeking a reference work that catalogs most of the movies that have either had jazz musicians as the subject or had jazz as an important on-screen presence;*readers interested in the back stories of jazz movies;*jazz historians and media scholars investigating trends in the image of jazz that has been portrayed by cinema and television;*philosophically minded readers intrigued by the tension between art and commerce;*jazz fans who may enjoy learning the personal pleasures and gripes of a fellow jazz fan who is particularly insightful and articulate;*film makers and journalists who are fascinated by discrepancies between the intents of script writers and movie directors, and their works' effects on viewers;*American literature students examining how themes such as the American Dream of Horatio Alger are used in biopics;*readers seeking a compact explication for the psychology of background music;*jazz buffs who like movies;*movie buffs who like jazz.As jazz fans well know, most movies about musicians have been weak. In fact, most attempts to portray jazz musicians have been disastrous, even in the hands of such esteemed directors as Martin Scorsese (New York, New York), Robert Altman (Kansas City), and Clint Eastwood (Bird ). Holly - wood ordinarily takes a few dramatic moments in a musician's life, such as tragedies and romances, and then revolves most of the movie about those incidents, instead of addressing more representative aspects of the artist's creativity. Moreover, the scripts that Hollywood selects are usually laughable. It is a shame that young musicians, especially those who may become jazz players, learn about the world of jazz by such accounts.These facts raise important questions. If we are usually disappointed by jazz movies, why bother seeing any films about musicians? More importantly, why would anyone write an entire book about them? The answer to the first question is that jazz fans thirst for any taste they can get of the music and any tidbits of insight into its players and the world they inhabit. They are compelled to see every new movie about jazz and every film reputed to have any jazz in it. They clutch at every opportunity because jazz is rarely presented on television or cinema.Holbrook's book offers multiple answers to the second question. First, the bad ones warrant being criticized. In fact, his book offers criticisms of the disasters with insightful commentaries that are often hilarious. Some are so entertaining that that they could have been published in The New Yorker or Vanity Fair. Second, Holbrook actually enjoys a few of the movies that are about jazz. For example, he appreciates, on a number of levels, the remake of High Society that features Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, and Louis Armstrong, finding that it offers a casual introduction to jazz in the context of a romance. Third, he finds legitimacy in some movie accounts of jazz lives. For instance, The Benny Goodman Story is mostly true, and it has good footage of the historic musicians. The film The Five Pennies honors Red Nichols, a neglected trumpeter-bandleader of the 1920s, and his combo. Paris Blues clearly portrays the philosophical tension between art and commerce.Among the wide assortment of offerings contained in Holbrook's book is a fortypage chapter that provides an elaborate background for the song My Funny Valentine. …

Jembe Hero: West African Drummers, Global Mobility and Cosmopolitanism as Status

In Guinea, West Africa, the status attributed to the musicians who play the wooden, goat-skinned jembe drum has historically been very low. But, over the last 60 years, the jembe has progressively ‘gone global’, and today some master drummers earn a living by teaching jembe workshops to amateur aficionados everywhere. In Asia one week, Europe the next and North America the following, these masters build global social networks, opening and plying the trade routes for the commodification of their roots. In this paper, I describe how the modern fetish for African drumming has created an alternative economy of status for jembe musicians. I examine how, against significantly increasing barriers, young musicians in Guinea are leveraging this economy to follow their elders into global mobility, attempting to achieve a cosmopolitanism through which they, too, can inscribe themselves into West African imaginaries of heroism. And I show how their life paths in turn can allow us to reconsider the notion of cosmopolitan citizenship, in a very unequal world.

The Spontaneity of Therapeutic Improvisation from Zhuangzi’s Perspective

The main theme of this study is focused on the spontaneity of therapeutic improvisation from Zhuangzi’s perspective. Based on the free spirit of life, Zhuangzi’s musicology emphasizes ‘one-self [自]’ and ‘joy [快]’ from nature’s point of view. It means that we should be able to pursue ‘joy in oneself’ by ourselves. This is also why musicians, who complain about performance anxiety, need music therapy, such as therapeutic improvisation. In fact, young Korean musicians can feel joy by communicating with the audience through their emotions in music and by exchanging them with many people. However, what is waiting for them, even before empathizing with the audience, is severe competition and evaluation. Why do young Korean musicians need spontaneity? Which implications and ideas for the spontaneity of therapeutic improvisation and Zhuangzi’s philosophy can be given to those musicians complaining about performance anxiety based on eastern culture? On Zhuangzi’s perspective, when young musicians can get free from external stuff WaiWu [外物] like ranking, they can overcome performance anxiety and be absorbed in their own music. This is why Zhuangzi talked about ‘Do not depend on external stuff WaiWu’ and emphasized ‘one-self’ and ‘joy.’ The goal of this project is to find answers to (1) how individual musicians can maintain spontaneity, (2) how musicians can solve the performance anxiety that they have had, and (3) finally how they can maximize their competence and ability as professional musicians from Zhuangzi’s view of spontaneity. Ultimately, this study reviews a music therapy article on young Korean musicians and applies the concept of spontaneity as the free spirit of life in Zhuangzi’s philosophy to the empirical case and interprets the case’s results to answer those questions above. There is one condition: If young musicians want to be able to enjoy music, they have to set themselves free from others’ eyes. They can feel joyfulness accompanied with a kind of catharsis, which can be only possible when they express their own feelings and get absorbed in their performance. This is the meaning of spontaneity as the free spirit of life, which is namely shēngzhīde [生之德] in Zhuangzi’s philosophy.

