Abstract
In the context twenty-first century higher or tertiary education, Music Conservatoires offer opportunities to undertake a wide range of degree programmes, from Bachelors, through Masters as far as doctoral level (On the Continent and elsewhere in this volume, these may be referred to as first-, second- and third-cycle degree programmes). These institutions, which were founded primarily for the education and training of practitioners, continue to embrace the practitioner ethos. This aspect is particularly evident in doctoral work at London’s Royal College of Music. Recent writers, however, remind us that ‘the project of institutionalising research in the arts, by putting it firmly into the established structures of higher education, is an ambitious undertaking’ (Nowotny 2010, xvii). By necessity, research degrees have become subsumed into these structures of higher education, a process which has brought with it the institutionalisation of various developments in the arena of what is labelled variously ‘practice-based research’, ‘practice-as-research’ etc. Drawing upon the research of Walter Ong, this chapter explores ways in which practising musicians are similar to persons from primarily oral cultures, thus foregrounding the pre-eminence of the practitioner in the Conservatoire. It also elicits research by others exhibiting strong and meaningful interfaces with that of Ong. Indeed, research supervision within the Conservatoire environment provides an opportunity truly, easily and profoundly to manifest the reconciliation of practice and theory.
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Notes
- 1.
In Europe the term ‘professor’ is accorded someone who teaches at a Conservatoire, whereas in the university context, as ‘Professor’, it denotes the holder of a personal Chair. In Australia Conservatoire teachers are more often referred to as ‘lecturers’.
- 2.
The Méthode de Clarinette by (Jean) Xavier Lefèvre (Lawson 2000) is a salient example, having been the basis for many subsequent French and Italian clarinet methods published until the early 20th century.
- 3.
This was the National Training School for Music which had been founded in 1873. See Wright (2003, 220–229, 237, 239).
- 4.
Henceforth the term ‘Conservatoire’ is used throughout this chapter to indicate a specialist monotechnic institution engaged only in the training and education of music.
- 5.
On the Continent and elsewhere in this volume, these may be referred to as first-, second- and third-cycle degree programmes.
- 6.
These figures include neither persons who teach for the RCM’s Junior Department (essentially a Saturday school for children aged between 8 and 18 years) nor research students with a Graduate Teaching position. I am grateful to Liz Ingram, the RCM’s Assistant Head of Human Resources for this information.
- 7.
The awareness of the need to reconcile practice and theory is also acknowledged by pan-institutional consortia, such as the European Platform for Artistic Research (EPARM), which held its inaugural conference in April 2011.
- 8.
I am grateful to Scott Harrison for the opportunity here to extend and revisit the paper given at The Reflective Conservatoire: Performing at the Heart of Knowledge held at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in March 2012.
- 9.
I use the term ‘performance’ to refer to that which is undertaken live. Too often and largely in the discourse of that sub-discipline of musicology which since the late twentieth century has concerned itself with the study of recordings ‘performance’ is used erroneously to describe a recording. In harnessing so-called scientific methodologies to legitimise musical performance some of these studies fail to disguise their overtly colonialist intentions. It is nothing short of disrespectful towards practitioners as well as profoundly inaccurate to refer to recorded performances as simply ‘performances’. We must use the terms ‘performance’ and ‘recording’ with greater care in order best to safeguard the semantic independence of these two musical products.
- 10.
A term I prefer to the more narrow and somewhat misleading label ‘Classical music’ which often privileges, often inadvertently, only those musics generated by Austro-German composers of the eighteenth century.
- 11.
Ong (2002, 1) uses the term ‘primary orality’ to mean ‘cultures with no knowledge at all of writing’. This chapter uses the terms ‘orality’ and ‘primary orality’ interchangeably.
- 12.
By which I intend an approach which seeks less to isolate, evaluate and recreate the elusive evanescence of performance as another form of text, often harnessing quasi-scientific manifestations of such.
- 13.
Indeed, practitioners in the popular music sphere are often so closely identified with individual pieces of music that it is often counterproductive philosophically to separate the work from the performer.
- 14.
See the discussion in Brubaker (2007, 69).
- 15.
In these modes we detect the faint echo of a rather more ancient classification, i.e. Artistotle’s phronesis: practical wisdom and his episteme: conceptual, scientific knowledge.
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Pearson, I.E. (2014). Research Degrees in the Conservatoire Context: Reconciling Practice and Theory. In: Harrison, S. (eds) Research and Research Education in Music Performance and Pedagogy. Landscapes: the Arts, Aesthetics, and Education, vol 11. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-7435-3_5
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