The emergence of learnables in music masterclasses

Abstract

In music masterclasses instruction is delivered in response to successive learners' performances, with masters having no recourse to lesson plans or other prepared materials. As a result, topics emerge discursively and spontaneously through interaction. In this paper we describe four ways in which masters develop matters for improvement (learnables). Masters may present learnables as being based on master expertise; on masters' direct displayed experience of the student's performance; on the elicited direct experience of the student-performer; or on the elicited direct experience of the audience. By using a conversation analytic approach, we detail the emergence of learnables in five recorded instances.

Keywords:

• conversation analysis
• institutional interaction
• music pedagogy

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Live Music Now for their generosity in allowing us access to their masterclasses and the participants and organisers of those masterclasses for allowing us to record their sessions. We also gratefully acknowledge the support of the University of York Pump Priming Fund for this work. Finally we would like to thank the reviewers of the paper who made invaluable comments that greatly improved the analysis.

Notes on contributors

Darren Reed is interested in gesture, gaze and embodiment in everyday life and teaches on performance and society. This is premised upon a history of work on technology-mediated communication and the materialities and techniques of social science research. He is currently a Lecturer in the Science and Technology Studies Unit, Sociology Department, University of York.

B. Szczepek Reed specialises in the study of language and interaction from a conversation analytic perspective. She has published the monograph Prosodic Orientation in English Conversation (2006) and the textbook Analysing Conversation: An Introduction to Prosody (2010), in addition to numerous papers on the prosody and phonetics of natural talk, units of talk-in-interaction and instructional interaction in journals such as Journal of Pragmatics, Research on Language and Social Interaction, Language and Speech and Applied Linguistics. She is currently Senior Lecturer in Language Education at the University of York, UK.

Notes

1. Cf. McHoul (1978, 1990), Weeks (1985), Lerner (1995), Koschmann and Le Baron (2002), Macbeth (2004, 2011), Mondada (2009, 2011), Koole (2010), Hindmarsh, Reynolds and Dunne (2011), Koschmann and Zemel (2011), Zemel and Koschmann (2011), De Stefani and Gazin (2014).

2. Note that we utilise hyphens instead of the typical numerical notation so as to indicate and emphasise embodied actions. This aligns with Heath, Hindmarsh, and Luff's (2010) adaptation of the Jeffersonian system.

3. One interesting ancillary point is that a number of the student-peers introduce their comments by referring to their notes. This action is very similar to that in the first section, when a master uses notes to frame up their comments.