Expanding the concept of craft and artistry provides a platform from which to understand professional practice in enriched ways, amplifying musicians’
agency and social connectedness and bringing these together in what might be termed the artist as maker in society, as visualized in Figure 4.
Within the context of higher music education, the concept of the artist as maker in society has the potential to underpin professional training that has a holistic integrity, both reaching into the personal aesthetic and evolving
motivation of individual musicians, and reaching out to connect with and embrace contemporary societal needs and opportunities.
Figure 4
The concept of expanded craft and artistry
Considering the musician as a maker builds on Sennett’s (2009) reminder of the physicality and functional value of craftsmanship, and highlights the emergent creative process involved in making work (see e.g. Hallam & Ingold, 2007). This latter point is important in distinguishing the idea from a practice of simply “reproducing” existing work, an argument sometimes levelled at the work of musicians playing canon notated repertoire and afforded little creative ownership of their output. The emphasis on making clearly prioritizes active interpretation, and curating of performance for and in contemporary contexts.
The musician as a maker always creates something new for a specific situation.
It is not made in a bubble, detached from the world. The context creates a new situation and possibilities for meaning to be made. Whatever the materials used to make with (repertoire or not), there is a process of making involved that responds explicitly to the context. This goes beyond the context of particular repertoire itself or the idea of simply interpreting repertoire, to embrace making as a social situation, an environment in which existing art is experienced, and in which exchange through the experience of that art may take place, as in musicking. This encourages the context to be one in which people can discover and voice their own artistic expression in different ways.
In practice within higher music education, a making process opens up
diverse ways into, for example, programming or incorporating improvisatory dimensions, as well as new composition; equally, it opens up into creating a particular environment and way of engaging with an audience, to collaboration or co-creation with them, or indeed with other artists. The musician as
maker therefore foregrounds the importance of developing a relationship, individually and collectively, to both tradition and innovation; ancient wisdom and contemporary thinking; repertoire and new work. Not all of these may be desirable all the time, but they are in scope, they need to be considered, and in many cases can be embraced without completely reshaping curriculum structures.
The position of being an artist in society then raises further questions about the motivation and objectives of the making process and its impact. A shift in the preposition is enough to signal this set of issues:
• Maker in society
• Maker of society
• Maker for society
The questions are political and moral as well as artistic, and fundamentally connect to philosophies of music in society, its possibilities and values, that go back to ancient Greece, to Aristotle, and indeed to the physical places of theatres within the polis. Much in these questions and debates goes beyond the scope of this essay, but their presence serves to demonstrate at least that the concept of a maker in society turns irreversibly towards an engaged practice.
This kind of conceptual underpinning seems critical if higher music
education is both to be relevant in contemporary societies and to resist more recent policy directions that have erred into polarized territory, looking for example to instrumentalize the arts and only look towards easily quantified measures of impact. It is essential if a flow is to be sustained between imagination and play on the one hand, and function and practical relevance on the other hand, with skill and expertise infused throughout.
Furthermore, conceptual underpinning also needs to identify more specific elements if it is properly to ignite significant change in practice. Detailed sensitizing lines of development for professional music education arising from the concept of artist as maker in society are likely to be essential in building bridges between grand conceptual design and the pragmatics of delivery, curriculum, and learning and teaching. Sensitizing lines of
development equally have to be fluid enough to grapple with what may easily be perceived as conflicting opposites and priorities, given the
polarized nature of older concepts of craft and artistry on the one hand, and professional skills on the other hand. In keeping with Goleman’s concept of focus, they must also highlight interconnections between the three circles, promoting porosity and co-development, embracing the messiness of non-linear learning processes and debunking myths of neat sequential stages.
Delving into these sensitizing lines requires considerable further analysis and research, but an overview is included, shown in Figure 5, as a provocation and an invitation for development.
Figure 5
Sensitizing lines of development for the artist as maker in society
These four sensitizing lines: Imagination and innovation, Discipline expertise and growth mindset, Individual and ensemble, and Embodied and propositional knowledge by no means offer a recipe for curriculum and pedagogy. Rather, they reflect key principles and values in the form of dynamic continua, each highlighting creative tensions and potential paradoxes to be navigated, but each also having a vital role to play in realizing the artist as maker in society.