The six group tuition trials described in this report were conducted by the Centre of Excellence in Music Performance Education (CEMPE) at the Norwegian Academy of Music. One of CEMPE’s key priorities is to investigate how principal instrument tuition in higher education can be further enhanced. The six development projects are part of this initiative.

Principal instrument tuition plays a fundamental part in music performance education. It is normally conducted on a one-to-one basis during weekly lessons and supplemented with occasional masterclasses where one student is coached in front of an audience of students or other interested observers. It is less common for students to be taught in groups on their principal instruments. It is true that some principal instruments teachers do teach their students in groups, but it appears that this normally involves the teacher teaching one student at a time while the others observe. There is no doubt that observing others while they are being coached by a gifted teacher is a good opportunity for learning, but it leaves less scope for drawing on the resources that the group of students represents. On the CEMPE project “Group tuition on principal instruments” we therefore want to explore the potential in having students learn together and from each other.

The CEMPE project builds on the experiences with group tuition of a number of teachers at the Norwegian Academy of Music in recent years, where the students have played a more active role in each other’s learning. These experiences have been described in the publication Instrumental group tuition at conservatoire level (Bjøntegaard, 2014). We are aware that some principal instrument teachers at other institutions also provide group tuition where student input is encouraged, but there is limited literature available describing and discussing their experiences. In other words, it is necessary to develop new knowledge about group tuition and then to disseminate this knowledge. CEMPE’s mandate is to develop new knowledge about higher music education and to share this knowledge with others. This report, in which the teachers describe and discuss their experiences, is intended as a contribution to this process.

The group tuition project ran for three academic years starting in 2014–15 and with new participants every year. In this report we describe and discuss our experiences from the first year.

Julius Pranevicius: Learning in a team

Mona Julsrud : Group tuition in improvisation for classical singers

Jens Harald Bratlie: Playing each other better

Svein Bjørkøy og Bjørg Julsrud Bjøntegaard: Teaching singing technique in groups

Morten Carlsen: In the same boat

Kristin Kjølberg: Peer learning in a group of voice students

We have presented six different trials involving group tuition [in the links above]. They are not large-scale scientific studies, but we still believe that there are things to be learnt from the experiences garnered by the six principal instrument teachers and their students. We will now sum up some of the key findings and what we can extract from them.