1 Introduction

In the previous chapter we saw how, for several reasons, a threat is being posed towards the traditional model of instrumental musical education that has predominated in conservatories but has also spread to other institutionalised environments, such as schools of music, or even beyond them to other less formal educational contexts (see Chapter “Learning Outside the Music Classroom: From Informal to Formal Learning as Musical Learning Cultures”) and virtual spaces, with their apps, video games, and tutorials (see Chapter “Re-thinking How to Assess Students of Musical Instruments”).

Of the different levels of analysis and intervention (musicological, cultural, institutional, curricular, professional, etc.) for improving music education, we shall be mainly concerned in this chapter—and also throughout the rest of the book—with how these changes affect the way teachers should act in the classroom to change the way their students learn. Of course, what happens in the classroom is largely consequential to what is happening on other levels—e.g., how student selection criteria and assessment are established (see Chapter “Re-thinking How to Assess Students of Musical Instruments”) or how future teachers are trained and selected (see Chapter “Instrumentalist Teacher Training: Fostering the Change Towards Student-Centered Practices in the Twenty-First Century”)—and we shall therefore also be referring to them at different times. Our intention, however, is for our core theme to be the perspective of teachers and students. We will be probing into the way they have traditionally related not just to one other but also to music, in what we could call the conservatory model or if preferred, the conservatory educational culture. Following this analysis, we will propose a new form of envisaging these relationships, of feeling, living and producing music through learning and teaching, which we will then expand in detail throughout the rest of the book.

2 Music Education in Conservatories

The culture of music education in conservatories has been greatly depicted and analysed (e.g., Burwell, 2005; Ford, 2010; Small, 1998; Sarath et al., 2014; Tregear et al., 2016; see also Chapter “Instrumentalist Teacher Training: Fostering the Change Towards Student-Centered Practices in the Twenty-First Century” of this book). For our purposes, especially useful is the analysis adopted by Musumeci (2002), according to which broad agreement exists that the standard model of Conservatory music education is characterised by a series of traits which we have partially redrafted. These would be:

  1. 1.

    A rigid and restricted knowledge structure of a historical and stylistically limited range of music.

  2. 2.

    Musical theory based on an epistemology with clear influence of positivist tradition.

  3. 3.

    A musical production system largely derived from Taylorism and individualism.

  4. 4.

    Guidance centred mostly on musical score decoding and technical control of the instrument.

  5. 5.

    Direct or transmissive teaching methods based on strictly prescribed, regulatory, authoritarian and one-directional social interactions, in a teacher-student method dyad.

These features will be examined in greater or lesser detail so that through this analysis we may propose an alternative way of conceiving and developing learning and teaching in both conservatory classrooms, and beyond them to other less regulated spaces of music education.

2.1 A Rigid and Restricted Knowledge Structure

Let’s begin with what could be considered a prototypical case of music education. Carlos belongs to a group of friends, just like those schoolboys who already got together in a garage when they had time to rehearse songs by trendy bands. His musical life is completely divided between the classical violin and modern music. His friends wondered why he had to choose when it was all music. They did not fully understand the duality Carlos was experiencing between the conservatory music and music with the group (maybe these friends could now read Chapter “Learning Outside the Music Classroom: From Informal to Formal Learning as Musical Learning Cultures” of this book on the different cultures of music education and get a better understanding). As Small (1998) explains, there are many places and ways in which sounds can be played and converted into something that communicates emotions, from the theatre opera singer to the multitudinous rock band concert in a stadium; from the spectators at a sports event sharing their feelings towards their team and singing its anthem to that family member who sings whilst cleaning the house, making light of their chores. The truth, as Carlos’s friends think and as explained by Small (1998), is that music is something people use to make sounds to communicate. Why does this difference between the conservatory violin music and that of the group exist?

In the group Carlos and his friends listened to their favourite tunes and together, little by little, they reproduced the sounds of those songs. On the one hand, the electric guitar melody and lyrics and on the other, the bass guitar, drum rhythm etc. They began to rehearse and propose: “I think it should go a bit faster”, “we should give it more umph here”, “we should lower the sound here to create that amazing atmosphere”, “Now, Luis, this is your moment, give it all you’ve got”, largely playing through cooperation (without the need to have read Chapter “From Individual Learning to Cooperative Learning” of this book on cooperative learning, even though this would doubtlessly have helped them). Neither did they read Chapter “Learning Music Through ICT” on the use of information and communication technologies (ITC) in music education. Carlos and his mates finish their rehearsal by recording it on a mobile, sending each other the audio and discussing it throughout the week: “hey, here it sounds like we are novices, we need groove, here […]” Carlos got really involved in these sessions, he realised what it was that he didn’t really like or what was truly wrong about them but he saw this as an opportunity to improve, to learn through self-regulation (as will be discussed in Chapter “The Psychology of Learning Music”). The songs of the big bands became his songs, he made his own versions, adjustments, took his own decisions, and everything became a genuine process of learning and creating. “These guys were really serious about it” he said of these friends.

In the conservatory the situation was different. Carlos had to finish his pre-professional violin studies and had to play the repertoire that was requested of him, the pieces had already been studied by his father, who was also a violinist. This repertoire was not exclusively the demand of his conservatory or of his instrument; it belonged to the educational culture that impregnates the world of conservatories worldwide. Albeit with certain variations there is a “classical” or canonical repertoire (Ford, 2010). There is little variation in this set of pieces: baroque concertos by Vivaldi, or similar, sonatas and partitas by Bach, or similar, classical concertos by Haydn, Mozart, famous violinist methods and etudes, caprices by Paganini, etc. At the end of the day this is the classical repertoire interpreted in conservatories to finalise pre-professional education, for entry to an advanced conservatory or university of music (as may be observed in the actual centre programmes, generally accessible on their web pages). It is even used for teacher entrance examinations (see Chapter “Instrumentalist Teacher Training: Fostering the Change Towards Student-Centered Practices in the Twenty-First Century” in this respect) or when auditioning for an orchestra. Ultimately, this is the standard repertoire established in the Western tradition as a canon from which to measure and compare instrumentalist competences, which we could call the canonical repertoire of Western music (Ford, 2010).

