Stylistic pluralism and the experiences of classically trained teachers of singing in the Republic of Ireland

Research design

The research design was qualitative, and participant interviewing (Bryman, 2008) was chosen as the most appropriate means of gathering experiential data. Primarily concerned with the subjective experiences of the research participants, the research is situated within an interpretive paradigm (Denzin & Lincoln, 2008; Snape & Spencer, 2003). This perspective is concerned with examining the lived experiences of the research participants from their emic points of view (Hennink et al., 2012). Data collected included the perspectives of nine participant voice teachers, who each separately participated in a singular, semi-structured interview (Brinkmann, 2013). The design of the research involved an inductive approach to the research questions (Tracy, 2012). The research was concerned with examining a number of aspects related to the experiences of interview participants and did so without constructing a prior hypothesis. The observations and findings of the research were connected to theory following data collection and subsequent analysis (Bryman, 2008).

Selection of participants

Information about the study and criteria for participation was initially disseminated online through social media pages of national organisations such as Music Generation ⁷ and Sing Ireland. ⁸ The study sought participants who self-defined as classically trained teachers of singing and who were teaching in the Republic of Ireland. Participants needed to be teaching classical repertoire along with popular and musical theatre styles. All who volunteered through this process were contacted for interview in accordance with University research ethics guidelines, and nine participants were engaged for interview. Participants were fully briefed on the purpose of the study and the nature of their participation. The primary focus was to illuminate and present their attitudes and experiences in relation to the central research questions, and to allow them to describe these from their unique points of view and social and cultural positions (Hennink et al., 2012). All participants were classically trained and seven out of nine were female. All participants maintained their own private teaching studios, with some also teaching part-time hours in school or third-level contexts. Participants were located in both urban and rural areas, with informants dispersed throughout every province in Ireland except Ulster. Interview times ranged from 45 to 90 min, and all interviews were carried out during a 4-month research period in 2017. Interviews were recorded and transcribed verbatim at a later date. All transcripts were fully anonymised. Pseudonyms were assigned and each participant was provided with the opportunity to review their data (Table 1).

OPEN IN VIEWER

Table 1.

Summary of participants.

Participant	Summary
Alice	Alice has an institutional qualification in classical singing and has performed nationally. She teaches a variety of students and facilitates choirs. Alice is over 35 years of age.
Bethan	Bethan has an institutional qualification in classical singing and has performed nationally. She teaches a variety of vocal students at a music school. Bethan is under 35 years of age.
Caroline	Caroline trained as a classical singer and has performed widely. She teaches an array of vocal students across a variety of contexts. Caroline is over 35 years of age.
Deirdre	Deirdre trained as a classical singer and has performed internationally. She teaches a variety of students in different contexts. Deirdre is over 35 years of age.
Evan	Evan has an institutional qualification in classical singing and has performed nationally. He teaches a wide variety of styles to students in different contexts. Evan is over 35 years of age.
Fay	Fay trained as a classical singer and has now forged a career as a CCM vocalist and singing teacher. She teaches a wide variety of students, across many different styles. Fay is under 35 years of age.
Grace	Grace has institutional qualifications in classical singing and performs regularly. She teaches a wide variety of students, across many different styles. Grace is under 35 years of age.
Heather	Heather received a diverse and comprehensive training in both music theatre, classical and choral singing. She no longer sings publicly, but she runs a busy vocal studio, teaching a variety of singers. Heather is over 35 years of age.
Ivan	Ivan trained classically and performs regularly as a soloist in a variety of contexts. He teaches singing to students in his home studio, he also facilitates a number of choirs. Ivan is over 35 years of age.

CCM: contemporary commercial music.

Data collection and analysis

The research design employed a semi-structured approach to interviewing (Bryman, 2008). The structuring within the interviews was designed to ensure that interview time was used effectively, with capacity for open-ended responses. The interviews were conversational in style and the participants were encouraged to speak without a sense of strict adherence to ordered questions. The function of the interviews was threefold. The first was to gain an understanding of the background of the teachers, which involved asking the participants to discuss their singing experiences prior to teaching. The interview process allowed participants to narrate aspects of their lives, revealing formative experiences that they had had in their own training, as well as identifying influential teachers and key moments within their development as teaching professionals. The second function was to contextualise their teaching practice. This section of the interview was designed to establish the various contexts in which the participants teach, the students that they teach and the styles of repertoire that they work with. Participants were encouraged to reflect on these areas, discuss their experiences and highlight any issues. The third function of the interview was to examine participant attitudes to ongoing professional development, professional networks, training courses and their views on professional development both for themselves and for other teachers. Analysis of transcribed interview data involved systematic coding to identify themes and patterns (Tracy, 2012). The inductive approach and subsequent analysis produced emergent themes which provided a basis for interpretation and connection to theory.