Out But In: Between Discourse and Practice in a London Jazz Quartet

I think the key is that we really try to think about what we're doing. I think a lot of bands don't. We put so much thought into what we're playing--and really deliberately in terms of concept or what we're trying to express. tune has an identity. It's all very considered. It's not chance, so much. Chance comes on the bandstand. Tom Farmer (Empirical 2010) At the start of Bowden Out, the concluding track on their 2009 album 'n' In, London jazz quartet Empirical generates a sound world that is both new and familiar. Acoustic bass, alto saxophone, and bass clarinet weave an accompanimental fabric of open, strummed chords and gentle breathy dyads. Over this consistently undulating foundation, a vibraphone skips a weightless melody. Drums enter, adding the wash and rumble of mallets on cymbals and tom-toms. Together, the ensemble floats in suspended animation. The recording offers admirable space and clarity, allowing the listener to focus on the quiet click of woodwind keys, the fleshy attack of bass strings, the slow rotation of vibraphone motors. This moment of quiet reflection comes at the end of an album dedicated to a modern reimagining of the music of reedist and composer Eric Dolphy. Bowden Out presents a reflective abstraction of his ensemble's music, revealing the extent to which Empirical has assimilated and personalized the compositional and interactive processes at the heart of Dolphy's recording, To Lunch. Empirical's process--careful study of a series of recordings as the foundation of the quartet's collective work as improvisers--is certainly nothing new. This imitative approach has been broadly distributed across the jazz landscape for the last century as countless young musicians have used old recordings as the foundation of new work. Empirical's particular result, however, is unique to them, and it is uniquely informed by their relationship to the jazz tradition--both as the tradition's story has been told and as the tradition has been lived by musicians. Through their collective imagination of the processes undertaken by the Dolphy quintet in Rudy Van Gelder's Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, recording studio in February 1964, the members of Empirical have pieced together their own understanding of the practices and relationships animating the American post-bop community of the mid-1960s. Their internalization of the dominant jazz discourse has led the members of Empirical to paint themselves--a racially diverse ensemble of young British improvisers--as outsiders, separated both in time and in locality from the most privileged sites at which the jazz tradition has coalesced. Their sincere, focused engagement with their recorded mentors, however, has enabled the group to overcome the limitations that they have associated with the distance they perceive between themselves and the tradition's discursive core. On 'n' In, Empirical explores Dolphy's music quite directly, focusing on To Lunch in particular. While 'n' In includes two Dolphy compositions (Hat and Beard and Gazzelloni), the majority of the album is dedicated to an abstracting and reimagining of Dolphy's processes and materials. As bassist Tom Farmer describes Empirical's approach, Each [track] deals with at least one specific idea from Dolphy and Dolphy's associates (Empirical 2010). Rather than writing new compositions based loosely on Dolphy's musical style yet utilizing traditional bebop forms, Empirical constructs spaces that fuse definite material and performative process within a single set of instructions. The pieces included on 'n' In are not only melodies and harmonic progressions composed by one of the group members; the works themselves also encompass collectively negotiated guidelines for each performance's interaction and expressive shape. These shared understandings are broad and negotiable, but they form an important foundation for the quarter's engagement with each composition. …

Practice Makes Perfect?

Helping young musicians learn how to practice effectively is a challenge faced by all music educators. This article presents a system of individual music practice instruction that can be seamlessly integrated within large-ensemble rehearsals. Using a step-by-step approach, large-ensemble conductors can teach students to identify and isolate difficult passages, select appropriate practice strategies, and make improvements to their playing. This model of practice instruction draws on Albert Bandura’s concept of observational learning, as well as music education research.

The collective organization of contemporary jazz musicians in the UK

This article examines the conditions under which jazz is created as a live music among young musicians in three major UK cities. The analysis uses approaches from political economy and cultural studies, including interviews with jazz musicians and promoters in these local jazz scenes, to explore how the participants organize themselves and, in particular, how they use ideas of collective working to achieve their ends. The authors make the case that the collective has become the primary organizing principle through which contemporary jazz musicians create performance opportunities, sustain production cultures and negotiate their relationships with the music industries in these scenes. This thesis is supported through a detailed examination of the work of local collectives, the semiotic use of collective organization, and the relationship of the collectives to the jazz educational programmes based in those cities.

JazzWerkstatt

On the initiative of a group of young and ambitious musicians, the JazzWerkstatt collectives were founded in the Austrian cities of Vienna and Graz in 2004 and 2007 respectively in order to create a workshop environment and performance opportunity for young musicians. The JazzWerkstatt platform’s activities include the organization of annual festivals, performances at national and international venues, the foundation of the record label, JazzWerkstatt Records, and a cooperation with the pan-European ‘ZOOM!’ collective. Based on interviews, this article examines the structure and development of the two branches of this successful Austrian initiative.

