In workshops aimed at developing shared reflections on instrumental practicing across genres, groups of teachers and students from jazz, baroque music, contemporary classical music, Norwegian folk music and free improvisation came together. The teachers were prompted to articulate a practicing-related theme or problem considered meaningful and important within their genre domain and used the project to develop pedagogical tools and exercises addressing the selected problem. To a large degree, this process involved developing a vocabulary to answer questions like: What is the purpose? Why does the student need to work on this problem? In this text, I will show two examples of themes that crystallised from the project, from jazz/improvised music and folk music, respectively.

The concept of epistemic cultures (Knorr-Cetina 1999) is used to illuminate this development work. The concept refers to how a cultural system creates knowledge about itself, and related to practising it can mean how language is used to talk about what practising is, and judgements about “what counts” as skills to be developed, as some examples. Sometimes, similar terminology may be used in different genres, but still refer to different phenomena; other times similar phenomena may be called different things in different genres. Therefore, to understand the particular language that is used one must also try to understand its practical context, and so we decided that it was insufficient to “just talk”. We also needed to work practically with concrete issues to establish an action-based, experiential point of departure for a shared reflection on practising. This way, we tried to bridge an understanding of the practical meaning of language across genres.

The project’s initial goal had two potential problems:

1. When aiming at transfer, do we run the risk of overemphasising similarities, and reducing differences? May we then overlook what is considered central and important to learn within a genre?

2. Could an emphasis on strategies alone hide the fact that strategy use is always for a purpose, and make us take for granted that purposes in practising are the same even across different genres?

Artistic diversity and flexibility seem to be important competencies for the future musician. Hence, there is a potential for developing new knowledge about practising through exchange across genres, where looking at strategies alone is not enough. We also need to look at connections between musical values, goals and strategies.