Empowering piano students of Western classical music: challenging teaching and learning of musical interpretation in higher education

ABSTRACT

This study aimed to empower piano students and explore their understandings of how teaching and learning of musical interpretation of Western classical music could be developed to foster autonomy and a personal, authentic artistic voice. Two research questions were formulated: How have students experienced teaching and learning of musical interpretation? How do students envision a meaningful organisation of such teaching and learning? The empirical material, created during a participatory action research project with 4 piano students within an artistic bachelor programme, was hermeneutically analysed, and narratives were created and twice negotiated with the students. Their education was described as backwards-looking and not preparing for autonomous learning and musicianship. In contrast, a meaningful organisation was envisioned as collaborative, dialogical, characterised by openness, humility, honesty, and mutual understanding, where musical interpretation is viewed as a complex, ongoing, open-ended process, allowing for multiple, incompatible views, breaking from the master–apprentice model and the current restrictive ideology.

KEYWORDS:

• Musical interpretation
• higher music education
• collaborative learning
• dialogue
• laboratory
• Western classical music

Introduction

The humiliated apprentice (Zipes 2017),¹ formed by authoritarianism and enslavement, could, according to the Hegelian master–slave dialectic² (2018/1807, §178–196), be considered the philosophical Urtext for students in the master–apprentice model within Western classical music (henceforth abbreviated as WCM). Although this dialectic, by its focus on the inevitable ‘life and death struggle’ (§187), might seem extreme, the bottom line is that mastering is one form of oppression, by necessity silencing alternative voices (see Allsup 2016, 11). For Hegel (2018/1807, §178), consciousness can be both in itself and for itself. If consciousness understands that other self-aware entities exist and that their recognition is required to realise itself as an individual, the potential for a formative process of self-realisation is revealed. Otherwise, speaking with Freire (2000/1970), both master and slave ‘bear the marks of oppression’ (58) insofar as their self-knowledge and learning are limited. In mastering the other, one finds that such domination makes the very recognition sought impossible since the slave, in this state, is not free to offer it. It has been argued that the current modern technological-rational educational climate does not provide a fully symmetrical recognition as students in higher music education (henceforth abbreviated as HME) are recognised as ‘the logical terminus of educational power rather than as a budding self-consciousness’ (Väkevä 2016, 48). Väkevä (2016) claims that ‘most of the energy fed into the pedagogical system serves the authority of the disciplinary rule, represented by the triumvirate of the educational administrator, teacher, and curriculum’ (48). Furthermore, the centrality of obedience and policing in WCM has frequently been emphasised (e.g. Leech-Wilkinson 2021; Bull 2019; McCormick 2015). In sum, the current ideology of WCM has been described as having negative consequences ranging from aesthetics, ethics, and health:

[f]or the sake of children’s health and mental wellbeing, quite apart from all the other considerations, it’s imperative that we turn the education of classical musicians into something collaborative and creative, so that we can turn concert life into something less competitive, less predictable and less routine (Leech-Wilkinson 2021, 17).

The education of rebellious apprentices that ‘refuse to be policed’ (Leech-Wilkinson 2021, 13) should strive towards students’ ‘empowerment and self-awareness’ (Zipes 2017, xiv), i.e. the education of autonomous musicians with a personal, authentic artistic voice.³ In this article, I view such musicians as having both the ability to make their own decisions—‘not another’s or a culture’s unless accepted after free, critical thought’ (Leech-Wilkinson 2021, 221)–and the authority to carry them out. Thus, such education should emphasise a multivoiced collaborative exploration of new meanings and expressions of how notated scores can ‘make musical sense’ and ‘sound relevant and revealing’ for the living (Leech-Wilkinson 2021, 2 & 164; see also Silverman 2008, 249; Cook 2018), striving to free students from the slave position that earlier forced them to obey unnecessary and unproductive rules and constraints. I believe that Silverman’s (2008) description of this aim as ‘one of the most challenging and elusive aspects of music education’ (249) should be understood as a call for research to investigate further how it could be achieved in practice.⁴ Thus, this study aims to empower students and explore their understandings of how teaching and learning of musical interpretation of WCM could be developed to foster autonomy and a personal, authentic artistic voice, i.e. developing more rebellious apprentices.⁵ The following two research questions were formulated to fulfil this aim:

1. How have students experienced teaching and learning of musical interpretation?

2. How do students envision a meaningful organisation of such teaching and learning?

Theoretical framework and methodology

In line with Hegel’s (2018/1807) master–slave dialectic, I conceptualise that students, through labour, gradually can develop a self-consciousness, thus, transforming their World and themselves. In the end, such transformation empowers the students to take on the liberating fight for recognition as an equal that they refused earlier, fearing their metaphorical death.

