The project’s participants reported a broad range of learning outcomes as a result of their participation. Based on the interview data, the students’ practicing and performing were enriched by their gaining of new perspectives and new tools. They started to see their instrument playing in a new light, thus suggesting that transformational learning had taken place. Unfolding over time as it did, this transformation manifested as the development of understanding through reflective practice and the development of a conceptual toolbox for students and teachers alike. The participants also reported gains in development (both personally and as musicians) and increased well-being.

We observed, however, that this kind of learning required that the students be actively engaged, willing to invest effort, and able to handle potential obstacles and discomfort while learning, since this type of learning challenged several of their previously held beliefs and assumptions. Some of the students in the project needed time to see the relevance of the work to their playing; the processes of making sense of and gaining mastery over certain ideas also took some time. The data suggested that the students in general needed an environment that could support their efforts over time and where their teachers could help them to translate between disciplines; the tight integration of the AT with main-instrument studies over an extended period of time seemed to support the students to attain these learning outcomes and mitigate the challenges.

I will now proceed to the main part of the discussion and will address three topics where the project’s findings clash somewhat with commonly held views about main-instrument tuition and the AT. First, I will problematise the view of the AT as a ‘bodily’ discipline and will argue that a more nuanced conceptualisation is called for to explain the learning outcomes of the project. Second, I will discuss how common views about main-instrument teachers’ competence might foster fragmented practices, contribute to teacher isolation, and stifle teachers’ competence development. I will argue that designing teaching/learning environments that will allow the emergence of shared practices that are based on shared languages and understandings will mitigate the aforementioned challenges. Third, I will address whether being introduced to the AT in such a way is suitable and relevant for everyone who studies music performance, after which I will conclude the report with pointers for further research.

Is it sufficient to say that the project yielded the reported outcomes by bringing the ‘bodily focus’ to main-instrument tuition? On the surface, the answer would seem to be yes, given the common conceptualisation of the AT as a bodily discipline; after all, the AT seems to address things like posture. While the project designers’ intention was not to bring in a bodily focus (but rather to inquire about how the AT insights where relevant to the main-instrument pedagogy), two factors point to reasons why people might perceive otherwise.

First, the literature commonly groups a range of disciplines under the umbrella of body/awareness/mindfulness; for example, authors frequently mention the AT, Feldenkrais, and yoga (to name just a few) in the same sentence. To make such a grouping possible, the disciplines need to be boiled down to their lowest common denominator, which then loses any nuances and actual insights these disciplines otherwise might provide. Because these disciplines do have a certain conceptual and sometimes historical overlap among them, this grouping seems to conveniently simplify the field; the project’s findings suggest, however, that this very simplification obfuscates the essential aspects of the disciplines – the aspects that make a difference.

Simplicity is of course useful for making decisions about, say, the curriculum. When curriculum designers face the challenge of designing comprehensive curricula and extra-curricular offerings, simplicity can offer them a way to tick off a box (so to speak) on the bodily focus. We often assume that the students will figure out which approach will work for them and that they will be able to employ that approach in their instrumental practice, after they have tried out some of the other disciplines. We do little to inquire what exactly the students are learning through these disciplines or what actual insights these disciplines offer, beyond their obvious commonalities of having something to do with the body.

The second factor for why the AT might be perceived as a bodily discipline is that the project’s informants commonly referred to the word ‘body’ in the interviews. The bodily focus seemed to enter the main-instrument tuition as a result of the AT, as though the body has not been present in such tuition before: the AT teacher manipulates the body of a student, while the student’s peers observe bodily changes. How is this not about the body?

A few questions need to be asked at this point. What existed in main-instrument tuition before the AT unveiled the body? And how can the appearing of the body be understood and explained? Because it is beyond the scope of this report to thoroughly investigate these issues, a few cursory remarks will have to suffice.

First, because we need to clarify what is meant by the ‘body’, I will proceed with a further question: In what way is playing an instrument not a bodily discipline? In other words, if the AT brings the body into instrument tuition, then how was it absent to begin with? Taking a starting point in phenomenology (Gallagher, 2012; Heidegger, 2010; Merleau-Ponty, 2013) and the perspective of embodied cognition, we cannot escape the body’s constant presence; we also must acknowledge the body’s role in shaping any activity. In shaping an activity, the body is not a mere instrument that is subservient to some higher-order control system. Activities are initiated and performed by bodies. Bodies take care of the necessary cognition and coordination; it is the body itself that constitutes its own control system. ‘We are bodies’ would be more correct to say than ‘We have bodies’. This perspective is a starkly different view from the dualistic mind/body paradigm, where the body is often portrayed as a slave to some ephemeral mind.

