Research Shorts: ‘Musical voice’ and ‘learner voice’ in instrumental classical music education

This week I’m absolutely delighted to be talking to Anna Bull, author of the award-winning book Class, Control, and Classical Music (Oxford University Press, 2019) about her recent research in exploring youth voice in classical music education. The article is published open access, and the links to the article and the toolkits that come out of the research are shared below. 

We talked about how the project explores young people’s perspectives and experiences to embed ‘youth voice’ within classical music instrumental teaching and learning, and the resulting academic article asks, ‘how classical music might change if young people’s voices were listened to?’ 

Anna explained that the project works to understand “youth voice in two distinct ways as ‘learner voice’ and ‘musical voice’”. She went on to explain the difference: ‘Learner voice’ refers to the extent to which learners have a say in their own teaching and learning. ‘Musical voice’, refers to the development of young people’s musical, expressive capacities. The work considers at length how young people perceive both of those things, placing their voices front and centre. 

It all comes out of a collaboration between Anna, Sound Connections, and Lewisham Music, through a two-day action research workshop called The Music Lab, with music facilitator Isabella Mayne, youth worker Jacob Sakil, and project manager Liz Coomb. The aim was to explore how young people’s voices could be embedded into instrumental classical music education: 

“Young people in The Music Lab had clear ideas on how they wanted their voices to be heard […] Most notably, they were clear that youth voice approaches in classical music instrumental education will only be effective if the genre of classical music is open to transformation – if they are able to move away from genre conventions of being ‘faithful’ to the score and their teachers’ ideas of how the music should sound and be able to bring in their own ideas.’” 

I asked Anna who the research was for, and she explained “It’s aimed at instrumental music teachers and anyone else involved in instrumental music teaching and learning, with a particular focus on classical music. It includes discussion or reflection questions for instrumental music teachers which they can use individually or in groups to think through how to introduce the concepts of ‘musical voice’ and ‘learner voice’ in their teaching.” 

The research has led to a toolkit and a briefing. The toolkit (led by Isabella Mayne) is an introduction to youth voice in instrumental teaching. The briefing is aimed at teachers who are somewhat familiar with youth voice principles and want to develop their practice further. The briefing could also be used as part of training for instrumental teachers, for example as part of a teacher development programme in hubs or within higher education or other training programmes for instrumental teachers. 

I asked Anna how she came to be involved in this kind of research, she explained her background training as a pianist and cellist in New Zealand and Scotland, and her work as a freelance musician and music educator before she retrained as a sociologist. She went on, “I have also been engaged in activism and research around sexual harassment and abuse in higher education, including music higher education. I became interested in youth voice through this work – as youth voice plays an important role in safeguarding – as well as through conversations with Jenn Raven while she was working at Sound Connections. Jenn and I developed the idea for this project together.” 

Resources:  

The academic journal article that this research is based on is available here.

Read more: 

• If you are new to principles of youth voice, you may wish to start with The Music Lab – A Toolkit for Exploring Youth Voice within Music-Making Practices in Classical Music which introduces ‘youth voice’ in the context of instrumental music teaching.
• If you want to dig a bit deeper with youth voice in instrumental music teaching, this briefing (based on the academic article linked above) is designed for music teachers, and includes discussion/reflection questions.
• Anna Bull’s academic staff page.
• Linkedin; Bluesky 

Interview by Dr Sarah K. Whitfield – Research Manager at Music Mark