The Psychology of Music Learning

Abstract

If we asked any music teacher or even any student what you must actually learn to be a good musician or, specifically, to play an instrument well, we would perhaps find there was some agreement that you have to learn to technically master musical language and the actual instrument in question.

1 Instrumental Learning in the Western Cultural Tradition

If we asked any music teacher or even any student what you must actually learn to be a good musician or, specifically, to play an instrument well, we would perhaps find there was some agreement that you have to learn to technically master musical language and the actual instrument in question. You have to be able to play pieces with a “good sound” which usually involves correctly decoding the written composition and the musical sense the author wished to portray in their composition, but using your own style or personality. However, this apparent consensus would quickly melt away if we began to ask not about the final goal—that sensitive, personal and technically precise interpretation of the composition—but about the day in day out learning required to reach that intended result. What should the student learn? And how should they learn it? Through what sort of activities or tasks? What should the teacher do to promote this learning?

Actually, if we analyse the answers to these questions, or indeed observe the classes of different teachers and students, responses will be very varied which, as we shall see in chapter “How Teachers and Students Envisage Music Education: Towards Changing Mentalities”, respond to the different conceptions these teachers and students have on what learning and teaching music entails. But this diversity of conceptions does in fact reflect a limited number of differentiated models or theories for managing learning and teaching in a music classroom. We assume that learning involves long-lasting changes to students’ abilities, knowledge or skills as a consequence of practice (Pozo, 2008). In turn, teaching would consist of a set of activities designed by a teacher—or by someone who is helping another or others to learn—to promote that learning. As shall be seen in greater detail in chapter “Learning Outside the Music Classroom: From Informal to Formal Learning as Musical Learning Cultures”, one of the traits that differentiates formal learning (that which occurs, for example, in a school of music or a conservatory) from non-formal (a group of teenagers getting together to play rap) or informal (an unregulated context of teaching or assistance) is that in the formal and informal contexts of learning there is someone who is responsible for preparing and organising the learning of others. These spaces are necessarily asymmetrical, clearly differentiating between the roles of the person teaching and the person learning, which is reflected in their form of socially organising the learning (also see chapter “From Individual Learning to Cooperative Learning”).

1.1 Traditional Versus New Approaches

Beyond the distant common goals, the way in which this learning is organised in formal contexts can be based on different models of learning. This is reflected by real examples, in this case in an instrument lesson, contained in Tables 1 and 2, where two different teachers handle instrumental learning of their students in quite different ways. In the first case (Table 1) there is a teacher who, at the beginning of the class, asks the student to play the pieces assigned to him that week, correcting the technical errors the student makes and identifying them on the musical score. The teacher then focuses on helping the student to identify the notes in both the musical score and in the instrument.

Table 1 Example of a basic level cello class from a traditional focus, centred on the musical content

This teacher centres her student learning on the musical score and how the notes expressed in the musical score are “interpreted” or transferred to the instrument, with all student attention and learning directed through precise instructions and explanations (“The C is high, raise the instrument, watch out for the chord change. Play it again”). The student rarely intervenes except to play when she asks him to and to respond to closed questions. The student is not an active agent in learning, but merely reactive.

Now lets us look at what happens in another different class (which we call B in Table 2) where another teacher gives a class to a student of a similar age and with similar contents. We see how here the class does not focus on the musical score but on the relationship between the student’s actions and the instrument, on how his actions can transform the sound produced by the instrument. Furthermore, instead of giving instructions or closed explanations the teacher encourages the student to take decisions, to try to understand why what is happening is happening and to appraise his own actions (“Perhaps you can tell me something that has improved since last week”). The class is constructed as a dialogue rather than the teacher’s monologue.

Table 2 Example of a basic level violin class, from a different focus, centred on the student

Although both teachers apparently have the same goal: to achieve a “good sound” (which is also sensitive and personal), the way in which they do so is extremely different and insofar as we know how students learn and how we can help them (Bransford et al., 2000; National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, 2018), their probabilities of reaching that goal are also highly different. In the next few pages, we will examine why.

Accumulated research over the last few decades on ways of learning and teaching music has identified these two teaching styles as the two extremes of a continuum (Torrado & Pozo, 2008), which extend from a type of teaching—which we could consider traditional—centred on established musical contents which the student must learn to produce that “good sound” (particularly the decoding of musical languages, instrument technique and repertoire excellence) to a more student-centred teaching and the development of capacities that allow them to establish a relationship between their goals and mental representations (what they wish to express and the sound they wish to make to achieve this), their bodily sensations, the actions performed with the instrument and the sound they are capable of making as a consequence, making it possible for students to self-regulate their learning (Varela et al., 2016) or become active agents in controlling them (Wiggins, 2016) Which method is more effective? To answer this question we have to consider not just goals but also criteria that allow us to define or assess what effective learning is.

1.2 When Is Teaching Effective? What Are the Criteria for Learning Well?

We can assume the that learning is more effective when it produces (Pozo, 2008):

• (a) More long-lasting changes. Learning is changing what we already know or do, but if all learning involves change, not all changes are the same in nature, intensity or duration. It is known that a student-centred type of learning, also called constructive learning, (as illustrated in Table 2), tends to produce more stable and long-lasting changes—for reasons which will be later explained—and therefore better learning.

• (b) Changes that are transferable to new situations or contexts. One of the consequences of more reproductive or repetitive learning (as reflected in Table 1), focusing on content and not on developing the student’s capacities or skills is that, although it effectively achieves learning in terms of the previous criteria, and they are consolidated, what is learned will rarely be useful for new contexts or situations. It is therefore probable that the student from the example in Table 1, who is used to it being the teacher who tells him what he has done right or wrong and why, is incapable in the future of taking decisions for himself to improve his music practice when he makes a mistake or does not like what he is doing. Guided by the teacher, the student will learn to play a passage or a piece but will find it hard to use what they have learned on their own in a new composition or situation. In contrast, constructive learning, as illustrated in Table 2, which focuses on developing student capacities will, as we shall see later, encourage the student to understand what they are doing, take their own decisions and autonomously use their knowledge in new situations. Whilst the traditional approach creates an increasing dependence on the teacher, who is the one taking all the decisions on the interpretation, the constructive approach inspires more student autonomy, towards their own interpretation of the piece.

Therefore, although there are doubtless many intermediate or mixed stances between these two extremes (see the conceptions described in chapter “How Teachers and Students Envisage Music Education: Towards Changing Mentalities”) and many nuances in this respect, research has convincingly shown that a student-centred learning leads in the medium to long term to more long-lasting and transferable outcomes. This is not just the case for music learning (e.g., Green, 2017; McPherson & Welch, 2012; Wiggins, 2015) but also for many other domains of learning (e.g., National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, 2018; Pozo, 2014; Sawyer, 2015). Here too, as in music teaching, the traditional approach has been on the learning of formal codes (grammar in the case of language whether this be the mother tongue or a foreign language, equations in mathematics and physics, syllogisms in philosophy), with fairly poor results.

There is a common way of handling learning in Western formal education tradition, whether it involves reading, writing, calculus, or playing an instrument. The strategy is based on following a gradual route or method, essentially centred on teaching the code, together with the routines that allow one to efficiently master it. Only when this code has been sufficiently mastered by the students are they allowed to enjoy certain autonomy, because it is assumed that only then are they in a position to use it without making mistakes and to enjoy it. This is how learning to read and write is usually taught, and also how to create music on the saxophone or the violin, with the consequences we are all aware of: the students disconnect, they fail to be motivated, they are not able to find any sense to what they are learning, they read or write less, or play less or are increasingly turned off by the instrumentso that they read or write or play increasingly worse which then makes them even less inclined to try. Some students of course do learn with this methodology, but the majority do not become engaged with formal learning. They end up withdrawing (in the case of music, this would be when they are not forced or highly pressured by their families) or they stop learning when they have no choice but to continue studying.

As previously mentioned, recent research has shown that there are other ways of teaching—reading, writing, mathematics, science, but also musical interpretation—and they are the backbone of this book. This is learning that centres on the students’ experience—in this case musical, their emotions, their intuitive musicality (see chapter “Early Initiation to Music Learning: Little Children Are Musicians Too”), of how they feel and experience music in their own body, and from there help the student to reconstruct—to broaden but also transform—that experience through reflection and comprehension of musical knowledge. Undoubtedly, mastery of those musical languages and instrumental technique is required but instead of musical knowledge being the aim of music education it becomes a necessary means of generating those changes in the musical experience of the students.

Student-centered music teaching requires understanding and transforming the way students learn. In recent decades, following the theoretical abandonment of behavioural approaches—which were concerned solely with changing the behaviours, the actions of students—it has been assumed that fostering learning requires above all changing how these students make sense of their actions. In addition, behaviorism also did not take into account that these actions or behaviors always happen in social, cultural or educational settings, which are what drive (or slow down) these changes. Along with the growing influence of neurocognitive approaches, research on learning in general, and music learning in particular, has now been dominated by two approaches: cognitive constructivism and sociocultural constructivism.