Making a distinction between an object and a subject might be pertinent, or that of a third-person and first-person perspective. Looking from the outside (from the third-person perspective), the body appears to be a mechanical system. To understand that system, we can break it down into constituent parts. The first-person perspective, on the other hand, looks from within the body: this perspective sees the body as a subject (or more precisely it sees the body as itself; or its-self). These two understandings of the body are very different. An arm, in an objective sense, is an abstraction, a common label for the things that are attached to the body, but my arm is something I can raise, that I can perform an action with. One is inanimate; the other is lived.

To bring the matter closer to what we’ve discussed in this report, we might investigate the idea of posture. Looking from the third-person perspective, we see a certain configuration of bodily parts. We use the noun ‘posture’ for the totality of this configuration. From the first-person, lived perspective, ‘posture’ necessarily becomes a verb: ‘I posture’, ‘the body postures’. While it would be more correct to use the verb ‘pose’: ‘I pose’, ‘the body poses’, such usage fails to activate the noun whose definition implies a static worldview against which I am arguing. Using ‘posture’ as a verb is meant to imply the underlying movement, directionality and continuity of what it is that a body does. This view opposes looking at what a body does as a set of discrete spatial and temporal positions which a body moves to and from. Referring to posture as a set of discrete body positions raises a question of what happens in between those positions, or postures. What position is the body in between the positions? A static, mechanistic view doesn’t account for this. Posture should thus be thought of as a continuous action[1] of the body. This is a subtle but very important distinction, in my view.

Returning to the question of ‘In what way is playing an instrument not a bodily discipline?’ if we take the phenomenological stance, then we have to concede that the question itself is built on a wrong premise. Just like every other activity, playing an instrument is by definition a bodily, or embodied, discipline. This conclusion brings us back to the issue of grouping of bodily disciplines. We have to concede that the label ‘bodily’ should be applicable to every human endeavour, discipline, and activity; from this it follows that the ‘bodily’-label is useless for referring to only a subset of human activities.

What are we left with, then? Dropping a grouping category muddles the waters and requires new criteria for understanding instrument playing and the AT. If we define both the instrument playing and the AT as bodily disciplines, then what is the relationship between them? If the AT cannot bring the body into the instrumental pedagogy because the body was there all along (even though overlooked and disappearing into the background), then what exactly does the AT bring?

More research needs to be done along this avenue, but some of the project’s findings point to the AT providing a different lens (or perspective) of looking at instrument playing. This lens seems to acknowledge the body as an ‘actor’ that is situated in, and interacts with, its environment, rather than as a mechanical tool steered by an ephemeral mind in a non-temporal vacuum. Furthermore, the perspective emerging in the light of the AT also offers the insight that the embodied activity is habitual, i.e. developed over time and influenced by one’s assumptions and preconceptions, as well as environmental factors. The project’s respondents reported that learning about how their activities were habitual was an important part of their learning process. A further related insight was that the way activity is performed is malleable. Activity is malleable because we can identify the layers of ‘doing’ within an activity and manage them (so to speak). We can add new layers of ‘doing’ to affect an activity (to sometimes cover and hide other layers), but we can also subtract the layers that previously might have appeared useful but that are not so anymore. This process of subtraction tidies up the fabric of activity from sometimes-chaotic interactions between the layers of ‘doing’. To clarify, it is not necessarily an absence of a certain skill or movement that might be preventing someone from performing an activity (say, playing an instrument) in a desirable fashion, but rather the presence of something in the habitual pattern that stands in the way. Typically, the students enter conservatories as already quite competent performers with many layers of assumptions, habits and ways of going about things which the AT helps to explore, assess and, often, address.