Although in general Carlos liked this repertoire as well, he was not happy about not being able to decide on it himself. His famous teacher knew perfectly well how Bach should be played, for example, on the violin, to the extent that he was the one deciding which fingering, articulations, etc., were most appropriate or more to the point which ones were canonical and therefore obligatory. Carlos felt a bit uncomfortable. With all due respect to the written text, Carlos thought that what he did was not what he felt nor did it sound like the audio of his favourite interpreter when he played a certain repertoire (see Chapter “Reading Music: The Use of Scores in Music Learning and Teaching” on what a musical score represents, from the sounds with its parameters—pitch, key, intensity, etc.—to the emotional content underlying them). He told his teacher about the situation and the teacher agreed. The teacher said he also liked that interpreter, but that first he had to play the piece as “it was written” and then, once he had passed the exam, he could decide differently and play it with a more personal or expressive type of interpretation (Chapter “Instrument Mastery Through Expression: The Learning of Instrumental Technique” contains real examples on forms of learning including that of this teacher, where literal reproduction of the musical score comes before the construction of a genuine interpretation).

Carlos felt that the centre stage of his musical world was not inside him, nor in the emotions beneath that conventional role. The leading role resided in the literalism of the text, and was shared with the teacher’s instructions to convert its signs into sounds canonically through the instrument. In fact, as Ford states (2010) and as we shall see throughout this book, the technique taught in conservatories that centre on the previously mentioned canonical repertoire, with the exception of departments of jazz or modern music, is to play that repertoire, not to be true interpreters. Ford (2010) explains that the repertoire has been given priority over the interpreter and his or her action of interpreting the music. As we shall see in the next section of this chapter, everything boils down to technique and repertoire, with the aim being to produce students who are their teachers’ clones. Small (1998) attributes this to thinking abstractly, which may be appropriate for conceptualising, but actually entails certain dangers like, for example, limiting the word music to a musical score and not to the action of musicking (Small, 1998), which suggests the activity of making music, where music stops being an object (the direct object) and becomes an action (the verb). As we shall see later, music is thus conceived as a formal, abstract language which is disembodied or disengaged from action, that needs to be exhaustively mastered before making or feeling the music (Pozo, 2017; Pozo et al., 2019). As a result, no educational value is attached to the artistic action (see Chapter “Instrument Mastery Through Expression: The Learning of Instrumental Technique” for examples of how this occurs in the classroom), nor to its recreation by the interpreter, the perception of the listener or their response. The work created by the composer is in itself the object.

Thus, continuing with Small’s ideas (1998), believing that the meaning, the emotional content of the musical score resides in the actual composition is assuming that the interpretation is not a creative part of the process, with the interpreter only being a mediator between composer and listener. If this is so, as commented by Sloboda (1986), if technical mastery and precision of key and tempo is all that is required for musical interpretation, it would be better to give the task to computer programmers and shut down our conservatories.

From the point of view of assessment, to be examined in Chapter “Re-thinking How to Assess Students of Musical Instruments”, if we return to Carlos’ experiences, the arguments stated become quite strong. Carlos passed his professional violin studies: he tuned up, weighed up and followed all the indications given by the musical score and did not stop playing, which accounted for a high percentage of his overall score. In Spain, since the reform of the Organic Act on the General organisation of the Education System (LOGSE, 1990), conservatory teachers create a document which states, among other things, what will be assessed and how much weight each element of assessment will have in the final score, as happens in other Western countries. In general, this could be considered an assessment framework which is more precise and explicit in some times, places and levels than in others (see Chapter “Re-thinking How to Assess Students of Musical Instruments” for the regular assessment procedures). Furthermore, Carlos was easily able to handle his instrument, i.e., the teachers who assessed him were able to observe a certain technical level in the execution of his repertoire and also that he played from memory, which slotted into another section of that assessment framework. The artistic part of the framework was blurred by the idea of having to comply to the last detail with the fortes, pianos, crescendos, phrasing, etc.

What Carlos had to do was faithfully reproduce the text. As we have just said and as we shall insist throughout this book, the educational tradition of conservatories, with a canonical and timeless repertoire, is therefore centred on technical learning. This may be understood as the most effective route to reproducing note for note the musical score of a composition. This in turn will allow for the expressive content to follow, if possible, with the collaboration or help from the individual talent of the instrumentalist, but this has to rather mysteriously appear because it is hardly touched upon in education, other than assuming that technical mastery will lead it to shine forth (Bonastre & Timmers, 2019).

As a result, the artistic part of the framework, that reinterpretation of the emotional content submerged beneath the organised sounds, melts away. It is understood that carrying out the different parts of the musical score is sufficient to communicate the emotional content. It is assumed that without a communicative intention, just by respecting the indications of forte, piano, etc., the communicative content will reach the listener. In other words, the teachers here use these indications (f, p, crescendo, etc.) as ends in themselves instead of indications to promote the composer’s communicative intention. In this way, they prevent the interpreter from becoming another creator, thereby generating the need to teach the instrumentalist to create, to communicate, to undertake an epistemic reading of the musical score. As you yourself may confirm, if you want your listener to capture your communicative intention—letting them know your anger for example—, you have to deliberately not just do this with what you say but with how you say it. By speaking in a higher or lower tone, faster, or slower, the anger will be noted if the intention to communicate anger is there. If not, the listener will otherwise understand that you are joking, or being ironic, etc. Learning any language is, after all, learning to communicate intentional meanings. This is what appears to differentiate human languages from other forms of animal communication (Tomasello, 2008).

