Ian Pace- Special Guest
What Does It Mean to be a Self-Reflexive Practitioner?
Abstract: The issue of self-reflexivity in musical practice is, I argue, fundamental to the concepts of practice-as-research, autoethnography, experimentation in musical practice, as well as a range of ideologies and practices existing within tertiary education institutions with music departments. This paper constitutes my attempt to delineate the meaning of this term, drawing upon a range of personal experience and observation of the work of others. The long-debated question of ‘can musical practice be research?’, about which I have made public my view (in the context of the debate inaugurated by John Croft), will be addressed concisely, not least because I find the question somewhat banal. More vital is the question of the level at which research is conducted, leading to issues of parity: under which circumstances can the work of practitioners, whether in the form of their practice itself, or through associated outputs in written or other forms, be considered to be equivalent in its level to more well-established forms of academic research? Elsewhere in the paper, I gave concrete examples of questions which practitioners are regularly required to answer, and argue that these constitute research questions as much as any others conventionally labelled as such, but explore the different ways in which practitioners operating in different contexts (with different associated expectations upon them, especially with respect to valorisation of ‘intuitive’ or ‘instinctive’ approaches). I also look critically at some of the related views put forward by Nicholas Cook, Daniel Leech-Wilkinson and others who have dominated Performance Studies in the UK in recent decades, maintaining that some of their arguments are variously anti-intellectual, nostalgic or narrowly empirical. I present attempts at rigorous definitions of autoethnography and experimentation, and from this derive my view of critically self-reflexive practice, entailing most fundamentally an attitude rather than any one particular type of methodology. I conclude by giving a few examples of how this has manifested in my own work as performer, musicologist and composer.
Abstract: The issue of self-reflexivity in musical practice is, I argue, fundamental to the concepts of practice-as-research, autoethnography, experimentation in musical practice, as well as a range of ideologies and practices existing within tertiary education institutions with music departments. This paper constitutes my attempt to delineate the meaning of this term, drawing upon a range of personal experience and observation of the work of others. The long-debated question of ‘can musical practice be research?’, about which I have made public my view (in the context of the debate inaugurated by John Croft), will be addressed concisely, not least because I find the question somewhat banal. More vital is the question of the level at which research is conducted, leading to issues of parity: under which circumstances can the work of practitioners, whether in the form of their practice itself, or through associated outputs in written or other forms, be considered to be equivalent in its level to more well-established forms of academic research? Elsewhere in the paper, I gave concrete examples of questions which practitioners are regularly required to answer, and argue that these constitute research questions as much as any others conventionally labelled as such, but explore the different ways in which practitioners operating in different contexts (with different associated expectations upon them, especially with respect to valorisation of ‘intuitive’ or ‘instinctive’ approaches). I also look critically at some of the related views put forward by Nicholas Cook, Daniel Leech-Wilkinson and others who have dominated Performance Studies in the UK in recent decades, maintaining that some of their arguments are variously anti-intellectual, nostalgic or narrowly empirical. I present attempts at rigorous definitions of autoethnography and experimentation, and from this derive my view of critically self-reflexive practice, entailing most fundamentally an attitude rather than any one particular type of methodology. I conclude by giving a few examples of how this has manifested in my own work as performer, musicologist and composer.
