ArtMonitor/Konstnärliga fakulteten

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BECOMING BEETHOVEN Re-Enacting Aesthetic Ideas and Mindsets From an Early Romantic Discourse of Musical Performance
(Göteborgs Universitet, 2023) Bania, Maria; Academy of Music and Drama, University of Gothenburg
This book explores French and German early Romantic music aesthetics from the perspective of the performer, including ways to re-enact ideas and mindsets from these aesthetics. It shows how musical performances were attributed with the potential to create an experience of synthesis between the real and the ideal, the material and the spiritual, as well as a unification or sympathy between the performers, listeners, composers, the sounding music and musical instruments. The book includes two video recordings of re-enactments of chamber music by Schubert and Beethoven in which the listeners’ real-time thoughts and feelings are visualized.
Musik och kunskapsbildning. En festskrift till Bengt Olsson
(Konstnärliga fakulteten, Göteborgs universitet, 2011-05-11) Lindgren, Monica; Frisk, Anna; Henningsson, Ingemar; Öberg, Johan; Göteborgs universitet
”Musik och kunskapsbildning. En festskrift till Bengt Olsson” är en hyllning till professor Bengt Olsson, innehavaren av professuren i Musikpedagogik vid Göteborgs universitet, på hans 65-årsdag. I bokens 27 artiklar reflekterar forskarkollegor och vänner från Sverige, Norge, Danmark, Finland, England, Italien, Österrike och USA kring frågor om såväl musik, människor, konst och kunskap som teori och metodologi. Artiklar kring professor Olssons betydelse för utvecklingen av det musikpedagogiska forskningsområdet i Sverige är också en del av bidragen i festskriften, liksom aktuella forskningsrapporter inom musikpedagogik och angränsande discipliner.
Texter om konstarter och lärande
(Konstnärliga fakulteten, 2014) Karlsson Häikiö, Tarja; Lindgren, Monica; Johansson, Marléne; Göteborgs universitet. Konstnärliga fakulteten
I Hear Voices In Everything! Step by step
(Konsthögskolan Valand, 2014) Gedin, Andreas; Göteborgs universitet. Konstnärliga fakulteten
Light Shapes Spaces: Experience of Distribution of Light and Visual Spatial Boundaries
(2012-11-14) Wänström Lindh, Ulrika
Light enables us to experience space. The distribution of light is vital for spatial experience but has not been the main focus of previous research on lighting. The lighting designer’s professional knowledge is to a great extent experience-based and tacit. With design practice as the point of departure, this thesis aims to explore spatiality and enclosure in relation to the distribution of light – with the intention of increasing subjects’ understanding of what can be regarded as a space, and to show how spaces can be shaped by the distribution of light. By focusing on users’ experiences and interpretations, relationships between the distribution of light and perceived spatial dimensions and experienced spatial atmosphere have been investigated. The main contribution of this thesis is to widen the base of knowledge that lighting designers, architects and customers can use as a common reference. This thesis is based on three studies: the Scale Model Study, the Auditorium Study and the Church Park Study. The thesis includes concept- and method development. The mixed methodologies comprise a range from introspective phenomenological observations to deep interviews and questionnaires. The experimental setups have also shifted from scale models to real-life interior and exterior settings. Consequently, a quantitative approach has complemented the mainly qualitative approach. Through artistically based research, patterns and relationships are dealt with in complex real spaces. The findings of these studies lead to a discussion of when, why and how patterns of brightness and darkness influence spatial perceptions of dimensions. The findings also show that brightness not only contributes to our experiencing a space as more spacious than it really is, but in certain situations brightness can actually have the reverse effect. Furthermore, darkness can contribute to a spacious impression, which has hardly been discussed in previous research. What subjects regard as a space may shift between the clearly defined physical space and the perceived space, which include light zones. Light zones can create a sense of inclusion or exclusion for subjects, which affects their sense of community and their feeling of safety. Light topography, e.g. the height of luminaire positions, as well as light direction influence the way we experience the private and the public. Enclosure can, if related to visible spatial boundaries, facilitate reassurance and safety.
