International Journal of Education & the Arts: Volume 6 Number 16

Roal played the beginning of the song for Mike and, after playing, commented about the last note: “Just like solid notes that have tons of bass in it”. Roal continued with the next section, playing and at times humming a variation of example 2 above. At the completion of this section Roal comments “….and then a chorus”. Mike asked, “You got vocals?” Roal replied, “Well I can write ‘em for that part but I can’t really write them until the song’s done.” Roal continued “but uh right before the chorus I want it to slow down.” Roal then demonstrated this section again while humming. Mike replied, “Play that first part again,” put on his bass, and played along with the first riff that Roal had played. Roal inserted musical vocables to indicate the drum sounds that would separate the two sections. (see video clip 1) Roal and Mike played the first riff together. They proceeded to play the next rhythmic pattern and Mike did not miss a single chord change due largely to his acute listening and observation of Roal’s hands. In the middle of the playing they confirmed with one another through comments and gestures that they were on the right path. It was evident their evolving compositional process involved musical thinking about form and expression. At the conclusion Mike began to interject his ideas as he comments, “then we’ll both go dun, dun” indicating with vocables his musical intention.

Roal had a holistic view of the structure and expression of the song (Wiggins, 1994) and it was up to the other group members to develop their parts. Lyrics were secondary; the music was clearly driving the creation. The melodic line was fashioned after the chord progression was established. Roal would create the melody line by singing while playing the guitar line. Much of the creation, even melodic ideas, were rhythmically generated. The process of writing lyrics last clearly points to the importance that the music played in their compositional process.

Further rehearsal of this established fragment allowed Mike to experiment with the bass line. Discussion ensued regarding various embellishments that surfaced as the piece progressed. What had started out as peer teaching quickly dissolved into what Rogoff (1990) describes as guided participation as Mike learned the part and began to offer his own ideas. The process of problem solving in the development of the piece allowed the players to mutually establish what should and should not be used and to value the outcome because it was a joint rather than individual decision.

The two band members worked together until they reached a point where Mike expressed a need for rhythm in order to continue. Bass players and drummers often “work off” each other in a performance setting. At this point, Jack joined the rehearsal and the drums served as the rhythmic glue that Mike required. The rhythmic support provided a foundation for the embellishments needed to fill in the holes that existed in the music at this point. After the first break in the song, the group discussed what should happen in an unfinished section of the piece. Suggestions were immediately tried and tested. Each new idea produced a lengthy jam session in which the cycle of collaborating and developing ideas was recurrent. The musical ideas had lives of their own and existed as a common understanding of the artistic direction. Everyone seemed to share a common understanding of the destination. Positive comments like “that’s sweet” and “that’s tight” were always their first comments before a summing up occurred. This summing up time was rich in musical conversation regarding clarification of certain aspects of the song and what should happen in the next rehearsal. Usually a “demo” CD was burned so that all band members could have take-home music to play along with and generate additional ideas.

This collaborative process enabled the musicians to function as performers, creators, and arrangers. Boespflug (1999) found this to be a unique aspect of pop music as opposed to traditional ensemble music. My awareness of Boespflug’s perspective helped me identify and observe each member’s development in these roles throughout the rehearsal. While all members operated as performers, some exhibited more strength in creating and some in arranging. This natural blend yielded cohesive musical rehearsals and was the catalyst for musical growth.

Technological effects play an important role in crafting the sonic quality of rock music. Many groups are known by their individual sound created through the unique sonic variances in the overall timbre of their music. The members of Our Delay were aware of the nuances defining these individual sounds and worked to achieve these exact representations through their own music. This required a disciplined and sensitive ear and repeated listening opportunities. Sound effects and timbre were very important to this group, and to Jack in particular. They regarded timbre as part of melody. They considered melody to be more than just contour, but rather a fusion of contour and sound effects partnered with the texture of the song to generate a harmonic structure as well as depict the mood they were trying to establish. As Jack comments, “well the sound is the melody the way the song goes but I think there is more to melody now. Like for punk bands, melody is the whole thing, they have a tune and they just play that and there are no effects, but effects, there is so much more to the sound than just the melody. So you can put a lot of reverb on it and then harmonize that with the guitar.”

