NOW or NOT NOW: Coordinating Restarts in the Pursuit of Learnables in Vocal Master Classes

Abstract

During the pursuit of learnables in vocal master classes, masters frequently produce lengthy clusters of directives, while students and accompanists orient to early opportunities for putting directives into practice. Participants are therefore faced with a continuous necessity to negotiate whether a directive is to be put into practice “now” or “not now.” Accompanists typically initiate musical (re)performances and are therefore the first to respond to a master's instruction completion, often preempting it early on in a master's potentially final turn constructional unit. Master class participants have to coordinate two action types: masters orient to giving instructions through talk; students and pianists orient primarily to restarting the musical performance.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Charles Antaki, Ruth Parry, and three anonymous reviewers for their extremely helpful comments on an earlier draft of this article.

Notes

¹Exceptions are Mondada (2009, 2011) and parts of Hindmarsh et al. (2011).

²This phenomenon is explored in more detail in Szczepek Reed and Reed (in press).

³This distinction is explored in more detail in the section “Local vs. Restart-Relevant Directives.”

⁴For transcript conventions, please see the appendix.

⁵For those readers who are not familiar with musical and performance-related terminology, we have tried to paraphrase the learnables for each extract. While we are aware of the danger of (mis)interpreting the data, especially in those cases where the learnable has not been stated explicitly, we hope that this makes the extracts more accessible to all readers.

⁶See Koschmann & Zemel (2011) for an example of this phenomenon in medical training.