Barns musikkomponerande i tradition och förändring
(2012-07-19) Lagergren, Anniqa
This thesis focuses on education at Swedish community music and arts schools and at primary schools. The aim of the study is to contribute to knowledge formation within the field of music education by examining how children make music in an institutional context and how the development of new approaches in teaching and learning affect how children practise music. This is studied by observing what happens when children aged 9 to 12, compose music when they have access to digital tools in a community music and arts school and in a primary school – with specific focus on how composing tasks take shape under varying contextual and interpersonal conditions. 13 children from a community music and arts school and 21 children from a primary school participated in the study. In order to gather material for this study a survey was undertaken to examine the children’s experiences of music, instruments and digital tools. In order to observe and examine composing activities and the music the children had composed, these sessions were recorded on video. The theoretical framework for the study is based on a sociocultural perspective. The results indicate contextual-related differences between the activities in the community music and arts school and the primary school. The differences are observed in the activities and the music the children compose. By addressing interpersonal-related differences the reason why some groups of children undertake the task of composing and some groups of children do not undertake this task can be examined further.
Devices. On Hospitality, Hostility and Design
(2012-03-14) Avila, Martin
This thesis studies and speculates upon the interrelations of artefacts with human and nonhuman agents. These interrelations form assemblages, some of which have emergent properties, becoming manifestations of processes that we cannot fully control or understand. The work started by exploring the theme of hospitality and hostility with the ambition to better understand the ecological complexity of the design process and its results. As an assemblage, this work combines different literary, philosophical and theoretical discourses and traditions with experimental design in order to develop and articulate the concept of device. A device organizes, arranges, frames our environment and thereby defines and limits possibilities of relation. Since relations can only be thought through a so-called natural language such as English, they must be taken into consideration through the process of languaging, understood by Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela as communication about communication”, and as the most characteristic feature of the human species. My focusing on linguistic and biological phenomena is a response to this concern, in an attempt to understand how this process influences our perception of the world. Through a series of design projects, the thesis examines the potential range of an artefact’s relations. It does so by exploring grammatical associations that affect design onceptualizations, creating tools (prepositiontools) as well as studying and articulating forms of symbiosis that an artefact might develop in and with its environment (¡Pestes!).
Jag går från läsning till gestaltning - beskrivningar ur en monologpraktik
(2012-01-04) Dahlén, Lena
I go from reading to performing. Descriptions from a monologue practice is a dissertation based on an actor’s work with monologues. The path of work is traced and described from a practitioner’s perspective. Concrete examples are used and examined in order to ‘sift out’ and expose the specific conditions this work involves. The dissertation follows the path from reading to performing, where one person, as in a monologue, is the speaker. It consists of three parts. In the first part the given circumstances of the path to performance are described. The questions that are posed along the way include: What role does the audience play? What significance does the performing space have for performance expression? How is a written text read, lived through, reshaped and transferred to performance? The second part is based on, and delimits, the search for a “living” performance. And what is that? What is presence? What different past and present acts does the actor have to relate to? What does rehearsing, what does ‘acquiring habitual practice’, involve? Habitual practice as a condition for change and as a condition for the unexpected and for the spontaneous is portrayed. The significance of detail for the performance and for the particularity of the performance is also described. The dissertation’s first and second part lead on to the third part, which exemplifies the particular. This is followed by rehearsals of Samuel Beckett’s play Happy Days. Here, the actor’s searching sheds its light on the dissertation’s earlier reflections. That reflection is based on practice and that it is examples that are used to capture, in writing, a fleeting path that disappears in an actor’s steps, is a part of the study’s task – and a result. To examine and convey something of the transient nature of this work from a practitioner’s perspective is its aim.
Think’st thou to seduce me then? Impersonating female personas in songs by Thomas Campion (1567-1620)
(2011-11-21) Karlsson, Katarina A
A Field of Possibilities: Designing and Playing Digital Musical Instruments
(2011-11-04) Nilsson, Per Anders
This thesis focuses on a set of digital musical instruments I have designed and developed with ensemble improvisation in mind. The intention is not to create a universal improvisational instrument, but rather to create a set of instruments which each realize one musical idea. My research addresses the meaning and relations between activities in two stages, what I call “design time” and “play time”. In short, design time is conception, representation, and articulation of ideas and knowledge outside of chronological time, whereas play time takes place in real-time and concerns bodily activity, interaction, and embodied knowledge. In this work aesthetics play a crucial role, and here signify what is important for me. At design time my aesthetic preferences guide the design process, whereas in play time, a subjective aesthetic tenet is that musical improvisation has strong similarities to gaming and play. One hypothesis states that choices made during the design process at the development stages of a digital musical instrument significantly influence ensemble improvisation and musical results at play time. A digital instrument in this work constitutes a field of possibilities, which in play actualizes the aesthetic decisions of its designer, and in cases where the designer and player are one, during play there will be a double influence: directly through the player’s actions, and indirectly through the nature of the instrument.
the sky is blue
(2011-10-11) Carlsson, Tina
Through its works the sky is blue wants to show that both institutional and subjective limitations are present in our lives but that we also have the ability to go beyond these limitations by way of our dreams, our fantasies and our visions. I maintain that this ability, which is built into the title’s adamant claim that the sky is blue, carries within it the possibility to change the present. However, knowledge and understanding of the now is also needed for change. the sky is blue wants to show how the individual experience and the subjective story are productive and necessary parts of the formation of that knowledge. The particular, or the individual experience, is central to the works in the sky is blue. the sky is blue contains photographic works, artworks and textual works. The three works “jag samlar på himlar, jag samlar på himlen” (I collect skies, I collect the sky), “1000 stories about a blue sky” and “under en himmel” (under a sky) are the point of departure for the dissertation and its central works. A subjective story that seeks the answer to the question why I do what I do forms itself around these works. By choosing the same method in the dissertation work as in my artistic practice I let the question intervene with the question what I do when I do what I do. This means that the dissertation the sky is blue, which has come into being in the search for a why, is an implicit answer to the question: what I do when I do what I do. In “två bakgrundstexter” (two background texts) is described how two losses have formed the conditions for the coming into being of the sky is blue. There is a series of micro-essays related to the “two background texts”, which, instead of looking backward, take their point of departure in the present. In “tolv betraktelser” (twelve reflections/discourses) everyday flow is central; in these texts come the thoughts and reflections on expressions that take up space when I am confronted with different events in my everyday life. The texts in “fyra verkbeskrivningar” (four descriptions of works) are written in intimate relation to the works, and are, instead of reports on the material of the works and their coming into being, portrayals of the personal “state” that are the points of departure for these works. Just like the personal experience, which never forms itself in a linear way but rather consists of different parts or wanderings here and there that correspond to each other, the sky is blue is built up of different parts that are situated in a dialogical situation with each other. In order to maintain the dialogue between the different parts of the dissertation, I have chosen not to use the book format, which, in most cases, invites linear reading; the different parts of the dissertation have been placed in a box instead. The dialogical situation between the works does not only correspond to my artistic practice; I also consider the former to nurture the methods that are used to convey knowledge and meaning within the arts.
Ateljésamtalets utmaning – ett bildningsperspektiv
(2011-05-20) Wideberg, Christian
The present study is in the field of Educational Science and is an investigation of the studio critiques i.e. the teacher/student studio interactions that take place as part of two higher education programmes in the Fine Arts in Sweden; these are the three-year Bachelor of Fine Arts programme and the two-year Master of Fine Arts programme. The aim of the dissertation is to find out what is essentially important in a studio critique, to understand its context and integrity, as well as to examine how a teacher captures the opportunities and challenges that occur within the force field of the student’s intention, of his or her idea and his or her formal knowledge. A phenomenological hermeneutical method is applied as the method of inquiry in the study, where several different collecting methods are used to gatherempirical data. An historical overview, transcribed interviews, a log book and studio critiques make up the narrative text data, which have both practical and scientific relevance. The core theme of the studio critique is to challenge the quality of the student’s artistic expression, thus contributing to involving him or her in a process of growth; this process embraces the potential of the studio critique to nurture and attain quality, which is the main result of the study. Studio critiques are complex and interwoven interactions of two kinds: 1) interactions where the teacher and the student seek common ground in a mutual process of understanding and accord, and 2) interactions where the integration of intention and quality is strived for. In his or her role as supervisor, the teacher aims at finding the point of interface between the student’s intention and the material qualities of his or her work. Ultimately the goal of this form of growth (German: Bildung) is to maximise student potential, thus enabling him or her to develop the full range of his or her talents. When the main topic for the studio critique is found, another interaction begins. This process addresses the challenge of integrating concept and material, the ultimate goal of which must be a seamless fusion of the two if the finished work is to possess sublime qualities. One can regard the studio critique as a process where the student reaches a deeper knowledge of self and his or her artistic goals, where subjective and creative impulses are essential for the developmental growth of this form of living knowledge.