Going back to Carlos, he contemplated getting away from this canonical conservatory higher education tradition of violin teaching and interpretation and submerging himself in modern music. He wanted to manage more technical resources like the Chop, the ghost notes, etc. However, advanced educational studies in the violin meant continuing to follow exactly the same routines he had already followed and continuing also with a similar and traditional repertoire in the conservatories: baroque, classical, romantic, contemporary, etc., generally requiring high technical demand. Obviously in all eras there have been more musical formats than the canonical one selected for his study. However, it needs insisting that the repertoire required in the interpretation itinerary for graduating has remained the same without any significant changes, since the foundation of the first conservatories at the beginning of the nineteenth century throughout the Western world (Ford, 2010, including Spain The interpretation of a repertoire which approximately, and depending on the centre and the instruments, includes a piece from each of the styles mentioned, with the inclusion of a virtuoso piece and a National repertoire piece (naturally chosen from those considered classical) is constant. For instance, in 2019, two centuries after the creation of that first conservatory, in a conservatory the name of which we no longer wish to recall, although the guideline in all of them is highly similar, to graduate in violin the person has to interpret a repertoire of no less than 50 min and include a sonata or piece by Bach for violin alone, a Paganini caprice, a concerto for violin and orchestra and a freely chosen piece (as can been seen by consulting teaching guides in their web pages, at least in Spanish conservatories). Give or take a minute more or a minute less, one piece more or one piece less, this is obligatory in almost any higher conservatory in the interpretation speciality in conservatories of our western cultural tradition.

Advanced level of music for Carlos meant playing a similar repertoire to that of professional education, for example Paganini’s caprice and the Bach sonata. Maybe the other pieces were more technically accessible, but they were pretty similar. The advanced level therefore actually meant spending at least four years with a similar repertoire, and at times even the same one, with the same composers and just waiting for any changes the respective teachers might include. In his city a modern music speciality was not available, nor is it in almost any public conservatory in Spain. Neither were there specialities which differed from the classical world, like jazz or flamenco, which is only taught in some of these conservatories. The 23 higher education conservatories existing in Spain offer the interpretation speciality in all instruments which form part of an orchestra, but from the exclusive vision of the repertoire understood as classical, or canonical, but not modern, or jazz or flamenco.

We do not know what the future holds for the fictitious Carlos, but we do know that he is not alone in his experience. Many of us who have been to a conservatory have shared that experience of an education based on that rigid structure of knowledge restricted to a range of historical and stylistically limited music, like that defined by Musumeci (2002). Minassian et al. (2003) reinforce that same idea when they point out that the activity in conservatories is restricted to the area of classical music and what’s more, also the way in which that classical music has to be interpreted and the instructions given to control the instrument to reproduce the musical score as requested or demanded. There is a great problem here, beyond questioning whether the conservatories should restrict their activity to classical music or open up and adapt to new trends and to the employment market (let us not forget that we should also be trained to teach students how to get into the job market and, as shown in Chapter “Learning and Teaching Music in the Twenty-First Century”, within a social and cultural context that differs greatly from that which prevailed when the first conservatories adopted this model). Putting the onus on technical resources (see Chapter “Instrument Mastery Through Expression: The Learning of Instrumental Technique”) in the musical score, its fingering and articulations, etc., structures what the piece will sound like whilst configuring a partial vision of it and constructs a canonical interpretation of the classical repertoire, but above all it structures the mind of teachers and students with respect to what the music is and how to teach and learn it. This is why changing the tradition and the focus into one particular musical format is complex unless we rethink what we understand by music and how we believe it should be learned, beyond entrenched traditions.

The learning of music conceived by most teachers and students (read Chapter “How Teachers and Students Envisage Music Education: Towards Changing Mentalities” in detail for information on teacher and student conceptions) is that the musical score is the truth and the life of the music and its learning is in keeping, as stated by Musumeci (2002) with a positivist conception of the music itself.

2.2 Musical Theory Based on Positivist Epistemology

Going back several decades before the recently related experience of Carlos, several of us still remember the “free access” contained in the 1966 study plan in force for many years in Spain until the LOGSE (October 1990) came into force. At the beginning of the year, you had to go to the conservatory Secretary’s office (because in those days there was no internet) and pick up a form which listed the compositions, studies and methods that you had to know for the June exam, the musical canon to which we referred in the previous section. Nowadays, those repertoire sheets from the 1966 plan, have evolved in Spain with the LOGSE and further educational policy changes into increasingly more complex teaching didactic programmes which are full of literariness that is more prosaic than poetic, involving objectives, contents, methodologies, competences, capacities, assessment, etc.

However, despite the alphabet soup of letters and terms, we fear that instrumental learning practice, as suggested by Musumeci (2002), is still based on positivist epistemology. In other words, often assuming more implicitly than explicitly that learning is appropriating objective, true and established knowledge from culturally authorised voices (Hofer, 2001; Pecharromán & Pozo, 2006, 2008). In the case of music, as we saw with Carlos, it is taken for granted that to master an instrument, one not only has to embrace an authorised repertoire but also interpret it from the proper canons.

This positivist epistemology is not exclusive to instrumental learning contexts. In keeping with Covington and Lord (1994), we will exemplify it with the use of what is not an instrument class but is so optimistically called musical language. Musumeci himself recounts, (2002, p. 1):

Nacho had already been throwing up that morning and when he arrived at the conservatory by bus he felt a cold ball of acid gas in his guts. The exam made him crazy. When Professor Frei at last entered the classroom he thought he would not be able to control his longing to disappear, vanish, walk or run away, it didn’t matter how, just getting away from the situation at any cost. But he stayed. He heard Frei saying, “Let’s begin by recognising the key. I’m going to play the chord three times”.

“First time”, he said and played A 440 and a chord. “What chord? Which is it? What’s A got to do with that chord” thought Nacho, whilst the sound of his classmates’ breathing was almost palpable, scarcely behind his own, on the piano’s echo that was already fading away. “Frei is good today,” thought Nacho, “he let it resonate a while... but I can’t hear one”.

This positivist, objectivist or reproductive epistemology (Hofer, 2001; Hofer & Pintrich, 1997; Pecharromán & Pozo, 2006, 2008; for music education see O’Neill, 2012) is still largely characterised by the education offered by conservatories today. As we shall see in Chapter “How Teachers and Students Envisage Music Education: Towards Changing Mentalities”, behind all the decisions we take as teachers lie beliefs on knowledge, learning, etc., which usually come into play unconsciously and automatically. Thus, this implicit positivism, this belief in an accurate, true, musical interpretation threatened by a silent, and at times not so silent, because they are perfectly detectable, army of errors, deviations, mistakes, means that the teacher’s job continuously consists, in a similar vein to that of newspapers of yesteryear, in detecting at least ten differences, or ten errors between the student’s interpretation and the canonical form in which that piece should have been played in the mind of the teacher. The objective is to try and immediately correct them so that the student does not persist with them. In Chapter “The Psychology of Learning Music” (Table 1, p. XX) there is an example of a teacher who is repeatedly dedicated to correcting the systematic errors of her students (other examples are available in Chapter “Instrument Mastery Through Expression: The Learning of Instrumental Technique”).