To sum up, the ‘bodily disciplines’-label that the AT is often grouped under loses its grouping power once we acknowledge that every activity (and by extension playing an instrument) is embodied. In the common understanding of music performance, the presence of the body and the mode of its operation are either unaccounted for or are pushed out into the periphery, where the body plays a mechanical role. Therefore, I would argue that acknowledging, and transitioning into, the phenomenological, embodied, enacted, habitual, and malleable perspective helps to illuminate the relationship between the AT and instrument playing in music performance. This perspective provides sufficient room to encompass the range of the informants’ experiences from this project.

The second point related to how the body ‘appears’ in instrumental tuition/learning can be elucidated from a learning-theoretical perspective. In the interviews, the informants referred to the development of their attitudes and understandings, which we may roughly trace along the lines of the previous point about the embodied nature of activity. It is through changes in participants’ understanding, we could thus say, that the body ‘appears’ in their playing. To say that the body appears as a result of the AT being used is not the same as saying that the AT brings a bodily focus.

The AT in this context can be thought of as a catalyst for the development of understanding and a conceptual shift that allows the body to appear in music performance in an embodied, enactivist sense. The AT ‘unveils’ the body. In this I would argue we have observed transformative learning taking place in this project.

Given the informants’ utterances and my own experience of teaching, I would argue that the way the body appears in music performance in this sense is qualitatively very different from a mechanistic perspective. The body-as-an-actor and the body-as-an-acted-upon-object are very different things altogether, and this distinction is unveiled to the students through the observational and reflective processes stimulated and supported by the AT and the configuration of the learning environment.

We need to develop a better understanding of the students’ developing understanding and accompanying processes as we observe the students moving along different learning trajectories. The data from this project suggests that some of the students progressed more quickly, while others encountered obstacles. While the student-respondents who participated in one iteration indicated that some transformation had occurred, a more elaborate picture has emerged from the participants who participated in two or three iterations. Future researchers might find it helpful to explore the more longitudinal aspects of this development, since a relatively small number of students went through two or three iterations in the project; also, further exploration could include the inquiry into the content and the nature of knowledge within the different learning phases.

The teachers who participated in the project reported a shared sense that this new way of teaching had revitalised their teaching practices. They acknowledged the blind spots in their competence and they were happy to collaborate with teachers from other disciplines, which supports Gaunt’s (2008) finding about conservatory teachers’ ‘thirst to learn’ (p. 238).

The main-instrument teachers reported increased efficiency in their teaching practices and appreciated the help from the AT teacher in managing the complexity of teaching their discipline. The management of focus areas within teaching situations was facilitated by the adoption of the collaborative model, since the teachers felt they could send their students to the AT teacher to address certain topics, and later follow up on what they had learned back in the instrumental lesson. The ability to interact with the AT specialist in the group sessions made it possible to integrate the subjects in a way that was ‘barely perceived as embodying a separate discipline’ (Farruque & Watson, 2014, p. 328). The teachers perceived that their students had progressed towards becoming autonomous and independent learners; they further reported developing a wider range of rich and flexible relationships between themselves and their students, thus moving from the old master-apprentice relationship to more facilitative relationships, depending on the situation.

Both the student and teacher perspectives indicated that the main-instrument teachers had limited competence related to the bodily aspect. The teachers reported that this perspective had been absent in their own studies, while the students indicated that they perceived that the ways in which their teachers taught and talked about these matters were based on the teachers’ individual, subjective experiences and understandings. How can we make sense of this apparent gap in competence?

I would argue that certain underlying assumptions are at play here; these assumptions relate in particular to (1) the thematic content of main-instrument tuition, (2) the instrument teachers’ competence, and (3) how that thematic content is related to the teachers’ competence. I would rephrase these points as questions. First, what focus areas are assumed to belong to main-instrument study? Second, what do we assume about the instrument teachers’ competence, and how does this assumption relate to our assumptions about topical areas?

The part of the answer to the first question that we are concerned with here is that the body seems to be a part of the thematic landscape of the main instrument study in some way; it is not entirely clear what role the body plays there and how that role of the body should be treated from the subject-pedagogical point of view, but there seems to be an agreement that addressing the body is relevant to the main-instrument tuition. In the section above, I have presented my account of the body’s presence and ‘appearing’ in the main-instrument study based on the interview data and insights from phenomenology: the body is an ever-present reality of instrument playing that is unveiled to the student during the course of tuition[1]. This unveiling might vary from none at all (i.e. no mention of the body) to an elaborate addressing of the body. Both the level and the nature of the unveiling of the body is subject to an individual teacher’s preferences, interests, and pedagogical judgements of student needs and available resources.