This attention to sound was a product of their acute analytical listening to their favorite groups, one of which was Sigur Rós, a band from Iceland. Jack described attending one of their concerts:

The desire to replicate this “huge field of sound” and other sonic qualities found in favorite groups led to much experimentation with software and external hardware devices. This followed a familiar pattern of copying an effect and then, once comfortable with it, changing and molding the results into their own effect. This process of working with sound effects was ubiquitous throughout each rehearsal and consistent with what Boespflug (1999) describes: “To become conversant with pop styles demands aural skills that go beyond recognizing rhythm, melody, and harmony; musicians must also recognize and be able to create or reproduce original texture and color” (p. 34). These acute aural skills set the direction for many of the compositional paths about to unfold.

For several rehearsals Jack and Roal collaborated on a song that Jack had started to compose on the keyboard. Lilliestam (1996) found that in exploring for new sounds or effects, musicians might choose to compose on instruments they do not normally play or know very well simply to discover new sounds. From the outset, Jack had preconceived ideas of timbre and working with the keyboard and digital audio sequencing software enabled him to experiment and manipulate timbre in the process of writing. Recording his song with sequencing software facilitated experimentation for both players simultaneously. Roal was free to practice the chord progression and experiment while Jack was free to experiment with additional obbligato passages as well as utilizing different timbres. Setting the sequence to loop enabled the players to continually practice less secure parts of the song. This process was used again when teaching it to the whole band.

As Roal and Jack built on Jack’s initial idea they seemed to know intuitively how many additional sections were needed.

They continued working on this section for quite some time, tweaking the chord progression, experimenting with alternate timbres and attempting to extend the bridge. After about an hour it was clear that they reached a creative wall.

Technology greatly facilitated their rehearsals allowing for experimentation, critical listening analysis, and compositional construction, however completion of the song required the input from the entire band. Because of the development of the song at this rehearsal, it was decided that Jack would play keyboard for this song and another drummer would be called in to take Jack’s place at the drum kit.

Collaborative composing is facilitated by shared musical taste and, in this particular case, was grounded in friendship and commitment to music making. As creative ideas materialized throughout the course of a rehearsal, group decisions were made regarding what would be included in the song. Trial and error, experimentation, practice and reflection, ensued before committing to a newfound musical phrase . Each player learned from the others through listening and watching, and then rehearsing. After one section was secure, there was always a desire to “take it from the top” to hear how the newly mastered section fit with the initial idea. Wiggins (2003) found similar cyclical procedures in her research on children’s compositional process: “Setting musical ideas into the context of the whole involves organizing, evaluating, revising, refining. If the product is coming together consistent with what the group intends, the group will move quickly to rehearsing” (p. 149).

For Our Delay, collaborative composing occurred in both small and whole group settings. In the previously described effort, Jack and Roal nearly completed a song together but found they needed the rest of the band to help them find an ending because they needed the instrumental support structure and input from the other “voices” in the band. “Collaboration requires a mutual task in which the partners work together to produce something that neither could have produced alone” (Forman & Cazden, 1985, p. 329). In this instance, we see that they had a holistic view of the song but were at a point where they needed more group input to finish the product.

Completing the song required bringing in another drummer because Jack was going to play keyboards for several of the songs. Joseph was an excellent drummer and friend of both Roal and Mike. After Jack and Roal performed the entire song they began to teach it to the others section by section. When band members had difficulty with a passage, Jack and Roal broke it down through repetition, playing slowly and non-verbal gesturing to help know when to change chords. Their teaching process reflected a tacit understanding of scaffolding (Wood, Bruner, & Ross, 1976) within their peers’ zone of proximal development (Note 6) (Vygotsky, 1987). As soon as the parts were securely learned, they began “looping” while one player or another experimented. As new ideas emerged, players gestured their approval of what they were hearing. Throughout, there was consistent discussion about dynamics and references to nuances of their favorite bands as stylistic guides.

The search for the ending of this song came when all players were familiar with the entire song. All members, including Joseph, contributed to the formulation of this song’s conclusion. Joseph’s ideas were given equal weight to those of the rest of the band, possibly due to his friendship with Roal and to the humorous comments he made throughout the rehearsal, which seemed to establish a healthy bond with the others.

One of the most significant findings that resulted from this study was the role that music played in the construction of identity. This was not something grasped by observing musicians playing music together but rather illuminated through the interview with the band members. This discussion took place after four months of data collection and observation. It served as a rich source of information regarding their personal and collective perspectives on the impact of music in their lives inside and outside of school.

