Rethinking “musical excellence” from a decolonial perspective: Disruptive autobiographical experiences among doctoral scholars

Background and Purpose

This article developed from an interest in contributing to the growing corpus of research and scholarship on how higher music education may become more relevant and effective. In recent years, researchers have endeavored to develop a clearer understanding of how musicians develop artistic expertise (Rink et al., 2017), aimed to clarify intercultural notions of “musicality” (O’flynn, 2005), and proposed ways of restructuring higher music education for improved inclusivity and equitable outcomes (Sarath et al., 2017; Stepniak, 2022; Thomson et al., 2023). Researchers have also endeavored to devise more appropriate and effective ways of teaching diverse musical traditions and practices in higher education (Coppola et al., 2020) as well as decolonized methods for experimental intercultural music projects (Östersjö et al., 2023).

Inspired by the notion of decolonization, as well as value of reflecting on disruptive experiences, this article shares findings derived from collaborative auto-ethnographic writings developed by recent doctoral students and doctoral graduates in music from four different regions of the world: Southern Europe (Spain), Eurasia (Russia), East Asia (China/Australia), and North America (Canada), in cooperation with a professor based in Northern Europe (Norway). Our primary research question is “What can disruptive autobiographical experiences teach us about the implications of the decolonization movement for redefining “musical excellence” in higher music education?”

The co-authors of this article first met in June 2022 at the Bergen Summer Research School where they were part of a course titled “Inequalities in Higher Education and the Arts.” The first four authors were among the 109 PhD candidates admitted to one of the six courses at this research school from all parts of the world, representing 40 different nationalities. The authors became acquainted through discussion of shared readings on decolonization, and engage here in “decolonial reflections,” by which we mean reconsideration of Eurocentric educational foundations and practices (Kingsbury, 2010; Nettl, 1995), in light of decolonial critiques, including non-western educational philosophies and related arguments (Hebert, 2023; Mohamed et al., 2020). Our objectives were to consider how the notion of “‘decolonial imagination’ that combines social and cognitive justice with existential justice” (Fúnez-Flores, 2022) might apply to our own “disruptive” autobiographical experiences, surmising that collaborative autoethnography (CAE) would be an ideal method for development of our study.

Methodology

Autoethnography is a reflexive methodology that is increasingly accepted in the field of music education and may be understood as “an autobiographical genre that connects the personal to the cultural, social, and political” (Bartleet & Ellis, 2009, p. 7). It has been adopted by researchers from a range of disciplines, including ethnomusicology, to introspectively explore both personal and professional lives in music. Our inspiration to employ autoethnography derives from the work of Carolyn Ellis (e.g. Ellis et al., 2011), as well as notable ethnomusicology monographs such as Rice’s (1994) May It Fill Your Soul: Experiencing Bulgarian Music, Faulkner’s (2013) Icelandic Men and Me: Sagas of Singing, Self and Everyday Life, and various other publications that model this approach (e.g. Bartleet & Ellis, 2009; Gilbertson & Hebert, 2021). Autoethnographers both “retrospectively and selectively write about epiphanies that stem from, or are made possible by, being part of a culture and/or by possessing a particular cultural identity” (Ellis et al., 2011, n.p.). Autoethnography thereby enables scholars to use data from “their own life stories as situated in sociocultural context in order to gain an understanding of society through the unique lens of self” (Chang, 2018, pp. 6–7).

Participants

The co-authors are a diverse group of performing scholars from diverging musical and cultural backgrounds:

Lu Liu is a China-trained pipa performer and Australia-trained scholar who received her PhD in ethnomusicology from one of Australia’s leading universities in 2019. She now works as a university lecturer in Australia, where she teaches, conducts research, and directs the Chinese Music Ensemble as well as the Non-Western Instruments Principal Study Programs.

Sergio Garcia-Cuesta is a PhD fellow and Lektor at one of Denmark’s music conservatoires. With degrees in rhythmic music, jazz performance, and a Master degree in Music Education—from Spain, Ireland and Denmark, respectively—his teaching and research interests include accessibility, meaningfulness, care and feeling of belonging within musical practices.

Laura Chambers is a classically trained flutist who works as a soloist, orchestral and chamber musician in a variety of musical genres with ensembles across North America. In addition to her performances, workshop leading and private teaching, she is a PhD candidate at one of Canada’s leading universities, where she researches the recontextualization and sustainability of classical music in today’s world.

Sergej Tchirkov is an accordionist, curator and researcher based in Bergen, Norway. Educated at the St. Petersburg Rimsky-Korsakov Conservatory, he lectured on contemporary music at the Moscow Conservatory and held the position of deputy artistic director at the Studio for New Music before moving to Bergen. He is currently teaching and pursuing a PhD project in artistic research at one of Norway’s main universities.

David G. Hebert is a full professor of music with one of Norway’s largest university music education programs and simultaneously holds academic posts in other countries. The other four authors who collaborated for this autoethnography–current doctoral students and recent doctoral graduates–met through one of his online doctoral courses.

