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Earlier research has stated the need for conservatory education to prepare aspiring musicians more thoroughly for a dynamic and changing society. A project that challenges the conservatory tradition is Sammankonst (TogetherArt) where students at a musical theatre program at folk high school level collaborate with intellectually disabled adults. Based on a phenomenological way of thinking, this article aims to describe and analyze the education of aspiring musicians for professional participation in society based on an analysis of experiences among conservatory students, music theater students and their teachers. Interviews were made with six conservatory students, 15 musical theatre students, and two teachers. The results show ambiguities when it comes to what voice students should be prepared for and how the choice of preparations influence the view of singing and musicians’ quality competence.

Musikerstudenter inom klassisk västerländsk musik utbildas i ett europeiskt perspektiv vid musikhögskolor, sprungna ur den konservatorietradition som uppstod under 1800-talet inom vilken hantverksmässiga färdigheter betonades. I och med Bologna- anpassningen av musikerutbildningarna fick reflektion ökad betydelse vilket har aktualiserat relationen och spänningen mellan praktik och teori i undervisningen. Dock har vare sig vilka aspekter av musikerprofessionen som dylik reflektion omfattar eller hur utbildningarna förbereder studenter för att kunna agera med gott omdöme i sin yrkespraktik hitintills beforskats i någon högre grad. Vår avsikt är att i denna resonerande artikel söka skissera och problematisera ett förslag på vad ett professionellt omdöme skulle kunna innebära för klassiska musiker och hur det kan kultiveras inom högre musikutbildning. Med utgångspunkt i ett exempel från en av författarnas konstnärliga praktik, Hannah Arendts omdömesfilosofi, samt författarnas tidigare och pågående forskning inom området resonerar vi om vad undervisning och lärande av ett professionellt omdöme bland klassiska musikerstudenter kan och skulle kunna innebära i en konstnärlig akademisk professionsutbildning. ENGLISH ABSTRACT Opening for a different musical being: Cultivating classical music students’ professional judgment From a European perspective, musicians in Western classical music are educated at conservatories, stemming from the conservatory tradition that arose in the 19th century, emphasising craftsmanship. With the Bologna adaptation of higher musician education, the significance of reflection has increased, which has brought attention to the relationship and tension between practice and theory in conservatory teaching. However, neither the aspects of the musician’s profession that such reflection encompasses nor how the educational programs prepare students to act with good judgment in their professional practice have previously been researched to any greater degree. Our intention in this reflective article is to outline and problematise a proposal for what professional judgment could entail for classical musicians and how it can be cultivated within higher music education. Drawing on an example from one of the authors’ artistic practice, Hannah Arendt’s philosophy of judgment, as well as the authors’ previous and ongoing research, we highlight what teaching and learning of professional judgment among classical musicians can and could mean in an artistic, academic, professional education.

Music educational researchers in the Nordic countries have pointed out how municipal arts schools are organised based on, and tend to reproduce, anthropocentric values and approaches, and that such unequal norms and structures are to be challenged. Taking a border-crossing musical comedy project as a starting point, the specific aim of the current study is to illuminate how, and on what levels, organisational norms and traditional structures can be challenged, and what possibilities and new challenges that occur in a project taking place beyond the Anthropocene. To be able to grasp the aspects of becoming within the project and how that is related to aspects of organisation, we created a research entanglement based on post-human theory. Hence, situations seen as webs of relations were created, including the actors: humans with intellectual disabilities, musical performance students, educators, artists, researchers, and varied digital communication tools. Observations, video recordings, collaborative writing, qualitative surveys, and interviews produced material for analysis. Actor-network theory was applied aiming to describe how the constantly performed intra-active networks were constituted, as well as how the actors influenced each other. The results identify significant actors and trajectories in Sammankonst, that in turn challenge anthropocentric organisational structures of municipal arts schools.

This article explores the meaning and function of streaming media as a potential facilitator of musical Bildung. Taking the affordances of streaming media technologies as a starting point, the article thus focuses on the formative and cultivating dimensions a music streaming service such as Spotify might offer. The specific aim of this article is to describe and analyse how musical Bildung may evolve within a Spotify context from a user perspective. To address the aim from the point of view of music education, Spotify users’ activities and experiences of streaming media interactions were accessed, inspired by internet-related ethnography. Stimulated recall interviews, focusing on the participants’ experiences as well as their actual use of Spotify’s streaming service, were conducted, recorded, and transcribed. The generated material was subjected to co-operative hermeneutic content analysis. The results illuminate how Bildung evolves in users’ encounters with the service and with art mediated via Spotify. Relevant topics occurring in the human-art-technology relationship of Bildung from a Heideggerian perspective were Being-possible, the ability-to-be, and Spotify as the Other. In sum, it can be stated that Bildung evolves when Spotify exceeds the thingness of the Other, becoming a work of art in itself, throwing the user into Being.

Recent studies of female guitar students in upper secondary school ensemble education suggest that girls behave, and are encouraged to behave, in more immanent ways than boys. They seem to receive less encouragement to stretch their bodies and become full musical human beings. Instead they become the second musical sex. During the course of my work with the problem of how to create space for girls playing the electric guitar in educational settings, I have continually found myself wondering how to create educational spaces and relations in ways that let all pupils, independent of sex, realize ideas, transcend as musical bodies, and become what they already are. If teachers and pupils are interrelated bodies, teachers must be aware of how they use their bodies when it comes to creating space for all pupils to develop and stretch out their bodies. The actions of the music teacher, as a musical body, must be balanced in relation to the other musical bodies in the room, as well as to physical preconditions, goals, visions, and expectations of the students. In this article, I want to delve into the subject of bodily interaction, teachers’ responsibilities, and questions of intentional educational bodily relations. The aim is to share my close reading of Young’s philosophical thinking regarding gender structures and especially female comportment, motility, and spatiality, and develop a set of prerequisites for intentional bodily (music) educational relations. With a starting point in research-based inspiration and motivation for conducting the current philosophical investigation, I share my close reading of Young’s theories regarding female situated bodies. Continually I relate to excerpts from two interviews with female guitar students, exemplifying musical body-relational experiences. Finally I share and reflect upon a developed thinking about mindful bodily (music) educational relations.

As a contribution to the critical and creative discussion regarding definitions and examples of how dance practices are being reimagined in the age of distance, this article focuses on possibilities and challenges with organizing virtual contemporary dance workshops for older adults. The aim of this article is to explore intra-actions within entanglements including older adult amateur dancers, a choreographer, homes, dance studios, the software zoom, devices, music, and dance during the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020. Situations seen as webs of relations including the mentioned actors were created. To be able to describe how the constantly performed intra-active networks of dancers and other material actors were constituted, actor-network theory was applied. The results show specific trajectories that exemplifies intra-actions with the participants. The older adults became dancers that make meaning in their lives, even if the virtual trajectories possible to follow to some extent, are limited by the pandemic cursed distance