In WRDS 150, we learn how to identify research perspectives and discourse features of disciplinary areas in the scholarly research on music. We read articles written by performers, theorists, musicologists, and psychologists to explore what makes a good research question in these areas, and how researchers adopt scholarly moves and practices that reflect their writing situation. In addition, students are encouraged to become apprentice researchers and to identify topics and research interests that feed their musical goals. To this end, I encourage students to ground their research in their musical practice. Grounding research in practice asks musicians to understand what is important about instrumental practice for the purposes of research.
Why should musicians learn to take an instrumentalist’s (or singer’s) research perspective? Isn’t it challenging enough just to learn how to play? Shouldn’t I let researchers be researchers and performers be performers? Good questions. Let me think this through with you for a minute.
There are sharp distinctions to be drawn between an instrumentalist’ or singer’s perspective and other research perspectives on music performance. Consider this rather extreme example: if a neuroscientist wants to study music performance, they will use a neuroscience perspective. They will study the structural and functional aspects of the brain to make knowledge claims related to music. There are various functional imaging technologies used to study these things – electroencephalography (to measure electrical activity), magnetoencephalography (to pick up magnetic fields created by electrical activity), positron emission tomography (to identify changes in glucose absorption), and functional magnetic resonance imaging (to monitor blood-flow). Each of these measurement techniques comes with a research methodology built on assumptions about the sorts of things that can be observed and what those things mean (ontology). In a nutshell, a neuroscientist is studying the concepts and ideas of neuroscience, not music.
It is not clear that the knowledge claims of neuroscience naturally extend to matters of music performance without careful translation. Translational research is a relatively new idea in medical research that seeks to create bridges between research worlds so that, to continue the previous example, neuroscience on music performance might develop explanatory power for performance, and not just neuroscience. The idea is that researchers who understand music performance can collaborate on the research design so that the questions, data gathering, and observations are properly bounded. This requires open and transparent collaboration between disciplinary perspectives.
For this to happen, there has to be a perspective to articulate on the side of music performance.
Finding musicians to collaborate on research design in neuroscience is not as easy as it sounds. It is not enough to force a scientist to listen to live music or that a scientist should to learn to sing! Similarly, we don’t want to throw away everything we know about music and simply observe music through the concepts of science. Much of what is important in musical activity is tacit – it requires a deep understanding of the management of skill in processes of attention and awareness. The musician researcher must be capable of understanding music making in a way that organizes it into a proper research question. Similarly, the scientist must understand and anticipate how the research methods will constrain and influence the findings. From the perspective of situated cognition, music made in a lab differs greatly from music made in the concert hall; sight reading is very different than playing from memory. How are those differences accounted for in the research? The researchers must understand how to properly bound their explanations to avoid major explanatory blunders.
This neuroscience example is an extreme case of fields so far apart that they require a process of translation. In many cases, the scientific methodology merely dominates – it observes its own concepts for its own purposes and leaves its readers to question the relevance of the findings.
Because we currently lack a coherent instrumental/vocal research perspective, this happens in other areas of research much closer to home – music theory studies its own concepts for its own purposes, music history tells its own story for its own goals, and so on. There are very few researchers who have attempted to take an instrumentalist’s research perspective. Far more common is the research that aims to inform the performer from another point of view.
As a result, many performing musicians question the relevance of research for their musical goals.
Over the years, I have come to see how important it is that instrumentalists and vocalists learn to understand their work in more formal ways. If we want to learn from research (and many of us do), we need to understand what is relevant to us and what isn’t. We need to understand what our interests and perspectives are so that we can properly investigate them through appropriate research methodologies. The best place to start this work is to curate the knowledge we gain from lessons, rehearsals, master classes, and performances. If we properly curate our knowledge, we will know how to select research practices that will deepen our understanding of ourselves and our work as musicians.
Further Reading:
Cook, N. (2001). “Between Process and Product: Music and/as Performance.” MTO: a journal of the Society for Music Theory 7(2):np. Available online: http://www.mtosmt.org/issues/mto.01.7.2/mto.01.7.2.cook.pdf
Hewitt, A. (2009). “Student musicians’ self- and task-theories of musical performance: the influence of primary genre affiliation”, British Journal of Music Education 26:3, 293-314.
Kaastra, L. (2008). “Performance Inquiry and Cognitive Science: A Search for Common Ground.” College Music Symposium, 48: 131-156.
Parmer, D. (2014). “Musicology, Performance, Slavery: Intellectual Despotism and the Politics of Musical Understanding.” Intersections: Canadian Journal of Music 34(1-2): 59-90.
Payne, E. (2018). “The craft of musical performance: skilled practice in collaboration.” cultural geographies 25(1):107-122.
Schnare, B., MacIntyre, P., & Doucette, J. (2011). “Possible selves as a source of motivation for musicians,” Psychology of Music 40(1): 94-111.
Also visit the Music Research Lab of Roger Chaffin and colleagues at the University of Connecticut, they have designed a tool, “SYMP,” Study Your Music Practice. This tool allows you to gather and analyze aspects of your music practice to better understand what happens there.
You can find it here: https://musiclab.uconn.edu/introduction/