Both approaches share the idea of putting the learner at the center of learning and teaching processes, albeit with certain differences. The cognitive approach (which will be the one adopted essentially in this book), emphasizes transforming the processes and representations that mediate learning (such as motivation, memory, beliefs, self-regulation or metacognitive management, etc.) (see e.g., Sloboda, 1985, 2005). Instead, the sociocultural approach focuses more on the analysis of social interactions and practices and how they are transforming people’s discourses and actions (e.g., Rogoff, 1990; Valsiner & Rosa, 2007; in music, Wiggins, 2015). While cognitive psychology takes an analytical approach (differentiating and analyzing different processes and components of learning), the sociocultural approach is more holistic.

However, far from being opposed, the two approaches are complementary. According to the general genetic law of cultural development formulated by Vygotsky (1963)—who may be considered the father, or perhaps the grandfather, of the socio-cultural approach—“all higher mental functions make their appearance in the course of child development twice: first, in collective activity, social activity, i.e., as interpsychic functions, second in individual activity, as internal properties of the child’s thinking, i.e., as intrapsychic functions” (p. 31). In this sense, although this book takes an essentially cognitive approach—that is, analytical and representational—in considering how music is learned, it assumes that the change in those representations and learning processes has its origin in social activities and interactions, essentially instructional. Consequently, teachers play an essential mediating role in helping students to become agents that self-regulate their own learning, also using various cultural devices and resources, such as scores (chapter “Reading Music: The Use of Scores in Music Learning and Teaching”), ICT (chapter “Learning Music Through ICT”), as well as various types of social organization (chapters “From Individual Learning to Cooperative Learning” and “Learning Outside the Music Classroom: From Informal to Formal Learning as Musical Learning Cultures”) to promote this internalization of musical skills by students.

Throughout the book we will see how these different forms of organizing musical learning have affected the different components of musical education (see Part II). In this chapter we will try to show how students learn in each approach. Not only are different things or outcomes learned, but their mental activity also changes in one case and in the other, with them learning through different processes. Finally, the teaching practices also differ: the activities carried out; the way they are organised, and how the teacher and student act through them. To sum up, the conditions in which learning takes place. These three components—outcomes, processes and conditions—make up the essential elements that must be considered when analysing any learning situation. This is the basic foundation of learning assumed in this book, based on the work of Pozo (2008). Of course, the reader could find alternative, or rather complementary, stories in other sources (e.g., McPherson, & Welch, 2012; Shively, 2015; Sloboda, 2005, Wiggins, 2015). Likewise, in order not to exhaust the reader’s patience, many of the statements made below are supported by recent research in Psychology of Learning (e.g., Bransford et al., 2000; Haties & Yeats, 2014; National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, 2018; Pozo, 2008; Sawyer, 2015), so we refer to these sources for further developments or to seek theoretical or empirical support for them.

2 An Outline for Understanding and Transforming Music Learning: Outcomes, Processes and Conditions

As shown in Fig. 1, we assume that all learning situations may be analysed from three basic components, regardless of whether they are formal or informal, implicit or explicit, with instruction or without it:

Fig. 1

Graphic for the analysis and intervention of learning, taken from Pozo (2008)

• (a) The outcomes of learning, sometimes also called contents, or competencies in new educational approaches. These consist of what is learned, or if preferred, from the previously defined traits, what changes occur as a consequence of learning.

• (b) The processes of learning, or how these changes come about, through which psychological, cognitive and affective activity from the person who is learning are achieved (how they concentrate, remember, think, explain, feel, etc.). These processes will make the changes in learning outcomes possible.

• (c) The conditions of learning, or the type of practice taking place to initiate these learning processes; whether it is formal or informal learning, or, if applicable, what type of help is received by the student from the teacher (e.g., the different types of help contained in Tables 1 and 2), from a tutorial or technology, if the learning is individual or in a group and, if applicable, how that joint activity is managed, how much practice or rehearsing is done and how that practice is organized.

As the downward arrow shows in Fig. 1, before starting any relevant learning, either one’s own, as learners, or externally as teachers, we would be advised to ask a series of questions about this learning (what, how, when, how much, with whom, etc.) to help us better analyze and understand the difficulties we will face and the possible ways of confronting them. Therefore, analysis and planning go from top to bottom in the figure, asking oneself what one wishes to teach, and from there, what are the processes required for the student and which conditions help to drive these processes. However, intervention acts from bottom to top. In reality the only thing that we can modify directly as teachers are the practice conditions, but not the processes and outcomes which, even with external aid, are essentially inside the body and mind of the students. If we wish to modify these processes—their motivation, their attention, their forms of thinking and feeling the music—we have to do so indirectly through the activities and tasks we propose.

This is of particular importance to teachers, since it partly explains the lack of efficacy of traditional teacher/learning approaches that, as mentioned in the previous section, produce less long-lasting and transferable outcomes. When they are not centered on the student and on the development of their abilities, these forms of teaching do not ensure autonomous learning and therefore solely depend on the activities proposed by the teacher, not on self-regulation, management or agentiality by the student. In other words, not on their metacognition, which we shall see is really important in the student-centred learning we have called constructive (Hallam, 2001). When the student cannot take their own decisions about their own learning, it is unlikely they will be able to transfer or use what they have learned with the teacher’s help in new situations (e.g., in the previous case in Table 1. when the teacher tells the student to raise the instrument, will the student understand why and when they should do so and will they be capable of transferring this to other situations?).

The distinction between these different learning components (outcomes, processes and conditions) is relevant for analysis and intervention because we now know that each of these components is in turn highly varied. Compared with monotonous learning continuously based on the same processes and always aimed at the same outcomes, through the same activities or conditions (e.g., repeat the same line of a song five times from the classical repertoire to learning its dynamics and fingering by heart), learning allows for multiple variants. The different combinations of these three components will give rise to different learning situations and with them, different learning problems. The problems and the solutions are not always the same. What is constant is the presence of these three factors and the need for a balance between them if we wish to achieve good learning. Both learners and teachers can improve the learning situations making outcomes, processes and conditions conform, and interlink well with one another. For this to happen the different variants adopted by each of these components needs to be understood, together with the different levels or types of learning they may lead to before illustrating in the next few chapters how these components interlink in subtle but predictable ways, in different learning situations.

3 The Outcomes of Instrumental Music Learning

What does one learn when one learns to play a musical instrument? To control body movements, master the instrument, breathe, discriminate between sounds, establish relationships between them, feel them, read the musical score and imagine what each individual part sounds like (in the “inner ear”). However, fears or doubts are also often acquired, believing or not believing in oneself, admiring, respecting or fearing the teacher, observing other musicians, understanding the historical importance of a certain composition, differentiating different musical styles and genres. These different outcomes—or, as we saw before, the different changes which whoever is teaching wishes for their students to learn—are learned in subtly different ways, requiring different processes and conditions. However, fortunately, we can classify them into a few types of outcomes, which will help us to understand learning problems that these students may have. In a simple way we can differentiate between three major types of learning outcomes (Pozo, 2008):

• (a) Symbolic (or verbal) learning: learning to decode and interpret musical languages and theories, but also the relationships between the components of the musical interpretation (the instrument, the body, the sound achieved, etc.) (see chapter “Learning Music by Composing: Redescribing Expressive Goals on Writing Them”). Basically, this is learning to say things about the music and understand what is said or written about it, and what its historic or musicological history is, as well as understanding the relationship between the different components of the musical production.

• (b) Procedural learning: learning to make music through bodily action by means of an instrument. (with the exception of song and dance, where the instrument is the actual body). Here it is not a question of “speaking” music, but producing it through the coordination of physical (or motor) actions and mental (or cognitive) actions which enable these physical actions to be coordinated or regulated.

• (c) Attitudinal learning: learning to handle the music and communicate through it, getting close and relating to the instrument, with the interpretation, audience, the composition, how to feel and live through it. In sum, how to acquire attitudes and values from which instrumental music may be approached and construct one’s own identity as a learner and as a musician.

These ideas will be treated in depth in Part II of the book, but for now we will take a brief look at each of the outcomes of learning and also the typologies within them that may differ, bearing in mind the polarity we have defined between a more traditional learning centred on musical contents and a more constructive learning, centred on the development of abilities or competences in the students through these contents.

3.1 Symbolic Learning: Reading Musical Scores and Musical Comprehension

As we have seen, at least in the formal music education tradition, a major part of learning is usually centred on the mastery of musical languages, systems from which music is coded not just so it can be stored but mainly so that actions can be translated, and interpreted in the form of organised sounds. Later on, in chapter “Reading Music: The Use of Scores in Music Learning and Teaching”, we will analyse the different forms or levels in which the students may process those languages, in the form of musical scores, and the different musical knowledge that may be acquired as a consequence. For now, to illustrate the different levels, or if preferred, the different symbolic outcomes that may be acquired by learning musical languages, and their different complexity, we will resort to an analogy. Just as by reading and interpreting a musical score one may learn different things about the music, different things may be learned by reading and interpreting texts, depending on the type of learning involved. Here is a simple test. Below is a text. You should read it several times (two or three maximum) and aim to learn as much as possible about its content, without taking notes:

The procedure is actually quite simple. First you arrange things into different groups. Of course, one pile may be sufficient depending on how much there is to do. If you have to go somewhere else due to lack of facilities that is the next step, otherwise you are pretty well set. It is important not to overdo things. That is, it is better to do too few things at once than too many. In the short run this may not seem important but complications can easily arise. A mistake can be expensive as well. At first the whole procedure will seem complicated. Soon, however, it will become just another facet of life. It is difficult to foresee any end to the necessity for this task in the immediate future, but then one never can tell, After the procedure is completed one arranges the materials into different groups again. Then they can be put into their appropriate places. Eventually they will be used once more and the whole cycle will then have to be repeated. However, that is part of life.