“Lasciatemi morire” o farò “La Finta Pazza”: Embodying Vocal Nothingness on Stage in Italian and French 17th Century Operatic Laments and Mad Scenes
(2011-05-16) Belgrano, Elisabeth
This music research drama thesis explores and presents a singer’s artistic research process from the first meeting with a musical score until the first steps of the performance on stage. The aim has been to define and formulate an understanding in sound as well as in words around the concept of pure voice in relation to the performance of 17th century vocal music from a 21st century singer’s practice-based perspective with reference to theories on nothingness, the role of the 17th century female singer, ornamentation (over-vocalization) and the singing of the nightingale. !e music selected for this project is a series of lamentations and mad scenes from Italian and French 17th century music dramas and operas allowing for deeper investigation of differences and similarities in vocal expression between these two cultural styles. The thesis is presented in three parts: a Libretto, a performance of the libretto (DVD) and a Cannocchiale (that is, a text following the contents of the Libretto). In the libretto the Singer’s immediate inner images, based on close reading of the musical score have been formulated and performed in words, but also recorded and documented in sound and visual format, as presented in the performance on the DVD. In the Cannocchiale, the inner images of the Singer’s encounter with the score have been observed, explored, questioned, highlighted and viewed in and from different perspectives. The process of the Singer is embodied throughout the thesis by Mind, Voice and Body, merged in a dialogue with the Chorus of Other, a vast catalogue of practical and theoretical references including an imagined dialogue with two 17th century singers. As a result of this study, textual reflections parallel to vocal experimentation have led to a deeper understanding of the importance of considering the concept of nothingness in relation to Italian 17th century vocal music practice, as suggested in musicology. The concept of je-ne-sais-quoi in relation to the interpretation of French 17th century vocal music, approached from the same performance methodology and perspective as has been done with the Italian vocal music, may provide a novel approach for exploring the complexity involved in the creative process of a performing artist.
Jag hör röster överallt - Step by Step
(2011-05-04) Gedin, Andreas
I Hear Voices in Everything – Step by Step, is a practise-based dissertation in fine arts. It includes three art exhibitions, several independent art works and an essay. It discusses the role of the artist and the making of art mainly through the ideas of the Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin (1875-1975) but also by reflecting on similarities between the artist and the curator. Being a dissertation in fine arts, the aim is not primarily to develop any certain philosophy but to use theory to discuss art, and vice versa. In the first section, the methodological presuppositions are articulated and contextualised. The relevance of artistic research as a means to develop artistic practice and as a means to increase the understanding of artistic practice is also addressed, as is the reasonability of using the philosophy of Bakhtin in this specific context. Bakhtin is usually referred to as a literary theorist; however, his dialogical philosophy concerns man’s being as a whole, that is, it is through dialogical relations man is constituted. Here, man, and also art in general, is understood by Bakhtin as being temporary meeting places for art works, readers, artists, protagonists, history etc. The reflective text in itself also endeavours to be dialogical and polyphonic by including different voices such as fictional characters, real comments, emails, letters and quotes. In the second section the practice of making art is discussed in relation to Bakhtin and other writers. One main topic is if one, by using Bakhtin, can also regard an art work as a meeting place for language (in its broad sense) so as to include physical material, skill, and experience; and hence, if one could, or should, regard the artist as a kind of curator, and vice versa. Bearing this in mind, is there then any relevant difference between organising language into an artwork or into an exhibition? The third section focuses on the artworks that are a part of the PhD project; these include an exhibition and two planned exhibitions. The central theme of, or the catalyst for, the works of art is repetition. Published as one exclusive copy, and also smuggled into the Lenin library, Sleeper is a collection of essays on the ingredients of a tuna fish casserole. Thessaloniki revisited is a video of a reading of a short story. Spin-Off is a video where a curse is read by an actor. Sharing a Square is a documentary-based video of a ritual drumming session in Calanda, Spain, and Erich P. is an artwork based on an embassy to Russia in 1673 and on contra-factual archaeology. As a final part of the dissertation project these artworks will be shown in a solo exhibition, and there will also be a curated exhibition, which will include only other artists. The last part of the dissertation’s title “Step by Step” refers to a larger art project called Taking Over, which this dissertation is a part of. Taking Over deals with different aspects of power relations in five separate projects. Being an integral part of this larger and thematic art project, the dissertation also refers to different aspects of power, and even to the lack of power in relation to the artist’s position in research contexts, both inside and outside academia. It also underlines that artistic research is part of a wider artistic practice.