This same underlying epistemology, in many cases positivist, is therefore intensely present in the assessment. This often, in keeping with the abovementioned game of ten differences, consists in comparing the product offered by the student with the authorised object of knowledge residing in the teacher’s mind (see Chapter “Re-thinking How to Assess Students of Musical Instruments”). The assessment method, with its rigid demands, its strictness and external control, does not lead to emotional states conducive to enjoyment and emotional expression but to feeling physically ill. The students anticipate a type of exercise (aural this time) which is completely removed from their daily lives but which generates a fear of failing, of punishment and external control. The conservatory student has to be able to aurally identify and then transcribe intervals, such as tones, rhythmic metrics and bars in the exercise which is traditionally called “music dictation”. This positivist epistemology with its objective, instead of subjective conception of music, is often implicitly rather than explicitly based on a behaviourist approach. In other words, a prefixed response is expected from the stimulus of an exercise or musical piece by the students, but not any response they may create themselves.

The consequences of this type of assessment are diverse: jeering at the Rite of Spring by Stravinsky, the experiences of Carlos in the previous section, and much more everyday experiences like the anxiety attack suffered by Nacho in the above transcription. This type of anxiety similar to stage fright is suffered by almost four out of every ten conservatory students (Zarza et al., 2016) and is in fact characteristic of classical music education (Perdomo-Guevara, 2014). This may be due to the way it assesses or appreciates music within the positivist conception framework, which ends up linking instrumental learning to the emotion of fear: fear of making mistakes, of missing out a note, of not playing “as it should be played”, fear of failing to reproduce the musical objective where knowledge resides. And learning from fear is one of the least effective forms of learning and enjoying what one has learned (Bächler et al., 2018; Pozo, 2016).

This organisation of learning, using “well structured” activities and objectives (Covington & Lord, 1994) apparently leads to good results, but they are restricted to specific academic tests and contexts (that feared assessment). In other words, no effective learning processes are produced, according to the definition which will be established in Chapter “The Psychology of Learning Music”, since they are neither durable nor transferable. Like Carlos in the previous section, Nacho is not going to be able to cross the bridge separating classroom from life with just his musical knowledge. The useful knowledge on one side of the bridge is no good on the other. This is another problem that the conservatory model faces: it is founded on cultural formats, or musical production modes, which undoubtedly do not respond to the demands and forms of distribution of musical knowledge in full twenty-first century swing.

2.3 A Musical Production System Based on Taylorism and on the Individual

In the previous section positivist epistemology was characterised from the perspectives of reproductive learning, i.e., the student knows music when s/he is capable of reproducing or interpreting the repertoire authorised from the established canons. The characteristics of this type of education have repercussions on the experiences of the students and also the teachers and other education entities, since they all share the same musical culture, and breathe the same impure air of a rigid and reproductive music. Part of this air has become impure, dense and for many students like Carlos and Nacho, and by no means few teachers, unbreathable. Its origin is in the history of the cultural production of music, which has undoubtedly contributed to solidifying this type of positivist epistemology practices. A quick glance at this highly complex history must begin with the way in which music was produced, which we share phylogenetically with other animal species. From here to its Taylorist production mode which organises the conservatory learning spaces and finally the contemporary methods of mass distribution that organise the production structure in today’s contexts of mimetic learning.

The evolution of homo sapiens but also of the other animal species has led us to produce, share and transfer music from generation to generation through our phylogenetically shared mimetic learning devices. For example, Fitch et al. (2018) propose an ecological vision for human musicality by differentiating four types of musical manifestations that we share with other species (vocal songs, percussion instrumental music, social vocal synchronisation, and dance). Thus, influenced by the immediate ecosystem, songs are formed or improvised combining the different cultural memes, or basic musical structures, which are implicitly acquired (Pozo, 2014) and which resoundly characterise each of these species and in our case, the different musical cultures.

The idea of a culture with productive rather than reproductive modes of production is therefore accepted and exercised from basic patterns of music or cultural memes learned mimetically (Lord, 1964, 1965; Pressing, 1988; Vikis-Fribergs, 1984). This mode of production, for example, would occur in the multitude of cultures studied in Southeast Asia, India, Gamelan, Latin America, etc. (Nettl & Russell, 2004). It is also present in the Spanish flamenco culture with improvised or “de repente” (spontaneous) song (Machado y Álvarez, 1881). This method of production allows the music to be a true language during social interaction, the essence of which is not the musical, expressive form but its content. It is the shared emotions that are synchronised in a community through the participation in musical activity. There are no social or cultural rites (whether they be wedding, funeral or ritual celebration) that are not interceded by music that is conceived as a social activity. Everyone participates, with no differentiation between composers, interpreters and spectators. This division of musical roles has its own history.

Although the goal of mimetic learning is imitation or reproduction of a previously established action or object, these open production formats stand out because no interpretation—or supposed imitation or reproduction—is exactly the same as the previous one. This is what characterises home-crafted production. If you go to a craft market anywhere, in Granada, Marrakech, Cusco or Oaxaca, you will recognise something that is hand-crafted because it will contain a variance, an error, a mark, that distinguishes it from anything else. No two hand-crafted articles are the same because each production is unique. They are open to multiple contextual variables which transform them. Innumerable identical copies of the same object can only be made by industrial production and this had a decisive impact on learning and teaching, which stopped being crafted and became technical (Pozo, 2014). The artisans became workers and music was reproduced instead of produced.

