Preparing Musicians For Precarious Work

Preparing Musicians for Precarious Work: Transformational Approaches to Music Careers Education promotes career counselling-informed techniques that encourage and guide musicians to drive their careers in necessary new directions. In exposing the ‘dark side’ of precarious work in the arts sector, these approaches acknowledge the high levels of risk many musicians face and focus on the fundamental and urgent skills they need to navigate uncertainty and hardship. The author calls for a greater recognition of the psychological magnitude of managing such work, drawing upon training as a career counsellor and the lived experience of a career musician to advance transformative learning principles as pathways for artists, students, and educators alike. Representing a radical shift from the content-knowledge approach to career development, a counselling-informed method is fortified by a broad range of ideas from vocational psychology and narrative therapy, emphasising the importance of change readiness and flexible identities while identifying the need for a post-portfolio paradigm. Preparing Musicians for Precarious Work proposes a new model for musicians’ career learning – the CHOICE model – in a timely and practical guide for 21st-century musicians looking to future-proof their careers.

Designed as a practical resource, this book examines transformational and inclusive approaches to the teaching of music at the postsecondary level based on first-person interviews with renowned musicians and their students. At the heart of the study are musical/artistic perspectives and pedagogical approaches from leading artists and the insights of their students on the impact of the teaching and mentoring process. Through case studies with renowned musicians and their protégés, the book identifies common themes in teaching and mentoring across classical and jazz performance. Each case study is a master class with the artist that offers insight into the evolution of the individual’s musical career, their approach to teaching, and specific strategies for navigating the complexities of the music business environment. With remarkable candor, artists and their protégés share how they navigated significant obstacles in their career journeys. Including overcoming performance anxiety, disability and injury, lack of financial support, difficulty obtaining an agent and recording contracts, country location and stereotypes based on gender and nationality. The book serves as an important resource for music educators by offering concrete approaches to mentoring talented students, while also sharing specific strategies for aspiring professional musicians seeking to forge a career in a highly competitive musical market.

Centring the voices of Indigenous scholars at the intersection of music and education, this co-edited volume contributes to debates about current colonising music education research and practices, and offers alternative decolonising approaches that support music education imbued with Indigenous perspectives. This unique collection is far-ranging, with contributions from Chile, New Zealand, Australia, Canada, Malaysia, India, South Africa, Kenya, and Finland. The authors interrogate and theorise research methodologies, curricula, and practices related to the learning and teaching of music. Providing a meeting place for Indigenous voices and viewpoints from around the globe, this book highlights the imperative that Indigenisation must be Indigenous-led. The book promotes Indigenous scholars’ reconceptualisations of how music education is researched and practised, with an emphasis on the application of decolonial ways of being. The authors provocatively demonstrate the value of power-sharing and eroding the gaze of non-Indigenous populations. Pushing far beyond the concepts of Western aesthetics and world music, this vital collection of scholarship presents music in education as a social and political action, and shows how to enact Indigenising and decolonising practices in a wide range of music education contexts.

Innovation in Music: Cultures and Contexts is a groundbreaking collection bringing together contributions from instructors, researchers, and professionals. Split into two sections, covering creative production practices and national/international perspectives, this volume offers truly global outlooks on ever-evolving practices. Including chapters on Dolby Atmos, the history of distortion, creativity in the pandemic, and remote music collaboration, this is recommended reading for professionals, students, and researchers looking for global insights into the fields of music production, music business, and music technology.

Viewing the plurality of creativity in music as being of paramount importance to the field of music education, The Routledge Companion to Creativities in Music Education provides a wide-ranging survey of practice and research perspectives. Bringing together philosophical and applied foundations, this volume draws together an array of international contributors, including leading and emerging scholars, to illuminate the multiple forms creativity can take in the music classroom, and how new insights from research can inform pedagogical approaches. In over 50 chapters, it addresses theory, practice, research, change initiatives, community, and broadening perspectives. A vital resource for music education researchers, practitioners, and students, this volume helps advance the discourse on creativities in music education.

Recorded Music in Creative Practices: Mediation, Performance, Education brings new critical perspectives on recorded music research, artistic practice, and education into an active dialogue. Although scholars continue to engage keenly in the study of recordings and studio practices, less attention has been devoted to integrating these newer developments into music curricula. The fourteen chapters in this book bring fresh insight to the art and craft of recording music and offer readers ways to bridge research and pedagogy in diverse educational, academic, and music industry contexts. By exploring a wide range of genres, methods, and practices, this book aims to demonstrate how engaging with recordings, recording processes, material artefacts, studio spaces, and revised music history narratives means we can promote new understandings of the past, more creative performance in the present, and freer collaboration and experimentation inside and outside of the recording studio; enhance creative teaching and learning; inform and stimulate reform of the institutional processes and structures that frame musical training; and ultimately promote more diverse music curricula and communities of practice. This book will be of value to educators, researchers, practitioners (performers, composers, recordists), students in music and music-related fields, recording enthusiasts, and readers with a keen interest in the subject.

Brazilian Research on Creativity Development in Musical Interaction focuses on creativity that involves interactive musical activities, with different groups, such as professional musicians, students, and student teachers. It seeks to present research with a theoretical foundation on musical creativity and interaction, within psychology and music pedagogy. A collection of ten contributed essays present studies that promote understanding of the possibilities of creative development from the interactive process. All are undertaken within the context of teaching and learning, whether one-on-one or group lessons, ranging from elementary school music class, instrument study, choral singing, composition and teaching an autistic student.

Informed by theories pertaining to transnational mobility, ethnicity and race, gender, postcolonialism, as well as Japanese studies, Transnational Musicians explores the way Japanese musicians establish their transnational careers in the hierarchically structured classical music world. Drawing on rich material from multi-sited fieldwork and in-depth interviews with Japanese artists in Japan, France and Poland, this study portrays the structurally – and individually – conditioned opportunities and constraints of becoming a transnational classical musician. It shows how transnational artists strive to conciliate the irreconcilable: their professional identification with the dominant image of ‘rootless’ classical musicianship and their ethnocultural affiliation with Japan. As such this book critically engages with the neoliberal discourse on talent and meritocracy prevailing in the creative/cultural industry, which promotes the common image of cosmopolitan artists, whose high, universal skills allow them to carry out their occupational activity internationally, regardless of such prescriptive criteria as gender, ethnicity and race. Highly interdisciplinary, this book will appeal to students and researchers interested in such fields as migration, transnational mobility, ethnicity and race in the creative/cultural sector, gender studies, Japanese culture and other related social issues. It will also be instructive for professionals from the world of classical music, as well as ordinary readers passionate about Japanese society.