This study examines five highly trained musicians who made the life-changing decision to leave their occupations and pursue professions in completely new fields. Portraitures were created to illustrate how these individuals went on to forge successful careers even though their new positions required vastly different skillsets. Through qualitative analysis, it was discovered that numerous skills appear to be transferable from long-term musical training to various career paths. By examining people who have excelled in both domains, common traits were uncovered and grouped into four categories: Cognitive, Expressive, Socio-Behavioral, and Skills Particular to the Craft.The purpose of this research was to identify the skills that musicians can carry over into new professions. Those who may be considering alternative fields of work as well as employers in non-musical arenas may discover that musicians can be desirable candidates for hire because of their numerous transferable skills. Understanding the training process of musicians may also help gather insights for improving curricula which conservatories can employ to prepare graduates for careers. Retrospective feedback from alumni provided this study with a backdrop as to whether coursework offered at their schools aligned with modern industry conditions. After conducting interviews, findings from this study revealed that highly trained musicians do possess many skills that can transfer into new domains, though hard skills should be acquired in the new field. However, the foundation on which a musician's skillset is built provides a formidable bedrock on which a variety of successful careers can be cultivated.

The diversity present within K-12 classrooms in the United States presents teachers with students from many backgrounds and musical traditions. Traditional undergraduate music education programs which prioritize the Western canon provide little opportunity for students to address diversity, both in pedagogy and in content. Prospective music teachers in the choral or general music areas experience vocal education that focuses primarily on the classical bel canto vocal technique. This education fails to prepare teachers to teach students from diverse backgrounds and musical traditions. Because music plays an important role in adolescents’ identity formation, teachers who are unprepared to recognize and teach diverse vocal styles may unknowingly alienate or silence their students. The purpose of this study was to develop an understanding of how two groups of music students, in early adolescence, and from a diverse urban public school, perceive the singing and the music teaching in their general music classrooms. By discovering their perspectives, I hoped to shed light on the ways in which music teaching influenced their musical, vocal, and cultural identities, particularly during the malleable time of adolescence. Over the course of three months, I conducted semi-structured interviews with 14 students and two teachers as well as twice-weekly classroom observations. Three research questions informed the data collection process: (1) How do students in a diverse urban public school describe their own singing and musical background? (2) How do they describe the vocal (and music) teaching in their general music class? (3) How do they describe an effective or ideal music teacher? The interview data and field notes from the observations were coded, organized, and analyzed into the following categories: (1) Music and Self Expression; (2) Music and Family; (3) Culturally Congruent and Incongruent Teaching; (4) Student Vocal Profiles; (5) If They Could Teach the Music Class, How Would They Teach? The overarching conclusion from this study is that the congruence or incongruence of a teacher’s musical epistemology — “the norms, logic, values, and way of knowing” music (Domínguez, 2017, p. 233) — along with the musical epistemologies of her students was the primary factor for student exclusion or empowerment in the classroom.

Composing is widely recognized by both researchers in music education and the NAfME (National Association for Music Education) as an important element in music education. However, composing as a primary activity has still not yet been established as an important aspect of secondary music education, particularly in the large ensemble setting. This study shows the efforts and outcomes of high school instrumental students as they created a notated musical composition for either a concert band or orchestra. What processes and approaches enabled these secondary instrumental students to compose for a large ensemble? What are the characteristics of the completed compositions composed by these secondary instrumental students? What impact did this experience have on the student composers who participated in this activity? In order to answer these research questions, qualitative instrumental case studies were conducted with eight high school instrumentalists, who participated in 7 workshop processes for composers to compose notated composition for either band or orchestra over a 3-month period. Using both expository method and discovery method, I taught and witnessed the processes of these eight students as they explored and discovered their compositions for band or orchestra, which were performed at the final recital. The result revealed that given an appropriate environment and tools, high school instrumental musicians can compose successfully for a large ensemble such as orchestra or band. Although these students had limited background in music theory, they were able to discover ways to create their desired effect by exploring and navigating sounds using the notation software, their primary instrument, and secondary instruments such as a piano. The experience fostered their curiosity for other instruments in the ensemble and nurtured their desire to learn more about them. This research opportunity gave all students a positive musical experience.

In this study I investigate alternative seating practices (ASP) within a public school orchestra. Traditionally, orchestras have employed hierarchical seating structures through the use of chair challenges and seating auditions in efforts to motivate students to practice. However, minimal research is available on the outcomes of hierarchical seating structures within an orchestra. Acknowledging that teachers are at the forefront of our curricular decisions for the orchestra, I explored these challenges from an autobiographical point of view, also sharing the experiences of my students who participated in the orchestra program for three years during the time in which ASP was first integrated. Twenty-five student participants volunteered to partake in this study and parents and administrators were interviewed, to share their perspectives of ASP. Data collection includes; individual and group interviews, letters/essays/journals, and archival collection. Participants were 10th-grade orchestra students in a public school setting 20 miles outside of a major U.S. city. ASP demonstrates how it can act as a practice of social justice within a community of practice. Students reported that ASP influenced their awareness of self and others and through their perceived experiences; they were able to transfer their awareness to the outside world. Students attributed their musical success to their unique musical-making experience formed through motivation, peer modeling and discovery of others’ musical capacity. This study asserts that using ASP in an orchestra can satisfy measures of musical performance and promote an equitable classroom in which students can form socially just principles to use as members of society.

