ABSTRACT
This chapter will consider the musicians’ experiences of what I will refer to as ‘traditional music education’. First I will examine classical instrumental tuition as it was experienced by nine of the musicians, including older and younger ones. Then I will look at classroom music in schools as it was experienced by the older musicians only, over the period from the 1960s to the end of the 1980s. The following chapter will look at the musicians’ experiences of what I will term the ‘new music education’, including popular music instrumental tuition across the whole age span, then school class-teaching for the younger musicians from the early 1990s to the end of the century. I will also look briefly at experiences of popular music further and higher education courses in that chapter. There are three principle aims of the two chapters, taken together. One is to illuminate those learning experiences within formal music education that can reasonably be considered to have contributed, through either conscious or unconscious means, to the musicians’ development of popular music skills and knowledge. The second is to examine the musicians’ encounters with formal music education in general terms not necessarily tied to learning experiences, and the attitudes and values which marked these encounters. The third is to chart changes in formal music education as experienced by the musicians over the last forty years of the twentieth century. Each section begins with a brief historical account of the overall educational context within which the musicians’ profiles are situated, paying particular attention where relevant to the incorporation of popular music into formal settings.
