Professional Documents
Culture Documents
http://journals.cambridge.org/BME
Additional services for British
Although it is often suggested that there are important connections between composing,
performing and audience-listening, there is little evidence as to the nature of this relationship.
In this paper we report research into the extent that musical understanding is symmetrically
revealed and developed across the three activities. Our theory of musical understanding is
based on the work of Swanwick, and assessment criteria derived from the work of Swanwick
and Tillman (1986) made it possible to compare levels of musical cognition whatever the
specic activity. A study of the musical work of twenty children in a music school in Belo
Horizonte, Brazil, suggests that performance usually elicits lower levels of musical understanding, signicantly different from either composing or audience-listening. It seems that
performance can be problematic within the music curriculum unless students are able to work
at a technical level where they are able to exercise interpretative judgement and make musical
decisions. The ndings support the claims for an integrated music curriculum comprising all
three activities.
http://journals.cambridge.org
IP address: 200.130.19.173
this device in a composition. Perhaps the same child also perceives the expressiveness
of a large crescendo in a recorded piece of music and may want to incorporate this in
a performance. This will only be successful if he or she has mastered technique
necessary to play a graduated crescendo. Interaction among the activities is optimal
only when there exist the necessary technical conditions for the accomplishment of
the different tasks.
The skills, procedures, techniques and experiences of composition, performance
and audience-listening are very different. For instance, a skill in composition may
include the ability to develop motifs; in performance, the capability to move the
ngers and arm in a particular way to produce a crescendo; or to identify a musical
style in audience-listening. Reporting audience-listening experiences involves still
other skills, often oral/linguistic, drawing, notating, moving/dancing to music. The
particularity of skills can also be seen, for instance, in the case of an accomplished
composer who does not have highly developed instrumental skills and may not
therefore be able to demonstrate musical understanding to the same extent when
attempting to play a virtuoso instrumental piece.
This kind of discrepancy between conceptual understanding and the means of
articulation is most obvious in the area of ordinary language. A pre-school child's
speech may indicate quite advanced understanding of the functioning of a language
even though, he or she may not have begun to learn written language skills. At this age
written text would be a poor indicator of linguistic understanding. The reverse may
happen with an adult in learning a second language. Someone who happens to have
learned this language mostly from books may be able to communicate reasonably well
through writing but not through speaking, a very different skill in which there may not
have been enough practice.
The demonstration of the extent of one's understanding of music similarly depends
on renement of the skills particular to that activity. We can only assess with
condence the extent of a student's musical understanding provided that the skills
specic to the activity are within reach. Furthermore, if students are not working at
the highest levels at which they can exercise musical judgement and take musical
decisions, how can they be said to be developing their musical thinking?
IP address: 200.130.19.173
sound materials (Sensory and Manipulative levels), expressive characterisation (Personal and Vernacular levels), form (Speculative and Idiomatic levels) and musical
valuing (Symbolic and Systematic levels). Although the model does not set up a xed
developmental timetable, it does imply an invariable sequence which has `considerable predictive power' (Swanwick, 1991). Subsequent research suggests that the
achievement of higher levels of musical development may be facilitated by education
and training (Stavrides, 1995; Hentschke, 1993).
The reliability of the criteria for the assessment of composition and performance
has been established earlier (Stavrides, 1995; Swanwick, 1994). The audiencelistening criteria, however, had not been subject to a reliability test prior to this study.
A similar procedure to the one described by Swanwick (1994) for testing the
performance criteria was used here to test the extent to which the audience-listening
criteria attract interpersonal agreement. These criteria are given below.
Audience-listening criteria
Sensory The student recognises sound qualities and effects, perceives clear differences of loudness level, pitch, timbre, tone colour and texture. None of these is
technically analysed and there is no account of expressive character or structural
relationships.
Manipulative The student perceives steady of uctuating beat, identies specic
instrumental and vocal sounds, devices related to the treatment of musical material,
such as glissandi, ostinati, trills; yet does not relate these elements to the expressive
character and structure of the piece.
Personal The student describes the expressive character, the general atmosphere,
mood or feeling qualities of a piece, maybe through non-musical associations and
visual images. The student relates changes in the handling of sound materials,
especially speed and loudness, with changes of expressive level, but without drawing
attention to structural relationships.
