Towards the Development of a Curriculum for Contemporary Musicianship
Michael Francis Hannan · Cross Connect (Southern Cross University) · 2005
Traditional musicianship skills such as sight-reading and listening skills tied to the notation of intervals, chords and rhythms seem inappropriate when training musicians in oral traditions such as blues, rock, pop, country, rhythm and blues, hip hop and electronic dance music. This paper reflects on issues in the musicianship training of popular musicians from a personal perspective, examines the literature of contemporary and future musicianship training and proposes a new approach to designing a musicianship curriculum for popular musicians. The focus of this curriculum is listening and aural recognition skills but these are enacted in the recording and live performance studio environments through practical music making. The musical phenomena to be studied are appropriate to the styles of music being played and the particular formats of performance and recording. These include recognition of frequency content (sometimes known as spectral solfege), of electronic sound sources and techniques, and of audio signal processing techniques, in addition to recognition of genre-based compositional and performance practices. The issue of whether music notation should be or could be effectively by-passed in the professional training of popular musicians is examined.