School is one of the chief contributors in the development of identity. Bruner (1996) depicts two critical components in this development: agency andself-esteem. Agency is the power of an individual or group to start and follow through with a desired activity. This indicates abilities or expertise in order to achieve these acts and as human beings we subjectively keep track of our success and failures in reaching desired outcomes. Our culture judges our successes and failures; these, in turn, nurture the development of the individual, positively. As Bruner (1996) points out, “(W)e must constantly reassess what school does to the young student’s conception of his own powers (his sense of agency) and his sensed chances of being able to cope with the world both in school and after (his self-esteem)” (p. 39). Schools therefore must be aware of the impact of their judgments.

Cultural influences play a central role in the development of an individual and provide a venue for the exploration of personal meaning. According to Reimer (2003), “(M)uch of the meaning of our lives, including musical meaning, stems from the particularities of our social condition—the ways we are, beyond the universal, also situated in time, in place, in an inhabited social space pervading every aspect of our lives” (p. 171). Cultural factors, experience, and biology converge to help construct personal identity.

Identity, then, is a web continuously woven throughout our lives. In the youth culture music is key in establishing both personal and social identity. As I began to delve deeper into the musical journey that brought the members of Our Delay to this point in their lives, they began to describe the role music had played in enabling them to understand their world. Music had been a part of all of their lives from early childhood. Each band member could recall the names of all the important musical groups they had listened to stemming back to early elementary school. Each group seemed to mark off a region of time in their lives that for one reason or another was distinct from the rest. Here music served as a tool to help construct memory of certain people and relive certain experiences. From a series of ethnographic studies of music in people’s experience of everyday life, DeNora (2000) articulated the importance of music as essential in the “construction of self and the illumination of identity” and “as a device for the reflexive process of remembering/constructing who one is, a technology for spinning the apparently continuous tale of who one is” (p. 63).

From my experience as an elementary school teacher, I am aware that personal taste in popular music begins to emerge as early as first grade. When popular music is brought into the classroom, lines are quickly drawn on personal taste with students actually segregating themselves into camps according to musical preference. This segregation according to Epstein “defines who you are within a youth culture” (Epstein, 1994, as cited in Allsup, 2004). The work of Tarrant (Tarrant et al., 2002), also revealed that musical preference is one way that enabled adolescents to make positive comparisons regarding the musical tastes of their own peer groups from other groups, and thus enhancing their individual identity.

For the members of Our Delay, the attraction to certain music through each stage of their lives was reflective of what was occurring in their lives at the time. For adolescents, sadness, depression, or losing a girlfriend or boyfriend are emotionally uncertain stages; and music serves as a constant companion, abating the storm of the uncertain middle and high school years. These band members reminisced about various groups they listened to through certain stages of their lives and could recall memories stored through music, from those periods in their lives. When asked about current music they listen to, they all agreed that they do relate the music to how they are feeling. Swanwick (1999) refers to music in this application as discourse, saying, “music significantly enhances and enriches our understanding of ourselves and the world” (p. 3).

Throughout the data collection it became evident that depicting emotion through manipulation of sound was very important to each member of the group, both in the music they wrote and the groups they listened to. Mike and Jack poignantly described the musical discourse they experienced when jamming.

From their words, it is evident that music is a part of their real life experience in what Swanwick (1999) refers to as “[t]he peak of aesthetic experience [that] is scaled only when a work relates strongly to the structures of our own individual experience, when it calls for a new way of organizing the schemata, or traces, of previous life events” (p. 6).

These young people’s musical tastes changed as they matured and they gravitated to music that not only talked about what they were experiencing in their lives, but music that reflected their emotions, e.g., anger, happiness, or mellow moods through the use of timbres and texture. Jack spoke directly to this:

For the members of Our Delay, playing music is more than for the purpose of a concert or festival award. The process or journey of playing meaningful music is more important than the actual outcome. Music serves as a vehicle to inform their world of feelings and emotions.

Music is powerful. That is why many dedicate their lives to teaching and performing music. Music strikes at the core of our humanity, helping define our culture, and helping us make meaning in our lives. In the lives of these band members music was the compass that helped steer them during calm and turbulent waters of school years. It helped them relate to issues in their lives and helped them cope. Mike summed it up perfectly by stating that music “is like the soundtrack to your life.” Music is not just a part of their lives; it under girds and fuses with their lives.

The most salient findings that emerged from this study lie at the intersections of musical growth, musical enculturation, and musical meaning. Throughout this journey, these young musicians grew in their ability to invent ideas, modify them fiddle with them in the safe environment they established, and work collaboratively and supportively until they achieved a complex product reflecting their intended meaning. Ideas brought to the group belonged to the whole group, and everyone had the opportunity to experiment with them. Musical enculturation was the barometer that determined the form and structure they conceived. Form was an important issue because it enabled them to improvise in real time, cognizant of the next section that lay just over the horizon. While they sometimes worked in smaller groups, the completion of the song entailed the commitment of the entire group. This commitment provided the support structure in the ensemble and was in direct parallel to the social structure of the group. Commitment to one another and the music was paramount.