Theme 1: cultural dissonance – literacy, orality and musicianship

All but two of the participants emphasised the value of notated music and musicianship. All participants spoke of the cultural differences and dissonances that they perceived between classical and popular singing. For many, these differences manifested through perceptions of these cultures of singing as binary and opposed, reinforcing their perception of a dominant and hierarchical classical singing culture. For three of the participants, this indicated a desire to actively repress the ‘non-classical’ other. Two participants were aware that these ideological binaries have led them to challenge and question the hegemony of their own training culture, as well as those inherent narratives of opposition.

Cultural differences

Five of the participants (Alice, Bethan, Caroline, Deirdre, Grace) outlined a very stark divide and opposition between classical singing and popular singing worlds, and they highlighted a number of issues which they viewed as culturally incompatible between classical and CCM ¹⁰ /popular culture. These participants displayed a sense of ‘dilution’ of classical singing. A number of emergent binary motifs evolved from their discussion of the separateness of these cultures. Table 2 illustrates a distillation of these binaries in relation to CCM styles, popular culture and the comparison of such with their perceptions of the classical vocal culture.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Table 2.

Perceptions of binary opposition between classical and popular singing.

Classical	Popular
Difficult	Easy
Gradual	Instant
Refined	Unrefined
Healthy	Unhealthy

Fay, Evan and Heather spoke knowledgably about vocal function and the importance of engaging with continuous professional development for teaching singing. With robust knowledge, and clear engagement with recent research and pedagogical discussion, these three participant teachers displayed confidence in their abilities to work with students across classical, music theatre and CCM styles. They were quite critical of many of the cultural narratives and implicit beliefs that they had been taught through their own classical training. Participants such as Fay, Evan and Heather described searching for this mediated understanding through the pursuit of knowledge that can help them to understand the process and dissolve boundaries.

Theme 2: vocal health and responsibility

Perceptions of what constituted healthy and unhealthy singing greatly varied between participants and impacted their perception of and negotiation with popular styles of singing. In general, each of the participants felt responsibility of care to student vocal health, but there were a number of ways in which this manifested. Participants who predominantly based their teaching on their own embodied training also appeared to hold greater reservations in relation to teaching popular singing styles. Three participants (Fay, Evan and Heather) renegotiated their own training experiences through targeted ongoing learning to further expand their knowledge for teaching across different styles.

Theme 3: continuous professional development

Eight of the participants identified a lack of emphasis on vocal pedagogy within their own performance training backgrounds. The findings demonstrate that participants were critical of the fact that pedagogical qualifications are not required to teach singing. Some participants were content in their accumulated experiential knowledge, while others sought information from written sources. Two of the participants (Evan and Fay) invest in pedagogical discourse and training outside of Ireland to increase their knowledge base in their negotiations with stylistic pluralism. All participants felt that it would be useful to have some sort of networking opportunity in Ireland to discuss and attend masterclasses and conferences with other singing teachers, but some of the participants worried that such a network would not be successful within what they viewed to be a competitive and hierarchical landscape.

Negotiating stylistic pluralism

This research has shown first that classically trained teachers of singing in the Republic of Ireland are teaching and negotiating popular music and musical theatre styles of singing in their voice studios. While specialised studios might be possible in a more densely populated country, it would be difficult for voice teachers in Ireland to sustain a career on teaching to one specialism alone. The interviews with research participants revealed some variation in participant negotiations with CCM. For the most part, participants held some reservations around vocal health in popular styles, with some participants opting to direct students towards repertoire that aligned with their own classical training and performance practice.

The research findings have shown a lack of professional development for singing teachers to explore and expand pedagogical approaches that include the CCM styles of singing that are now being taught. This lack of development among Irish singing teachers may also be symptomatic of the absence of a singing teaching network to advocate for and represent this community in Ireland. A small number of participants identified a gap between their own formative classical training and the CCM styles they found themselves teaching and invested in professional development. These participants appeared to be confident in their teaching abilities and expressed a wish for other voice teachers to engage in learning more about pedagogical approaches to CCM. These participants highlighted areas where they felt that classical pedagogy might be incompatible with some CCM styles.

