Connections - a seminar on musical interactions

Two students leading two projects supported by CEMPE, presented their experiences at the seminar. The highly engaged composition student Anna Berg was lamenting the lack of meeting places where students could work together across disciplines. She also felt there were too few contemporary music forums at NMH. In the autumn of 2019 she therefore launched Ensemble 3030, a project ensemble in which composition students write works which are then performed by music performance students and conducted by conducting students at the academy. They signed up Christian Eggen as coach. He promptly said yes when approached by Anna. With the CEMPE-funded project Anna wants to create a forum were musicians can practise and build experience with playing contemporary music. The ensemble’s concerts will only last 30 minutes in a bid to generate interest around contemporary music. The first concert was held in November in Majorstuen kirke, attracting around 100 people in the audience.

Elin Michalsen also felt something was lacking in her studies and decided to take matters into her own hands. In 2016 she formed Ensemble Sonore together with fellow students at the University of Agder. Since then the ensemble has given numerous concerts and is currently based in Stavanger. Ensemble Sonore, or EnSo as they are also known, includes musicians from Kristiansand and Stavanger and both current and past students.

– The aim is to create a playground for the musicians and to support and remind each other of what is important to us musicians, Elin said in her presentation.

The ensemble has given several performances, and they have worked together to develop their performance and chamber music skills and prepare themselves for entering the profession. CEMPE supported their latest project with funding to cover travel and the coach’s fee.

While teachers often struggle to connect the different elements of a study programme and management strives to create meaningful connections between study and work, the student projects are examples of such connections occurring organically, baked into the project itself.

Teachers at the University of Stavanger are this year working on a project where music history and analysis are taught in blocks instead of having one lesson each week. One important goal has been to create forums for knowledge sharing between performance teachers and theory teachers, something the project has suceeded in doing. The project is being co-ordinated by Per Dahl and will continue until the end of the 2019-20 academic year.

Gjertrud Pedersen and Unni Løvlid at the Norwegian Academy of Music have spent two years experimenting with a creative project in Musicianship, a compulsory subject for all first-year students at the academy. The students have been working in groups on Luciano Berio’s Folk Songs to interpret the piece in any which way they like. The project period will conclude with a performance for their peers, discussions and a joint evaluation. Gjertrud and Unni wanted to create meeting places and help prepare the students for their future careers. One particular bonus was that the project enabled them to watch their colleagues teach, something they rarely have the time and opportunity to do otherwise. The project is also described in the anthology Becoming Musicians, in which Gjertrud and Unni have authored a chapter based on their Interplaying Folk Songs project.

Lasse Thoresen was invited to give a keynote on reflected listening. He argued that reflected listening is under pressure as performers rarely take the time to engage in repeated listening. Such listening is a key skill in order to be able to give an insightful performance. It involves being conscious of what we are listening to, aware of our intentions while we listen, and mindful of our own listening style.

– We must return to the music-as-heard again and again, we must feel that sense of wonder over and over in order to trigger our desire to explore and, above all: to put us on the trail of music as a quality that exceeds correctness, music that grabs and fascinates us who makes up a tacit community of listeners.

The seminar concluded with a discussion in plenary on the challenges and opportunities that exist in the field. There are multiple structural challenges which prevent relationships and connections from being made in higher music education, including timetabling, room issues, resource planning and resistance within the institution. Another challenge is to make teachers from different disciplines talk to each other.

The students often find it difficult to see how subjects are linked. It is also a common experience that their teachers do not talk to each other often enough. The dividing lines between genres are also unnaturally distinct, said another. A third student wanted to be challenged more by his teachers in relation to his artistic ambitions and choices.

One of the teachers felt that we are currently offering «package trips» and that we should instead start offering more student-centred «study journeys». The Bachelor of Music with Individual Concentration at the Norwegian Academy of Music is an example of how the students themselves design their course to a considerable degree and choose how they want to spend their allocated principal instrument lessons. However, there is also a danger in offering the students an à la carte menu in which everything is deemed equally important. One jazz teacher felt there is a risk that the students will not expose themselves to the more difficult challenges, those that can help them develop a broad musicianship that will help them build a career later on.

And should theory only be introduced later in the study programmes? Perhaps the students should concentrate on their main subject for the first few years before being challenged later on once they have acquired the resources to make the connections that are presented to them? These important discussions are continuing at the institutions, between teachers and students and they are explored through R&D projects.