However, this path towards the mechanisation of learning in the case of music actually began many centuries before the Industrial Revolution, with Pope Gregory Magno, who had the idea of unifying Christendom through a single rite. For this he created the Schola Cantorum, where the reproduction of what was later known as the Gregorian chant was taught (Serrallach, 1953). In order to quicken and facilitate the learning process of these chants the first attempts were made at writing music (Sarget, 2000). Even so, the open forms of production continued being a daily practice, resulting in the first polyphonies (del Arroyo & Rey, 2017; Devoto, 1980; Lara, 2005; López, 2009) and progressive reduction was maintained, up until Romanticism (Crocker, 1962).

Writing music became fully developed with the Enlightenment and due to the good intention of transferring genuine musical knowledge to all mankind pieces, treatise and dictionaries on music began to be published and marketed (Rosen, 1971), as did the figure of the bourgeois enthusiast and his or her respective cultural associations (predecessors of the current wind instrument bands in Eastern Spain). However, the most influential change for formal music learning spaces came at the hands of the Industrial Revolution. The new Taylorist industrial production model with its assembly lines, specialised labour and division of work organised the spaces of learning in the emerging conservatories, similarly to the other educational spaces (Pozo, 2014, 2016), which in the case of music meant the already assumed distinction between composer and interpreter (Moore, 1992; Salazar, 1944), that enabled us to understand the positivist or reproductive epistemology described in the previous section.

So, by observing the history of cultural production it is possible to understand how musical practice conditions have changed, to a large extent through outside interests from emotional communication. Our approach to Taylorist industry and its mass production lines must differentiate between the different professional profiles and their specific education: designers and managers of production chains (composers/directors) on the one hand, and technical experts (instrumentalists) who proceed with them on the other. We have spent a couple of centuries moulding professionals for the Taylorist mode of production, which incidentally we have achieved very well. In fact, there are numerous professional European orchestras (and students) whose musicians have been trained in this musical culture. However, as was shown in Chapter “Learning and Teaching Music in the Twenty-First Century”, most musicians currently trained in this tradition have to search for other professional careers for which that specialised Taylorist education has not prepared them (López-Íñiguez & Bennett, 2020).

Ultimately this musical production has generated a whole culture of learning and teaching, which consists in confronting the student with a closed task that requires the decoding and interpretation of musical scores but rarely the creation and interpretation of their own creations, either alone or with companions, or even the creation of their own interpretation or version of others’ works, as their cover. But, do we prepare conservatory students to enact their lives through music? Apparently not. Even worse, we do not show them how to create interpretations from the musical scores themselves, but only to obey the teachers, who on too many occasions act like production line managers, where the need for the student to know what they are doing and understand the process is less important than respect for the established product. Phrases like “you don’t need to think” or “this is played like this” are far too common a conclusion. Rather than confronting them with genuine problems of composition, creation or interpretation that are tasks open to finding different solutions, they are confronted by mere closed task exercises, that only admit a pre-established solution (see Chapter “The Psychology of Learning Music” for the differences between exercises or musical problems and also the example given in Chapter “Instrument Mastery Through Expression: The Learning of Instrumental Technique”, p. XX).

2.4 Guidance Towards Decoding the Musical Score and Technical Mastery of the Instrument

This form of conceiving music as a more or less closed or established knowledge system, as a subject of knowledge that predates the student, and the teacher that music education has to convey to new generations of interpreters in the most faithful way possible, within the framework of a Taylorist production model, necessarily moves towards an instructional model or musical education in keeping with these premises. Circumstances are similar with other emblematic contents of our educational tradition, such as reading and writing, mathematics, or science. As shown by Small (1998), by denouncing what we would call the abstract or decontextualized nature of music taught, instruction has tended to begin with a mastery of the code (reading musical scores) which only later when students they have already fully mastered these codes do they have to convert them into actions. In the beginning is the Verb not the action (Pozo, 2014). Thus, as we shall see in greater detail later, we learn music as an arbitrary, abstract, and amodal language (AAA) (Glenberg, de Vega & Graesser, 2008; also Pozo, 2017), decontextualised from action, interpretation and meanings. In specific contexts this production is closed in on itself, packaged like just another industrial consumer product instead of being an open production, centred on communicating meanings in a specific context.

Learning thus begins with the decoding of written, musical language, and translates it into sound patterns which have to be executed using specific actions in the instrument. Playing music is conceived as a process of acquisition of the necessary technical skills to decode the musical score and master an instrument, thus achieving the translation of the musical score, which itself is conceived as a closed code, into another equally closed code, of technical patterns which are able to generate this organised, technically accurate sound.

Although there are many different forms of teaching musical language and its translation into patterns of sounds, studies show a dominant conception in our culture, according to which music, in keeping with the dominant positivist conception is contained in the musical score, (see Chapter “Reading Music: The Use of Scores in Music Learning and Teaching” of this book).Playing involves turning what is written on a score into sounds and therefore, to be able to play any instrument you have to know how to decode it. As we shall see further on in Chapter “Reading Music: The Use of Scores in Music Learning and Teaching”, in this process of musical literacy we usually also assume an analytical focus, in which the musical text is decomposed into minimal units, notes, the subsequent combination of sequencing of which then produces the desired melody. In accordance with model AAA (arbitrary, abstract and amodal knowledge) already mentioned (Pozo, 2017), the musical score is decomposed into a series of arbitrary, abstract and amodal units (the notes). A meaning should arise from their combination, in a similar manner to how it is proposed that children should learn to read and write or learn mathematical notation. If we return to the shining metaphor of the Library of Babel by Borges (1944), it is taken for granted that the whole of knowledge is contained within the Library, in the code, and therefore mastering the code will mean mastering or knowing all music (Pozo, 2007).

