by ANDREA SCHIAVIO, FRED CUMMINS
Background
Within the context of Western music, learning to play a musical instrument has for centuries been one of the primary concerns of music teachers, having a privileged place among the tasks of music educators (Ericksson, 1996). A traditional way to engage in practice is based on the combination of sessions of individual training and one-to-one tuition (Hallam, 1998). This pedagogical strategy taps into a long tradition stretching back at least as far as medieval and renaissance models of musical education (Murray, Weiss, & Cyrus, 2010), where evidence emerging from instrumental treatises (often set in form of a dialogue between a single teacher and a single student) appears to reflect one-to-one forms of tuitions (e.g. Morley, 1597). Although records and images also indicate that choristers were taught singing as a group and wind instruments were learned on an apprenticeship basis and played almost exclusively in ensemble, the one-to-one model of musical teaching regained its ascendancy during the late 19th Century, where more systematic approaches to music education and the rise of professional private music teachers (Roske, 1987) contributed in formally establishing this pedagogical system.
The appeal to tradition, however, is not the only reason to explain why this teaching system currently serves as the most common methodology in instrumental music education (Association of European Conservatoires, 2010). Indeed, during the last few decades, a number of authors have highlighted the benefits of a one-to-one teaching approach for the development of musical skills (Bloom, 1985; Duke, Flowers, & Wolfe, 1997), portraying it as an ‘indispensable, intense and intricate’ feature of learning a musical instrument (Gaunt, 2007, p. 230). Accordingly, the teacher-pupil dyad seems to provide adequate scaffolding for the development of music learners (Wood, Bruner, & Ross, 1976), despite being based on highly verbal and conceptual practices (Kennell, 2002). As such, musical training is usually ‘designed by a dedicated teacher, with early age for start of practice’ (Sloboda, 2000, p. 399) and subsequently implemented across time by establishing flexible sets of rules apt to facilitate and monitor the progresses of the students (Perkins, 2010; Sosniak, 1990).
Although this methodology produces every year an impressive number of talented musicians – mostly devoted to Western classical music – there are reasons to question whether the tutor-pupil approach really is the most effective to enhance musical learning. Some criticism has pointed out that the context of one-to-one tuitions is still largely unexplored and unchallenged; only a few studies have specifically focused upon its dynamics (Perkins, 2013). Additionally, it has been argued that individual forms of tuitions lack shared standards of good practice, and they may necessitate forms of formal accreditations to meet more general teaching objectives (Carey, Lebler, & Gall, 2012; Gaunt, 2010). Another problem concerns the development of interpretative skills: according to Burwell (2006), many students rely too much on the unidirectional form of learning implicit in individual tuitions, ending up being almost unprepared to develop their own style and take responsibility for their interpretative choices without their teacher. Finally, recent research in joint musical performance (Glowinski et al., 2013), perception-action coupling (Novembre & Keller, 2014), and multicultural musical practices (Elliott, 1989), has expanded exponentially the directions and perspectives of the broader area of musical education, showing that other learning modalities can equally contribute to the development of musical skills. The recent rising of popular music pedagogy represents a good example of this trend, as it emphasises collective improvisation and joint performance (Higgins & Campbell, 2010).
Aims
As it emerges from these critics, there are necessary limitations to the traditional practice of musical skill development as a process that unfolds within a single individual, rather than between practitioners. At the same time, more research is needed to provide an adequate frame to the different teaching strategies described. In light of this, we firstly aim to put the one-to-one teaching approach into a broader context, highlighting the similarities between such pedagogical method and the mind-as-a-computer metaphor that characterises the cognitivist framework (Fodor, 1983). In doing so, we will provide a comparison with the teaching modalities based on the constructivist philosophy. Finally, drawing from the enactivist approach (Varela, Thompson, & Rosch, 1991) and from the recent focus on the centrality of interaction for cognition (Fuchs & de Jaegher, 2009), we will put forward an ‘inter(en)active’ approach to musical agency and learning, emphasising the benefits of real-time, embodied, interaction for music education and cognition.
Main contribution
‘Music has been widely […] accepted as a matter of cognitive understanding, or special intelligence, instead of flesh-and-blood experience in which there is a continuum between various aspects of experience’ (Westerlund & Juntonen, 2005, p. 114-115). This assumption contributed in developing a musical pedagogy in which a learner’s mind is seen as a machine programmed to compute fixed musical information received from an external environment in light of standardized rules (Gruhn, 2006). But framing musical learning within this cognitivist paradigm might create problematic descriptions of the complex dynamics that govern skill acquisition. Consider, for example, a novice guitarist learning the first rudiments of the instrument. According to the input-output dichotomy implicit in the cognitivist stance, the process of learning how to put the fingers on the strings and play can theoretically be reduced to these three basic components:
(i) Explanation of the correct position that the hand should assume (external knowledge – input – exists independently from the learner)
(ii) Concrete example by the teacher, while the learner observes (external knowledge can be acquired through conscious processing and then retained in human memory)
(iii) Repetition of the example by the student (behaviour – output – is governed by mechanical principles)
Relying on a unidirectional view of learning, where specific musical information (possessed by the educator) would elicit an appropriate response in the learner, this view reduces pupils to machines unable to actively participate in the complex dynamics of meaning attribution (Maes, van Dyck, Lesaffre, Kroonenberg, & Leman, 2014), exploration (Clarke, 2005) and emotional response (Molnar-Szacaks & Overy, 2006) that constitute musical behaviours across cultures (Cross, 2013). In other words, one-to-one tuitions seem to be rooted in a disembodied approach that downplays the autonomous faculty of the learners to self-generate knowledge.
