APSMER2017 PROCEEDINGS

Proceedings of the 11th Asia-Pacific Symposium for Music Education Research
(APSMER 2017) 19th to 21st July 2017, Melaka MALAYSIA
Facilitating Musical Expression as an
Emergent Interaction amongst a
Teacher and Players
Hiroshi Suga
University of Miyazaki
ABSTRACT
The purpose of this study is to get a model of the thinking process of expert
music teachers to facilitate students’ musical expression from a viewpoint of
teaching as improvisation. I videotaped rehearsals of three electric
keyboards ensembles instructed by three expert teachers. I interviewed the
teachers about their thinking about instruction, their impacts to the
performance and assessment for the players whilst reproducing VTRs of their
rehearsals. I also interviewed the keyboard players about their impression of
teachers’ teaching style and their thinking in the rehearsals. I segmented all
of the text data scripted from the VTRs and the recordings of the interviews
by their contents and categorized them from bottom up by using procedure of
the grounded theory approach. None of the three teachers brought definitely
predetermined plans of musical expression as their goal. They mainly
facilitated the players to generate their own ideas of musical expression by
inspiring their imagination with intentionally ambiguous words. They gave
scaffolding support for the players. From these results, I made a model of the
teaching process by an expert teacher for improving musical expression as a
group creation characterized by emergent interaction between a teacher and
players.
Keywords: musical expression, group creativity, emergent interaction.
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