In music learning, as in other areas of expertise, a cultural pattern in keeping with a behaviourist-centred learning appears to predominate, as has been pointed out previously. We could also call it associative (see Chapter “The Psychology of Learning Music”), according to which everything is reduced to the sum of its parts. Thus, the meaning which in the case of music teaching, as we shall see later on, (see also Chapter “Instrument Mastery Through Expression: The Learning of Instrumental Technique”), refers to its emotional content (Kivy, 2001) that comes from the combination of the most elemental units composed by the code, adding on notes. Borges said that the Library of Babel contained all the books that could be written with the 28 letters of the alphabet but also all the errors of each one of these books. The function of the teacher, as we have seen, is to detect each one of the errors committed by the student when decoding the musical score by turning it into sounds. And the function of the student, as we shall see in Chapter “Reading Music: The Use of Scores in Music Learning and Teaching” will be to process the musical score to a highly elemental level, note by note. Just as when one learns a text by “heart” without understanding it (see the example presented in Chapter “The Psychology of Learning Music”) the student tries to learn music “accurately” without detecting the underlying musical structures that organise and provide meaning to these notes, and certainly does not link that music with all the cultural, expressive, personal etc. elements that give it life (see an in-depth analysis in Chapter “Reading Music: The Use of Scores in Music Learning and Teaching”).

As with certain teaching methods for reading and writing, the student learns to combine notes, or letters (p with a, pa….), which they then thread together with other notes, letters or syllables like the links in a chain until long “dictations” are made. But in music, unlike writing, these dictations then have to be translated into actions which through an instrument generate the desired sounds. The letter—in this case the notes—have to be converted into actions, which are sequenced and organised and with a high level of technical complexity in keeping with the restrictions imposed by each instrument. As we shall see further on, and is already pretty fully developed in Chapter “Instrument Mastery Through Expression: The Learning of Instrumental Technique”, the most normal route for teaching instrumental technique is based on providing the student with a detailed model of the pattern of actions they should carry out and under the control and supervision of the teacher, who goes about forming this interpretation, correcting as many errors as the student commits until the established musical pattern is reached. This pattern is the only one that will ensure the desired canonical sound. Let us now go into one of Carlos’s classes for a moment and see how his teacher helps him to correct his errors:

Teacher: Carlos, there are several things regarding what you have just played. The intonation, really, there is no note that we could say is well in tune…, and it is clear that the positioning and tension in that hand will not help to improve it. Look, if you hold the violin like this, it only leads to problems. It even affects the bow. Look how you hold the bow, how your hand does not allow for flexion. Your sound is tense. The piece is not well read, you played several wrong notes and there were changes you did not adhere to. The B of this ascending scale, for example is a flat, the next time there is a natural. And several other things. You haven’t followed the fingering and articulations I gave you. I am not surprised that what you play does not sound anything like Bach. Play what is written, improve those technical problems, as I´ve told you several times how to do it, and you will see everything will come together.

As the example shows the technique from this classical focus is conceived as an end in itself and is acquired through several phases (see Chapter “The Psychology of Learning Music”; also Pozo, 2008) which should include very clear and precise instructions (on the positioning of the fingers or the hands or control of the column of air—depending on the instrument) accompanied usually by the teacher, who the student has to imitate as much as possible (“Carlos, look at how I move my arm during this passage”). This also requires a great deal of practise, which is difficult to ensure if the students’ motivation is insufficient (as we shall also see in Chapter “The Psychology of Learning Music”). The student must also be strictly supervised by the teacher, whose function is to correct all errors the student commits as soon as possible (“not like that, repeat it again and please do it as I told you and showed you”). This obsession with error and correction will become, whether they like it or not, one of the pillars of the learning and teaching process, where the student will also be worried about error and experience music from this fear of error. They will focus all their attention on avoiding these technical errors (missing a note, not keeping time, not getting the tempo right, etc.), and as we shall later see, will scarcely think about the music and the expressive meaning of what is being interpreted. The teacher will take on the responsibility of preventing all these errors, so they will always be breathing down the student’s neck when they play, displaying their authoritarian role that leaves little room for student autonomy with regard to both their abilities and competences and their actual motivation.

2.5 Transmissive Teaching Methods Based on Authoritarian and One-Directional Relationships

The model we have just described is based on a certain relationship between student and teacher, or rather pupil and maestro, which also forms part of our educational tradition beyond music, but that here, given the didactic and usually long lasting relationship between teacher and student (a teacher does not usually, as in other educational contexts, teach several students at the same time nor does the student have several teachers), and therefore the relationship and its consequences become more intense.

As shown in Table 1 at the top, in the traditional model the teachers assume that their function is, according to Pozo (2008), to provide their students with as much knowledge as they would need (but never allow them to choose their musical repertoire or decide how they wish to do things), mould their execution, promote mimetic learning and train the student’s execution, focusing as we have seen on the correction of errors (i.e., deviations from the knowledge provided and models established). Claxton (1990) expresses this more graphically: the teacher has to be a petrol attendant who fills up the student’s tank with knowledge (empty because from this focus we have seen the music the student knows and experiences in their everyday life is of no consequence. The most it can do is distract). The teacher is also a sculptor who moulds the student’s action and a watchmaker who painstakingly revises and changes the technical execution of the student, piece by piece. And what is the student in that model? The passive receptor of the teacher’s actions, a mind to be filled, a mass of information to be polished or sculptured to the teacher’s tastes, a piece of machinery to repair or at least to adjust. If the student persists and practises sufficiently the desired results will be achieved.

Table 1 Different teaching functions or profiles in the traditional educational focus (top) and in the other alternative focuses centred on the student (bottom)
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The theoretical and practical limitations of this model will be analysed in detail in the following chapters. The former lead to a much poorer musical learning than desired in most cases, as was pointed out some years ago by Covington and Lord (1994), but one of the undesirable consequences is that often such a close link established in instrumental learning between the learner and the teacher has a negative effect on actual learning and becomes what today is called a toxic relationship. Leaving aside extreme cases, unfortunately, as analysed by Fernández-Morante (2018), it is not so infrequent for a strong relationship of dependence or domination to be created where the student, far from building up the necessary autonomy, ends up being increasingly more tightly under the supervisory control of the teacher. Without mentioning those cases where the teacher tries to maintain that control by using psychological punishments, the continuous correction of student errors is the seed of the famous fear of failing, or stage fright which threatens a large part of the interpreters even whilst they are exercising their profession. It is not surprising that the emotion you deal with reported by musicians trained in the classical tradition, unlike those trained in other musical cultures, is that of fear, fear of making mistakes (Perdomo-Guevara, 2014). Since it is impossible to learn without emotions (Pozo, 2016), the teachers who adopt this model usually try to motivate the student, making them see that if they do not correct their errors, the audition they have the following week will not go well, that their parents will be disappointed and what will the people listening to them think. What emotion will the student feel when they have to participate in that audition? If music, as we shall later see, above all involves expressing emotions, what emotions will a terrified student express, who does not believe in their own musical skills?

