Project Description (positions available two students)

Music is a site of the production of identity, and as a significant source of community, it can serve as a way for musicians to understand self in relation to sociality. Unpacking the formation of musical identity through the study of varying musical educations, such as formal education in a post-secondary jazz program, and informal education in west coast folk music communities, can give us a holistic understanding of the ways that culture, education, and music interact. The coming paragraphs will explain, in greater detail, the goals and methods of each half of this project.

Phase One: The first phase of this project will be to conduct interviews with musicians in the locations discussed below.

Part A

A site of education, art creation, and improvisation, a post-secondary music program is a complex social network. Each person within this network is at an intersection of various social, institutional, and existential pressures. Using the GBA+ analysis framework and “Background Practices” theory, I will attempt to disclose the nature of some of these pressures and the ways they intersect. Through interviews and participant-observation research in the Bachelor of Jazz and Contemporary Music program at MacEwan University, Edmonton, I will attempt to discover how individual students construct musical-personal identities in this context.

Part B

Informal music education is formative of musical identity and of how we, as musicians, think about and understand our practice of music-making. Using the restricted geographical context of Vancouver Island and the surrounding Gulf Islands, this project aims to conduct interview-based research on how informal musical training informs the singer-songwriter identity. We intend to use GBA+ analysis framework to uncover the relationship between intersectional identity and musical learning, and we plan on centering the idea of “background practices” in our analyses. The southwestern coast of Canada is an ideal place to study the impact of informal music education on the singer-songwriter identity; especially on the Gulf Islands, there is a distinct “anti-establishment” culture that informs many people’s decisions surrounding formal music education. Folk music is typically an “anti-establishment”, grassroots, community driven music that directly reflects culture by way of story-telling. Simultaneously, folk musicians often depend on and compete for grants and government funding. These tensions between art and institution create a fascinating ecosystem in which to unpack the relationships between musical community, informal education, and identity.

Dr. Michael B MacDonald will be supervising the students.