Emotion, engagement and meaning in strong experiences of music performance

This paper explores the emotions connected with music performance. Performing music provides the potential to attain wellbeing via the hedonic and eudaimonic routes, appealing to pleasure, engagement and meaning (Seligman, 2002). To date, most research exploring emotions amongst performers has focused on these components separately, exploring positive or negative affect, flow, or the development of performer identity. In the current study, 35 university students (mean age 20.6 years) gave free reports of their strongest, most intense experiences of performing music. Accounts were content analyzed using the Strong Experiences of Music Descriptive System (Gabrielsson & Lindström Wik, 2003), and also analyzed for the components of wellbeing using an idiographic approach. Four basic types of response were characterized, emphasizing: (1) negative and positive emotions and personal engagement; (2) negative and positive emotions, engagement and meaning; (3) positive emotion and meaning; or (4) positive emotions, engagement, and meaning. The emphasis on the eudaimonic route to wellbeing (through engagement and meaning) shows that young musicians do have valuable and rewarding experiences with the potential to sustain long-term motivation to engage with practical music-making. The value of the positive psychology framework is also demonstrated by its applicability to descriptions of strong experiences of performing music.

Research Review: Performance Stress and the Very Young Musician

Research Review: Performance Stress and the Very Young Musician

Hans von Bülow: A Life for Music (review)

CONDUCTORS Hans von Bulow: A Life for Music. By Kenneth Birkin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. [xviii, 715 p. ISBN 9781107005860. $150.] Illustrations, appendix, bibliography, index. It is probably safe to say that no musician of nineteenth century had a more decisive on direction of German music than Hans von Bulow. As a teenager and law student, he crossed paths with Robert and Clara Schumann, came to know and quickly idolize Richard Wagner during turbulent late 1840s, became Franz Liszt's star pupil and outspoken defender of Zukunftsmusik, promoted orchestral works of Johannes Brahms and Richard Strauss, and furthered Gustav Mahler's conducting and-by extension-composing careers a decisive moment in young musician's artistic development. In doing so, he revolutionized concert-going experience as conductor and pianist. Yet, scholarship on Bulow has been overwhelmingly underwhelming. Indeed, only in last decade have his life and works been examined with necessary critical care: first by Frithjof Haas, Hans von Bulow: Leben und Wirken (Wilhelmshaven: F. Noetzel, 2002); and more recently by Alan Walker in Hans von Bulow: A Life and Times (Oxford: Ox - ford University Press, 2010; reviewed by James L. Zychowicz in Notes 67, no. 2 [December 2010]: 333-35). These two authors sought to present Bulow as a creative musician who composed, arranged, performed, taught, and criticized-in other words, as someone no different than, say, Liszt or Camille Saint-Saens. While acknowledging various aspects of Bulow's artistry, Kenneth Birkin argues in his Hans von Bulow: A Life for Music that it is as a self-styled 'reproductive' artist that he made his greatest impact (p. ix). This position significantly colors Birkin's presentation. The first two chapters, which cover Bulow's upbringing and first years in law school, lead inexorably to chapter 3, Decision Time: Weimar, Zurich (1850- 1851) and chapter 4, Weimar Apprentice - ship (1851-1853), in which twentyyear- old takes oaths of servitude to Wagner and Liszt. On latter, Birkin wryly notes that the emotional bond formed in those months in Switzerland was, in fullness of time, to prove hostage to fortune (p. 45). Indeed, in following five chapters, which cover next decade of Bulow's career in Austria-Hungary, Chocieszewice, and Berlin, Bulow repeatedly manages to change his fortunes for better, only to undermine them next turn. To be sure, Bulow's commitment to (good) music above all is commendable, but one cannot help but wonder whether he could have achieved his artistic aims earlier in his career had he but been a better team player. Coming in middle of Birkin's narrative, chapter 10 chronicles Bulow's tenure in Munich from 1864 to 1869, a period made famous by his conducting premieres of Tristan und Isolde and Die Meister - singer von Nurnberg, and made infamous thanks to his wife-Liszt's daughter- Cosima. Birkin devotes most of chapter to Bulow's extraordinarily productive concert activities: more than 230 appearances that include music by usual suspects ( J. S. Bach, Ludwig van Beethoven, Liszt, and Wagner), but also by Charles-Valentin Alkan, Josef Rheinberger, and Anton Rubinstein, to name but a few. While Birkin dutifully covers Cosima's affair, he spends little time rationalizing it. But Bulow's chief reason for denying liaison may rest in his success Munich. As he informed Karl Bechstein, I am musical overlord of a city which will soon, artistically, eclipse Berlin, Vienna and Leipzig! Yes, indeed-that's exactly goal I'm aiming at (p. 171). This and similar statements amply justify Birkin's subtitle. The remaining chapters follow Munich model: promise followed by failure. Birkin notes a recklessness which became more pronounced as Bulow rose, during 1880s and 1890s, to veritable guru status on German musical scene (p. …