Instead of having students who are always immersed in these negative emotions, it is possible to propose a music education guided by motives, goals and positive emotions. As shown in the example presented in Chapter “Learning Music by Composing: Redescribing Expressive Goals on Writing Them”, when the goal of the music is to communicate an emotion, the only possible error is not to achieve it, not to literally play the key that releases the mystery or the suspense. There is no external canon to repeat, no execution to emulate. Instead there is personal management of one’s emotions and the technical actions (yes, because technical actions are still there) that are able to communicate them. In this new model (see the lower part of Table 1) the person teaching becomes the guide, the tutor, the adviser, of a journey the students themselves set out on in keeping with their expressive goals. According to Claxton (1990), the petrol station attendants or watchmakers become sherpas, those native persons who are more knowledgeable of the terrain, who guide the climbers but who do not decide which journey they should go on nor take decisions for them. They are in the background, leaving the student to be centre stage of that climb. They do of course try to prevent them from falling or freezing in the middle of the audition but they do this from suggestion, questioning, guiding, not from orders and control or imposing certain patterns of action (in Chapter “SAPEA: A System for the Analysis of Instrumental Learning and Teaching Practices” the criteria that distinguish one type of teaching action to another will be analysed).

This new form of being a teacher, which is illustrated in several chapters of this book (for example, in Chapters “Early Initiation to Music Learning: Little Children Are Musicians Too, 9 through Learning Music by Composing: Redescribing Expressive Goals on Writing Them”), also requires a new form of conceiving music as a cultural, epistemological production and as an instructional activity. In other words it wishes to rethink each of the points we have been analysing and take them as its guide, but without strictly following them, in keeping with the characterisation suggested by Musumeci (2002). This is a new focus on music teaching which largely draws on assumptions that oppose the traditional model.

3 Towards a New Approach on Instrumental Music Teaching

Part of the content of this section is adapted from a previous publication (Pozo et al., 2019).

Recently the AAA focus, that underlies the processes of literacy, is being strongly reacted to by the philosophy of the mind (Rowlands, 2010), neuroscience (Damasio, 1994) and cognitive psychology and learning (Claxton, 2015; Glenberg, de Vega & Graesser, 2008; Pozo, 2001, 2014, 2017; Wilson, 2002), and also from actual educational spaces (Barab & Dodge, 2008). A new focus is therefore proposed, based on the so-called embodied mind which defines our mind as an incarnate, incorporated system. Compared with the mind–body dissociation and the belief that all knowledge begins with abstract, formal, decontextualised activity, this draws upon the fact that all mental activity is produced from and for the body. It is an embodied activity. Compared with the evangelical supposition that “in the beginning was the Verb” then this “became Flesh” upon which, as we have seen, a large part of our music educational culture is founded, the embodied mind focus accepts that all of our acts of knowledge implicitly begin in the body itself, in the bodily or embodied sensations and representations. Therefore, knowing is to a fair extent specifying and reconstructing these primary embodied representations (Pozo, 2001, 2014). Unlike that which occurs in the classical cognitive focus, in keeping with the ideas that as we have seen have predominated in our music educational culture, where these representations are coded in the form of arbitrary, abstract and amodal symbolic units, (Glenberg, de Vega & Graesser, 2008), from the embodied focus it is accepted that the primordial representations are enactive in nature, they are based on bodily actions and sensations and are therefore genuine representations/actions (Pozo, 2014).

Thus, learning and teaching, including musical learning (Cox, 2016), should be aimed at explaining and transforming these primary embodied representations through the mastery of new codes and systems of representation (Pozo, 2014, 2017). All learning has to start from implicit and embodied representations which unconsciously guide the activity of learners. However, as we shall see, this transformation requires recording using different external social or cultural languages and representations (Pérez Echeverría et al., 2010), which not only help to make them explicit but mostly to generate new meanings using a representational re-description (Karmiloff-Smith, 1992) in other representational formats. The process of re-description, according to Karmiloff-Smith (1992), would involve the progressive translation of a representation to a new code or format, with greater representational power. In the case of the instrumental music this would be indicating how the intuitive representations, linked to the body (which we will see in Chapter “Early Initiation to Music Learning: Little Children Are Musicians Too”) acquire a different meaning and translate to other external cases, to acquire a more symbolic and flexible character from the musical scores. Since embodied representations are fixed or linked to the context, they need to be translated into other codes with greater capacity of transference than the actual bodily experiences, so that what is learned may be generalised to other contexts or situations.

The question which the reader may be asking him or herself is what can a student who is beginning to learn an instrument re-describe if they do not yet know anything about how to play that instrument or what these primary embodied representations are that are linked to the body and which let us learn music and instruments the way we intended. The answer is simple, we are emotional beings (Damasio, 1994), music plays its role in the area of expressing emotions (Juslin & Västfjäll, 2008; Koelsch, 2014; Koelsch et al., 2008; Meyer, 2008) and we are all humanly musical (Hallam, 1998; Musumeci, 2005). Music is one of the most genuinely emotional expressions of a human being. In fact, this emotional content is found to be present in the roots of creation and musical practice, as emitted from the so-called proto languages (Mithen, 2005), in this case and more specifically in the use of sounds for driving emotions. It is also found in classical studies such as that of Blacking (1995) in the Venda tribe from South Africa. More recently, Juslin and Sloboda (2013) report that music is above all a communicative and expressive phenomenon the main aim of which is to express emotions. Even from the viewpoint of interpretation and not just from the composer’s view, Levitin (2006) states that the essence of musical interpretation is, essentially, being capable of transmitting emotions which would imply, as we shall see in Chapter “Instrument Mastery Through Expression: The Learning of Instrumental Technique”, a personal construction of the emotional content underlying the musical score.