To empower the students and gain access to their expressions of experiences of teaching and learning of musical interpretation of WCM and how such teaching and learning could be organised to foster autonomy and a personal, authentic artistic voice, a multifaceted empirical material suited for a hermeneutical analysis and narrative presentation was created through a participatory action research project on developing response guided workshops on musical interpretation (henceforth referred to as PAR, reported in [Holmgren 2020a, 2022, 144–150] where the overlapping cycles of ‘planning, acting and observing, and reflecting’ [Kemmis and McTaggart 2007, 277] are accounted for). The participants in the PAR were a group of piano students consisting of four piano students (three male and one female) in the second and third year of the artistic bachelor programme at one institution for higher education in Sweden. The PAR consisted of five workshops conducted during the autumn semester of 2019. It employed a response model—building on the Piteå model (Ferm Thorgersen and Wennergren 2010), collaboratively developed for academic seminars—where two students, one week before each workshop, audio recorded their performance of a piece that they were studying in their regular studies, scanned the score, described where they were in their interpretational process, and included questions directing the desired response. A couple of days before the workshop, all participants shared their written response, and the students beforehand selected topics to focus on during the workshop. The researcher led the workshops, provided the overarching structure, and strived to find ‘the right questions to ask’ (Gadamer 2013/1960/1960, 312). However, on multiple occasions, I felt a conflict of loyalty or interest between me as a teacher or master and researcher. The teacher urged to address the areas he perceived most urgent, even if they were outside of what the student had noticed or wanted to address. In handling this issue, I always asked for permission to enter the teacher position, which I got, and referred to which aspects of my interpretive paradigm I used a particular argumentative strategy to address, striving to articulate what I was trying to achieve. Furthermore, to be able to more freely form their own opinions as rebellious apprentices, the students needed to recognise what could constrain them, their teachers, and HME at large and understand that the regulative beliefs within the current WCM ideology are contingent (see, e.g. Leech-Wilkinson 2021, 90; Cook 2018)1996. Thus, in addition to the practical playing, each workshop treated philosophical texts and theoretical models intended to develop the students’ understanding of musical interpretation and which factors affect and regulate art in a broader sense. In sum, the PAR strived to achieve ‘a multivoicedness (Dysthe ), accepting and valuing a diversity of opinions and experiences, ultimately furthering equal participation’ (Holmgren 2020a, 50).

In the hermeneutical philosophy of Gadamer (2013/1960/1960) and Ricoeur (2008/1991), the understanding of a phenomenon is viewed as the fusion of horizons that ‘takes place in conversation, in which something is expressed that is not only mine or my author’s, but common’ (Gadamer 2013/1960/1960, 406). Such dialogues can further the understanding of one’s own and others’ worlds and lead to mutual change. In this study, these dialogues took place before (through the communication of instructions and response), during (verbally and through practical playing), and after the workshops in the negotiation of the narratives (see below).

Analysing, creating, and negotiating narratives

The borders between analysis and creation of the empirical material, consisting of transcriptions of 4 two-hour long workshops; students’ scanned scores, audio recorded performances, and written instructions; participants’ written responses; reflective one-minute papers written at the end of all 5 workshops; and the researcher’s field notes and reflections, have not always been clear cut. Nonetheless, for reasons of trustworthiness (see, e.g. Riessman 1993, 68), the overarching three-stage process can be described as a thematic narrative analysis (Riessman 2008, 53–76) or narrative configuration striving to craft a ‘coherent developmental account’ (Polkinghorne 1995, 15) based on the empirical material: first, an initial analysis, second, a condensation and restorying, and third, a negotiation of the narratives with the students.

First, during the initial analysis, I searched the empirical material for verbally-articulated narratives of the students’ experiences of teaching and learning of musical interpretation, giving extra attention to situations where our musical and verbal dialogues revealed a lack of shared understanding. Then, I synthesised meaningful themes based on the topics that the students frequently reiterated in their practice during the PAR and their written and oral reflections about their experiences. Based on these, I created ten narratives centring on scenes that appeared to contain central points during the workshops. In addition, I created one narrative for each of the five workshops and my reflective documentation. In this stage, the narratives were very closely aligned with the empirical material, and the original material was included as comments in the Word document.⁶ However rich and interesting, these narratives—created in both the original language, Swedish and simultaneously translated to English—contained too many threads and details, encompassing about 10 000 words.

