Sound escapes: images of spirituality from music teachers and students

Abstract

This on-going piece of research seeks to identify what music teachers, performers and students from high school through to university understand by the word spirituality in relation to music. From this it is hoped to be able to look at the relevance of the term spirituality in the music classroom. In this paper, data are presented from qualitative research gained in the form of interviews with 37 respondents and four focus groups of children, and quantitative research from questionnaires completed by 38 trainee music teachers. From these data, we identified five themes relating to the respondents’ understanding of the term ‘spirituality’ in relation to music. These were: to what extent spirituality is seen as a religious concept; whether spirituality is an inner or outer experience; to what extent words are relevant to spiritual experiences; the role that knowledge and emotion play and whether musicians experience a sense of spirituality more when listening or performing. From these data we go on to identify implications for the music classroom.

Keywords:

• music
• identity
• spirituality

Notes

1. The students from Nepal included here were also being interviewed as part of ongoing research looking at the spiritual significance of music in various world religions which includes interviews with religious leaders from the main religions. This research is part of on-going research into spirituality and education in the music classroom.

2. Ghazals are secular songs from Muslim countries.

3. A simple Taizé song.