Vernacular The student identies commonplaces of metric organisation, (sequences,
repetitions, syncopation, drones, groupings, ostinati) and perceives conventional
musical gestures and phrase shape and length.
Speculative The student perceives structural relationships, the ways in which musical
gestures and phrases are repeated, transformed, contrasted or connected. He or she
identies what is unusual or unexpected in a piece of music; perceives changes of
character by reference to instrumental or vocal colour, pitch, speech, loudness,
rhythm and phrase length, being able to discern the scale in which changes take place,
whether they are gradual or sudden.
Idiomatic The student places music within a stylistic context and shows awareness of
technical devices and structural procedures which characterise an idiom, such as
distinctive harmonies and rhythmic inections, specic instrumental or vocal sounds,
decoration, transformation by variation, contrasting middle sections.
Symbolic The student is aware of how sound materials are organised to produce a
particular expressive character and stylistically coherent formal relationships. There
7
http://journals.cambridge.org
IP address: 200.130.19.173
Context
The main study was carried out in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, over a ve-month period of
teaching in a non-specialist music school. This school provided the range of music
education that enabled us to investigate students' achievement across the three
activities. Students attend weekly a one-hour `musicalisation' lesson (in groups from
four to eight), which consists of general musicianship activities, and a one-hour
instrumental lesson (in pairs). The study proceeded in an ecologically friendly way,
where music-making took place in a normal classroom environment.
Sample
A purposive sampling method was used (Robson, 1993; Cohen and Manion, 1994).
The population consisted of twenty students at the school who met all the sampling
requirements. They were aged between eleven and thirteen-and-a half, an age at
which they are expected to have developed a reasonable level of instrumental
performance skills as well as language skills to articulate their audience-listening
experiences. Potential technical differences across instruments are controlled by
choosing only pianists with a minimum of three years attendance at classes at the
school. Students' social background was considerably levelled, as it is a private school
that attracts high-middle-class students. A further element of control was the use of
repeated measures. We collected three `products' by each student in each activity.
There were thus nine observations for each student, giving measures both across the
conditions and within the conditions, thus increasing the internal validity of the study
(Coolican, 1994).
IP address: 200.130.19.173
sufcient for students to work out and organise musical ideas into pieces without
these getting too complicated or long. Although students had already developed
reasonable notational skills, oral composition was preferred, since notation tends to
impose several constraints over the process. The initial stimulus for each composition
was at the level of the Manipulative as, for example, syncopation, particular intervals,
or the `chop-sticks' technique. The students determined everything else and they
could even move away from the initial stimulus. Once the student said the composition was nished it was recorded. A second recording was made for those who were
not satised with the rst one.
The students' performance repertoire in this school is agreed between them and the
teacher, and rehearsed over the semester. The three performances by each student
were recorded by the end of the teaching period. The collection of data in the
audience-listening modality was through an individual structured interview. Students
were to listen to three pieces of music, three times each, and report in turn. Whole
pieces (not fragments) ranging from 1'30'' to 3'0'' minutes were chosen from different
Brazilian musical styles. They were instrumental and musically interesting but did not
require complex listening skills. The objective was not to test students' discriminative
skills, but to check what dimensions of music criticism captured their attention. To
minimise the possibility of bias, broad questions were posed, like `What can you tell
me about this music you have listened to?', `If you had to describe this music to a
friend who had never heard this music before, what would you say about it?'
(Swanwick 1994; Hentschke, 1993). Students were given the opportunity both to
take notes and talk about the pieces.
Results
The scores of all judges for all the products were computed to show their range and
distribution. This distribution is given in Table 1 and Figure 1.
In composition and audience-listening the raw scores are clearly concentrated
around the Speculative and Idiomatic levels (the Spiral layer of form). There is a
greater dispersion of lower levels in performance than in the other two modalities.