The teachers in this project reported that before the project, they would often talk about similar things in reference to the body, although in slightly different ways and using different words, which confirms the assumption of the body as a theme in tuition. Furthermore, this illustrates the teachers attempts to unveil the body to the students within the boundaries of their specific competences and paradigms.

On to the second question: What do we assume about the main-instrument teacher’s competence, and how does that assumption relate to the acknowledgement of the body’s presence? This is a complex matter to disentangle, since it touches on several complex and contentious issues.

First, unveiling the body in an actual teaching situation has various ethical issues that we need to be aware of and that must be addressed. Looking at, talking about, and touching the body are sensitive topics and thus should be treated with care, respect, and consent. Second, it is unclear how the acknowledgement of the body plays a role in the process of becoming a good musician. While the findings of our project suggested that certain conceptualisations of the body and modes of its unveiling seemed to advance the students’ development as musicians, further research is required to shed more light on this issue. Third, the assumption of a master instrument teacher who already knows everything seems to be prevalent. Conveniently, this assumption allows us to avoid questioning teachers’ competence in the first place (in particular, about the body), since the teacher is supposed to know everything to begin with.

Investigating the boundaries of the competence of main-instrument teachers might be suspected to be a contentious issue, however, as we saw from our findings the teacher-informants willingly acknowledged limits to their competence, effectively refuting the all-knowing-teacher assumption. It is not to say that the teachers didn’t perceive this assumption at work, shaping their practices. The teachers talked about a tension between their perception that the body was important, their attempts to address the matter in teaching (since they assumed they were supposed to be competent) and the results of these attempts that often did not yield the intended outcomes.

The competence gap thus only emerges if we start with an assumption of an all-knowing teacher. Once we drop it and tune in with the actual teachers, this ‘gap’ becomes a fertile field for collaboration and learning.

While it is convenient to maintain the all-knowing-teacher assumption and to try to fill that gap with other curricular offerings, the project’s findings indicate that doing so will not solve the issue. From the students’ perspective, that gap remains unbridged by the supporting subjects, and they still perceive the curriculum as being fragmented.

We seem to have two options for further development: either all instrument teachers should become better versed in understandings of the body and methods of addressing these matters, or we should drop the assumption of an all-knowing teacher and move towards the distribution of competence, i.e. sharing competence among different members of the staff. A response to the latter option might be that distributed competence is already present in a typical conservatory, given the different subjects that attempt to cover different topics. But this idea is refuted by the literature – which often discusses fragmented specialist knowledge, studio isolation without knowledge sharing, and curricula being perceived as fragmented – as well as the project’s findings. Furthermore, a distributed system is typically characterised by the communication of its components, and communication between the components seems to be lacking in the practices within conservatories. For communication to occur, the components of a distributed system need to agree on the same protocols or languages of mediation. The project’s informants referred to an emergence of shared languages and understandings as a result of their participation, which I take to indicate the absence of shared languages prior to their participation. The students referred to their main-instrument teachers as translators of the AT into the language of their main instrument, again invoking the need for shared understandings and paradigms and the ability to ‘translate’ between the subjects.

Once we make the move into distributed competence, the notion of a practice, or a shared practice, would seem to be better able to encompass the emergent way of thinking and describe what is actually going on. In addition to our talking about the explicit and tacit competence of individual teachers, the relationships between participants –the ways through which competence is embedded, communicated and learned – will then become equally important aspects. The participating teachers reported raising their competence in the sense that they had developed their factual knowledge and evolved their understandings and ways of thinking about the matters that the AT illuminates. But I would also argue that the instrument teachers appear to have learned to participate in a new practice, since they had to negotiate understandings, formulations, and disciplinary boundaries with an AT teacher. Therefore, in addition to increasing competence in knowledge, the teachers have developed another kind of competence – participatory competence.

In a shared practice, participants learn to use the resources available to them within the practice. By ‘resources’ I am particularly referring to other participants’ competencies, but also any physical things and conceptual tools that are available. For example, in order to tap into the resources constituted by the AT teacher’s competence, an instrument teacher needs to learn an ‘interface’ to that competence, and we can think of language as one form of an interface; the same applies the other way around, from AT teacher to instrument teacher. The students also participated in this practice with their own competence, which the teachers could tap into. Through using these resources, the data suggested, the teachers started to think of their teaching differently. The students’ learning through participation in the practice may be described in a similar manner once they become more proficient in using the interfaces to tap into other participants’ knowledge and competence.

