Negotiating traditional music in educational spaces: An ethnographic case study of the Norwegian Academy of Music.

Abstract

This article engages with issues of musical belongings in institutional spaces in higher music education. It makes an ethnographic case study of the Norwegian Academy of Music and explores how traditional music was established and negotiated as education at the institution, with special attention on the period from 1995 onwards. The study focuses on processes of change and the ideas of traditional music at the Academy, as well as its proximity and relationality towards art music idioms. It draws mainly on newly conducted interviews with central actors involved in education and partly on archival material, such as study plans and interviews. By using assemblage as a theoretical approach, the article illuminates how the actors translate and negotiate traditional music through discourse, material, and practice in forming their relationship with the Academy as place and social context. The study demonstrates shifts in focus from transcriptions, arrangement and harmony to performance practices, functional aspects of playing to dance, fieldwork and the social features of 'being a musician'. It also reveals how the actors tend to place themselves in the position of a musical Other. This musical otherness is multileveled; simultaneously creating senses of belonging and dis-belongings within the Academy, as well as within the field of higher music education in Norway.