ABSTRACT
The examination of popular musicians’ informal learning practices, attitudes and values in Chapters 3 and 4 considered some of the ways in which young musicians teach themselves to play music into which they are encultured and with which they identify, through listening and copying recordings, alongside an exchange of knowledge and skills with peers. Enjoyment, commitment, even passion for a wide variety of music run high. In Chapters 5 and 6 I looked into the musicians’ experiences of formal music education. These were both negative and positive. On the negative side, the musicians were largely alienated by having to study music or engage in musical practices to which they could not relate and through which they felt unable to progress. On the positive side, they benefited from the acquisition of skills related to notation and technique, familiarity with musical terms and an understanding of theory and the forms and processes of a range of classical and vernacular musics. Whilst the informal learning practices, attitudes and values of young popular musicians do not appear to have undergone any radical changes, their formal music education experiences do seem to have significantly altered, mainly in positive directions, over the forty-year time span represented by the musicians in this study.