Confronted by this task, there are two different ways of attempting to deal with the text learning. The one most students would probably try if this text was to “come up” in an exam would be to try to remember it “Word for Word”, based on repeating it over and over again with the exact words to “memorise” it. But there is a different way of learning it: read it and meanwhile try to discover what such an ambiguous text is about (in fact you may already have done this, in a deliberate fashion or otherwise). What does the text mean? What is it really referring to? What procedure is it talking about? What has to be taken from one place to another? It has been proven that the key to remembering a greater number of ideas from a text is not repeating them one by one (the causes of the decline of the Roman Empire are three, there are three… or, in music, there are seven main types of musical trills, there are seven…) but to achieve a general idea of its content, a structure of meaning through which the information contained in the text can be linked to previous knowledge which you have, which you know about the world, and more specifically, about the set contents of the text. However, to understand it, instead of simply repeating it, you have to try to relate the different phrases composing the text in a necessary or meaningful way. It is not just a question of juxta-positioning them or associating them to one another (there are three causes, there are three…) but logically linking them to one another.

It is not at all easy to understand the text above, to relate the phrases in it to one another instead of arranging them one after the other and repeating them faithfully, because the text is quite ambiguous, with no specification of what the text refers to and it is difficult to imagine a plan or idea to organise the parts that compose it. However, when we try to imagine what the text is about, we create an interpretation of it which will depend not just on what is said in it, but what we believe its content is about (classify a library? Prepare materials for an exam? Prepare a meal? Do a puzzle? Pack suitcases?). Comprehension will partly depend on the previous knowledge we activate to interpret it, and indeed, from our previous experiences with the subject matter contained in the text. Our memory and learning will be the product of the interaction between these materials and the previous knowledge we activate. Understanding is, to some extent, translating something into one’s own words, one’s own ideas, one’s own experience. This is a central idea of learning through comprehension: it is a process whereby what we learn is the product of the new information interpreted with regards to what we already know. It is not a question of reproducing information but assimilating it or integrating it into our previous knowledge, and thus changing it, and therefore learning. This is the only way we can understand and the only way to acquire new meanings or concepts.

The problem of the above text is that it is very difficult to understand because no specific experience can easily be connected. It is hard to know what it is about. In fact, when one reads the text preceded by a heading that summarises its contents, comprehension is much greater and therefore the learning more durable and transferable, since the text now makes sense. (If you are curious, you will find the title of the text in this note below¹.) It no longer appears to be a succession of juxtapositioned or disordered phrases (the reader possibly had that impression on reading it before without knowing what it was about). There is now a certain logical organisation to it, as a sequential action plan. This means the text may be explained in its own words, thus providing it with a meaning, and possibly recalling it for some time. But text recall will never be a copy of it, what is remembered will not be exactly what the text says, but the interpretation that someone has made of it.

Learning by understanding is therefore more effective since, coming back to the previously described criteria of good learning (see page XX) it produces longstanding and transferable outcomes. However, it is also more complex and difficult to achieve, since it requires a more demanding cognitive activity from the person learning to link the new information with previous knowledge, translate it into one’s own words, look for the relationship between the parts forming this information and seek their relationship or application in other contexts.

So if a text may be learned in different ways that lead to the mere literal reproduction of it or to its genuine comprehension the same occurs with “musical texts”, the musical scores. This shall be covered in detail in chapter “Reading Music: The Use of Scores in Music Learning and Teaching”. To interpret it, to transform it into sounds, the student can limit him or herself to reproducing it note for note, rather than word for word in a literary text or s/he may comprehend how that musical score is organised, what parts it is made up of and what musical meaning these parts have (note that when Beethoven composed his famous Moonlight Sonata, he did so thinking about the noblewoman aged 17 who he was in love with at the time, Gillette Guicciardi, and that although the composition was a sonata for a keyboard, it does not follow the classical structure of this type of piece).

Consequently, as we shall see in chapter “Reading Music: The Use of Scores in Music Learning and Teaching”, students may process the musical score at different levels of complexity or depth, from reproductive, note for note learning (with hardly any meaning), to comprehension of the relationships between the musical structures within the musical score (types of dialogue of two instruments in the different movements of a sonata, or contrast between voice and piano accompaniment in a Lied; how differentiated musical motifs are combined for certain instruments in programmatic compositions such as the oboe sounding like a duck in short, fast notes, or the gong played with the bow to reproduce the wind; or what relationships may be established between the harmony of a composition and its agogic and dynamic tones), thanks to the mastery of syntaxes, of the musical language in which this musical score is coded, and even knowing how to capture the historic or conceptual significance of the piece by connecting it to other musical compositions, schools or periods. We shall see that students with greater musical education generally process musical scores more deeply or significantly (chapter “Reading Music: The Use of Scores in Music Learning and Teaching”), but also that a student-centred teaching encourages a more in-depth processing of musical scores, even at early ages, and therefore better comprehension of them (chapter “The Impact of Teaching Conceptions and Practices in Early Musical Instrument Learning”).

There are not just different levels of symbolic learning in the reading of the musical scores, since interpretation requires the use of diverse musical concepts which students do not always master. Again, they sometimes tend to learn them reproductively without capturing their essence and therefore without being able to transfer them or use them correctly in new contexts which, as we have seen, is one of the demands of good learning only guaranteed through genuine comprehension. As the examples contained in Tables 1 and 2 reflect, the students are hearing about quavers, semibreves, scales, slowing down, soft notes, but also of tones, pitches, tempi, harmonies, etc. And they may learn them by simply reciting them or giving them a name or a label (“well, let’s say what the notes are here…” says the teacher in the first case, Table 1, more linked to traditional teaching) or trying for the student to give it some sort of meaning, i.e., that they relate it to some sort of musical concept (for example, understanding a musical passage composed of the same musical note repeated four times in ascending thirds) or with their own actions with the instrument (“So what can we do to make it increasingly softer?” asks the teacher in the other situation, Table 2, to which the student replies “increasingly lessening the bow work”, establishing a relationship between interpretation tempo and bow movement).

As we shall see in chapter “Early Initiation to Music Learning: Little Children Are Musicians Too”, children already have an intuitive musicality which lets them make sense, i.e., feel in their own bodies with an emotional content, of some primary musical concepts (tone, tempo or quantity of sound). However, to truly understand these concepts beyond this intuitive sense and to be able to use them flexibly in new musical contexts, they need to explicitly establish relationships between them and with their own actions. Although they feel that a slow tempo induces sadness, they should understand explicitly how that tempo is related to other musical parameters (the key, the rhythmic and harmonious density, the technical traits of their instrument, etc.), and also with their own actions with the instrument and the other components implicated in musical production, as we shall see in chapter “Learning Music by Composing: Redescribing Expressive Goals on Writing Them”. These at the very least include comprehension of emotional content which is intended to be communicated using these organised sounds, the sound which is needed to achieve that communication, the actions which should be made with the body itself to produce these sounds with the instrument and the “logic” or technique of the instrument itself, which imposes restrictions to these possible actions. (Pozo et al., 2019).

Learning music therefore requires not just learning to decode a musical score, from its most elementary levels, note for note, to the most complex ones (see chapter “Reading Music: The Use of Scores in Music Learning and Teaching”). It also mainly requires understanding that all of these symbols are not only related to one another but are also related to the way in which the body feels on interacting with the instrument to produce a sound from the musical score. Then moving beyond it, to communicate to whomever is listening to the music the emotions which the interpreter wishes to convey with it. Learning music is not just about understanding these relationships. It is mostly about being capable of converting them into actions or in terms of learning outcomes, into procedures.

3.2 Learning Procedures: From Technique to Strategy

If there is anything that characterises instrumental learning, including vocal interpretation, it is that this requires meticulous mastery of the necessary motor skills to produce the necessary sounds, depending on the technical requirements of each instrument. Whilst musical comprehension of different instrumentalists would to a large extent be shared, each instrument requires specific procedural learning, with the understanding of procedures as sequences of actions aimed at a goal. However much the musical contents of a piece are understood, a violinist would not normally be capable of producing the necessary sounds from the oboe or the piano, because each instrument requires specific techniques. This technical instrumental interpretation requirement has frequently led to technique becoming the central, if not the only objective in instrumental teaching, as we saw in chapter “Teaching Music: Old Traditions and New Approaches” from Musumeci’s characterisation (2002) of the conservatory model (also see Hallam, 1995). As we shall see in the next chapter, there are some highly popular beliefs among teachers and students that instrumental learning is principally technical and is usually centred on the automation of motor skills required for instrumental mastery.