The transition to thinking in terms of shared practice is not without its problems. In addition to the potential challenges of negotiation between participants, questions of ownership and responsibility emerge. Who owns this emerging practice? And who is responsible for making the students into good musicians?

If we start from a traditional one-on-one instrumental teaching practice, this transition and opening up of a practice can amount to letting a stranger into the ‘secret garden’. Typically, the ownership and the responsibility are balanced on a continuum between the main teacher (or the master) and the student. In master-centred environments, the teacher might assume most of the ownership and responsibility, while student-centred environments offload the ownership and responsibility onto the students.

The challenge might arise when a teacher from a different discipline enters an established practice. The project’s findings do not indicate that such challenges arose; instead, they point to the participants’ fluid adaptation to the new practice. But this situation might have arisen because of the relatively small number of teachers involved, or because of a tacit project’s goal that the AT and the main-instrument teacher would be co-responsible for making the students into good musicians.

The project’s findings indicate that the organisation of tuition in this way and the emergent practice mitigated studio isolation, helped to bring to light the assumptions that typically cause this isolation and alleviated the perceived lack of integration between different subjects. Acknowledging the boundaries to the main-instrument teachers’ competence opens up possibilities for the development of new learning environments that will contribute not only to student learning but also to the professional development of teachers.

The findings do not indicate that because the understanding became shared and because teaching was organised in similar ways that the instrument teachers started to teach in the same way; the instrument teachers continued to teach in their own unique ways, but now with a more aligned understanding with their colleagues. By enabling collaborative and interdisciplinary teaching in this project, we were able to embed knowledge development and sharing within teaching/learning practices. Collaboration and knowledge development were then not something that the teachers had to do on top of their usual practice but became a part of that practice.

The project’s findings suggest that shared practices did emerge (and new ones seem to continue to emerge, even in the aftermath of the project). But it is important to acknowledge that the development of practices doesn’t happen out of thin air. It was the design of the setup – and, more importantly, making available the necessary material resources (in terms of AT teaching hours) – that provided the necessary framework for the shared practices to evolve around. Without the design and the resources, no amount of teacher creativity or initiative could have led to the emergence of practices (and thus the learning outcomes).

We cannot make practices happen out of thin air, but we can design for an environment where a certain practice will be more likely to develop. The curatorship of a learning/teaching environment is thus an important task for curriculum developers. The project’s findings indicate that the setup enabled the emergence of a shared practice around a curated set of insights and through reflective, student-active forms of teaching. Managing complexity through informed choices of what to offer – rather than including everything that might seem interesting – requires research, but also shared understandings and shared language.

What kinds of learning environments should we design? What kind of practices should we foster, especially in the face of the constrained resources that are so familiar to conservatories? This question is, of course, up for discussion. The Integrated Practice project discussed in this report only provides one humble option, but one that in the view of the project participants was an effective one. With any luck, the proposed blueprint for a learning environment can be further tested and developed in other institutions.

To conclude this section, I would like to briefly remark on the relationship between the emerging shared practices and the formal curricula. This section started with the project participants acknowledging how their perceptions of what they thought a main-instrument teacher should be competent in were not met by practice. A tension between assumptions and actual practice was exposed as a competence gap. I would like to embark on a brief exploration of how those assumptions are embedded in and later perpetuated by curricula. This will bring us back after travelling the full circle to the starting point of this section regarding the assumptions about the instrument teachers’ competence.

The curriculum structures the teaching and learning that occur. It determines the resources that are made available at an institution and models the relationships between participants (teachers, students, and administrators) as well as the underlying subjects it encompasses. It mediates the tacit and implicit meanings of the knowledge culture of a discipline that the curriculum itself aims to reproduce and re-create. Curricula communicate what is being done within a study programme or a subject to the outside world, thus exposing assumptions about the nature of the discipline.

