How Popular Musicians Learn: A Way Ahead for Music Education

by Green,Lucy

• ISBN13: 9780754632269
• ISBN10: 0754632261
• Format: Nonspecific Binding
• Copyright: 2017-06-09
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

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.

Table of Contents

Foreword	ix
Robert Fripp
Acknowledgements	xi
What is it to be musically educated?	1	(20)
Research methods	8	(9)
Concluding thoughts	17	(4)
Skills, knowledge and self-conceptions of popular musicians: the beginnings and the ends	21	(38)
The `beginnings'	22	(6)
Professional musicianship: the `ends'	28	(17)
Some self-conceptions of popular musicians	45	(14)
Learning to play popular music: acquiring skills and knowledge	59	(40)
The overriding learning practice: listening and copying	60	(16)
Peer-directed learning and group learning	76	(8)
Acquiring technique	84	(2)
Practice	86	(7)
Acquiring knowledge of technicalities	93	(3)
Summary	96	(3)
Attitudes and values in learning to play popular music	99	(28)
Discipline and osmosis	99	(5)
Enjoyment	104	(3)
Valuing musicianship	107	(10)
Valuing oneself	117	(4)
Attitudes to `other' music	121	(3)
Summary	124	(3)
Popular musicians in traditional music education	127	(24)
Classical instrumental tuition	127	(8)
Traditional classroom music education	135	(13)
Summary	148	(3)
Popular musicians in the new music education	151	(26)
Popular music instrumental tuition	151	(4)
The new classroom music education	155	(12)
Popular music in further and higher education	167	(5)
The musicians' views of popular music in formal education	172	(3)
Summary	175	(2)
The formal and the informal: mutual reciprocity or a contradiction in terms?	177	(42)
The neglect of informal learning practices in formal music education	177	(8)
Informal learning practices, attitudes and values: their potential for the formal sphere	185	(29)
What can teachers do?	214	(5)
Appendix: Summary profiles of the musicians	219	(2)
Bibliography	221	(12)
Index	233