Mastering an instrument definitely requires demanding technical expertise, and this may be understood as the carrying out of complex sequences with a high level of efficiency (without committing errors) and automation (without requiring a conscious effort). It is known that mastering a technique, whether this be a motor technique (articulation of the fingers on the fingerboard of string instruments) or cognitive (the use of vibrato depending on the desired sound and expression), generates a series of advantages from the point of view of the processing and execution of the action compared with what would be the controlled or conscious execution of these same actions, applied to learning to play the guitar, to multiplying, driving a car or making an omelette. As shown in Table 3 some of these advantages would be a faster execution, making fewer errors, hardly using any cognitive resources and therefore being able to perform in adverse emotional, cognitive or contextual conditions and free up resources for executing other tasks, with non interference in other processes or actions, resulting in the ability to carry out several parallel or simultaneous tasks. These are all characteristic traits of the expert execution in any mastery and of course also define the excellence or musical virtuosity wherein so much effort from teachers and learners lies.

Table 3 Differences between automated and controlled actions (taken from Pozo, 2014)

How can this technical mastery of an instrument be achieved? The automation and condensation of actions which characterise technical learning are gained to a large extent through repetitive learning, practicing the same sequences over and over until they are executed in automatic pilot, so to speak. This then frees up resources for other actions or mental representations. There is no doubt that technical learning is the result of practice, which as we shall see involves a great deal of motivation and as we shall also see later on, is not always easy to manage or achieve by the teacher or student. However, this does not mean to say that is necessarily a repetitive or blind practice, where the students carry out actions they do not understand or about which they cannot take decisions, but that they follow the instructions of the teacher (as seen in the case of Table 1, where the teacher says to the student “Do is high, raise the instrument, watch out for the cord change. Play it again”). It is also possible for the student to make the decisions, as shown in the example in Table 2, where the teacher asks and helps the student to make his or her own decisions. Chapter “How Teachers and Students Envisage Music Education: Towards Changing Mentalities” shows in detail how certain teaching conceptions and practices which are far removed from the most traditional ones or those of direct transmission, are precisely characterised by ceding control to the student for their own actions, to show them how to regulate their mental and motor activity whilst they interpret music, instead of acting mechanically. We shall see at the end of this same chapter how they may be helped to resolve musical problems (i.e., open tasks for which many solutions may be found) rather than carrying out simple repetitive exercises with no musical meaning, such as the scales which the Teacher in Table 1 programmes for her students without using strategies that are aimed at helping the student to assess the importance of the scales, or the relationship that these scales have with their repertoire, for example.

Returning to Table 3, we see that although technical mastery of the instrument has a series of advantages for instrumental execution that we have already mentioned, it also has major limitations, such as rigidity or lack of flexibility of automated actions, the lack of control on them or the difficulty in transferring them to new contexts or combining them with other actions to generate new patterns of execution, and all of these traits are associated with a better learning, as we saw previously. The flexibility required for a personal, expressive interpretation linked to a specific context, requires going beyond that technical dominance and reaching what is usually known as a strategic action, where strategy is defined as the deliberate and conscious use of certain actions for achieving certain goals.

To better understand the difference between a technique and a strategy as procedural learning, we can use an analogy based on the sports people and their trainers. This is another social activity which requires high technical mastery by the players but where automaticity of these techniques is not usually sufficient for the desired goals to be met. Competitive sports also require a strategic use of these techniques, normally entrusted to the trainer. These techniques need to be applied flexibly, adapting them to the requirements of a situation or a specific sports event. They are dependent on fixed goals; the strengths of the rivals; training session activities; supervision of what needs correcting (the trainer changes several players during a match), and assessment in order to adopt decisions for future occasions (why have we lost? What should we do to improve?).

This same idea would occur in procedural learning in instrumental music, where the aim for achieving an autonomous and competent student (see chapter “Instrument Mastery Through Expression: The Learning of Instrumental Technique”), is to convert them into their own trainer, making them capable of taking decisions on their expressive goals and actions which will allow them to achieve them, but also to assess their own execution and learn from their mistakes. This requires, as we shall see in the next section of this same chapter, metacognitive management of their own actions.

Thus, procedural learning implies both technical and strategic mastery of the instrumental execution. Usually, this means that the initial stages of musical education are intensively dedicated to technical learning under the direction of the teacher and it is only when the student has a good mastery of the instrument that they are allowed to begin to take decisions about their interpretation (see the critical analysis of this educational route for the acquiring of techniques in chapter “Instrument Mastery Through Expression: The Learning of Instrumental Technique”). However, as we shall see in chapter “Learning Music by Composing: Redescribing Expressive Goals on Writing Them”, other routes are available for this technical mastery, driving in the opposite direction: instead of presenting the student with blind exercises at the beginning, executed under the teacher’s supervision, the student is asked to manage their own goals from the beginning and own expressive means, conceiving music mainly as a vehicle to transmit and communicate emotions. One of the advantages of this alternative focus is that it creates another concept of music in the student—more closely linked to his or her expressive goals instead of blind repetition of motor patterns attached to many forms of learning. It also creates other attitudes, other ways of approaching musical interpretation that seem to encourage better learning than the traditional attitudes. With the latter the student mostly approaches music as frightened, if not terrorized, because of the errors s/he may commit.

3.3 Learning Attitudes: Autonomy and Self-Regulation to Overcome Stage Fright

Judging from the personal experience of many instrument students and also diverse studies that assess how musicians feel when they play their instruments, it is normally with trepidation if not pure fear that they directly confront interpretation, especially in the tradition of classical education (e.g., Perdomo-Guevara, 2014). In fact, this stage fright as an approach to music is characteristic of interpreters who are learners and also almost all children who within the framework of curricular artistic education, are forced to play an instrument. This is generally the recorder, and usually out of tune to them and no doubt to their long-suffering neighbours, since one of the most common memories of these early school experiences by adults is precisely that feeling of incompetence and fear when playing, putting in many cases a premature end to their interpretative career or their musical appreciation. Curiously in other cultures and areas of musical production other attitudes or more positive approaches predominate (Perdomo-Guevara, 2014), and this probably is connected with the different ways in which music in these contexts is learned and produced (see chapters “From Individual Learning to Cooperative Learning” and “Learning Outside the Music Classroom: From Informal to Formal Learning as Musical Learning Cultures”).

It is insecurity that feeds this stage fright or this aversive attitude towards music which, as shown in chapter “Teaching Music: Old Traditions and New Approaches”, leads to many students dropping out. This is the sensation of a lack of control over what one does, the fear of making a mistake or the harsh judgement of the teacher or public. As we shall see in chapter “How Teachers and Students Envisage Music Education: Towards Changing Mentalities”, from certain conceptions and teaching practices, much emphasis is placed on the correction of technical errors, tuning, etc., which converts interpretation into a tense struggle to get close to the established model or canon (see, for example, chapter “The Impact of Teaching Conceptions and Practices in Early Musical Instrument Learning”), where all error or deviation is penalized, as reflected also in the prevailing assessment systems (see chapter “Re-thinking How to Assess Students of Musical Instruments”). This in turn affects student motivation, which instead of being internally regulated in keeping with the expressive goals and bodily sensations, is under the control of external supervision, based on standards which students usually find difficult to achieve. The less motivated students are, or the more negative their attitudes and sensations in their approach to music, the less they will practice and the less they will play, the worse they will do so and this in turn exacerbates their fears and insecurities, with further demotivation and increasingly the student is unable to have positive emotions or a sensation of control in their music learning.

How can this truly vicious circle be broken? Although throughout Part II of the book the chapters present numerous alternatives to approaching teaching, which appear to generate more positive attitudes, letting the student enjoy the interpretation and therefore desiring it instead of escaping from it (for example, look at the case of the girl in chapter “Learning Music by Composing: Redescribing Expressive Goals on Writing Them” who through composition ends up enjoying not just the music but also mathematics!). The acquisition of these positive attitudes generally occurs from transferring control to the student. They are responsible for their own actions, providing them with enough liberty to take decisions and learn from their errors. Instead of being penalized for making the errors, the latter become a reason for reflection and learning. If instead of focusing assessment on the final product—the desired result or sound—, which is often unattainable even for the student, the focus is placed on the process—on what the student does and can do to improve their interpretation—, the student’s so-called Zone of Proximal Development (Vygotsky, 1978) may be worked upon (that which they are not yet capable of doing alone but may achieve with the help or guidance of their teacher), so that in this way we will be helping the student to feel more competent, realising they can achieve the small or progressive goals proposed. As a result they will feel more capable of achieving the objectives proposed through their endeavours.

To sum up, if we wish to help students approach music with less fear, with greater confidence in their technical and expressive resources, we have to help them become aware of their potentialities and weaknesses, to self-assess and self-regulate (see chapters “Learning Music by Composing: Redescribing Expressive Goals on Writing Them” and “Re-thinking How to Assess Students of Musical Instruments”), which implies greater awareness of the processes (emotional, cognitive, motor, social, etc.) through which, at times without knowing it, they control the production of sounds. This implies, as we shall see in chapter “How Teachers and Students Envisage Music Education: Towards Changing Mentalities”, aiming a major part of the teaching towards processes through which music may be produced instead of directly on actual products or outcomes. These processes, as we have seen before, are another of the essential components of learning in any domain, and also, obviously, in musical learning since they actually refer to the psychological activity the student is experiencing as they are learning. If we are unable to change that psychological activity, what they think, feel, imagine, expect or remember, whilst preparing the interpretation or performing, we cannot change the products or outcomes of that interpretation, which as we have seen are varied and complex (symbolic, procedural, attitudinal). The outcomes of learning are always mediated by the processes that make them possible and therefore a good part of teaching has to be aimed at making it necessary for the students to control their own learning processes, providing the essential scaffolding (Wood et al., 1976) to achieve the construction of these processes and above all, helping the students themselves to autonomously regulate and strengthen them.