With regard to this point, the constructivist approach to learning (Lewis, 2001) offers a concrete alternative. For ‘constructivism’, here, we refer mainly to the theory of education firstly proposed by Jean Piaget and widely promoted by Glaserfeld (1992), which focuses on the learner’s ability to generate knowledge. The constructivist challenge thus accounts for a new role for teachers, now seen as facilitators (Rhodes & Bellamy, 1999), and explores the dynamics by which educators elicit and facilitate meaning-making in the learner. In a musical context, therefore, the pupil learns to play by interacting with the instructor (Vygotsky, 1978) and by constructing (Savery, 1994) the knowledge appropriate to achieve the given musical goal. Instead of offering guitar tuitions in terms of stimulus-response duality, a constructivist teacher will emphasise the agency and self-knowledge of the learner, perhaps employing (but without being limited by) the following schema:
(i) Critical examination of the possible positions the hand should assume (engaging and challenging the learner, offering relevant motivations)
(ii) Examples in real-time situations, in which the learner participates responsibly (knowledge needs to be generated in ecologically coherent contexts)
(iii) Acquisition through active participation (learning is governed by flexible principles of real-world experiences)
Although this model is also limited, it contrasts with cognitivist approaches by shifting the focus from a conception of knowledge as determined by properties and relations independent from the subjects to a subject-first characterization of learning, where reality is not an imposition but rather is constituted by the learner.
As such, this model provides a better framework to emphasise the embodied dynamicity of musical learning (Bowman, 2004). At the same time, however, it seems to remain based on a one-to-one teaching system. While we recognise the importance of interactions for meaning-making and skill acquisition, we maintain that interactions limited to the teacher-student dyad will downplay the self-producing, world-making, aspects of the ‘musical animal’. To avoid this, interactions within learning should involve two or more pupils – ensuring continuity between self-generating processes and the social norms of the learning contexts (Kukla, 2000).
Sharing with the constructivist approach the centrality of active co-determination of knowledge in context, the enactive approach to cognition (Thompson, 2007), sees autonomy (the network of flexible processes intrinsic to the animal’s organisation, which allow the creature to shape their environment) and sense-making (the ability to self-regulate these inner processes to achieve autonomous stability) as the main properties of a living system. These self-generating capacities – apt to maintain the cognitive system under a precarious equilibrium determined by the niche and to actively participate in the world by enacting the system’s own domain of meaning – are what we believe is missing in the one-to-one teaching strategy. Indeed, the recent focus on embodied interactions – seen as constitutive tools for cognition (De Jaegher & Di Paolo, 2007) – makes it clear that co-subjectivity is promoted also in musical contexts through real-time entrainment and motor gestures (McGuiness & Overy, 2005). In other words, we argue that the acquisition of musical skills is rooted in agency and in the dynamic interplay between music and bodies in action, and thus is not reducible to inner structures (Schiavio, 2012). Additionally, we maintain that the condition of satisfaction of skill acquisition depends upon the balance of the components of the system: in a teacher-student environment there will always be a disproportion between the autopoietic, flexible, capacities of the learner and the stable set of rules to be transferred or elicited via habituation or interaction.
Instead, consider two learners playing the guitar together for the first time: exploring the musical environment they co-create and the musical instruments’ affordances, the pupils disclose a horizon of degrees of interaction that co-constitutes the musical event in which they are immersed, creating a circular interplay of actions, perception, and shared motivations (Menin & Schiavio, 2012). Through these circular exploratory behaviours, one enacts a domain of meaning that will perturb the other players’ understanding of the musical event, relying on coordinated flexibility and accurate timing (Cummins, 2009). Motivating the other to do likewise, this process leads to self-regulatory and interactive mechanisms based on the circular interplay of actions among learners. We predict this process to provide a higher degree of precision when compared to teacher-student dyads or to individual training. If we are to reduce these tenets into the same example employed before, we would end up with the following representation – in which the acquisition of musical skills builds upon active exploration, motivations, and self-regulation – based on the constant circularity between coupling and autonomy, the two faces of coordination (Dumas, Laroche, & Lehmann, 2014):
(i) Active and reflexive exploration of the possible positions the hand should assume (pupils motivate their behavior through constant interactions)
(ii) Self-regulation through interaction (both learners have first-hand experience of the event to perform, as they participate actively in the process of meaning-making)
(iii) Acquisition through interaction (learning is distributed across bodies and world via non-linear patterns of action shared by the pupils)
Activity, self-regulation, and interaction enfold into each other, allowing the learners to understand the sonic environment in constitution by enacting their own domain of meaning (Matyja & Schiavio, 2013; Krueger, 2009). This process is embodied in the concrete capacity of the system to act upon the sonic environment, thus modulating the acquisition of sensorimotor knowledge necessary for its constitution. Ultimately, the better understanding of these sensorimotor contingencies will determinate the degree of flexibility and stability of the musical event – which is a central component of musical experience and agency – leading to adequate skill acquisition.
Conclusions
The dynamic paradigm described here may improve upon the way in which music is traditionally taught, because it promotes co-awareness of the relevant musical goal(s). Having two or more learners sharing the same musical goal will ensure a balanced equilibrium between flexibility and stability. As such, this teaching system will tend to have fewer perturbations when compared to traditional teacher-pupil settings. Better clarity of the musical goals will in turn facilitate coordinated behaviours, promoting co-awareness of the intrinsic musical events (Overy & Molnar-Szacaks, 2009), in a continuous loop that involves affective, motor, participatory and sensorial aspects. Finally, we hope to stimulate future research to engage in discussion, forging the link between cross-disciplinary research in music cognition, music education, interactionism, cognitive science and skilled action.
Notes
Address for correspondence: Dr Andrea Schiavio, Department of Music, The University of Sheffield, 34 Leavygreave Road, Sheffield, S3 7RD, United Kingdom.
Email: a.schiavio@sheffield.ac.uk.
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