Participant negotiations with CCM emerged from their habitus (Bourdieu, 1977) and embodied training experiences. Habitus has been widely discussed by a variety of theorists in relation to an array of disciplines throughout the past century. Western classical singing, through the discipline of classical training and musical canon, conditions vocalisation to the accepted structures defined and dictated by the social and cultural world, referred to by Bourdieu as the field (Bourdieu, 1993). Embodied ways of doing and techniques are adopted by singing bodies (Gvion, 2016), and singers are enculturated to operate within certain social roles and structures which are often reproduced. This pedagogical model enforces codes of behaviour valued by the musical and professional culture to which it belongs, reproducing this culture of vocal behaviour and affirming its status.

Participants revealed that their profession challenges them beyond their habitus – that is to say, the embodied training and culture to which they were socialised has expanded beyond the scope of what many feel comfortable teaching and performing. The findings of the study revealed that many of the participants perceived CCM to be culturally separate and oppositional to Western classical singing culture. Only two participants actually demonstrated an awareness of the growing body of pedagogy for CCM internationally. Participant negotiations with these seemingly oppositional cultures resulted in preoccupations with binaries and power relationships, with many participants struggling to negotiate deeply socialised and embodied experiences of singing as constructed by one culture, when encountering the other. Participants, who displayed difficulties in adapting to the other, described pedagogical decision making that reinforced dominant cultural ideologies or redirected student tastes to align with their own embodied experiences of classical vocal education in Ireland, thus choosing to negotiate CCM by reproducing the classical training which they themselves were taught.

While these findings are within an Irish context, they also reflect current discourse in vocal pedagogy outside of Ireland (Edwards & Meyer, 2014). Returning to the uniquely Irish setting of this research, Moore (2012) examines musical habitus and cultural capital upon entry to higher education, and in the discussion of these research findings, it is interesting to consider the negotiations undertaken by those inscribed with a ‘classically trained’ identity through their institutional training. Many of the participants were also graduates of training institutions, and Moore (2012) makes an interesting case for probing the different values which exist both inside and outside of these institutional settings in Ireland. This research reveals that many of the participants are now dealing with a teaching landscape that far exceeds what they themselves have covered within their own training.

The findings of this study suggest that for many of the participants, re-production of habitus is favoured to develop cultural capital for what they perceive to be essential within their experiences of the professional landscape in Ireland. Indeed for some of the participants, it was clear that they perceived the idea of training the voice as classically defined.

Ideological differences: the perceived decline of classical music in Ireland

The popularity and accessibility of CCM singing was seen to perhaps threaten a direct reversal of power relations within the perceived classical/CCM binary or signify the toppling of the desired hegemony that many of the participants felt a duty to reproduce. As Potter (1998) speculated, ‘it is not inconceivable that this fragmentation into stylistic pluralism will eventually see mainstream classical singing reduced to one variety among many in competing taste markets’ (p. 198). A proportion of the participants lamented what they perceived to be a decline in music education and expressed a wish for more musical appreciation in schooling. Their positions are closely aligned to arguments put forward by White (1998, 2005) and Heneghan (1995, 2001). By contrast, international scholarship in music education embraces discussion on musical and cultural diversity (Campbell, 1991, 2005; Clayton et al., 2003; Green, 2006).

Some of the participants expressed opinions that positioned CCM styles of singing as easy, accessible and, in addition to this, also potentially injurious to vocal health. A perceived reduction of classical music education underpinned many of these viewpoints, with some participants finding it difficult to distribute value equally across genres. Participants who were socialised in classical music and singing education from childhood, and who subsequently formed very defined and internalised classical vocal identities through their embodied training, emerged as the participants who displayed the least engagement with pedagogical literature, professional development or further education in vocal pedagogy for genres outside of classical. Some of these participants were content that their classical training would be broadly applicable across genres. As discussed by Bourdieu (1977), habitus is both structured and structuring, and therefore, through social upbringing and education, this defines the ways in which participants develop aesthetic ideals and tastes, thus contributing to status, class differences and social currency within capitalist society.

Renegotiating habitus: adapting to a diverse landscape

Two of the participants demonstrated a response to student demand and learning requirements for different genres by choosing to question and re-negotiate aspects of their habitus. These participants recognised that their embodied training did not hold enough currency within the rapidly changing Irish or international vocal pedagogical landscape. While the other participants recognised change, and avoided, resisted or accommodated popular styles on their own terms, these two participants sought to navigate the stylistically plural landscape by connecting to international networks outside of Ireland. This approach furthered their understanding of current discourse within the interdisciplinary field of vocal pedagogy.