4 The Processes of Music Learning

One of the traits characterizing the new approach to education in general (Pozo & Pérez Echeverría, 2009; Sawyer, 2015) and music education in particular (Brown, 2009; McPherson, 2015), is that it concentrates more on developing the capacities or competences of the student than on the learning of contents itself. The contents thus become simply a means of making meaning of those capacities (Pozo, 2016). As a result, in the case of music and in keeping with the analysis plan proposed in Fig. 1, this implies that teaching is aimed more at developing the learning processes in the students than simply gaining specific and immediate musical outcomes, on the understanding that there are processes (cognitive, metacognitive, emotional, motivational) which will make the students autonomously and self-sufficiently achieve those desired outcomes (sound, technique, stage presence, etc.).

As we shall see in the next chapter, one trait that differentiates the most complex or updated conceptions or practices from the most traditional ones in music education is precisely that of situating processes in the centre of the learning and teaching process. This does not of course dismiss the importance of these outcomes (without them a good musical interpretation would not be possible) but to design a different route in their obtainment, where the aim is not the appropriation of a repertoire (or as children say, “going over songs”) or the technical mastery of the instrument, but capacitating the student through this learning to independently produce the musical sounds required at all times.

But what are the psychological processes that the student has to learn to better control the sounds they need to express what they feel? It is not our intention to draw up an exhaustive list of these processes or the role they play in learning (see Hattie & Yates, 2014; National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, 2018; Pozo, 2008; Sloboda, 1985, 2005) but we can at least consider attention, perception, memory, learning as such, motivation, emotions and metacognitive management of learning itself.

4.1 Attention and Perception

Interpretation requires attention to many elements or stimuli simultaneously (the positioning of the hands, or of each of the fingers, body tension, the positioning of the bow, the angle of the instrument in relation to the body, the sound produced, the mouthpiece, the musical score, etc.). Unlike a computer, simultaneous processing of information is highly restricted in the human mind, the student has to learn to pay attention to the most relevant elements at each given moment.

When we observe, in keeping with the analysis system of musical practice described in chapter “SAPEA: A System for the Analysis of Instrumental Learning and Teaching Practices”, what it is the students are paying attention to whilst they play, we find there are many differences depending on the learning model to which they are exposed. There are students who whilst they play only look at the musical score, or at the face of the teacher to see how to appreciate their interpretation; some students only concentrate on the technical movements that have to execute; others, and by no means few, do not listen to the sounds they produce, because they are so tied up with following the instructions received. However there are also students who feel it in their body when they play, who compare the sound produced with the one they wish to produce (chapters “Instrument Mastery Through Expression: The Learning of Instrumental Technique”, “Learning Music by Composing: Redescribing Expressive Goals on Writing Them”, and “Learning Music Through ICT”). These are not causal differences but responses to teaching methods and specifically what their teachers ask of them and help them construct, where their attention is focused, as is so well reflected in the examples in Tables 1 and 2 (whilst the teacher Table 1 makes the child fix all their attention on the musical score, the other teacher makes him fix his attention in the relationships between what he is doing with the instrument and the sound it is capable of producing). Furthermore, this focused, educated, attention lets the students perceive the sounds differently, and if there is one thing music requires it is to learn to distinguish different tones, melodies, tempos or musical structures (Levitin et al., 2018; Reinfrow & Levitin, 2019; Tan et al., 2017), to recognize the different voices using those that the instrument can convey their emotions with. Again, this may also be trained or taught. Given the processing limitations the student is submitted to, it is impossible to simultaneously listen to or perceive of all to these nuances, and the use of technologies or mediating resources, such as recording the interpretation with a mobile to later review it, may be, as we shall see in chapter “Learning Music Through ICT”, a highly useful resource for helping to manage concentration and perception.

4.2 Memory

In addition to selective concentration and discriminatory perception of the here and now, musical interpretation also needs to be associated or related to previous experiences. It requires having a musical memory and knowing how to use it. Obviously everything the student does is conditioned by what they already know, by the famous prior knowledge of their musical memory. The question is to help them to use this knowledge optimally, establishing links between what they should do and other previous learning, between the problems they face and other problems they already resolved in the past, between the emotions they wish to convey and the ones they managed on a past occasion. The student is never a clean slate, a whiteboard with no writing. Even the youngest students, when they begin to formally learn music already have a history of musical learning, an intuitive musicality from which to begin and this we shall examine in chapter “Early Initiation to Music Learning: Little Children Are Musicians Too”.

Teaching must therefore help the student to manage this memory, to link what they are doing with previous experiences, reconstructing them to provide a new significance to what they are now doing. This is one of the traits that define what we could call an experiential focus on education. Throughout this book, the reader will find numerous examples (see the examples presented on developing the system for analysing the practice of instrumental lessons, SAPIL, in chapter “SAPEA: A System for the Analysis of Instrumental Learning and Teaching Practices”). The ways of helping the student to manage their memory can be more, or less sophisticated. As we shall see in the practice analysis model described in chapter “SAPEA: A System for the Analysis of Instrumental Learning and Teaching Practices”, this management may be based on asking the student for a literal recall of previous situations (or of notes, as required by the teacher in the example contained in Table 2) or asking more for the search for non literal similarities, which transform their memories to generate something new (as shall be seen in chapter “Learning Music by Composing: Redescribing Expressive Goals on Writing Them”, when the girl who is learning music composing evokes the soundtrack of a horror film to search how to express the intrigue in her piece).

It is therefore not just a question of the student recalling musical memories, but of transferring them to new situations or interpretation contexts. As we saw before, on reviewing the traits that define good learning, the latter has to be not just long-lasting (i.e., stay in the memory and be as accessible as possible) but also transferable (i.e., be able to be used in contexts or situations that are new). Only then can we help the student to autonomously control these problems or new situations which they will undoubtedly have to face in the future and for which their previous knowledge or experiences should be flexibly applied with their hand (or arm, elbow, back, lung, diaphragm or throat, depending on the instrument).

4.3 Learning

If in accordance with the definition we provided before on page XX, learning implies changing who we are, how we feel and what we do, then to bring about that change the student needs to manage other processes leading to it. Throughout the book, the reader will find numerous examples of the different forms of managing learning propitiated by different music teaching models. More specifically, chapter “How Teachers and Students Envisage Music Education: Towards Changing Mentalities” deals with how these models are conceived, represented and managed by both teachers and students. Here, we will limit ourselves to highlighting several classical distinctions in the Psychology of Learning, that involve clearly different ways of managing learning processes in the classrooms, and of teaching the students themselves to manage them.

For a long time the study of learning was linked to behaviourism, which assumed that learning was basically changing behaviour or obvious actions, but nowadays it is assumed that learning should mainly produce mental changes, in cognitive processes and representations, like those mentioned here. Although behaviourism is clearly declining in theory and practice (especially in educational contexts) (Hattie & Yeats, 2014; Pozo, 2014; Sawyer, 2015) it continues to survive greatly in our classrooms and also in music classrooms, since there are many teachers who still have naive behaviourist conceptions regarding the processes of learning, as we shall see in chapter “How Teachers and Students Envisage Music Education: Towards Changing Mentalities”, and they take it for granted that the student’s function is to make a more or less exact copy of the interpretation provided to them by a model. If the student is able to faithfully reproduce the overt behaviour or actions of the model (whether this is the teachers themselves, a video or a canonical interpretation of the composition) then the student has learned.

Another distinction contrasts implicit learning processes (when we learn without realising what we are doing), which lead to the reproduction of habits and behaviour (and we thus acquire a good part of our social attitudes, stereotypes, emotional responses or behaviour patterns), from explicit learning processes, which force us to be aware of what we are learning and how we are learning, since only then can we change and control (Pozo, 2014). Whilst stage fright or a passive attitude may be learned implicitly, changing them requires making this learning explicit or previous experiences explicit in order to reconstruct them. Whilst intuitive musicality which children have when they formally approach learning music (see chapter “Early Initiation to Music Learning: Little Children Are Musicians Too”) has been acquired implicitly, to change it and reconstruct it they have to make it explicit. In other words, they have to convert it into a symbolic code where they can express it. This is something musical languages can help with if used appropriately (see chapter “Reading Music: The Use of Scores in Music Learning and Teaching”) as can ICT (Information and Communication Technologies) if used as didactic resources aimed at redescribing or reconstructing the actual previous experiences and implicit learning (chapter “Learning Music Through ICT”), which largely constitute that musical memory we mentioned previously.