The purpose of this study is to explore and identify flow characteristics in experienced middle school and high school band directors in the context of their teaching. The research was conducted using a qualitative multi-case study through the use of non-participant observations, field notes, and interviews with observational video with stimulated recall to identify the characteristics of flow in a total of five experienced middle school or high school band directors. It was apparent from the findings that every experienced middle school and high school band director experienced flow characteristics at different times while instructing their bands; conditions that facilitated and inhibited characteristics of flow as well as qualities that sustained characteristics of flow also were observed. This research may contribute to improved professional development and preparation of band directors; it may help them to recognize and achieve flow and develop good teaching practices, thereby enabling their students to reach their learning potential.

This study explores the complexities of professional performing freelance musicians who teach part-time through arts organizations in multiple educative settings, a condition I refer to as nomadic. Nomadicism is characterized by an inherent sense of itinerancy. Through semi-structured interviews and observations with three participants, I constructed narratives of individual experience through a method of narrative inquiry, which enabled much-needed nuance and complexity, as prior research in the field of teaching artistry has focused mainly on surveys of working conditions with mostly informal anecdotes from the field. The music teaching artists in this study negotiated highly complex careers to extraordinary degrees in which they experienced conflicts between their preparation as highly accomplished performers and their preparation for their work as teachers. While each participant expressed their motivations for pursuing careers as teaching artists in radically different ways, they shared similar patterns of integration and reciprocity between their performing and teaching identities. Participants communicated unique, varied, and idiosyncratic narratives of perceived successes and challenges in preparing, adapting, and negotiating their multiple roles across multiple spaces. While their work had them interacting with students, teachers, administration, family, and musical colleagues, the teaching artists still experienced significant feelings of isolation. Ultimately, each participant articulated the need for openings of dialogical spaces for teaching artists to commune and grow with one another. This study brings a critical perspective to the conditions of music teaching artists and how they and those that prepare and work with them might bring criticality and responsiveness to their unique place within the wider world of arts education.

This dissertation explores multi-modal, symbolic, and embodied strategies for navigating musical periodicity, or “meter.” In the first half, I argue that these resources and techniques are often marginalized or sidelined in music theory and psychology on the basis of definition or context, regardless of usefulness. In the second half, I explore how expanded notions of metric experience can enrich musical analysis. I then relate them to existing approaches in music pedagogy. Music theory and music psychology commonly assume experience to be perceptual, music to be a sound object, and perception of music to mean listening. In addition, observable actions of a metaphorical “body” (and, similarly, performers’ perspectives) are often subordinate to internal processes of a metaphorical “mind” (and listeners’ experiences). These general preferences, priorities, and contextual norms have culminated in a model of “attentional entrainment” for meter perception, emerging through work by Mari Riess Jones, Robert Gjerdingen, and Justin London, and drawing upon laboratory experiments in which listeners interact with a novel sound stimulus. I hold that this starting point reflects a desire to focus upon essential and universal aspects of experience, at the expense of other useful resources and strategies (e.g. extensive practice with a particular piece, abstract ideas of what will occur, symbolic cues) Opening discussion of musical periodicity without these restrictions acknowledges experiences beyond attending, beyond listening, and perhaps beyond perceiving. I construct two categories for various resources and strategies: those which involve dynamic symbolic encoding (such as conducting patterns and tala gestures) and those which utilize static theoretical information (such as score-based knowledge and calculation of abstract relationships). My primary means of revealing and exploring these additional resources involves instances of “metric multi-tasking,” in which musicians keep track of multiple non-nested periodicities occurring simultaneously. One of the reasons these situations work so well at revealing additional resources is that attentional entrainment offers no explanation for how one might be able to do such a thing (only that attention is insufficient for the task). I do not make these moves in an attempt to significantly alter the theory of attentional entrainment. Rather, I frame that model as but one mode of temporal perception among many. I also leave room for types of temporal knowledge which may not be perceptual at all, but are nonetheless useful in situations involving musical periodicity. Pedagogical systems already make use of dynamic symbols and theoretical knowledge to help with temporally difficult tasks, and generally not virtuosic feats of metric multi-tasking. With these ideas in mind, I return to more straightforward “mono-metric” contexts and reconsider what to do with the concepts of “meter” and “perception.”

This study investigated the motivating and engaging factors of jazz programs present in the learning environments of avocational jazz musicians in higher education. The investigation explored these factors as perceived by the learners themselves as well as the educators tasked with creating enriching musical experiences for their college students. The student participants for this study consisted of college students currently enrolled at a liberal arts college in the NorthAbeles, east, all of whom perform in the jazz ensemble at their institution. The setting of liberal arts colleges was chosen for the study as an environment where students are actively learning and performing jazz music while pursuing other academic interests more closely related of their desired future professional goals. The educator participants came from the same institutions and provided data in specific regard to their experiences working with this unique population of jazz learners. Students reported their motivations were peaked by the social element inherent to the ensemble experience, their desire to exercise their creativity, and the value of diverse learning environment as part of their overall college experience. On the other hand, educators from the same institutions found that they were best serving their students by demonstrating their own enthusiasm for the music, demonstrating the critical thinking element of jazz learning, and understanding that the students more closely relate the ensemble to a recreational activity available at the college. The study gathered data from focus group interviews with 49 students and 6 one-on-one interviews with jazz educators at liberal arts colleges. The questions for these interviews and focus groups were derived from an earlier pilot study of the same population of jazz learners and liberal arts music educators, and the analysis paralleled reported findings to relevant motivational theories and pedagogical practices common to jazz performance education.

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