Second, after multiple re-readings of the empirical material and the narratives, a condensation and redisposition into three narratives seemed meaningful to convey the insights and the sense made of the students’ experiences and focus more on ‘what’ is said than ‘how’ it is said (Riessman 2004, 706): the first looking backwards focusing the students earlier experiences of teaching and learning of musical interpretation, the second looking out the window during the ride on the road to the future as it took place during the PAR, and the third centring on one potential future describing a meaningful organisation of teaching and learning. Furthermore, such a condensation, commonly labelled as ‘narrative smoothing’ (Spence 1986; see also Polkinghorne 1995, 16), was needed to stay within the limitations of a journal article. Nonetheless, some elements were inevitably foregrounded in the process, whereas others were left out as ‘the researcher fills in and links the data elements to other data elements’ to produce a coherent story (Polkinghorne 1995, 18). Although I initially strived to tease out a multivoiced account of the students’ experiences, I was surprised that their understandings of the central problematic aspects and potential solutions appeared strikingly monovocal. Thus, I decided to consequently use ‘we’ and ‘our’ as personal pronouns in the narratives, except for my reflections where ‘I’ and ‘mine’ were used. In doing so, although I restoried (Ollerenshaw and Creswell 2002; Clandinin and Connelly 2000), retold (Barrett and Stauffer 2009, 11; de Fina and Georgakopoulou 2015), and ghostwrote (Rhodes 2000) the stories, however, I still saw the resulting composite narratives as ‘belonging to the participants’ (Byrne 2017, 43) and that they reflected the participants, viewed as a group (Todres 2007; Willis 2019).

Third, in taking the consequences of the dialogical and collaborative approach employed in the PAR, to ensure that the narratives expressed the students’ understanding of their experiences as a group and that the unison student voice did not suffer from too much narrative smoothing nor lacked complexity, the narratives were twice discussed and negotiated with the students before seeking approval for the final revised version. Approximately one week before each 1,5-hour-long video documented session held on Zoom, I shared the narratives with the students. During the sessions, the focus was on deepening our collective understanding, and, more tangibly, editing, and identifying ideas for further development and refinement of the narratives. Special attention was given to the two areas of the expressed critique and the use of terminology. First, I paid particular attention to discussing how the expressed critique and the exclamation marks could be understood, ensuring that the students understood its potential implications, and that it was essential that the narratives expressed their understanding, as I understood the risk of being criticised for merely having the students to adjust to my (pre-)understanding, wanting or having to accept my authority. Second, the terminology used, e.g. voice, interpretive paradigm (the experienced and acknowledged freedom and constraints of musical interpretation, see Holmgren 2020b, 2022), and authenticity had been treated during the sections in the PAR focusing on philosophical and theoretical aspects. Although the students did not consistently use this terminology, we agreed to use the terms in the narratives, as they had started to become accustomed to and found them beneficial.

In sum, through the overarching three-stage process, I aimed to reach an intersubjective understanding through going beyond mere member checking of the transcripts, adopting a more collaborative approach (see Chase 2017), continually refining and adjusting my analysis, striving to adhere to the recommendation Bakhtin (1984) gives to novelists: ‘the author speaks not about a character, but with him [original emphases]’ (63). My reflections as a researcher are typeset in italics and interfoliated as interludes and a postlude around the narratives in striving for a transparent and dialogical self-reflexive approach.

Narratives on teaching and learning of musical interpretation

I

Our education of Western classical music is backwards-looking. We are taught to reproduce supposedly correct and authoritative interpretations and historical traditions. But the teachers’ demonstrations often lack argumentative support. Instead of focusing on our musical interpretations and how they could be developed, the teachers relate to their own understanding. Such unnecessary emphasis on our lesser knowledge makes it all too apparent that the teachers, or other sanctioned authorities, always are right. Sometimes we are instructed to go home and listen to how Rubinstein, Argerich, or some other of the teachers’ favourite pianists play a particular phrase or section. Strangely, we have never analysed or discussed such performances nor the recording situation itself with any teacher. What are we supposed to learn from that?

Our group lessons tend to be particularly teacher-centred. It is impossible to give and receive a response in a dialogical way. We more or less play our pieces and hope for the best. Responses such as ‘that was good’ or ‘that was bad’ are actually not that informative and will likely quickly be forgotten. The pace is too fast. And differentiating between the teacher’s subjective comments on musical interpretation and more objective technical problems is not always easy. What is the actual problem, which rules should we abide by, and why? When we do say something, our perspective is often from how we would have performed the music. The setting’s organisation and the fact that we often are not acquainted with the repertoire nor have the scores creates a distinct and unproductive hierarchy.

