Developing Concepts of Musical Style

Durham E-Theses Developing concepts of musical style Marshall, Nigel Andrew How to cite: Marshall, Nigel Andrew (2001) Developing concepts of musical style, Durham theses, Durham University. Available at Durham E-Theses Online: http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/3809/ Use policy The full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that: • a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in Durham E-Theses • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders. Please consult the full Durham E-Theses policy for further details. Academic Support Oce, Durham University, University Oce, Old Elvet, Durham DH1 3HP e-mail: [email protected] Tel: +44 0191 334 6107 http://etheses.dur.ac.uk University of Durham School of Education Developing concepts of musical style Nigel Andrew MarshaJJ 2001 The copyright of this thesis rests with the author. No quotation from it should be published in any form, including Electronic and the Internet, without the author's prior written consent. All information derived from this thesis must be acknowledged appropriately. This Thesis is presented for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy =- '1· JUN 2002 " .. .life is full of noise, death alone is silent: work Noise, noise of man, and noise of beast. Noise bought, sold or prohibited. Nothing essential happens in the absence of noise" Jacques Attali (1985) For my dad, Rev. Arthur Marshal! Who always knew I could do it. Acknowledgements I would especially like to thank the following people for their help and advice: Firstly, Professor David Hargreaves of the Centre for International Research in Music Education, University of Surrey- Roehampton, who encouraged, helped and supervised the dissertation. Also, Professor Barry Cooper, Department of Educational Studies at the University of Durham, who supervised the final stages of the dissertation, read and made helpful comments on the fmal draft. Professor Carl Roberts. Department of Sociology and Statistics at Iowa State University, Ames. Iowa. U.S.A, and Dr. Douglas Bonnett. Department of Psychology and Statistics at Iowa State University, Ames. Iowa. U.S.A who both helped with the Statistics, and Dr. Stewart Thomas. Department of Psychology. Marshall University. Huntington. West Virginia. U.S.A. who provided further help and hardware for the statistics. Dr. Kate Windridge (Castell) University of Leicester. Leicester. UK. for her comments and advice on her original research. Mr. Roy Lidstone, Mr. Harry Elliott and Mr. Ron Harding helped by driving many miles coHecting and delivering papers, tapes and alllcinds of other essentials. To my mother, Mrs. Irene Marshall for all her help marking papers, typing in data and checking final drafts. Mrs. Wendy Bray, Headteacher and the Staff and Pupils ofFishboume Cof E Primary School, West Sussex. U.K. Mr. Bob Dabney and Mr. David Crockford and the Pupils ofTeddington School. U.K. Mrs. Leslie Reetz, Head ofMusic and the pupils of Fair Oaks Middle School. Fort Dodge. Iowa. USA. Mr. John Mulett, Head of Music and the pupils of Fort Dodge Senior High School, Iowa. USA. Mr. A. Laverty, Headteacher and the Staff and Pupils ofBishop Tufuell Junior School, Felpham. West Sussex. U.K. Mr. A.J. Pratchett, Headteacher and the Staff and Pupils ofWoodcote School, Surrey. U.K. Mr. A Simpson, Headteacher and the Staff and Pupils ofBoxgrove Primary School. West Sussex. U.K. Mr.ALovett, Headteacher and the Staff and Pupils of The Vale School, Findon Valley. Worthing. West Sussex. U.K. Mrs. J. Wilson, Headteacher and the Staff and Pupils of Robin Hood School, Sutton. Surrey. U.K Mrs. V. Griffin, Head ofMusic, Robin Hood Jtmior School, Sutton. Surrey. U.K Ms. Cheryl Sager, Music Teacher. Stratford School. Center Stratford, New Hampshire and Hopkinton School, Concord. New Hampshire. USA Ms. Kate. Ingoldsby and Mr. John Green for their help with the testing. Lastly, a second 'thank -you' to my friend Roy Lidstone, who spent many hours proof reading several drafts and made many helpful suggestions and to Lisa, who read and re read many of the sections, printed, e-mailed and saw it all through to the end. Abstract This thesis explores the development of sensitivity to musical styles in children aged between 3 and 16 years old. The thesis is divided into four parts. The first part of the thesis explores the historical background of the developmental and the social psychology of music and reviews some pertinent previous literature. This section places the later studies in a theoretical context. The second part presents a review of the four previous studies, which have been carried out into style sensitivity, namely, Gardner (1973), Castell (1983), Tafuri et al. (1994) and Hargreaves and North (1999). This section of the thesis also includes a review of a number of methodological issues and gives a full description of the design of the test methodology. Six experiments are carried out and reported in the thesis. Experiment one explores the effect of varying the lesson context in which the style sensitivity test is presented to the participants, whilst experiment two explores the effect of varying the test presenter on participants' test performance. The third experiment is a comparative study between participants in three different regions, one region within the UK and two regions within the USA. The participants in each of these three regions all experienced a number of variations in their music education programme, the status accorded to music within that music education programme and also considerable variation in participants' commercial musical diet. The experiment explores whether or not these variations affect the development of sensitivity to musical styles. Part three of the thesis manipulates two further variables firstly, by varying the introduction to the style sensitivity and secondly, by manipulating the musical material used in the test. Experiment four presents two variations to the test introduction. In the first condition the introduction is changed through the offer of a reward and in the second condition, the introduction is changed in order to make the experiment competitive. The fifth experiment attempts to manipulate the musical material used in the style sensitivity test by increasing the level of stylistic divergence between the musical extracts. This is achieved in two ways. Firstly, a broad grained method of measuring various artefactual elements within the extracts is devised and incorporated into the selection of the musical test material. Secondly, the stylistic divergence between the musical extracts in increased by extending the chronological period between the musical eras used in the musical extracts. Part four presents the findings of an exploratory study. Experiment six attempted to create a new test methodology which was appropriate for use on younger children. The new methodology was successfu11y piloted in order to further explore style sensitivity in participants aged between 3 and 5 years of age. In the last section, a review of the six experiments is given and this is accompanied by a number of implications for further research. Finally, a model of the development of style sensitivity is presented. This model proposes that sensitivity to musical style is not a single unitary skill, the development of which is linear, and therefore any measurement of musical style sensitivity should be seen as a multidimensional description of a combination of abilities, skills and knowledge. The model proposes that acquiring the ability to be sensitive to musical styles can best be seen as the progression from stylistic discrimination to stylistic competence. Table of Contents Abstract Acknowledgements Chapter 1: introduction 1.1 Historical background of music psychology 1.2 Studies of listening to music 1.2.1 The use of musical stimuli 1.2.2 Psycholinguistic influences in studies of listening 1.2.3 Meaning in music 1.3 The present studies Chapter 2: the developmental and social psychology of music 2.1 Theories of developmental psychology 2.2 Developmental theories of music 2.3 Two developmental theories in the arts: Koopman (1995) and Koroscik (1997) 2.4 The social psychological perspective 2.5 Historical background of social psychology 2.6 Developmental social psychology 2. 7 The social psychology of music 2.8 Summary Part one: development of style sensitivity Chapter 3: literature review 3.1 Gardner's three systems model 3.2 Gardner (1973a) 3.3 Castell (1983) 3.4 Tafuri, Addessi, Luzzi and Baroni (1994, 1995, 1996) 3.5 Hargreaves and North (1999) 3.6 Summary Chapter 4: methodological considerations 4.1.1 Research precedents 4.1.2 Experimenter rapport 4.1.3 Experimenter expectations 4.1.4 Pretest experiences and activities 4.1.5 Experimenter status and experience 4.1.6 Test anxiety 4.1. 7 Experimenter distortion 4.1.8 Summary 4.2 The present studies: general methodology and procedure 4.2.1 Test design and modifications 4.2.2 Reliability and validity 4.2.3 Pilot studies 4.2.4 Musical materials in experiments one to four 4.2.5 Musical content in experiments one to four 4.2.6 Response sheet 4.2. 7 Testing procedures 4.2.8 Marking procedure and analysis in experiments one to four 4.2.9 Method of analysis 4.2.10 Practice examples 4.2.11 Practice examples: music selection

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