Reflective Practice in Music: A Collaborative Professional Approach

Abstract

Reflective practice and critical analysis are major components in any creative discipline. For the ephemeral performing arts such as music, keeping art ‘in the conversation about art’ is central to meaningful engagement with a discourse around the creative work (Dillon et al., Physical and virtual learning spaces in higher education: Concepts for the modern learning environment, 2011). Storing, recalling and presenting artworks as digital artefacts offers ways to make the critical analysis process less abstract. Learning about music involves having an understanding of the concepts that frame musical practice and the language to discuss it as an entry point into the musical discourse. In an elective subject titled Sex, Drugs and Rock n Roll students are asked to examine their personal, social and cultural relationships with music in their lives and reflect on these connections using musicological and semiotic analytical tools. Students experience the process of deconstruction, reconstruction and analysis in three cycles of activity that move from the ontological to the epistemological and back to a focus on self-understanding. The reflective process is documented and shared via multi-modal representations including wikis, blogs, video media, eZines, podcasts/vodcasts and creative works. This discussion will draw on examples of student work in the subject by exploring both the ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’ perspective, as encountered in ethnomusicology (Barton, 2014), and reflective practice about the meaning of music for undergraduate university students.

Appendix 1—4Rs Model of Reflection Applied to Music

Level	Stage	Questions to get you started
1	Reporting and responding	Ask questions such as: Where is music in my life? What music do you like? What musical experiences give me Flow? What are my experiences of music in personal, social and cultural context? How do I evaluate the quality and value of music? What language do I use to describe music and my response to it?
2	Relating	How does my music ontology compare to my peers? How does my understanding of music compare to my peers? How does our group understand music and me, music effects and music and culture?
3	Reasoning	Why do I need to analyse music? How can I use musical language and concepts? How effective is the groove, the hook, the sound as an analytical tool for me? How does our critical analysis fit into semiotic notions of semantics, syntactic and pragmatic ecologies?
4	Reconstructing	How can I use these skills techniques and processes in my life? How has critical analysis affected my relationship with music? What is it you know now about music and you and the wider culture? What experiences, people, ideas and resources you encountered in the unit had an influence on the way you think and act?