We feel that our autonomy and personal expression are not systematically developed. Instead, musical interpretation is treated as something that is more about achieving a predefined and fixed product than an open-ended process. During lessons, imitation of the teacher can create rapid but ephemeral improvement. However, such a way of working does not prepare us for independent practice between lessons. The areas of what musical interpretation is, which interpretational paradigm the learning is supposed to take place in, questions regarding freedom and constraints of musical interpretation, and expectations of our explorative approach are not addressed.

Lastly, in contrast to other instrumentalists, pianists’ work with solo repertoire is overemphasised over chamber music and genre-crossing projects, thus limiting creative collaborations that could broaden and nuance our understanding of what musical interpretation is and could be.

Interlude

Engaging the students in a dialogical and collaboratively way seemed to increase their self-awareness and empower them to voice considerations regarding their past experiences and present situation. Although they were not used to verbalising their experiences, it seemed to benefit their understanding of themselves and past and current situations. The teachers’ directives, lacking argumentative support and description, appeared to limit the students’ agency and understanding of the difference between the what, how, and why of that which they were supposed to learn. Furthermore, their experience of a too fast pace could be due to a misalignment between pianistic skills and the difficulty of repertory, or indicating conflicting views regarding which phase of the education that students’ own understanding could or should come into the foreground.

Although the students and teachers may believe that they are engaging in faithful transfer and reproduction of historical traditions, it has repeatedly been shown to be a misconception as current aesthetics strongly affect the (selective) understanding and application of earlier practices, and that performance practice is in constant flux (Butt 2002; Leech-Wilkinson 2021). This was a topic that I did not discuss enough with the students.

Lastly, it is interesting to note that the students experience the work with solo repertoire to be overemphasised and understand that genre-crossing creative collaborations could be beneficial, potentially increasing their creativity. As the concurrence between pianists is fierce, their outlook on having a solo career is rather slim. Thus, giving such students broader experiences and skills needed for a diversified and unpredictable professional future might be crucial. Furthermore, shifting the view on which competencies are deemed necessary might also positively affect students’ views on WCM and, as the students expressed it, help make it relevant to the current society again.

II

It is challenging to always strive toward open communication and uphold a productive mindset. This applies both to handling practical matters such as scheduling, sharing of material, meeting deadlines, and the workshops themselves. To really listen takes courage, knowledge, and practice. We need to listen analytically and critically to formulate a constructive response to others’ and our own piano playing. Although wanting to contribute, it is often difficult to formulate our thoughts about musical interpretation into words. Our regular instrumental lessons have not prepared us for these workshops! Even worse, sometimes, we neither read everyone’s response beforehand nor meet deadlines for sending out material. The time is just not there.

The atmosphere is turning benevolent, and we are opening up for new perspectives and ideas for how our dialogues could grow. Giving response to others is easier than understanding what we need to develop. We are not used to having the possibility nor being expected to take responsibility for our own learning. Which strategies could we use for making the most out of the workshops and avoid focusing on details?

The work on our practical playing is very productive. However, the aim with the philosophical texts and theoretical models is not always easy to understand. We are not trained to prioritise thinking, reflecting, or creating a personal connection to the works studied. Instead, we are used to viewing piano playing from a more technical and mechanical angle. Thus, both the language and content are challenging, and it does not really feel like we use them when giving response. What are the purpose and practical use of discussing such things?

On the one hand, the teachers seem to prefer interpreters that have reflected a lot and developed a personal, authentic artistic voice. On the other hand, our development of such competencies is not supported by the programme’s design and implementation, although clearly stated in the goals. Why haven’t we been given a more solid philosophical and research-based foundation preparing us for professional musicianship? When will we move on from reproducing historical traditions to performing classical music in-line with today’s society?

Lastly, we need to find a more appropriate room with a better instrument. It is hard to cope with an unknown piano, and the feeling of the rest of the group breathing down one’s neck causes unnecessary performance anxiety and shift of attention. Two hours in a small den makes us go crazy!

Interlude

The students found changing working methods challenging and demanding as the roles and responsibilities shifted. Based on their expressions, it should not be understood as scepticism or unwillingness to change. Instead, it indicates that the necessary competencies and meta-strategies were not yet developed. Furthermore, during the PAR, the students were encouraged to verbalise and voice their concerns regarding issues that were unclear, complicated, and difficult to understand. Thus, they were given the possibility to expand both on what they thought they needed to understand better and how it could be achieved within the PAR.

III

The whole learning environment for musical interpretation and piano playing is characterised by collaboration, openness, humility, honesty, and understanding. We, all students and teachers, work in different teams in giving and receiving synchronous as well as asynchronous response. At all times, we aim to improve our understanding of musical interpretation. Taken together, our knowledge and understanding is broad and multifaceted. The distinction between interpretative paradigms, how we think that a piece could or should be interpreted, and how others’ interpretations could be developed are regularly addressed.

