Reflection and the Classical Musician : Practice in Cultural Context
- Submitting institution
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Royal Conservatoire of Scotland
- Unit of assessment
- 33 - Music, Drama, Dance, Performing Arts, Film and Screen Studies
- Output identifier
- 2396443
- Type
- C - Chapter in book
- DOI
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10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199346677.001.0001
- Book title
- Musicians in the Making : Pathways to Creative Performance
- Publisher
- Oxford University Press
- ISBN
- 9780199346677
- Open access status
- -
- Month of publication
- December
- Year of publication
- 2017
- URL
-
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
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- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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1
- Research group(s)
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-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- 'Musicians in the Making: Pathways to Creative Performance' was the first in the five volume series 'Studies in Musical Performance and Creative Practice', which found its origins in the AHRC Research Centre for Musical Performance as Creative Practice. The final volume, 'Music as Creative Practice', is a monograph by Nicholas Cook, interrogating the insights and themes of the other four volumes.
This chapter was commissioned by the volume editors from my co-author Mary Hunter and myself. Mary and I had not worked together before, and the editors had determined that our respective approaches to reflection in musical practice could be usefully brought together. While I had looked in detail at processes of reflection in developing musicians – students at conservatoires – Mary had conducted a series of ethnographic interviews with professional musicians.
When we examined the key messages from our work, we found a curious contrast between the (relatively) older and younger generations: it is this contrast that the chapter explores in detail, drawing also on a key passage from Gerald Moore’s autobiography. In his monograph, Cook reflects in some detail on our chapter: “Thinking about performance expression, [Hunter and Broad] say, has completely changed in the half century since Moore was writing”.
Being based in different continents, Mary and I worked exclusively by correspondence and through Skype, an approach that, at the time, felt unusual. We pursued a working method that was iterative: I wrote a full first draft based on our initial discussions, and this was radically extended and developed by Mary, with her new text then subject to the same process of extension and development by me. We repeated this process several times, meaning that the chapter was co-authored in all respects.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -