The study falls into two parts, the investigation of what is meant by musical appreciation' and the investigation of the personality traits that characterise the musical appreciative. A review of the literature reveals that there is no agreement as to what music appreciation is. A practical investigation using a specially constructed questionnaire, in which 33 musicians were asked to indicate what they conceived music appreciation to be, confirmed the lack of concensus evident in the literature. To investigate the several aspects of music appreciation, the results of 200 secondary school pupils on a series of music tests and on a questionnaire concerning musical interests and experience were factor analysed. The same music variables were analysed using different techniques and the results of the different agree well. Twelve factors were identified. While no one factor stood out olearly from the others as a 'music appreciation faotor', eleven of the factors can loosely be described as relating to musio appreciation. These factors can be classified under three headings, factors of test ability, factors of performance on an instrument and factors of musical taste. (The twelfth factor concerns how musical the home background is.) The 'taste factors' are considered to be particularly valid, and they are confirmed by an independent study using a semantic differential technique with the same subjects. To investigate the personality struoture of the musically appreciative, one approach was to correlate the school pupils' personality test results (trom Eysenck's J.E.P.I. and Cattell's H.S.P.Q.) with measures from a number of musical variables, which were chosen because of their intrinsic importance and because they represented the 'appreciation' factors produced in the factor anaqses. A second approach, which yielded results consonant with the first, made use of the results of E.P.I. and 16P.F. from more than 200 musicians and music students. Without doubt, 'intelligence' is the trait that most characterises the musical. However, the musically appreciative are also sensitive and emotional. It ia suggested that their emotionality reveals itself as the driving force for any one of many different musical interests or pursuits. What characterises the musical person is the (musical) end to which this drive is directed. Why this drive is directed into musicality may be the result of other personality traits and of home background. Home background is found to be a more important influence on music appreciation than personality, though the two are not independent: those with a musical personality tend to come from musical homes. The magnitude of the relationships between personality and music appreciation and between home background and music appreciation were determined by multiple regression analyses and, disappointingly, are found to be rather slight. The personality characteristics of musically appreciative school pupils are not entirely the same as for musicians and music students. The differences are in line with published findings relating personality variables with the academic achievement of pupils/students at different levels of education. With both the school pupils and the adult musicians, some regularly occurring variations from the basic appreciative personality profile are recorded; e.g. different personality structures are associated with different tastes in music; brass players are more extrover; men musicians are more tough-minded and shrewd than women. The variations are sufficiently great to accommodate a great variety of personalities among the musically appreciative • A number of test instruments were devised for the study. Apart from the questionnaires and the semantic differential, already referred to, a test of ability to discriminate oomposers by their style was developed. This test is promising because 1t appears to measure rather different skills from those measured by other tests, because it is possibly the first genuinely objective test in music in which judgements about musical extracts must be made, and because it is popular with teachers. Although the test does not yet reach the technical standard required of tests, further research and development on it are considered well worth while and are planned.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:465086 |
| Date | January 1976 |
| Creators | Martin, Peter J. |
| Publisher | University of Glasgow |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | http://theses.gla.ac.uk/4291/ |
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