SETTING UP AN EXPERIMENT

An experiment in this sensitive area need not be a paltry or inconsequential exercise, provided that the assumptions behind it are musically valid. For musicians and teachers it is of some importance to know whether and how to organise audience-listening and to find out—not simply presume—if the reported experience of my colleague with the choral piece has qualities in common with a listening audience, including those students in school and college. Given a potentially rich musical experience, might they share his sense of a receding desert and growing pools of water?

Before setting off to gather data of any kind we need possession of a map, in this case a theory of musical knowledge to guide us, however provisional and roughly drafted. Fortunately I happen to have one, though so far I have presented it only as an outline, a sketch, consisting of a description of the layers of musical perception and response. These identifiable strands of musical experience constitute in our minds its essential fabric, each of which can be a focus for analysis: materials, expression, form and value. Although intuitive knowledge of music may comprise a response in all four layers fused together simultaneously, they can be separated out for the purpose of analysis.

The main hypothesis is that musical knowledge is essentially acquaintance knowledge—knowledge of. We might therefore predict that repeated exposure to the same piece of music is likely to increase our knowledge of it, even if no further information is given. With the dimensions of musical knowledge in mind, we might also be more specific in predicting that-given repeated opportunities to listen—a musical performance will come to be heard differently, perhaps as more clearly expressive and possibly more or less varied and complex. There may also be changes in our impressions of sound quality, perhaps in terms of brilliance and thickness (materials) and possibly certain modifications in value attitudes, perhaps perceiving hearing the music as more of a good than a bad experience, more oasis than desert or indeed, the reverse. Familiarity can breed contempt as well as foster positive insights. However, the main aim of this experiment is not to ascertain levels of preference, ‘taste’, or liking. That is a well-trodden road (for example, Bartlett 1973, Bradley 1971, Wapnick 1976, Sluckin et al. 1982 and Hargreaves 1984). Just now I am interested not so much in how music is received but how it is perceived.

We have an awkward experimental problem at the outset. As John Sloboda reminds us, it is very difficult to get into the mind of a music-listener.

The principal problem facing the student of listening processes is to find a valid way of tapping the moment-to-moment history of mental involvement with the music.

(Sloboda 1985)

For a listener to give any kind of account of what is going on in music is to divert attention to some extent from the music itself, to move away from the direct intuitive experience of music to secondary or extrinsic analysis. Asking for a response in words is certainly problematic, relying on linguistic abilities which may not always adequately reveal levels of musical discernment and richness of response. In an effort to catch glimpses of the ‘moment-to-moment history of mental involvement’ it is tempting to ask for a continuous verbal commentary, perhaps recorded (Bartlett 1973). The diversionary effect of this ‘talking through’ may be quite powerful and other methods can be equally problematic and may lead to trivial or peripheral accounts of the music.

Devising a way of gathering responses to music is always crucial and it is necessary here to give some detail. It was decided to utilise the semantic differential, a well-tried if somewhat blunt instrument consisting of adjectival opposites.1 _{A version was constructed which would at least have the possibility}

that some scales might pick up response to particular musical elements, those of materials, expressive character and structure. In effect, the semantic form is an instrument of musical analysis. It may not tell us much about ‘the moment-to-moment history of mental involvement with the music’ but it might reveal something about how a relationship with a musical work is built up over time.

There is one potentially evaluative scale, Good/bad, and here we need to make a distinction. Value judgements appear to take place on two levels. It is one thing to accept or reject a musical performance on the basis of direct and sustained acquaintance, with a real understanding of the significance of the

layers of materials, expressiveness and form. But it is a very different matter to dismiss any music out of hand without ever attending to it, perhaps on the basis of peer-group solidarity or social status. ‘Good/bad’ is an ambiguous scale which may be used to signal instant prejudice or to denote an attitudinal outcome of critical awareness—appreciative or otherwise.

These semantic scales were chosen with some care and evaluated positively beforehand by five independent people. The seven scales are not taken ‘out of the air’ but are credibly related to the musical knowledge layers of materials, expression, form and value. The rate and change of onward movement is a prominent feature of musical expression and the scale Active/passive is a likely candidate for characterising the degree of forward propulsion. Large/ small has obvious potential for describing the perceived weight of a musical gesture, perhaps communicated through accentuation, loudness or register; though it might also be descriptive of sound materials, an impression of the instruments or ensemble.

Thick/thin and Dark/bright are attempts to pick up perceptions of tonal colour, or sonorities, though these words could also be expressive descriptions. Musical form is likely to be represented to some extent by the scales Simple/ complex and Varied/all-the-same. Musical value might be picked up by the Good/bad scale, although this could also signify a general prejudice for or against the music on the basis of identifying its cultural origins and counting it in or out of our accepted range. We do this all the time, changing the pre- set buttons on the radio should we accidentally find ourselves on the ‘wrong’ channel.

Although these scales may be interpreted by people in different ways, these interpretations are unlikely to alter radically for any individual in a short space of time. The experimental design is that of repeated measures; the same children were to have three opportunities to respond to the same piece of music at weekly intervals—the same time in each lesson—and any change on the scales can be charted for each child. The age of the children was to be between 12 and 13, old enough to be able to cope easily with the level of analysis required with the check form.

The procedure is simple: subjects listen to music and afterwards mark one of the seven spaces between the two extremes on every scale. The ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ ends of scales are switched around to prevent automatic scoring down one side or the other and to help focus on making a judgement for each separate scale. Despite obvious limitations—particularly that of making a static once-for-all description of a mobile event—there are certain advantages with this device. Although words are employed to generate the sematic opposites, a response in words is not required. Thus verbal fluency is not being assessed and no potentially distracting verbal account takes place at any time, certainly not during the musical performance.

The chosen music has to meet certain criteria: firstly, of being in an idiom not perceived as exotic or strange; secondly, of itself being unfamiliar; thirdly, it has to be clearly expressively characterised while being complex enough for people to discover new aspects on subsequent hearings, though not excessively changeable—for that would make a snapshot type of description on semantic scales very difficult, probably impossible. This is where the first two minutes of Elgar’s In the South re-enters the arena. This major paragraph of the concert overture has about it a sense of musical wholeness; many major ideas have been revealed and a structural turning point is reached when we can quite legitimately stop and ask, ‘what about that?’. It is a place where Elgar himself took a deep breath before moving on.

Three London secondary school music teachers offered to help with this experiment and each identified an average to ‘bright’ class with a regular music lesson at weekly intervals.2 _{Seventy-one young people (12–13 years}

old) from three schools were present at all three weekly sessions and each was allotted a personal number to preserve anonymity while keeping track of who was who over time. A blank copy of the form was given to each student for each session. There was to be no discussion about the music. A couple of practice runs were made at the start of the first session, for example, using the semantic scales to describe ‘an angry elephant’.