So, the curriculum is structured by assumptions about the discipline, but it also embodies and perpetuates those assumptions, thereby playing a structuring role towards the very practices that generated the assumptions in the first place. While it is common for curricula to be somewhat decoupled from enacted practices, they nonetheless define the playing field in which the teaching/learning practices unfold.

The main reason I bring up the topic of curriculum is because of two unresolved issues from the findings that might help to illuminate the hidden assumptions that first shape, and then are projected by, the curriculum. The first issue is that some of the student participants claimed that they had not been introduced to the body in their studies. Second, the teachers reported that they were eager to learn and that they felt positive about developing their teaching practices. There is the possibility that both points can be written off as local phenomena that only took place within the context of where the project took place. Positive feelings about developing teaching practices might be local phenomena because of particular characteristics of participating teachers, or due to particularities of the project’s setup that the participants found interesting. Regarding the first point about the body, the analysis of these findings is quite interpretative. More specifically, within the students’ statements I implicitly read ‘the body’ in the sense of the ‘subjective body’ discussed earlier, which might not be what the informants are referring to.

Still, these seem to be important issues to be investigated. What does a student mean when she says that ‘We’re not introduced to the body in our conservatory’? This statement seems to make little sense, because at least one of the students who made this claim had taken the obligatory first-semester course on introductory physiology. Following from my previous points, I would thus argue that the body was either not unveiled through the practice that unfolded through the enactment of the curriculum, or it was unveiled in such a way that the participants did not perceive it to be an unveiling in a meaningful and relevant way. Although the data on this issue is scant, the enactment of the formal curriculum seemed not to have yielded the learning outcomes that it was supposed to yield. I believe that the assumptions about the conceptualisation of the body are at play in this case. A relevant curriculum-related question to ask is: How could a curriculum reflect and facilitate the development of understanding within the paradigm of embodiment?

The point regarding the teachers’ ‘thirst to learn’ presents an interesting contrast to the assumption of an all-knowing teacher, or master. Is it possible that the structure of the curriculum projects a certain picture of an instrument teacher that is no longer accurate, or maybe was never accurate to begin with? Is it possible that this projection has led to studio isolation? While we currently cannot answer these questions with the data available from the project, these questions do seem to be important to pose nonetheless, as they illustrate the scope of implications that the development of shared practices might have.

So, if a curriculum fails to unveil important learning and is causing isolated practices through its embedded assumptions, then how should we respond? One response to failing to achieve learning outcomes would be to attempt to constructively align the curriculum – at least its learning outcomes and teaching/learning activities. While an important pursuit in its own right, this strategy would require the alignment of many perspectives: deep insight into the disciplines that it encompasses, consensus among stakeholders, and adherence to the outside constraints that curricula are subject to. This mixture is important, but it often fails to capture nuances in favour of generality, and, as we’ve seen, nuances are very important.

But I think it is important to pursue the idea of alignment further and to ask: What might constitute such an alignment in practice? The project’s findings suggest that the students had attained a range of learning outcomes that had not been yielded by previous practices. Thus, I would argue that a shared practice is the process through which alignment happens. In this project, the alignment was embedded in, and enacted by, the shared practice. The alignment took place through the sharing of language and understanding. Illuminating the assumptions about the nature of music performance and the expectations of teachers’ competence has prepared the groundwork for shared practices to emerge.

[1] I am not arguing that one conceptualisation of the body is better than others: they are complementary. I would argue, however, that we often fail to go beyond a single perspective (one that is often mechanistic) when thinking about the body-related matters.

As previously mentioned, the findings indicate that some of the students experienced more learning than others. Many of the students reported experiencing confusion and some discomfort as they grappled with the AT, while some reported having initial scepticism about the technique that in a few cases didn’t fade away. This raises the question of whether integrating the AT into main-instrument tuition is appropriate as a general approach for every student.

The project’s findings suggest that the answer is both yes and no. To start with the latter, as seen from the findings, a considerable investment on the learner’s part is necessary. Musicians need to become more attentive and willing to explore and question their assumptions about how their playing should be done. While in many cases these are desirable developments, they might not be relevant in certain situations, or other issues might be more urgent to address (the discipline is very broad and complex, after all). There is the possibility that learners with a certain set of characteristics will be more likely to derive benefits from the approach than others. It is also possible that at some stages of individual learning progression, it will be easier to see the approach’s relevance than at other times. The framework that the AT proposes might for some students be conceptually very far from their beliefs (and the gap in understanding so large) that trying to bridge the gap would further increase their confusion and discomfort and thus in general would need to be avoided. The sense of identity loss, as reported by some of the informants, might also be a reason not to engage with the AT, which points to the conclusion that the approach might not be the best for every situation.