After we began doing a formal analysis of the musical works before beginning to play them, our understanding, fingering, memorisation, and time management during practice have improved. Gaining a broader overview of the interpretational process and understanding the difference between performance and intention makes it easier to listen attentively, form decisions, and understand others’ arguments.

We strive to prepare ourselves thoroughly. Our motto is always to have the scores at hand, and the person’s instruction in mind. Otherwise, it is easy to misunderstand which response is relevant. Even though it takes time and effort, we believe that giving response can be as rewarding as receiving it. Earlier drop shot comments such as ‘that was good’ would nowadays spur a discussion about which feature(s) that had that particular characteristic and argumentative support would be presented in relation to interpretive paradigm(s), set of rules, and criteria. The communication is truly open and democratic. We are merciless towards all arguments and ideas, but merciful to the participants in our collaborative endeavour!⁷

Our way of working is very developing, well aligned with the programme’s goals, and differs from the master–apprentice-tradition. However, the risk of domination is still obvious, and the power-dynamics needs continuous attention, especially regarding the workshop leader’s role. It is a vital function, and that person kind of sets the tone. The scheduling is never tight, allowing us to deep dive into philosophical and aesthetical aspects of musical interpretation and art in general. Through having such in-depth discussions, the risks for misunderstandings and unclarity decreases. Moreover, as equal participants, each of us feels important in being involved in everyone’s development.

At the beginning of every academic year, we review the workshops’ philosophical foundation and the response model itself to introduce newcomers and to periodically and transparently renegotiate them. This foundation is documented in written form, easily accessible on the university’s learning management platform. All participants must understand the underlying philosophical assumptions and research base. We share experiences of initial discomfort, doubt, and how we gradually became accustomed. Becoming better at receiving response, without getting hurt or retaliate, takes time and is about psychology at least to some degree. Clear and transparent guidelines prevent insecurity and minimise wasted time!

These workshops differ from other subjects, as they, although formally obligatory, are not graded. Thus, it feels like everyone voluntarily participates, merely because they find them valuable. Lastly, we find it very useful to have the response in written form afterwards when we continue our individual work with our pieces.

Postlude

According to the students, the narratives above exemplify a meaningful organisation of teaching and learning of musical interpretation, neither the final nor necessarily the best. Although the centrality of the notated score is still emphasised, the reader and the reading are at least seen as important as the text. As the reading of a score is not viewed as a linear decoding process where a final predefined goal can be reached, multiple equally epistemologically valid positions regarding musical interpretation are acknowledged. However, this does not necessarily imply that all positions are equally productive from a pedagogical or artistic perspective.

Summing up, I believe that the narratives centre on (1) the students’ experiences of their education being backwards-looking and that they harbour questions that remain both unasked and unanswered, (2) their discomfort and shortcomings as the inadequacy of their earlier education became more evident during the PAR, and (3) the description of how a meaningful organisation of teaching and learning of musical interpretation could be conceptualised. Consequently, the narratives emphasise the rationale for the current study, make the students’ voice heard by taking their perspective and offer potential clues to how the core issues could be addressed to achieve actual change.

Discussion and reflection

Based on my understanding of the narratives, the negotiation thereof and the PAR, I will first discuss a necessary but, according to the students’ experience, missing pre-requisite for resolving the master–slave dialectics of their instrumental studies in HME; second, elaborate on the limitations and possibilities that resulted from me lending another teacher’s practice; and third, reflect upon how it could be possible to conceptualise a pedagogical situation where master and slave are not seen as static categories but as zones of technique.

First, to resolve the master–slave dialectics in a constructive way, a necessary pre-requisite is that masters are open for dialogue, critique, and willing (or obliged by curricula or organisation) and capable of actual change. Unfortunately, on a multitude of occasions, the students expressed that they did not believe that discussing their critical views with their teachers would be productive as they experienced the one-way communication as inevitable within their instrumental teaching; neither did they see that their teachers could or would change. Although this reflects these students’ experiences and not necessarily the teachers’ actual capacity and willingness, it says something that in itself should be food for thought for both teachers and leaders of HME.