One final distinction established by the Psychology of Learning which is highly relevant for our proposals and matches the previous ones (Pozo, 2014), refers to the difference between associative learning processes (in psychological jargon, it is most common to speak of repetitive or even “memoristic” learning) and the constructive learning processes (or also comprehensive or meaningful learning). Going back to the previous examples, we found how the teacher of the episodes from Table 1 insists that her student “memorises” the names of the notes, driven more by repetitive learning, whilst the other teacher places emphasis on the fact that the student links his actions to the sound he produces, that he understands why he obtained that sound and how it could be improved upon. As we shall see several times in the book and we illustrated some pages ago using the text we asked the reader to learn (the title of which I am sure you still recall), repetitive learning (word for word or note for note) produces poorer learning outcomes in general (less long-lasting and transferrable) than understanding. This does not mean to say that it is not necessary for this literal learning to take place in some cases, but as we shall see throughout the book limiting all learning to the student reproducing and copying usually has negative consequences not just for the learning but also for motivation and the student’s own self-esteem.

4.4 Motivation

Another essential process that intercedes in all situations of learning and teaching is motivation. Since, according to the definition presented some pages ago, learning requires practice and instrumental learning requires a lot of practice, no intentional learning can be achieved without effort and of course one cannot learn an instrument if there is no interest in doing so. What types of reasons can the student have for making an effort to learn music and in what way can the teachers promote or, in contrast, reduce the motivation of the students to learn?

If we pay attention to etymology, motivating means moving towards something, aiming at a goal (Pozo, 2008). What goals can the students have for studying music in the afternoon, after school, when they could be chatting to their friends or playing their favourite video game? In the traditional model, as we have been analysing, the goal of many students directly controlled by their teachers through assessment, was to be successful, not to fail, to do what was asked of them so as not to have to repeat it. Often the teachers try to uphold these motives by “threatening” the student with the risk of failure, either in a test or an audition in front of the parents (“what will they say”). In chapter “Teaching Music: Old Traditions and New Approaches” we saw how Carlos, that imaginary and imagined student had to drag himself into the conservatory to ensure himself of success or avoid failure. We also saw how Musumeci (2002) spoke about the anxiety, if not anguish, of Nacho, another student, who may have been imaginary, when faced with a test or an exam. The bad taste in his mouth Nacho was literally left with due to this test will hardly help to make music a pleasure for him. It is worth bearing in mind that here the student will only make an effort and practice if he feels newly threatened.

For this reason, contrary to what some people think, the common strategy of this model for motivating students by increasing demands will not succeed in making Nacho or Carlos study or practise more, let alone learn more. Anyone who has walked through the corridors and classrooms of a conservatory could provide several examples of this strategy, the film Whiplash took this to extremes, where fear of making mistakes and failure became the only driver in achieving musical perfection. The fallacy of the so-called “work effort culture” is that it takes it for granted that the higher the demand the higher the motivation and effort by the student. But relationships between motivation and learning are far more complex (Hallam, 2009). Demanding more, without adjusting those demands to the student’s context and abilities, without redirecting goals from immediate success to genuine learning, will possibly only achieve that the student’s anxiety, and fear of failure increases (Sternbach, 2008; Wilson & Roland, 2002) and that they disconnect even more, that they feel less competent and with it, less interested. And worst of all, as everyone who has given up on their studies knows, they will detest music.

However, there is another way of driving motivation to learn music. We also saw in the example of Carlos that, unlike the conservatory experience, in the group he played in with his friends he was driven to achieve the goals set by himself and his companions. Compared with the external goals fixed by the teacher, through extrinsic motivation, with his friends Carlos learned music for intrinsic reasons that he himself established and regulated. We now know that when it is the student him or herself who fixes the goals of learning, who manages motives, when learning is sustained by an intrinsic motivation rather than an extrinsic one it tends to promote more significant or constructive learning than when the student is limited to achieving goals fixed by others (Alonso Tapia, 2005; Covington, 1998). If, as we saw, motivating oneself is etymologically moving towards something, it is the goals that to a great extent move the student. If the student enjoys the music, and what s/he is doing to produce it, s/he will approach the instrument. If not, then, as we saw before, s/he experiences the interpretation with anxiety, feeling fear of making a mistake, avoiding committing them and whenever possible creating distance with the instrument.

But what can the teacher then do to drive these goals when it is the student who should fix and manage them? We could think that the alternative to this model of traditional motivation based on appraisal and fear of making a mistake, is to let the students do what they want, and that to motivate them the class must be fun, that if they have a good time they will therefore be interested in learning. According to this idea, partly supported by the woolly principles of positive psychology, for the student to be interested it is enough to create more “friendly” contexts,” making them feel good and enjoying what they are doing.

It is a necessary starting point, but focusing on the students’ interests is insufficient. They do not need music teaching for this. They need to be helped to construct new goals from their old ones, and from their interests and musical tastes, helped to change them, to reconstruct them. Claxton (1984) said that to motivate is to change someone’s priorities. But we cannot and should not change those priorities directly. What we can do is design activities so that they feel the need to change their interests, from the most immediate or pragmatic, here and now, to construct new epistemic goals, aimed at true learning, which transcends their initial interests and therefore makes them feel the desire to learn. In chapter “Learning Music by Composing: Redescribing Expressive Goals on Writing Them” there is an example of how a girl who is learning music through composition starts with these pragmatic, immediate goals (expressing a desired emotion) but how through the teacher’s mediation, these goals become transformed and the girl ends up becoming interested in musical scores and even mathematics! These are because it is the only way to achieve the expressive goals she had proposed. Similar examples may be found in other chapters of this book as well (e.g., chapters “The Impact of Teaching Conceptions and Practices in Early Musical Instrument Learning”, “Instrument Mastery Through Expression: The Learning of Instrumental Technique” or “From Individual Learning to Cooperative Learning”).

In the end changing priorities is changing desires, and in this case constructing the desire to continue learning, and it is therefore difficult to disconnect those goals from how the student feels whilst learning music, in their emotional management of the situation.

4.5 Emotion

Although the essential aim of music is to incite emotions in people, it is significant that only recently has there been an interest in discovering how students manage their emotions whilst they are learning music. As happens in general with formal learning, there has been a tendency to assume that learning is a cold experience, a rational rather than an emotional experience (Pozo, 2016) and that the emotions, if activated during learning, tend to interfere with rather than benefit it. In fact, this is quite a common idea among teachers of different areas (Bächler & Pozo, 2016), who in the best of cases tend to believe that inducing positive emotions with a “good class atmosphere” tends to create favourable conditions for good learning but that emotions as such do not form part of the process of learning itself.

However, as with other teaching conceptions about learning and education (see chapter “How Teachers and Students Envisage Music Education: Towards Changing Mentalities”), this conception which is upheld by a cultural tradition that tends to separate reason from emotion (Claxton, 2015; Pozo, 2017) is being brought into question by recent theories on the role of emotions in cognition in general and in learning in particular (Bächler & Pozo, 2016). In fact, as we have just seen, it is impossible to intentionally learn without motivation and it is impossible to motivate without feeling emotion. Emotions are therefore always central in the drive to learning and all the more so in the case of learning music, the final goal of which is to convey emotions.

When a teacher links effort to something done badly, something that must be corrected, when they penalise errors, as do so many teachers who ask their students to repeat something that has gone wrong ten times, until they do it right, or like the famous “tiger mother” (Chua, 2011) forcing her daughter to continue practicing every day until everything was correct, even though this went on until the early hours of the morning, learning is controlled from negative emotions (anxiety, fear or making mistakes etc.). This will lead to the infamous stage fright. In contrast, at the end of the first episode, contained in Table 2, the teacher helps the student to manage his learning from emotions with a positive bent (“let’s see if you can tell me something you have improved from last week”). This does not prevent them from fixing goals, from forcing them to come out of their comfort zone with this positive evaluation (Teacher: “ah!, I liked that. Did you like the sound? Student: I was going at it really hard and very close to the bridge; Teacher: OK.. Shall we try something to improve it?”). The teacher does not reject or react negatively to what the student has done and does not give precise instructions so that they do it well, like the other teacher does. (Table 1: “The Do is high, raise the instrument, watch out for the chord change. Play it again.” The student plays it again, this time without mistakes.) Negative judgment is reserved, and the student is encouraged to assess their own execution so that from their emotional response, they can improve interpretation.

Later we shall see how different forms of teaching (chapters “The Impact of Teaching Conceptions and Practices in Early Musical Instrument Learning” and “The Choir Conductor: Interpreter or Maestro?”, for example) or different musical learning cultures (chapter “Learning Outside the Music Classroom: From Informal to Formal Learning as Musical Learning Cultures”) manage the emotion of learning differently. Furthermore, in chapter “Instrument Mastery Through Expression: The Learning of Instrumental Technique” we shall see how this control of the emotions, linked to learning and to musical interpretation in itself, form part of the keystone of instrumental learning. Thus, part of the teaching is to help the student to become aware of their emotions in learning music, learning to regulate them and finally, to handle them in a metacognitive way (Pozo et al., 2019).

4.6 Metacognition

In each of the processes we have been reviewing, not just for emotions, we have shown that the essential goal of learning while managing them is not just to make them visible but also to train the student to manage them alone with a certain degree of autonomy. This capacity to recognize and regulate the actual psychological processes to improve learning is called metacognition (knowledge about knowledge itself) and is now considered essential for learning not just music (Hallam, 2001) but any other learning area (Panadero, 2017; Schunk & Greene, 2017).