On the other hand, if we subscribe to the paradigm of embodiment and to the idea that all human activity is habitual and enacted, then the insights and principles of the AT should not raise many objections about whether they are universally applicable. As reported in the Findings sections of this report, one of the main insights the students gained was that of the prevalence and impact of habit in doing something, such as brushing their teeth or playing an instrument. The students commented on this idea regardless of their initial attitudes towards the AT, or how much they had reported to have learned. To recap one student’s quote:

Horn student 1 (IT1): [What I learned] was these tiny tendencies that we all do … I’ve never thought about [those tendencies] before, and then once I noticed them in others … [I saw that] everyone was doing [these things].

So, while investigating and exploring our habits and assumptions might not be the way to go in every situation, we also have to conclude that habits and assumptions do play a constant role in what we do, and in that sense, the AT might be said to be universally applicable, since it explores these very things.

One objection to taking an integrated approach might be that the AT may not be a good fit for an individual instrument teacher’s teaching practice. While more research is needed on this notion, the project’s findings point to the different ways in which teaching practices successfully responded to the integration. Doing so required an initial effort on the main-instrument teachers’ part to do some work to integrate the AT perspective to their practice in a meaningful way, both to their students and to themselves; this investment, however, seemed to pay off when the teachers reported that they appreciated the competence development and the availability of new tools in their teaching.

It is thus up to the judgement and discretion of the reader to take a stance about the importance and relevance of such an exploration in music performance studies. Why should we bother? As the project’s findings illustrate, gaining the learning outcomes outlined in this report took time and sustained effort, as well as a developed ability to tackle uncertainty and confusion. With the world’s ever-increasing number of different methods and general overload of information, I would argue that leaving students alone with the judgement about which method to choose (as well as leaving them the tasks of the sustained effort and focus over time that are required to acquire an in-depth understanding of that method) is unfortunate and seems to too often leave students stuck in their learning journeys. The curriculum designers therefore play an important role as the curators of the teaching/learning environment. Given the prevalence of AT courses in conservatories internationally, it seems reasonable to propose the further development of an integrated approach and a further exploration of the actual insights that the AT offers for instrument pedagogy. Further research will be necessary on how we can understand the different learners’ trajectories of the students, and how different teaching practices respond to integration.

To conclude this report, I will outline five points that might be relevant for further researchers in light of this project’s findings. First, an even better understanding of the AT and its insights is necessary to achieve, as well as a further elaboration on the habitual nature of human activity. How can the body as ‘actor’ be understood? Would it be pertinent to define the AT as a study of habit, or more precisely a study of embodied habit?

Second, we should develop an understanding of music performance as an embodied discipline. What about the AT is relevant to main-instrument study? In what sense is playing an instrument a bodily discipline?

Third, the processes of learning need to be further investigated. How can the learning processes of learning the AT be characterised? The project’s findings indicate that students typically encounter practical and conceptual obstacles. How can learners be supported in their pursuits in order to overcome these barriers? How can the transformation of understanding be understood, and what constitutes that transformation?

Fourth, the characteristics of the learning environment should be explored. What characterises the learning environment where these learning outcomes are likely to emerge? A few characteristics for exploration include teacher qualities, student qualities, and the prevalence of resources, such as people, materials and rituals, and relations between them. What factors bring about (or prevent) learning outcomes? What characterises the participating teachers and students? What makes such a practice work, and what stands in the way?

Fifth, researchers should explore the interplay between shared practices, curriculum design, and institutions as a whole. What are the implications for curriculum design? What are the implications of the approach on an institutional level? What are the benefits/shortcomings and opportunities/challenges of an institution-wide implementation? What institutional limitations and cultural obstacles would a collaborative, interdisciplinary approach face?

During the course of this project, we saw an expansion of the notion of main-instrument studies and what constituted these studies. We hope this report contributes to a better understanding of music performance and its challenges, and that the proposed common points for shared practices will provide the impetus to support the teachers to collaborate across disciplinary boundaries and to evolve shared practices.