Transcript My Comments
24.
25.
26.
A: I think I would sometimes. A lot of pieces … might not suit it especially, something more classical or strictly based but with the contemporary stuff and jazz as well, which is very much my favourite style … after playing through how I would originally. I think it might be even more effective on pieces that I’ve already got to grips with and played a lot and visualizing in my head and being free with movement to help myself express them would be interesting to do. Perhaps we can try some of the exercises with another piece sometime?
M: Yes, that would be great. I’ll think about how I can incorporate that into my research plan. Well, thank you very much Alex, we have to finish there. Is there anything you would like to say before I turn the recorder off?
A: Just that, I definitely would not have been able to have done the movement exercises without your help because it’s interesting to feel free with your body and a lot of people wouldn’t know actually how to do that. So, it’s good to have an expert, especially just with the breathing and the actual connections … to hear it said to you makes it much clearer because you might not actually be doing it very well if you are trying to do it on your own. So, thanks for that.
Descriptive: He seems unconvinced of the movement method. He mentions that it would not be suitable with certain types of music but seems to be open to trying it with others. Suggests that it may be effective on pieces he already knows. He relates the method to helping him to express his ideas better with pieces he already knows.
Conceptual: Why does he
think the method is suited to some pieces of music and not others?
Descriptive: He talks about
needing guidance with the movement exercises. He mentions that feeling free in the body is not always something musicians experience easily, especially in connection with playing the piano.
Conceptual: Is his reference to ‘feeling free’ related to the bodily restraint of his experience of established classical music
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performance training?
In dialogue unit 24, Alex talked about his experience in general, about applying the movement/music exercises to his tool bag of practice methods. He said, ‘a lot of pieces might not suit it, especially something classical or strictly based’ and recounted that it might be more suited to ‘contemporary stuff and jazz’. This would have been something that I would have liked to discuss further but due to lack of time we had to bring the interview to a close before we could explore this in more detail. Although he mentioned that he might find the movement exercises more useful in further exploring pieces that he had already learnt and performed: perhaps by increasing awareness of dynamic control and balance or by enhancing the clarity of the shape of a phrase. He talked about ‘visualizing and being free with the movement’ and that to do this with more confidence he would prefer to use the movement exercises with pieces he had ‘already got to grips with’.
To round up the interview, Alex talked about his experience of the social interaction between himself and me as the facilitator. In dialogue unit 26, he said that ‘I definitely would not have been able to have done the movement exercises without your help’. This seemed to suggest that he experienced a sense of interaction with the environment and an awareness of accommodating to the surroundings and other people. In this way, he seemed to experience the complexity of the situation as a whole. In this extract, Alex gave me another set of themes to consider:
choice of music to work with movement exercises; application;
stages of the learning/preparation process to introduce movement exercises; Somatic Movement exercises as complementary methods;
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co-creative relationships; and learner autonomy.
So far, I have established a set of emergent themes within the transcript. In the next section, I develop a chart of how I think these fit together. In line with IPA methods, I discarded some of those which do not seem important at this stage and fell outside the scope of my central research question. Essentially, I looked for a means of identifying patterns in the emergent themes and produced a structure that allowed me to point to the most significant aspects of Alex’s account and how they related to each other.
7.3.1 Searching for patterns in emergent themes
In order to identify patterns between the emergent themes in Alex’s account, I developed what can be called super-ordinate themes. These involve putting related themes together and developing a new name for the cluster (Smith, Flowers and Larkin 2009: 96).
In Alex’s account, there were series of themes around his experience of flow: ‘how phrases are connected’, ‘finding the flow in the music’, guiding and adjusting releases of energy’, ‘connecting with composer’s intentions and ‘making, keeping a grasp of and realizing musical intentions’. There were also themes around his experience of embodying musical concepts and ideas through movement and kinaesthetic and visual imagery: ‘how feelings about the music can be expressed kinaesthetically, ‘development of self-awareness – feeling comfortable in one’s own skin as a performer’, a sense of ease’, ‘embodying concepts of shaping phrases’, sense of agency, and ‘an aid to memorization’. Furthermore, there were themes around his experience of challenges: ‘initial distraction’, ‘loose connections’, ‘maintaining equilibrium’, ‘process of change’, ‘clarity of musical phasing ideas’, uniting techniques and expression and ‘transformation’. In addition, there were themes that expressed his experience of application and autonomy: ‘free choice’, ‘application’, ‘slowing things down – not a quick fix’, ‘preparing to perform’, ‘social interaction’, co-creative relationships and ‘performer/learner autonomy’.
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At this stage of the analysis, it was clear from the emerging themes that Alex experienced the benefits and some of the challenges of a Somatic Movement approach to music-making tasks such as practising and performing musical phrasing. As an overview, Table 7.1 illustrates the four super-ordinate themes that emerged from the main study analysis.
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Table 7.1 Super-ordinate themes and themes from Alex’s account