The general idea is that music education should extend further than outcomes (sound, technique, stage presence), improving the way in which the student processes the music (what they pay attention to, how they perceive it, what they recall and memorize, what they do to learn, how they are motivated and how they manage their emotions whilst they play and learn), and should also ensure that it is the student who metacognitively manages or self-regulate each of these processes. The student must concentrate on what they should do; probes into their own perception of the music produced; search their memory aids to understand better what they are doing or evoke other possible actions; decide what should be done to improve learning; fix their goals and assess to what degree they are achieved, and regulate their emotional responses to help fix new goals, etc. (see chapter “Instrument Mastery Through Expression: The Learning of Instrumental Technique” in detail).

As we shall see in chapter “How Teachers and Students Envisage Music Education: Towards Changing Mentalities”, many teachers who consider that learning these processes must play a major role in the definition of their goals or objectives and in their teaching strategies to be used in their classes, continue to think that they, as teachers, are the ones who should regulate these processes and they give no autonomy to their students to take any decisions, partly from fear of errors and partly because they are incapable of doing so. A metacognitive education involves empowerment, supporting students to become active agents of their own learning (Wiggins, 2016), to take decisions on their own goals of learning, on the actions they can carry out to achieve them and the degree to which they have been reached. Three essential sub-processes are usually established in metacognitive learning (Pozo, 2008):

• Planning: this is fixing leaning goals and the means to obtain them prior to initiating the task. In the traditional teacher-centred and musical-content-centred teaching model, the teacher decides what has to be done and what the objective is. In the more student-centred teaching, which promotes metacognitive control, the student is taught to establish their own goals and to decide how to achieve them. In the previous examples it was clearly seen that the teacher in Table 1. always tells the student what he has to do; in contrast, the other teacher questions the student, inviting him to search for his own answers. But as we can see the teacher does not leave him alone, she guides him towards the most effective goals and means to improve his interpretation. Later on, when dealing with the conditions in this chapter, we shall see how this guiding approach is much more complex than the traditional role of conveying instructions and monitoring their compliance and how it leads to a genuine change in both teacher conceptions (chapter “How Teachers and Students Envisage Music Education: Towards Changing Mentalities”) and in the teacher’s own professional identity.

• Supervision or regulation: Once the goals have been fixed (what sound we wish to achieve, or what emotion we wish to communicate) and the means to achieve them (breathing, position, attack, tempo, etc.) these actions must be executed with supervision as to whether what is being done fits in with the proposed plan or not and assessing any deviations from it. Usually it is the teacher who is supervising (or “correcting”) the position of the student, their actions (Table 1: “The Do is high, raise the instrument, watch out for the chord change. Play it again”). As shown by López-Íñiguez and Pozo (2016) when analysing good practices in music teaching, some teachers continuously interrupt what the student does, correcting them each time an error is committed, whilst others leave the students to complete the piece and then start verbally interacting with them to help them supervise their own actions (this is the case of the teacher of Table 2., who starts a dialogue with the student on what he has just done, and the student says “I was going at it very hard and very close to the bridge”).The student is learning to metacognitively manage their own learning and over and above this, their musical interpretation to the extent that they learn to supervise and regulate what they do, comparing their goals, since only so can they improve it themselves. This metacognitive management, as we have seen, affects all the processes mentioned: the student has to concentrate on essential aspects; they have to perceive the sound as it is produced, but also their body expression whilst they do this. They have to search in their memory for other experiences which help them to understand, by comparison, what is happening. They have to think of other possible actions which allow them to learn or to change what they have done, applying new goals and regulating their own emotions. Once again, as we shall see, the function of the teacher in this model is to guide the student through this process of metacognitive reflexion and regulation.

• Evaluation: as we shall see in chapter “Re-thinking How to Assess Students of Musical Instruments”, assessment fulfils a very important function in formal music education because when it is well designed, it provides the student with essential feedback on what is happening in the classroom. In an accreditation assessment culture (aimed at deciding if the student has or has not obtained the established standards), for example like that usually predominating in conservatories, it is the teacher’s responsibility and obligation to appraise. However, as occurs with the other components of metacognition, planning and supervision, from another perspective closer to a formative assessment culture (Martín, 2009), you have to help the student to learn to self-assess, to decide whether they have achieved the goals proposed or not and what they may do to improve (see chapter “Re-thinking How to Assess Students of Musical Instruments”), in sum to be agentive. Since most of the time the student practices in absence of the teacher, it is really important to help them supervise and assess what they are doing (chapter “Instrument Mastery Through Expression: The Learning of Instrumental Technique”), because if not, it is possible that a large part of that practise is contributing to consolidating actions which then need to be modified or relearned, and this is usually more costly. In addition, it is also important to teach them to regard assessment as a guide to learning, which instead of penalizing these errors, leads to them understanding that detecting them and thinking about them is the only way to learn and improve.

Finally, encouraging students in the ability to plan their actions before executing them, in supervising whilst they execute them and then assessing what has been achieved requires designing a different type of teaching activities, and above all requires the teacher adopt different functions to the traditional ones, i.e., that also require rethinking as well what we have called learning conditions.

5 Learning Conditions in Instrumental Music

According to the learning situation analysis plan presented in Fig. 1, if we wish to achieve the lasting and transferable change that learning is all about in our students we have to decide what we wish to change, i.e., what outcomes we wish to achieve, and what psychological processes are required to help the student activate and achieve these desired changes. However, in reality, our tool as teachers, trainers or even as learners for activating and managing these processes leading to these outcomes is to modify practice, the activities through which these processes must be activated to facilitate those outcomes. However, as we have already seen, and luckily for the students we can clearly affirm that nobody from outside can directly activate these processes. We cannot concentrate or remember or feel for them. What we can do is create the conditions so that they feel, concentrate on, are motivated by, recall or learn music. However, as we have seen, there are different processes leading to different outcomes, and so too are there different conditions, different types of practice for learning/teaching, promoting different processes and therefore also promoting different music learning. In chapter “SAPEA: A System for the Analysis of Instrumental Learning and Teaching Practices” we will study these relationships between outcomes, processes and conditions in detail in the classroom practice, but we know that there are some variables of that practice which are critical for music learning.

5.1 The Effect of Practice Quantity

The effect of practice quantity on learning is one of the most highly studied variables.. In our case this is the number of hours the student practises with the instrument. Although initially it is assumed that there is a lineal relationship between the quantity of practice and the outcomes of learning—i.e., that every increase in practice would lead to a proportionate improvement in performance—we now know that the relationship is more complex, but that in the long run, it can continue to be maintained that the more the practice the better the performance, particularly in the area of instrumental practice that requires large amounts of practice. Beyond the magic number of 10,000 h of practice required for expertise in any mastery (Ericsson et al., 1993), it is absolutely true that the variable which best predicts expert performance in any domain, be it chess, medical diagnosis or music, is the amount of practice (Chi, 2006). If we ensure that a student practices a lot, we can be sure they will also learn a lot (although as we shall see later, there are also differences in quality between the types of practice: there are hours of practice which in the long run count more than others, there are ways of practicing with which one learns better). However, as we have seen, for students to maintain that effort, these hours of practice at ages where there are many other stimuli, goals and projects, we have to make them activate certain processes (motivational, emotional, learning in itself) which we cannot take for granted. How can we get students to practise more?

Here we are facing the problem of motivation, the main process underlying the time the student dedicates to practising with the instruments, or rather a problem of lack of motivation, lack of desire to improve or learn. Often when instrumental learning is not obligatory this demotivation leads to giving up (in statutory education, particularly secondary, lack of motivation is more pronounced, since it is not possible to dropout) but in other situations it leads to insufficient but constant practice, which makes learning difficult. How can we help the student to practise more? Faced with this problem of lack of motivation, in our educational culture in general, recently the so-called “work effort culture” has been established. As we have seen before, this is the idea that the more effort the student puts in, the more that is to be demanded of them. It is a simple type of law, a false learning equation dictating that the more we demand of the student the more they will learn (Pozo, 2016).

But this equation, as it has been already mentioned, is empirically false since there are already many data that refute it, and it is also theoretically incorrect, because today we know quite well why this does not work (e.g., Alonso Tapia, 2005; Covington, 1998). As we have seen, motivation like any other psychological process cannot be controlled from outside the body and mind of the student. All we can do is generate more motivating conditions. The latter appear to be more closely linked to the student finding meaning in what they learn, in his or her dual acceptance of making it significant and feeling it in their own body, Instead of forcing him or herself to reach certain levels of high performance due to fear of failure, the student is more motivated when s/he can fix individual goals s/he believes s/he is capable of achieving, instead of confronting huge waves of demand s/he feels incompetent about, or tasks that do not make sense. If we want the students to practice musical interpretation more (or reading, or mathematical calculation or scientific research or tennis), instead of threatening them with the flames from hell (or failure, or what their parents will think or whoever is listening to the concert), we have to ensure that they enjoy playing, reading or researching. This is the first step to learning. However, it will not suffice. The way in which they practice has to also promote improved learning.

5.2 The Effect of Practice Type: From Repetition to Reflection

As we have just seen, the probability of the student practicing more or less also depends on how they practice. Going back to the distinction established before when we referred to the learning processes, repetitive, blind, meaningless practice not only leads to poorer learning than constructive and reflexive practice—i.e., less long-lasting and transferrable outcomes-, it is also less motivating or if preferred, more difficult to maintain. The reason is clear: it is not only that the more interested and involved the student is the more they will learn, but also that the more they learn, the more interested and involved they will be. This is a two-way relationship of learning and motivation which mutually offers feedback to one another (which is also why the opposite occurs, the less motivated the less the student learns and the less they learn the less they are motivated, until they give up altogether).