I believe that the students’ experiences of their situation as unchangeable and determined results from the locked positions springing from mastering within WCM on three hierarchical levels, enforced and made possible by the current ideology and its belief system (Leech-Wilkinson 2021; Hunter and Broad 2017). First, on a structural level, organisations and functions such as record companies, artist managers, concert planners, musicologists, musicians, teachers, and critics benefit from maintaining the current ideology of WCM, in which they have economic interests and professional investments (e.g. Leech-Wilkinson 2021, 93–95). Second, within HME, curricula, organisation, and teachers limit students’ creativity when, in striving to educate employable musicians, force them to assimilate teachers’ interpretive paradigm(s) (Holmgren 2020b, 2020c), i.e. the experienced and acknowledged freedom and constraints of musical interpretation, in themselves regulated by the normative assumptions regarding musical interpretation and performance upheld by the current WCM ideology (Leech-Wilkinson 2021, 24, 99, & 102; Hunter and Broad 2017; Goehr 2007). This is supported by the students who expressed that there was too little emphasis on developing their own creative musical understanding and that the dominating mode of working was imitation and reproduction of teachers’ interpretive paradigms either directly or by proxy, through listening to recordings prescribed by the teachers, leading to rapid surface-level development that often was forgotten, in-line with earlier research (see summaries in Holmgren 2018, 2020a, 2020b, 2020c, 2022). Thus, in a worst-case scenario, each generation’s interpretive paradigm(s) (Holmgren 2020b) could become increasingly limited as it is regulated by the subset of ranges available to the teachers in the generation before (Leech-Wilkinson 2021, 110; see also Westerlund and Gaunt 2021, xxii–xxiii). Third, from the performers’ perspective, the illusion that performers could and should (strive to) be transparent and establish direct communication between the listener and the composer (Leech-Wilkinson 2021, 26; Goehr 2007, 232), i.e. the concept of faithfulness to the composers’ intentions or scores (Leech-Wilkinson 2021, 63; see the discussion of authenticities in Kivy 1995), forces musicians into recreators (Leech-Wilkinson 2021, 30). In sum, this mastering at the different hierarchical levels resonates with Leech-Wilkinson (2021, 69), who emphasises the centrality of obedience in WCM, and argues that the current ideology has negative consequences ranging from aesthetics, to ethics, and health (17).

Second, although the students’ main instrumental teacher supported their participation in the PAR, the teacher was not part of the project. As I borrowed another teacher’s students and had no own practice to direct the research outcomes to, it is reasonable to suggest that the PAR did not affect any existing teaching practice. Thus, future research will have to include instrumental teachers in developing and implementing such response-guided workshops. However, on the positive side, not being in a formal teaching position allowed me to explore what it could entail to step out of the traditional master role and work together with the students. Thus, I experienced that the function as workshop leader gradually transformed my position as an instrumental teacher in the Deweyan direction of becoming more of a laboratory facilitator (see Allsup 2016, 66–105) and fellow adventurer (see Allsup 2016, 106–141). Within the PAR, which could be construed as a laboratory in the making, we all learned about musical interpretation, experimentation, and how such teaching and learning could be developed.

Third, mastering could be acknowledged as a powerful mode of teaching and learning that could be used for good means if detached from its ‘static political meanings and allowed to circulate as zones of technique’ (Spatz 2020, 91). As indicated earlier, I felt a conflict of loyalty or interest between me as a teacher and researcher. On one level, I had the urge to present myself as artistically knowledgeable and skilled and pedagogically trustworthy towards the students, thus sometimes feeling a need to put on my master’s hat. Thus, I felt a need for mastering, probably because I was at least partly trapped by the second hierarchical mastering suggested above, i.e. feeling the need to adhere to or at least show knowledge about the normative assumptions regarding musical interpretation and performance upheld by the current WCM ideology. However, metaphorically putting on the laboratory facilitator’s hat, I could focus on the now instead of assuming or maintaining the ownership of the students’ learning and future musical interpretation and performance, lacking or not having to accept what Spatz (2020) calls the ‘power to determine future practice [original emphasis]’ (76). Thus reconceptualising mastering as a technique manifested in actions rather than as a natural and desirable result from the fixed and non-negotiable power asymmetry inherent in the master–slave-relationship should increase both students’ agency and the educational contracts’ transparency. Although Spatz’ (2020) argument centres on European-influenced theatrical practice and directors’ (henceforth understood as the master position or function) power to inform a future theatrical performance, I believe it could be productive to apply such a perspective in reconceptualising pedagogical situations where master and slave are not seen as static categories but as zones of technique.