Their conception of musical material was holistic in nature and rooted in their shared understanding of the song they were composing and of the music of their common experience. Their musical enculturation supplied a storehouse of data that provided initial templates for constructing new songs. These templates acted as musical schemas from which they drew, and the band members interpersonal relationships facilitated their personal and collective musical development. (Anderson & Pearson, 1984; Dowling, 1984; Wiggins, 2001). Internalizing these templates (or formulas) enabled them to detect variances and complexities in their own music, an ability fostered by their continuous and gradually maturing music listening experiences. Music they valued served as a point of departure for developing their own unique style and expression. This expression was cultivated through flexible song structures allowing for improvisation and timbral effects facilitated by technology. This flexibility was revealed even in the ways they constructed their music (i.e., always leaving room in the structure for improvisation). This was in contrast to what they found in school band music. In the interview, they articulated that the rigid structure of school band music had alienated them. (Note 7)

Perhaps it is from here that their passion stems. It is not only the music, but also their ability to engage in and invest part of themselves in the music that made this such a meaningful experience for them. Ownership, agency, relevance, and personal expression fuse at the core of the value they place on this musical and social experience.

Engaging in this study made me increasingly aware of the rich musical understanding that occurs when engaged in playing and learning music by ear. I came to understand and value the depth of the band members’ learning, the enjoyment with which they learned, and their motivation to continue to learn and perform. While I do feel reading notation is an important aspect of music learning, it is only one aspect, and one to which I have given too much weight to in my own teaching. As a result of engaging in this study, I have made efforts to foster aural musicianship in my beginning band classes. When I asked my beginning band students to cover some of their favorite songs, I found that the holistic nature of the experience opened up opportunities to study musical concepts other than those initially intended. It so quickly and successfully captured the attention of the students that I know I will continue to explore this way of teaching beginning instrumentalists.

In my interview with the band members, we discussed an idea for establishing a rock band ensemble in a secondary school setting. They proposed a full-year course that would encompass instruction, rehearsal, and performance. There would be student input regarding music choice, teacher guidance for learning about that music, and guidance in developing their own music. They remarked that this class would have to be meaningful and challenging and not “a blow off class.” Perhaps students would study mutually agreed upon classic rock pieces. An end-of-semester concert of original tunes or covers would be required. The teacher would help them learn to analyze what they were hearing in the music, help them hone strategies for achieving greater complexity in their music, and foster their development as musicians. These young people expressed a desire to be involved in classes with these kinds of ensembles if they could exercise ownership in the structure of the class. Clearly they wanted to learn and would want music teachers to help scaffold this process.

Formal music education certainly has much to learn from the ways that young people make and learn music informally outside the walls of the classrooms. We need to find ways to bring into formal music learning the ownership, agency, relevance, and means of personal expression that will enable our students to begin to feel as passionate about school music experiences as they do about non-school music experiences.

Notes

1. This place was most often the drummer’s home because of the logistics of packing a drum kit.

2. I have worked as the music teacher in the elementary, middle, and high school that my son has attended. For most of his life, I have been his teacher as well as taught in the same school that he attended. This experience has taught me about dealing with bias in regards to my own child, likewise he has come to deal with his mother in the role of teacher. In this study, my role was non-participant observer.

3. Equalization is adjusting the bass, treble and mid-range frequencies to ensure proper sound.

4. Riffs are memorable melodic or rhythmic patterns repeated many times.

5. Lilliestam (1996) defines a formula as “a characteristic musical motive or pattern, which has a recognizable core even if the exact performance of the formula can be varied within given cultural frameworks” (p. 203). These formulas provide a “common musical language” particularly amongst aural musicians and serve as memory devices (p. 204).

6. Vygotsky (1978) defines the zone of proximal development as “the distance between the actual developmental level as determined by independent problem solving and the level of potential development as determined through problem solving under adult guidance or in collaboration with more capable peers” (p. 86).

7. The American high school band setting is driven by traditional band repertoire. Statewide festivals and contests allow band directors little rehearsal time for students to develop their own compositional skills. This is unlike band programs in other countries which do accommodate this much needed opportunity for developing students compositional voice.

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