Anteckningar om Spår. Fotografi – Bevis – Bild
(2011-04-29) Wallsten, Lars
Anteckningar om Spår (Notes on Traces) is a self-critical and self-reflective practice-based PhD project. It endeavours to make visible how artistic practice can create its content and context in relation to experience, reinterpretation and further progression. The project is an inquiry into photography’s capacity to prove evidence. It is structured around photographic representation and written text. The dissertation consists of four photographic works together with an introduction, a list of contents, and a main text presented as an essay with numbered passages. The research effort is guided by a broad, selective inquiry. Contextualisation and conceptualisation have been identified through a process of bricolage, whereby creative use has been made of different discourses such as photography, film, art, philosophy, psychology, education, law, criminalistics, literature and cognitive science. Artistic strategies and practices that use forensic aesthetics are also discussed. The method has the character of tracing a trail that leads the project forward. This creates a dialogue between the content and the form of the dissertation. Trace together with condensation and pattern are presented as productive concepts; these concepts, which in some respects have their roots in photography, not only provide others with the leads to understand a photograph as evidential proof but are also characterised by a suggestive quality, which is a recurring feature in the photographic projects. The study contributes to overcoming the differences in the ways theoretical and practical knowledge are produced.
Claiming Space: Discourses on Gender, Popular Music, and Social Change
(2011-01-27) Björck, Cecilia
This compilation (portfolio) thesis explores how language is used in the context of gender-equity music initiatives to construct ideas about gender, popular music, and social change. More specifically, it examines the use of spatial metaphors and concepts revolving round the idea that girls and women need to “claim space” to participate in popular music practices. The empirical material consists of recorded round-table discussions with staff and participants from four different initiatives in Sweden, all with the explicit aim to increase the number of girls and women involved in popular music production and performance. They include a time-limited project by a youth organization, a grass-roots network for young musicians, an adult education course, and a pop/rock music camp for girls. A Foucault-inspired discourse analysis method in six stages was used to examine the data in terms of discursive constructions, discourses, action orientation, positionings, practice, and subjectivity. The results are organized in four themes – Sound, Body, Territory, and Room – and are discussed in relation to the concepts of performativity (Judith Butler), feminine body spatiality (Iris Marion Young), and gaze (Michel Foucault and others). The idea of “claiming space” is found to be involved in two dialectics. The first dialectic is formed by space-claiming understood as on the one hand extrovert self-promotion to be seen and heard, and on the other hand, as introvert focus on the musical craft. A second dialectic is formed by an ongoing struggle between empowerment and objectification, i.e., between being an acting subject and being the object of a disciplining gaze.
Att peka ut det osynliga i rörelse: En didaktisk studie av taktart i musik
(2010-09-30) Wallerstedt, Cecilia
The aim of this study is to examine what constitutes being able to discern time in music, as seen from the learner’s perspective. Listening is not only regarded as a higher mental process but also as a core skill in musical ability. Participants in the empirical study are 3 teachers and 27 children in a preschool class and in primary school. Three lessons aimed at facilitating children’s ability to discern time are analysed. The data also consists of interviews with the children. The theoretical framework for the study is variation theory. Four critical aspects of the object of learning have become apparent: to be able to discern stressed beats, the auditory meaning of keeping time and the continuous aspect of pulse; of critical importance is also to be able to separate the metrical aspect of the music from different forms of representing it, such as clapping or drumming. It is suggested that mediating tools, such as time, constitute important learning objects in music education. The teacher’s task is to point out what is invisible in the music and also what is invisible to the children. This can be done with the help of visual representations of auditory aspects, patterns of variation and verbal dialogue.
