Contemporary composers’ changing “practice in context”: What can higher music education learn from Theodore Schatzki’s practice theory?

Abstract

While musical practice is more often than not considered through musical repertoires, genres, and traditions, in higher music education, musical practices are further narrowed down to music profession-specific, craft-based competences and learning outcomes. This narrow understanding encompasses the intertwined social and material dimensions that—according to practice theories—constitute and determine all practices. This study seeks a new understanding for practice-based, relational, professional education in context. By “practice in context,” we refer to Theodore Schatzki’s practice theory, in which practices are understood as organized, materially mediated, spatiotemporal nexuses of activities, and in which human coexistence is inherently tied to a context and “sites” of events and entities— site-ness. The empirical material consists of interviews of 10 bigenerational, experienced contemporary composers in Finland, including both males and females. By thinking composing practice with Schatzkian practice theory, three intertwined site-nesses are unveiled, comprising emerging locations (such as small-scale venues and local festivals); wider scenes or nonspatial sites (such as digital platforms and the festival scene); and extended realms (political, economical, educational, and policy). In this theory, various elements of practice-arrangement bundles constitute the site-ness and the complex practice plenum for composing. The site-ness thus becomes part of contemporary composers’ professional practice and higher music education which challenges the musical autonomy discourse which disentangles music from people and society. By posing a critique toward higher music education as a merely transmissive mediator of musical craft, this study seeks for a new understanding for practice-based, relational, “music professionalism in context.” It advances theoretical underpinnings of Schatzkian studies in the arts, by arguing that practice theory can bridge the individualistic past- and competence-oriented higher music education with the present- and future-oriented social understanding of musicians’ changing “practice in context.”