Spatz (2020) argues that by removing the director’s power to determine future practice, their role is ‘reduced, or clarified, to that of making present interventions’ (76), grounding them ‘in the temporality of the practitioner’ (76). Furthermore, he believes that such directing is ‘a craft or technique in its own right, which must be distinguished from the shaping of a final composition [my emphasis]’ (76). Although Spatz (2020) acknowledges that domination and abuse always are possible, he suggests that the master position should be understood in a fundamentally different way, namely as an ‘intensive relation of focus and care’ (76). This relation is, according to Spatz (2020), not limited to ‘directing in the sense of giving directions’ (76) as it can also include.

other qualities such as watching, perceiving, witnessing, supporting, enabling, facilitating, questioning, intervening, guiding, conducting, provoking, and more. (76)

However, adopting such a position does not mean that I subscribe to a view that relieves teachers from their educational responsibilities, decreases the need for scrutinising their actions, or accepts attributing students’ lack of learning to their supposed lack of talent (see Holmgren 2020c, 46; 2022). Rather the opposite: teachers’ educational responsibility remains and could perhaps be argued to be even more emphasized, as their direct control of students’ actual future musical interpretation and performance is diminished (see Spatz 2020, 76). Spatz (2020) suggests that a teacher-facilitator may ‘set up certain basic conditions that deals with time or space’ or ‘propose the study of a problem that requires debate and dialogue’ (124). Finally, he emphasises that ‘the field is always remade at each encounter and is always unique to the members present at that particular moment in time’ (Spatz 2020, 124), which also applied to the PAR. Lastly, Allsup’s (2016) postulate that ‘[i]t is more difficult to be a laboratory facilitator than it is to be the Master’ (93) resonated with my experiences.

Closing thoughts

The findings suggest that the students do not experience that their education supports their autonomy and personal, authentic artistic voice, i.e. not developing their ability to make and the authority to carry out their own decisions, and that it could be fruitful to engage students in discussions and decisions regarding both the organisation of their education, as well as striving for a shared understanding of how the current ideology of WCM affects the culture in HME at a fundamental and philosophical level.

Speaking with Hegel (2018/1807), the PAR contributed to developing the slaves’ conception of their World, presumably leading to their own change. Although such a development does not solve the inherent master–slave conflict, it might help the students take on the fight for freedom that they earlier avoided. To facilitate students’ development towards freedom, teachers within HME need to be able and willing to develop their practices to affirm each other as equals and end their existence as limited consciousnesses.

Moreover, one topic brought up more frequently at the end of the PAR was the students’ desire to participate in their teachers’ experimentation, sharing their failures, successes, and learning. Before our second negotiation of the narratives, I read the article by Costello (1956) discussing the merits of philosophical seminars containing a story (76–77) that spoke to me as it shed light on the educational situation per se. Thus, I adapted, restoried, ghostwrote, or transposed the story to the realm of HME and had the students read it. They approved the content as it resonated with their experiences and suggested that it could function as a summarising coda to this article. Consequently, I present it below, with a bow to the students who taught me quite a lot about musical interpretation, teaching and learning, and how collaborative research could be conducted:

Instrumental teachers, hedge and equivocate lest they are caught off base. They do not want to expose their half-formed thoughts to possible refutation. Such teachers are too self-consciously proud to love the quest for truth as a process. Then, ‘who is a true teacher?’, one might ask. Glenn Gould would answer he who ‘considers the student to be a fellow searcher for truth.’ We said to a piano professor, on one occasion, ‘Why don’t you organise some laboratory workshops on musical interpretation? We look up to you, and you are full of ideas. It would be interesting to see your process in the lab!’ She answered, ‘I prefer to explore and make my mistakes in private. I can’t think nor teach under public scrutiny.’ Yet the professor’s great weakness was a lack of self-criticism. She needed to come bang up against criticism. It would have stimulated her to novel musical interpretations that she never realised. Following Plato, who postulated that you cannot really learn philosophy without a dialogical approach of open questions, answers, and explanations – we believe that the same goes for the learning of musical interpretation. And such a way was what the response guided workshops on musical interpretation gave us.⁸

Finally, regarding the lack of venues for truly dialogical collaborative learning laboratories, I believe Hansson (2005) correctly observes that such might not have been in the interest of the leading professors (philosophers in his example as well as the one from Costello [1956]), as they were ‘preoccupied with convincing the students of their own views’ (89), and that ‘[t]he general picture of a successful philosopher was (and arguably to some extent still is) a philosopher who creates a ‘school’ of followers who remain faithful to his teachings’ (89). Consequently, the long-term vision I argue for is to increase the understanding of how HME could actively and consciously–through looking backwards, sideways, and forwards–be shaped to allow, support, and value the development of rebellious apprentices. However, at the bottom of the discussion is the topic that I have not explicitly touched upon, namely about which qualities and practices are considered good and why, and how it affects students and teachers in HME as well as the broader society regarding aesthetical, educational, and professional aspects (Leech-Wilkinson 2021; Westerlund and Gaunt 2021). Leech-Wilkinson (2021) believes that if thinking and acting within WCM were informed by a different conceptualisation of what is considered good (or perhaps not entirely bad), it would suffice to ‘change the State from one that is fundamentally oppressive into one that is fundamentally permissive’ (167).