You Told Me – work stories and video essays / verkberättelser och videoessäer
(2010-05-06T10:32:45Z) Bärtås, Magnus
You Told Me is a practice-based research project and consists of three video biographies (the Who is…? series), and two video essays (Kumiko, Johnnie Walker & the Cute (2007), Madame & Little Boy (2009), an introduction with a contextualization and methodology of the field, and three essays. The dissertation is an observation and analysis of certain functions and meanings of narration and narratives in contemporary art, as well as being an experiment with roles, methods, actions, and narrative functions in an artistic medium – the video essay. Using the methods of “pilgrimage” (Chris Marker) and essayistic practices, and by revisiting and retelling biographies, this work tries to find a place in between collective and personal memory. During the practical process and the reflective theoretical work the different elements or instances of the video essay are identified: the subject matter, the images (the representation), the artist/author, the narrative/text, and the narrator/voice. In documentary film the lack of natural correspondence between these entities is often dissolved or denied – this work instead exposes the instances as separate units. A question arises: What alternative roles can be established between these elements, for example by negotiation and transference between them? The methodological part of the text focuses on the conceptual invention made during the process, which I have called work story [verkberättelse]. A work story is a written or oral narrative about the forming of materials, immaterial units, situations, relations, and social practices that constitutes, or leads to, an artwork. By discussing analogies between storytelling, collecting, and biographical accounts together with examples from conceptual art, the dissertation shows how the work story is not only crucial for the understanding of the artwork but that the act of making and the very order or sequence in which the making proceeds often have symbolic, metaphorical, metonymical, political, and even epistemological meanings. In an extended form a work story disseminates meaning rather than capturing it. This is the essayistic work story that permits a writer/artist to wander off and touch upon a subject as if in passing, reproducing its neglected genealogy and destiny in the detailed materiality of the work story.
Sångaren på den tomma spelplatsen - en poetik. Att gestalta Gilgamesheposet och sånger av John Dowland och Evert Taube
(2010-04-23T10:33:47Z) Kristersson, Sven
The aim of this doctoral project is to explore an expanded role of the singer in an artistic field situated between poetry, theatre, music and reflection. The project consists of three parts: Firstly, three performances of songs and poetry: (a) Me, Me and None but Me!, a blank-verse monologue connecting songs of John Dowland, (b) Gilgamesh – The Man Who Refused to Die, a musical version of the Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic, and (c) The Poet and Time, interpretations of works by the Swedish chansonier Evert Taube. As artistic methods, I use the Shakespearean traditions described in Peter Brook’s The Empty Space. Within these traditions, scenic communication is established using verbal imagery instead of a stage set. Secondly, a thesis, where I describe the working process of the performances as a series of problem-solving. I also compare my performances to performances by contemporary artists. In the thesis, I also apply a method of inquiry in which I use the Orpheus myth as a means of understanding the expanded role of the singer. Thirdly, a film by Lars Westman. The DVD contains excerpts from the performances and interviews with me, conducted by Westman and by the Norwegian singer and researcher Astrid Kvalbein. The results of my research are firstly manifest in the performances themselves. Secondly, the written descriptions articulate a synthesis of artistic knowledge which has not previously been collected in one publication. Thirdly, the comparing of the Dowland performance with other performances constitutes a mapping of new forms of presenting lieder on a national level. The comparison with a Palestinian Gilgamesh performance gives new knowledge about how Western theatrical traditions are combined with Arabian storytelling tradition in an international context. Fourthly, the Taube performance implies new results in literary scholarship. Finally, the inquiries into the use of the Orpheus myth show that the mythic figure can be seen as an embodiment of “knowing-in-action”. Thus, the thesis establishes a link between practice-based research and mythology as embodied knowledge.
Samtal om samspel. Kvalitetsuppfattningar i musiklärares dialoger om ensemblespel på gymnasiet
(2010-03-15T15:32:02Z) Zandén, Olle
The purpose of this thesis is to analyse music teachers’ collegiate discourses on ensemble playing with regard to dialogically expressed criteria and conceptions of quality, and to relate these criteria and conceptions to the national governing documents for upper secondary ensemble education. The study has two theoretical perspectives, that is, a didactical perspective and a dialogical perspective. The research setting as well as the research questions are clearly didactical, whilst dialogical theory is used both as a foundation for the research method and as an ontology against which the findings are interpreted. Topic analysis, which is based on a dialogical theory of sense-making according to which meaning is constituted in a double dialogical process between interactants, situation and socio-cultural traditions is the method used. Four groups of music teachers have discussed video excerpts of popular music ensembles from ensemble classes, and these discussions have been analysed with respect to topics displaying conceptions of musical and didactical quality. Topics are created through communicative projects, in which two or more people display a mutual understanding of what they are talking about. Thus, all conceptions of quality elicited from the participant groups of ensemble teachers are the result of intersubjective sense-making. The results show that the ideal of informal music-making is so strong that the groups describe teacher intervention as detrimental to musical progress. Very little is said about the sounding music, whereas physical expressivity, autonomy and joy of playing are prominent topics. The apparent lack of music-specific, “contextual” criteria and the low valuation of the teachers’ work are discussed as possible threats to the existence of music as a subject in the national curriculum.

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