Table 1. Distribution by raw scores
COM
AUD
PER
MAN
PERS
VERN
SPEC
IDIOM
SYM
0
0
1
0
3
19
27
9
115
117
138
74
81
90
27
15
0
4
9
http://journals.cambridge.org
IP address: 200.130.19.173
140
120
100
80
60
40
20
0
MAN
PERS
VERN
Composing
SPEC
IDIOM
Audition
SYM
Performing
J2
5
Composition 2
J3
5
J4
4
J1
5
J2
5
Composition 3
J3
6
J4
5
J1
6
J2
7
J3
6
J4
6
In this instance, should either the mode or the median be used, the score for that
student in composition would be 5 (Speculative) despite the work having been
assigned to level 6 (Idiomatic) four times, and once to level 7 (Symbolic). Both the
median and the mode are unaffected by extreme values in one direction (Coolican,
1994). Consequently, they would have given a distorted picture of the student's
understanding of music by leaving precisely the highest scores the evidence this
research was looking for out of the derived scores.
10
http://journals.cambridge.org
IP address: 200.130.19.173
A more coherent procedure was to set up a `rule' for transforming the raw scores
into more valid derived scores. There were two critical points. First, how much
evidence was needed to say that a particular quality of thinking was revealed across a
student's products? Or, how frequently was that quality of behaviour occurring so that
it evidenced the consistency of that quality of thinking? Secondly, the rule should also
be able to accommodate the possibility that a student may have produced, for
instance, one Idiomatic and two Speculative compositions (as suggested in the
example above). That is why it was imperative to have several (nine) observations per
student, representative of a range of musical behaviours, thus lending the measures
more validity.
Thus the following operational `rule' was followed:
For a student's products in an activity, nd the highest score assigned at least
three times out of the twelve judgements.
A higher score includes the previous ones, e.g. a score of seven includes level six.
The levels are essentially cumulative.
This `rule' was applied to all students' `products' in each of the three activities. The
derived scores obtained correlate signicantly with the raw scores from which they
were drawn; i.e. the rule does not signicantly distort the raw scores.4 The distribution of students' derived scores by level is shown in Table 3 and Figure 2.
Table 3. Distribution by students' derived scores
COM
AUD
PER
MAN
PERS
VERN
SPEC
IDIOM
SYM
0
0
0
0
3
0
0
0
7
4
6
10
15
14
2
1
0
1
Once again, performance is the activity with the greatest dispersion of lower levels,
ranging from the Vernacular to the Symbolic. The derived scores for composing and
audience-listening are again clearly concentrated in the layer of `Form', that is to say
at the Speculative and Idiomatic levels. The differences between the three activities
are statistically signicant (see Table 4). There is no simple symmetry across the
activities.5
Table 4. Difference between the three activities
Variables
Chi-Square
Signicance
composition/aud-list/performance
13.8250
p<.001
A Friedman Two-Way Anova was calculated for each pair of variables to check if the
difference could be explained by one single variable. The results are given in Table 5.
Table 5. Difference between each pair of activities
Variables
Chi-Square
Signicance
Composition/audience-listening
composition/performance
audience-listening/performance
0.4500
8.4500
9.8000
p<1 (n.s.)
p<.01
p<.001
11
http://journals.cambridge.org
IP address: 200.130.19.173
16
14
12
10
8
6
4
2
0
MAN
PERS
VERN
Composing
SPEC
Audition
IDIOM
SYM
Performing
Discussion
The relationship between musical understanding and skills
We argued that musical understanding is an underlying conceptual dimension that is
manifested through the various `channels' composing, performing and audiencelistening. The symmetrical results across composing and audience-listening seem to
support the assumption that musical understanding is a broad conceptual dimension
that operates across more than one activity. There are instances in the data that
illustrate interaction among the activities within the dimension of understanding
(musical materials, expression or form).
The non-symmetrical ndings in performance support our argument that the
12
http://journals.cambridge.org
IP address: 200.130.19.173
revealing of musical understanding is constrained when tasks are not appropriate and
accessible. This embraces two distinct but overlapping issues: the level of practical
skills involved in the tasks and the distinctive nature of the activities.
IP address: 200.130.19.173
took advantage of their idiomatic awareness and produced compositions in the same
style as their repertoire. In these cases, they showed the knowledge of how materials,
especially certain harmonic colours and textures, work to create mood and stylistic
authenticity. Their accumulated experiences in performance and audience-listening
enabled them to put musical ideas together creating interesting new structural
relationships, but the realisation of these compositions through their playing was in
general constrained by their instrumental technical accomplishment. In some cases,
the interaction includes also the transfer of technical uency, motor control, quality of
touch and articulation. Although performance was in general the poorest indicator of
children's understanding of music, these musical examples point to a very positive
effect it made on composition: it enabled students with the technique to realise
compositions in a consistent and developed manner.
