Composing, performing and audience-listening as symmetrical indicators of musical understanding

Abstract

The thesis conceptually disentangles two dimensions of music making and \ndevelopment: understanding and practical skills. Musical understanding, the \nawareness of the meanings embodied in the elements of musical discourse, is taken \nas a single conceptual dimension which operates across the central modalities of \nmusic making — composing, performing and audience-listening. It is recommended in \nthe literature that these activities should be integrated in the curriculum as they \ninteract with each other. A rationale is offered on the nature of this interaction, \nsuggesting that it takes place in the dimension of understanding, the manifestation of \nwhich depends on the refinement of the practical skills necessary to accomplish \nparticular tasks. It is hypothesised that musical understanding will be manifested \nsymmetrically across composing, performing and audience-listening activities once the \ntasks are appropriate and accessible. \nThe empirical study consisted of a small sample design with repeated measures both \nacross and within the three modalities. Over five months of teaching within the \nintegrated approach to the three activities, twenty students between 11 and 13,5 years \nold from a non-specialist music school in Brazil offered three 'products' in each modality. \nThese were assessed by independent judges using for the first time the three-fold \ncriteria derived from Swanwick and Tillman's Spiral Model (1986) as an instrument to \nassess musical understanding across various modalities of music making. Results show \nthat there was no symmetry across all three modalities. They revealed, nonetheless, \nsignificant symmetry across composition and audience-listening. Performance was \nthe modality in which students achieved lower scores, being the poorest indicator of the extent of their musical understanding. This supports the assumption that the \ndemonstration of understanding is constrained by the complexity of the tasks. The \ndistinctive psychological nature of each modality and the extent to which this might have \naffected the results are also considered. Curriculum implications point to the relative role \nof each modality in facilitating the development and demonstration of musical \nunderstanding.

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