Lastly, I encourage you, dear reader, to explore how the futures of HME can be co-constructed together with fellow researchers, teachers, students, and other colleagues. For reasons of clarity, this article should not be considered a naïve success story told from the perspective of the happy action researcher reporting his findings (see Strand 2009) or a ‘victory narrative’ (see Kenny and Christophersen 2018, 3). Instead, I believe it is a profoundly tragic description of one example of the consequences of the current ideology of WCM. However, it also outlines a potential path forward that the students were interested in taking. Hopefully, higher education of WCM ran rise to the occasion, through remembering its heritage and tradition, and having learned its lessons from research (see Jørgensen 2010, 79), consciously bringing the past and present into the future, ultimately striving to (re)make WCM relevant for students, teachers, and the wider society anew.

Ethical approval

The research reported in this article has, at all stages, taken due consideration of the ethical regulations formulated in Swedish law and by the Swedish Research Council in Good research practice (2017), in line with The European Code of Conduct for Research Integrity (2017). The participants in the research have partaken voluntarily and given their informed consent. Furthermore, before the start of the study, they were informed about the research design, aim, and planned report and that they could withdraw their participation at any time. Moreover, they were promised confidentiality and that the created empirical material was to be stored securely only accessible to the researcher. Lastly, the results, in the form of the created narratives, were collaboratively edited and negotiated with the participants twice before they got to approve the final version. There were no conflicts of interest as I had not been nor were in a teacher–student relationship with any of the participants. In addition, for reasons of transparency, no request for ethical approval was submitted as the research reported in this study, according to Swedish legislation (SFS 2003:460), did not need ethical approval. Information regarding the Swedish regulation can be found at https://www.riksdagen.se/sv/dokument-lagar/dokument/svensk-forfattningssamling/lag-2003460-om-etikprovning-av-forskning-som_sfs-2003-460 and https://etikprovningsmyndigheten.se/for-forskare/vad-sager-lagen/

Disclosure statement

In accordance with Taylor & Francis policy and my ethical obligation as a researcher, I am reporting that I have no financial and/or business interests in any company that may be affected by the research reported in the enclosed article.

Additional information

Funding

The research reported in this article was carried out during my employment as an internally funded PhD Student at the Luleå University of Technology. No other funding has been used.

Notes on contributors

Carl Holmgren

Carl Holmgren holds a PhD in Music Education from Luleå University of Technology. He received his Master of Education in music and Master of Music from the same university. Holmgren has published in European, Nordic, and Swedish journals and presented at Swedish, Nordic, and international conferences. His research interests centre on teaching and learning of musical interpretation in higher education, hermeneutics, poetry, and translation.

Notes

1 According to Zipes (2017, xiv, 12, & 28), the memeplex of ‘The Sorcerer’s Apprentice’ consists of the two distinctive story types of ‘The Humiliated Apprentice’ and ‘The Rebellious Apprentice’. For a philosophical discussion of teaching and learning within a piano master class using components from the former’s primary written source, see Holmgren (2020c).

2 Hegel’s (1989/1807) original German terms are ‘Herrschaft und Knechtschaft’.

3 For discussions on the topic of what an artistic voice can consist of see, e.g. Cumming (2000) and Laws et al. (2019).

4 I have earlier summarised the state of current research on the topic of the continued influence of the conservatoire tradition in higher education of WCM, lack of development of student autonomy, the increasing development of and research on group lessons, peer learning, and collaborative approaches as alternatives to the still dominant master–apprentice tradition (Holmgren 2018, 2020a, 2020b, 2020c, 2022), and will thus not elaborate on that here.

5 In this article, musical interpretation refers to the understanding of notated scores, commonly manifested in, but not limited to, musical performance (through the selection and application of performance choices). For further context, see e.g. Krausz (1993) and Rink (1995). For a fuller account of my position, see Holmgren 2022, 108–118.

6 For an example of closely the initial narratives related to the empirical material, see the example of the narrative based on the written one-minute paper from the first workshop in Holmgren 2022, 556.

7 This expression is based on the last of Hansson’s (2005, 90) ten commandments for seminar participants.

8 The narrative is based on Costello 1956, 76–77. Gould’s statement cited and adapted from Angilette 1992, 190. In the narrative, the personal pronoun ‘she’ is consequently used (see argument in Holmgren 2020c).