As a result, those conditions or activities, which encourage constructive or reflexive learning, unlike repetitive learning, would promote more lasting and transferable learning, because it is also more probable that the practice is further sustained over time. Going back to the now remote Tables 1 and 2 we can find examples of the type of practice each teacher promotes. In the episodes of Table 1. the teacher proposed closed tasks (giving orders: say the notes, play according to their instructions and corrections, etc.) and that they should play it repetitively (“play it again, Sam”). In contrast the teaching style of the teacher who guides the student in Table 2 is really different: instead of giving orders or instructions she asks questions. Instead of proposing closed tasks, she proposes open tasks where the student has to take decisions, manage their technical, cognitive, etc. resources and this promotes reflexive practice rather than repetitive practice. Metacognitive control is required by the student of his or her own learning.

The processes which a teacher who adopts this teaching style or conception (see chapter “How Teachers and Students Envisage Music Education: Towards Changing Mentalities”) promotes are really different from those adopted by the more traditional teacher. The former tends to use a different type of activities in the classroom: asking or suggesting, offering the student greater autonomy and helping them to confront their own mistakes, instead of pointing them out and correcting them (López-Íñiguez & Pozo, 2016). Beyond musical learning there is a classical distinction in psychology which helps one understand the difference between activities or tasks which are proposed by one or another type of teacher. This is the distinction between exercises (understood as closed tasks, which offer a single solution which has to be reached by a well-trodden route, without the need to take any decision over and above that of applying the established sequence) and problems (open activities, which allow several possible routes towards their solution, and even several possible solutions, which require the student to take decisions on the best way of confronting the task) (Pérez Echeverría, 2004). In terms of the previously analysed outcomes, whilst the exercise promotes superficial symbolic or technical learning, the problems promote meaningful and strategic learning.

Although it is unusual to speak of musical exercises or problems, unlike in other domains such as the sciences or mathematics, when students are faced with open musical activities which require fixing their own expressive goals, choosing the technical resources to reach them, supervising those actions and assessing them, totally different patterns of interpretation are observed than when they are limited to mechanically applying a pre-established plan of action to a mere musical exercise, which is usually understood as the interpretation from a simple or well-known musical score (Torrado et al., 2016, also see chapter “Instrument Mastery Through Expression: The Learning of Instrumental Technique”). The students carry out a more sensitive and personal interpretation, but also more technically tighter, when the activity requires a metacognitive control of their actual interpretation, instead of mechanically following previously fixed instructions. One of the ways of converting closed tasks to open activities, converting exercises into problems is to promote learning spaces of dialogue and even cooperation instead of listening solely to the voice of the teacher in the music classroom.

5.3 The Social Organisation of Learning: From Monologue to Dialogue and Cooperation

Something which most clearly reflects the differences between educational practises in the music classrooms is student participation. Going back to previous examples, in the Episodes of Table 1, you can barely hear the student’s voice. In Table 2, genuine dialogues are shown, where both student and teacher take it in turns to speak, and the student’s voice is not only listened to but encouraged, sought through the continuous questions the teacher asks. This seems to be a trait which identifies student-centred musical teaching (López-Íñiguez & Pozo, 2016). The voice of the student is called for, converting the teacher’s monologue into a genuine dialogue, to help the student redescribe their own experiences and actions through symbolic codes (words but also gestures or visual representations provided for by new technologies) (Pozo et al., 2019; also see chapter “Instrument Mastery Through Expression: The Learning of Instrumental Technique”).

Obviously, these dialogues reflect asymmetrical conversations whereby, as we shall shortly see, the teachers must assume new roles, new functions, but continue guiding the student towards new learning goals to aim for. The teacher’s work does not disappear; it becomes more complex when its function is to help construct the student’s voice without converting it into the teacher’s ventriloquist doll.

Another type of dialogue which occurs in the music classroom, but less frequently, involves not talking with the teacher but with other students. Due to its technical bent—more focused on exercise than solutions to musical problems—instrumental music teaching remains to a large extent individual or dyadic. However, the actual interpretation of the music is produced almost always in the most complex social group contexts, which require coordination with other interpreters. As we shall see in detail in chapter “From Individual Learning to Cooperative Learning”, group learning does not always imply dialogue, since at times it is so hierarchical that it is almost monological. However, in its most complex but effective forms, music learning should promote truly cooperative learning, i.e., situations in which one learns not just with others but through others. It is known that metacognitive control and constructive learning as well as several types of social learning, are encouraged when they are cooperative rather than individual or competitive (Monereo & Durán, 2002). However, for this to occur, the tasks set have to be open. It is not a question of reproducing a pre-produced sound but of searching for solutions to new musical problems (also see chapter “From Individual Learning to Cooperative Learning”). If previously programmed actions are reproduced, it is of no help to complete them with others, but if planning, supervising or assessing how to deal with the interpretation of a piece is the case, then cooperative dialogue between a number of voices not only helps to multiply perspectives by finding more and better solutions than an individual response, but also to express optimisation of each of these alternatives better and therefore understand them better. Cooperation does not only add voices, it multiplies them.

5.4 The New Teaching Roles or Functions: From Trainer to Guide

All the dimensions or variables of the practices we mentioned regarding the conditions that favour one or another type of learning, sooner or later become the teacher’s responsibility—the person who has to take decisions on what learning they wish to promote and how they wish to achieve it. The main variable, therefore, in bringing change to music classrooms is the teaching mentality. It is not a question, or only a question of acquiring new teaching resources, new techniques or strategies to apply in the classroom, but of changing conceptions regarding what it means to teach and learn instrumental music, as we shall see in detail in chapter “How Teachers and Students Envisage Music Education: Towards Changing Mentalities”.

Indeed, the new teaching practices which have been outlined in this chapter in the form of conditions, but which are developed in detail throughout the whole of Part II, the nucleus of this book, imply new teaching functions, or if preferred a new teaching identity. This is summarised to a large extent in Table 1 in chapter “Teaching Music: Old Traditions and New Approaches”. in the previous chapter (p. XX), which illustrates the different roles of functions that may be adopted by a teacher depending on the teaching model they select. Does the reader recall them? Perhaps you recall that in the new learning culture the teachers, in the terminology of Claxton (1990), should stop acting as petrol station attendants (filling up the student’s knowledge tank) or watchmakers (minutely adjusting the student’s technical actions) and should behave like sherpas, guides who accompany the student in their journey towards knowledge, helping them achieve their goals—returning to the idea of the intrinsic motivation suggested some pages ago—, leaving the student him or herself to take decisions, but always closely supported by the teacher.

Of course, this guiding function is much more complex than that of a finished musical knowledge transmitter. It is not enough to know how to play an instrument or have musical knowledge to be able to help the student acquire it as well. The teacher has to know how to guide and this, as we have pointed out, requires not only acquiring new teaching strategies but assuming a new role, providing appropriate teaching aids to match the student’s capabilities. Speaking of constructing knowledge, Bruner himself (Wood et al., 1976), who later was involved in identifying these new teaching roles, coined the term scaffolding to define this teaching function. Guiding the student is going a little bit ahead of them, anticipating the difficulties they may have, constructing scaffolding—formed by a set of teaching aids, or activities, or in our terms, conditions—from which to construct the musical knowledge of the student. However, once this has been constructed, the scaffolding, the aids, must be removed so that the student may autonomously manage their own musical actions and their own interpretation. Another way of expressing this comes from the famous concept by Vygotsky (1978), which is that these aids should form the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) of the student. In other words it should be something the student can do if we provide the necessary aids, but which they are not yet able to do alone if we remove them (for probing into this concept see, e.g., Kozulin et al., 2003, or Lacasa, 1994). In this sense, to programme activities in the ZPD of the students requires posing challenges that exceed theircurrent capacity, converting those activities into real musical problems that they can only solve by using the cognitive and emotional resources they possess, together with the scaffolding offered through the teaching mediation. As these aids are taken on board and the student can use them autonomously, new ZPD will appear in which to deploy the action of teaching.

6 Conclusion: The Need to Change the Design of Learning and teaching Music

To conclude this chapter, we can refer to an old saying that again reflects common sense on teaching, i.e., these traditional forms that must be amended if we wish for music learning to play a more major role in the students’ personal development in today’s society. The proverb goes “to each his own”, i.e., his own teaching techniques or resources, acquired through craft or experience, rather than formally or academically, at least in the case of instrumental music teaching. This book’s aim, to improve the learning and teaching of music, does not require giving up one’s own way of doing things so much as amending it, being aware of what one does, how one does it and why one does it and trying to contrast it with other models or approaches, as will be shown in chapter “Instrumentalist Teacher Training: Fostering the Change Towards Student-Centered Practices in the Twenty-First Century”. If student learning is yielding metacognitive management of actions, representations, and bodily sensations, the same should occur with teacher training. Only by knowing and rethinking what we are can we change. A first step towards this may be becoming aware of the different conceptions held by teachers and students on learning and teaching music, and this is the objective of the following chapter.