IP address: 200.130.19.173
either consciously or not what musical elements would be articulated and how. This
does not diminish the importance of the consistency achieved in audience-listening,
but it certainly highlights the capability of students to compose at a higher level.
Traditional instrumental performance also involves a great deal of accommodation to
a musical product that would have been produced by someone else, in another time
and place. The individual has to adjust to a series of external constraints it is a
struggle to master various skills, from notation (if this is the case) to idiomatic
features. One will only be able to make performance decisions within a range of
performing skills that one controls.
There seem to be also important psychological differences between performing
one's own composition and performing someone else's. It is important to recall that
our students were to perform their own compositions. It is striking and almost puzzling
that in many cases they were able to play their own compositions more meaningfully
and sensitively than their `normal' piano repertoire this despite the fact that they
had practised their performance repertoire for many weeks, even months. There were
instances of students who could not shape a phrase in their performance, but who
produced expressively shaped phrases in their compositions. This may be due to the
fact that while composing they are using their skills with a direct musical purpose to
achieve a particular result or effect that is in their mind. The analysis of individual
students' `products' show many cases in which all the renement, careful touch,
phrase shape and direction, the structural articulation, ending gestures, many times
revealed in their compositions, disappeared in their performances.
The assimilation/accommodation issue involves not only technical but also intellectual and affective aspects, as to personal preference and taste in terms of expressiveness and style. The distinctive nature of the activities sets up different levels of
freedom in regard to choices and decision making over musical discourse. When
performing someone else's piece, students must rst `conform' to what is being
dictated by the score and hopefully give their individual interpretation which would
involve no more than subtle deviations of timing and loudness. But while playing their
own compositions, they are playing what is technically appropriate for their ngers
and hands, and expressing their own ow of ideas, with their meanings, shapes,
character, personality, emphasis: they are speaking for themselves.
15
http://journals.cambridge.org
IP address: 200.130.19.173
16
http://journals.cambridge.org
IP address: 200.130.19.173
Conclusion
It is important to acknowledge the possibilities of generalisation. The small sample
was studied in some detail, and this enabled us to address the relationship between
understanding and skills across the various activities, and to address the relative role
of these in musical development. This was possible because all students selected for
the sample were productively involved in an integrated approach to the three activities
and could offer a range of products across which we could assess their understanding
of music. Hence, there is a relevant scope for generalisation at a theoretical level:
students may achieve at their optimum level when tasks are appropriate and accessible. The
modality in which tasks were less appropriate and accessible (performance) the
revealing of students' understanding of music was constrained. Should the composing
tasks have pre-set more complex techniques, a particular style or another medium
students were not acquainted with, the results could have been quite different the
same for audience-listening.
The ndings of this study support the idea that music education should provide a
wide range of musical experiences. It was evident that different forms of musical
behaviour may be either better or poorer indicators of students' optimal level of
understanding, according to the nature of the task and the skills involved. Also,
different students may have different degrees of ability or interest for one activity or
another. The data illustrate that the three activities nourish students' experiences
from differing angles. Through audience-listening students may expand their musical
horizons and understanding. It enriches their repertoire of options upon which to act
creatively, transforming, reconstructing and reintegrating ideas into new shapes and
meanings. But it allows decision-making to a lesser extent. Also, there are no signs in
our data of any student reaching the Symbolic level in audience-listening, which did
happen in performance and composition. Performance allows decision-making to
some extent, for the interpretative component that it involves. But it is composition
that allows more breadth for decision-making over a much wider range and thus is
particularly powerful in facilitating the development of musical understanding (Swanwick, 1994). This study indicates that an integrated approach to the three activities
may foster development when it engages students in all the layers of musical understanding. But in order to maximise any interaction, it is necessary to enable students
with activity-specic skills.
