ABSTRACT
In 2012 my brother, a BMus (Jazz Performance) graduate with five years’ experience playing in jazz ensembles and other bands, tweeted: ‘I’m sick of being told by old non-musicians that I’m young therefore I don’t understand “their” music.’ In his tweet, Jeremy characterized music through possession, framed by scare quotes to indicate disagreement; sometimes music is defined not by its own qualities, nor by its relation to other types of music, but by whose music it is. He objected to people positioning him according to a social category (his age) and thereby dismissing his status as a legitimate music knower. He rejected the suggestion that to truly understand the music of an era, first-hand experience of that era is required. At the same time, Jeremy dismissed these people in turn as ‘non-musicians’, as not having the skills, experience or training to understand music the way he does. Both Jeremy’s interlocutors and Jeremy himself emphasized something about their dispositions as musical knowers, but they were clashing over what kinds of dispositions are legitimate. One is marked as social positioning (age) and the other as experience (education and practice). Maton (2014b: 171-95) describes this distinction in terms of kinds of knowers and ways of knowing. This distinction is central to this chapter, which discusses how performance students write about music, the values they express, and what this reveals about the organizing principles of music studies. For this specific object of study, the distinction becomes one between musicality (kinds of knowers) and musicianship (ways of knowing). As Maton (2014b) argues, subject areas have different ways of positioning its knowledge and its knowers, and writing in each area reflects those. Success for students depends on demonstrating in their writing the capacity to position knowledge and knowers in ways that are seen as legitimate. Exploring this capacity is a key concern of work in educational linguistics, including academic literacies; it drives the effort to better understand disciplinary differences in writing and to develop forms of teaching to enable more students to achieve success. This chapter centres on such writing from a corpus of six research project reports written by jazz performance students
at an Australian conservatorium. The projects were written in an Honours year, an optional fourth year for selected students that is required for entry into postgraduate research degrees. The focus of these projects was musicians, that is, musical knowers rather than musical artefacts independent of producers. The students were confident as skilled instrumentalists and working musicians. They sought through research and analysis to learn instrumental techniques that they could integrate into their own performances. They were far less confident, however, as academic writers. The study drawn on for this chapter (J. L. Martin 2013) enacts both Legitimation Code Theory (LCT) and systemic functional linguistics (SFL). It thereby contributes to a growing number of studies in educational fields (for example Chapter 5, Chapter 6 and Chapter 8, this volume). The contribution of LCT in such studies has often (though not always) been to pose questions that can be explored through linguistic analysis and to provide a framework for interpreting differences that emerge from such analyses. In this kind of ‘close encounter’ (Chapter 5), SFL offers an ‘external language of description’ or ‘translation device’ (Chapter 2) that enables movement between the sociological concepts and the language data. This is the relationship between the theories that I utilize in this chapter. From LCT I enact in particular the dimension of Specialization (Maton 2014b; Chapter 1, this volume) to frame my explorations of how the six jazz performance students represent various kinds of knowers in their research writing. Analyses using SFL explore how the students construed themselves and ways in which they evaluated their chosen musicians and themselves. In general, the texts exhibited the knower code that also shapes the general basis of legitimacy in jazz performance, emphasizing that who you are as a musician is more important than what is played. However, as my brother’s tweet demonstrated, there are various ways in which a knower may be specialized. In order to investigate the basis of knower-code specialization, I identify two key concepts in the evaluation and legitimation of musical knowers, those of musicality and musicianship. The first stage of the analysis is to examine how students presented themselves, as well as how they represented their readers. In general, the students presented themselves as legitimate by virtue of a cultivated gaze acquired through immersion (Maton 2014b). In other words, their legitimacy derived from their own experiences of playing and performing and through their exposure to others’ performances. They did not validate themselves on the basis of innate talent or musicality, which would indicate a social gaze. Second, focusing on a comparison of two students’ texts and their portrayal of their chosen musicians, the chapter explores the distinction between musicality and musicianship and uncovers key differences in otherwise seemingly similar texts. This identifies variations within the knower code of jazz performance. The chapter thereby reveals how students write about jazz and, by extension, the values and organizing principles of jazz performance.