Finally, as Kivy (2001) says, the emotional qualities of music cannot be denied since they are heard and we have ears to hear them with. We feel music and its sounds impact us until they achieve the communicative effect that lies within them. This quality of understanding the emotional content that sounds transport and reacting to them is not a specific quality of musicians. It is applicable to the human race, that is evolutionally prepared to appreciate and express music. (Mithen, 2005).

However, as we have seen, music as an academic discipline concentrates on the study of the musical code and forgets or abandons this communicative nature of organised sounds that form part of our embodied representations, or our “standard cognitive equipment” (Pozo & Gómez Crespo, 1998). Based on amalgamated rhythms, seventh chords, modulations and semi-cadences taught from abstraction, we forget the primitive use of music, which truly connects us with what we are (Mithen, 2005; Peretz, 2006), making up that “humanly compatible” musicality (Musumeci, 2005). In fact, if we allowed ourselves to choose between different versions of “My Way”, by Paul Anka, made famous in the version by Frank Sinatra, it is certain that one of them will sound more intense to you than others, and make you feel more emotional. This communicative and expressive intention of the singer of the version that you perceive as more emotional, is what each one of us appreciates as listeners, even teachers, as the most significant aspect of a musical interpretation (Laukka, 2004). Curiously, though, what is most highly appreciated in one interpretation is usually what is the least taught and naturally does not form the backbone of music and instrument teaching, but is supposed to be something that, magically, comes from the interpreter. Or not.

Recovery of this primitive sense of music which lets us learn from our primitive embodied representations means using expressiveness as a starting point, as we shall particularly see in Chapters “Instrument Mastery Through Expression: The Learning of Instrumental Technique” and “Learning Music by Composing: Redescribing Expressive Goals on Writing Them”. This communicative function starts with this expressivist model of music education (Torrado et al., 2014) because the actual nature or function of music is not just to move people but because that expressiveness or emotional content modulates the management of sound parameters and therefore the management of what we will do to produce it.

As shown in Fig. 1, it is the management of the different sound parameters which enables expressive content to be modulated. For example, to get a certain bodily response from the listener (relaxation, serenity) we have to communicate tranquility and security to them and to do this we use long sounds, with little attack and little sound material (Gabrielsson & Lindström, 2010). For this reason, sound and its parameters are another musical learning content. Learning to construct the emotional content we perceive in a musical piece and learning to strategically control what parameters of sound we need to manage so that these contents reach the listener are essential areas of learning in the music classroom (as shall be shown with different examples in Chapters “Early Initiation to Music Learning: Little Children Are Musicians Too”, “Instrument Mastery Through Expression: The Learning of Instrumental Technique” and “Learning Music by Composing: Redescribing Expressive Goals on Writing Them”).

Fig. 1
figure 1

Components of instrumental learning according to Pozo et al. (2019), with permission from the authors

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These sounds, with their parameters, must be produced either from instruments inherent in being human like a voice, or external instruments like a violin or a saxophone which of course have their own mechanism of sound production. Its emission design restricts how much of the bow has to touch the violin or the air that has to be used with the saxophone, for example, to produce those sounds with the planned parameter which drive the desired expressive content. For this reason, mastery of the instrument, as a sound production mechanism, should integrate all learning contents. It is not a question of not teaching technique because obviously technique is essential but always as a medium for achieving expressive ends, not as an end in itself. This we shall see in the next chapter when we establish the difference between technical and strategic use of musical knowledge.

Continuing with Fig. 1, it is the mind/body system that decides what to communicate, what emotions to arouse in the audience, through which sound parameters, by which actions with the instrument (Damasio, 1994). And from the perspective of embodied learning adopted here (Pozo, 2017), we can speak of the mind/body system because it is not only promoting cognitive management of one’s own actions but feeling and experiencing that management through the body itself, which is what is going to make the necessary actions possible to achieve the desired sounds and produce the sought after emotions. The interpreter must feel the achievement of his or her communicative goals through this bodily position management, muscular tension, and breathing. It is the body which finally produces the music, so one should therefore learn to feel it and regulate it in a cycle. As we have tried to reflect in Fig. 1, this is not a vicious cycle because every time the relationship between the components of this expressivist model (emotions, sound, instrument, body) twist around, a new level of representational re-description of musical knowledge is reached.

Ultimately and to conclude, in the case of instrumental music, compared with the traditional focus described in Musumeci’s characterisation (2002), this new focus proposed and based on these embodied assumptions of the mind imply significantly uniting the four representational devices that need consideration for this new form of music education:

  • The emotions to be communicated (the emotional content of the music that is its genuine meaning)

  • The sounds and their characteristics that can link these emotions together

  • The technical properties and characteristics of the instrument which restrict the actions and enable these sounds to be generated

  • The bodily actions and sensations linked to the production of these sounds with emotional content though the instrument

For classroom work on these four components, to be dealt with in detail in Chapter “Instrument Mastery Through Expression: The Learning of Instrumental Technique” (see also Chapter “Student-Centred Music Education: Some Ideas to Improve Learning and Teaching”), activities need designing which will lead to:

  1. 1.

    Specifying the desired expressive goals, which, in turn, requires

  2. 2.

    Establishing relationships between the different representational components (emotion, sound, instrument, body), which in turn involves

  3. 3.

    Also clarifying the means through which they may be achieved (regulate the actions and sensations of the body that must be deployed to produce the desired sounds).

To sum up, interpreting is rather more than decoding and translating the musical score into sounds (Cook, 2013). It requires the creation of expressive goals which have to be regulated and executed through the instrument using specification and meta-cognitive control of the actual bodily actions (Pozo, et al., 2019). Music is not contained in the musical score nor in the instrument. It is the interpreter who conveys the emotions through the control and regulation of their own body and the sound generated through their actions with an instrument. For this model to expand into music classes, in the conservatories and outside them, then we, as teachers, also have to re-describe our ideas on how our students learn. We will deal with this in greater depth in Chapter “How Teachers and Students Envisage Music Education: Towards Changing Mentalities”, and assess what we are really teaching when we say we are teaching the use of a musical instrument as a means of expression. Table 2 compares and summarises the existing distance between the traditional model and the expressivist model proposed.

Table 2 Differences between the traditional and the expressivist models explained in this chapter
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