An important outcome of this work is that it draws attention to the relationship
between revealing understanding and developing understanding. It is necessary to
disentangle the level of technical skills involved in a task and the level of understanding being fostered through that task. If pupils are not working at a level where
they can exercise judgement and take decisions, how can they be developing a more
sophisticated quality of musical thinking? How can students develop a higher level of
musical understanding if they are not given the opportunity to work or `function' at
that level? How can students have an aesthetically rewarding experience when they are
still worried about `the third or fourth position'? How can students engage in music as
symbolic discourse if they never have the opportunity to produce a musically meaningful statement? If education is concerned with the potential of musical experience to
develop the mind, to open new horizons, to deepen intellectual and affective life,
there can be no compromise.
17
http://journals.cambridge.org
IP address: 200.130.19.173
Notes
1
2
3
4
See Leonhard and House (1959/1972), Swanwick (1979 and 1994), Regelski (1975),
Plummeridge (1991), Mills (1991), Glover and Ward (1993), Gane (1996) among others.
The Kendall Coefcient of Concordance W' is a non-parametric test which determines the
degree of association among several sets of rankings; it is particularly useful to measure interjudge agreement (Siegel, 1956). In this case there is a W value of 0.9193, at p<0.0001. The
order of the sums of the ranks matches perfectly the predicted order of the criteria.
Each of the two groups of judges was tested by the Kendall Coefcient of Concordance, at
p<0.0001 for both groups. `W' values are 0.7866 for Group 1 and 0.6780 for Group 2.
The two `distributions of scores', the one before the rule (Table 1), and the one obtained
from the rule (Table 3) were subject to a correlation test. A Spearman Correlation Coefcient
gives a value of 0.7274, p<.001.
Students' derived scores in the three activities were submitted to a Friedman Two-Way
ANOVA. The signicance level is p<.001.
References
Cohen, L. & Manion, L. (1980/1994) Research Methods in Education. London: Routledge.
Coolican, H. (1994) Research Methods and Statistics in Psychology. London: Hodder &
Stoughton.
Gane, P. (1996) `Instrumental Teaching and the National Curriculum: A Possible Partnership?'
British Journal of Music Education,13/1, pp. 4965.
Glover, J. & Ward, S. (1993) (Eds) Teaching Music in the Primary School. London: Cassel.
Hargreaves, D. (1996) `The Development of Artistic and Musical Competence', in I. Deliege
& J. Sloboda (Eds) Musical Beginnings: Origins and Development of Musical Competence. New
York: Oxford University Press.
Hargreaves, D. & Zimmerman, M. (1992) `Developmental Theories of Music Learning', in
R. Colwell (Ed) Handbook of Research on Music Teaching and Learning: a Project of the Music
Educators National Conference. New York: Schirmer Books.
Hentschke, L. (1993) `Musical Development: Testing a Model in the Audience-Listening
Setting.' Unpublished PhD thesis, University of London Institute of Education.
Leonhard, C. & House, R. (1959/1972) Foundations and Principles of Music Education.
McGraw-Hill Book Company.
Mills, J. (1991) Music in the Primary School. Cambridge University Press.
Plummeridge, C. (1991) Music Education in Theory & Practice. London: The Falmer Press.
Regelski, T. (1975) Principles and Problems of Music Education. New Jersey: Prentice-Hall.
Robson, C. (1993) Real World Research: A Resource for Social Sciences and PractitionerResearchers. Oxford: Blackwell.
Siegel, S. (1956) Nonparametric Statistics for the Behavioral Sciences. New York: McGraw-Hill
Book Company.
Silva, C. Franca (1998) `Composing, Performing and Audience-listening as Symmetrical
Indicators of Musical Understanding.' Unpublished PhD Thesis, University of London
Institute of Education.
Stavrides, M. (1995) `The Interaction of Audience-Listening andCcomposing: A Study in
Cyprus Schools.' Unpublished PhD thesis, University of London Institute of Education.
Swanwick, K. (1979) A Basis for Music Education. London: Routledge.
Swanwick, K. (1983) The Arts in Education: Dreaming or Wide Awake? Special Professorial
Lecture. University of London Institute of Education.
Swanwick, K. (1991) `Further Research on the Musical Developmental Sequence,' Psychology
of Music, 19/1, pp. 2232.
Swanwick, K. (1994) Musical Knowledge: Intuition, Analysis and Music Education. London:
Routledge.
18
http://journals.cambridge.org
IP address: 200.130.19.173
19
http://journals.cambridge.org
IP address: 200.130.19.173