1st Edition
Community-based Traditional Music in Scotland A Pedagogy of Participation
This book examines the community-based learning and teaching of ‘traditional’ music in contemporary Scotland, with implications for transnational theoretical issues. The book draws on a broad range of scholarship and a local case study of a large organisation. A historical perspective provides an overview of new educational formats emerging from the mid-twentieth century folk music revival in Scotland. Practices through which participants encounter and perpetuate the idiom of traditional music include social music-making, learning by ear and participatory and presentational elements of musical performances. Individuals are shown as combining these aspects with their own learning strategies to participate in the contemporary community of practice of traditional music. The work also discusses how experiences of learning contribute to identity formation, including the role and practice of ‘tutors’ of traditional music. The author proposes conceptualising the teaching and learning of traditional music in community-based organisations as a ‘pedagogy of participation’.
List of Figures
List of Music Examples
Acknowledgements
Preface
- Learning and teaching traditional music: Refocusing the questions
- ‘A passport into a community’: Setting the scene
- ‘I’m a better learner now’: In the class
- ‘Actually doing it’: Participating in performance
- ‘You can make it your own’: Individual musical trajectories and organisational constraints
- ‘A sense of who we are’: Creating a musical identity
- Community-based learning and teaching: Towards a pedagogy of participation
Introduction
Transmission and enculturation
‘Traditional’ music
Community-based settings
A ‘non-formal’ setting?
Communities of practice
Masters and apprentices
Family
Oral tradition and music literacy
Socialisation
Researching the case study
Methods and ethics
Notes
Learning and teaching: the revival and post-revival contexts
Learning and teaching: formal education
‘Take off’: community-based organisations
Introducing Glasgow Fiddle Workshop
Locality: a sense of place
Introducing the tutors
GFW in a stylistic community of practice
Notes
Joining a class
Learning the shared skills
Learning and teaching a tune
The role of listening
Playing it through
Varying, ornamenting and arranging tunes
Dealing with notation
Choosing repertoire
Notes
Participation or presentation?
GFW sessions
Slow session and pre-class warm-up
Prepare for the pub
Very slow session
Islay Inn session
Concerts
Cèilidh dances
Member-led groups
Notes
Encouraging agency at GFW
Self-directed learning
Making progress: reflecting on learning
‘Expressing’ the tune
‘Learners’ and ‘musicians’
Music as leisure and levels of involvement
Non-participation and dissent
Musical trajectories beyond GFW
Notes
A GFW identity
A community-based identity
A traditional music identity
Tensions and boundaries: ‘who we are’ vs. ‘who we are not’
Notes
Learning and teaching traditional music in a post-revival landscape
The ethos of the ‘community-based’ organisation
Repertoire
Tutors
Learning and teaching practices: between participatory ethos and individual musical trajectory
Conclusion: A pedagogy of participation
Biography
Josephine L. Miller is an ethnomusicologist and community musician based in Scotland. Her main research interest is the transmission of traditional music. She holds an MLitt from the University of Edinburgh and a PhD from the University of Sheffield. In 2017, she received the Hamish Henderson Award for Services to Traditional Music at the MG Alba Scots Trad Music Awards.
"In this deft and convincing study, Josephine Miller sets out to describe the process by which traditional music is being taught and learned in community settings in Scotland in the twenty-first century. This is achieved through a nuanced layering of extant educational theory and ethnographic data gathering, including interviews, observations, and detailed, thick descriptions of the setting… There are chapters here that provide an opportunity for the interested folk musician, whether learner or tutor, to reflect on and inform their own practice. And for those making any kind of study of post-revival folk music education the book can be added straight to the list of compulsory reading."
Matt Price, Folk Music Journal