Procedures

Our original data source for this collaborative autoethnography (CAE) consists of written representations of personal memories from the four participant co-authors’ lived experience. Each of the four participant co-authors wrote about their own experiences, and each interviewed one other co-author to help uncover and document their respective personal narratives in relation to our primary research question, and a fifth author (professor) later collaborated in the analysis and write-up of the article. We agreed on the following four sub-questions as prompts for the interviews and narrative development: (1) What was your gateway into music and how did the music learning-tradition that you were exposed to affect your development as a musician? (2) In what ways was the concept of “musical excellence” a part of your (early) development as a musician? (3) How does the concept of “musical excellence” impact how being an “artist” is defined by you and people around you? (4) How did this perception of “what is an artist” affect your musical path (and even how others perceive your career)? The entire process took nearly 1 year. From December 2022, months after the course where they first met ended, five of the doctoral scholars from the course began meeting online (Zoom videoconferencing) about once every 2 months. First, they developed self-reflections to share with each other, then by Spring 2023 each interviewed another co-author to generate additional data. Soon the professor was invited to join the writing project and encouraged the doctoral scholars to develop both more extensive holistic biographical sketches and episodic narratives of notable memories from their musical development as additional data sources.

Data Coding and Analysis

In collaboration with Hebert, we used descriptive coding and inductive thematic analysis to identify specific statements and phrases from the corpus of both (a) interview transcriptions (each of us interviewing another co-author) and (b) autobiographical reflections (both holistic and episodic narratives) that were ultimately grouped into themes represented by this article’s subheadings. We emphasized selection of interview excerpts that we interpreted as revealing both diverse contexts and unifying examples of underlying values attributed to the culture of higher music education. Like other CAEs in music, our analysis was developed “dialogically” with extensive mutual discussion and revisions, which is in “contrast to a single-person autoethnography” (Gilbertson & Hebert, 2021).

Interpretation, Ethics and Collaboration

We note that “CAE emerged in response to concerns about colonialism,” and it aims to challenge the norms of research practice and representation by disrupting canonical narratives and breaking the silence around understudied, hidden and often sensitive topics (Adams et al., 2021, p. 41). The factor of “power sharing,” as identified in the book Collaborative Autoethnography distinguishes CAE from traditional (and colonial) research practices by eschewing the hierarchical power imbalances between “researcher” and “subject,” thereby aiming to place all members of the research team on equal footing, which has ethical advantages (Chang et al., 2013, p. 28). We agreed that individuals or institutions would remain anonymous and collectively scrutinized the data to ensure nothing was revealed that might raise ethical issues. We aimed in this article to remain true to the egalitarian spirit of autoethnography described here while collaborating as co-authors situated in distant locations, most of whom have only ever met online. Still, life changes inevitably led to some complications during the writing process. Two authors became mothers while codeveloping this article, and this and other extenuating factors led one author to withdraw from the project by the end of 2023. However, the other new parent remained determined to continue despite formidable time management challenges. Ultimately, the result was a gender balance of two women and two men who co-developed this article along with the professor from the online course where they all first met.

Musical Upbringing

Regarding her musical upbringing, Chambers wrote:

Beginning flute at the age of 4, I remember being drawn to the sound of the flute, and the way flutists seemingly spun air magically into this rich, round-smooth tone. My parents listened to instrumental classical music in our home, and I would spend hours imagining stories to go along with these soundtracks. The flute became the vessel through which I brought to life the stories and images in my head.

Liu shared a story of an important realization reached while a young music student:

I still recall the cozy army barracks where Mei Yu taught me, filled with the comforting scent of freshly brewed tea. Her fingers moved gracefully across the pipa strings as she demonstrated intricate melodies. Mei Yu was not only a talented teacher but also an elegant performer. One particularly cold evening during our lesson, as I struggled to master a challenging passage with the right hand saoxian (forceful strum), from the martial piece “The Conqueror Disarmed” (“Bawang Xiejie,” “霸王卸甲”), Mei Yu leaned in toward me and said, “this is the first piece that will take you into the world of the pipa, where you’ll tell stories with every stroke of your fingers.” It was a profound epiphany for me, as I realized that the pipa was more than just an instrument; it was a vessel for Chinese stories.

However, not all our stories revealed positive early-age experiences with music. Garcia-Cuesta shared his perceived lack of musical skill while singing in choir as a 10-year-old:

The teacher asked me to sing alone. I produced a random pitch (I could never anticipate the sound that would come out when I sang) and then tried to adjust it to match what I heard. When I saw the face of the teacher, I knew I was wrong, so I tried to keep moving the pitch up and down with no success. . . I could hear the whispers and giggles of the other children . . . I cannot remember what he recommended, but I remember the faces of the other children, how their smirks became louder, how some of them looked away in shame.

Systematic Training

Chambers chronicles how she

. . . followed the traditional path for classical music education in North America (. . .) centred around weekly private lessons with a master teacher that evaluated [her] progress and proficiency. It also included regular participation in competitions and graded examinations based on a syllabus of standardized criteria for musical “excellence.”

Tchirkov also shared a vivid recollection:

The competition’s regulations stipulated that the program for the second round must include at least one virtuoso piece, among other compositions. Together with my teacher, we selected the renowned “La Chasse” by Paganini that Liszt arranged for the accordion . . . a staple virtuoso piece that fits the requirement of a “virtuoso composition” often demanded by competitions. As time passed, my performance reached a level of brilliance, polish, and unwavering stability that met the stringent competition standards.

However, amidst this pursuit of technical perfection, I began to sense a subtle loss of spontaneity, fragility, and the unique charm of a live concert performance. I grappled with the paradox that while achieving technical excellence and stability in a piece is a significant accomplishment, it can sometimes come at the cost of the genuine emotional connection between the performer and the audience. It was during this phase that I first started contemplating the elusive concept of perfection in music, what truly constitutes musical excellence, and who or what confers upon us the authority to label it as such.

Tchirkov’s experience shares some features with Liu’s intensive pipa training in a Chinese conservatory, with its institutionalized emphasis on technical proficiency, often contrasting with the approaches to teaching and learning associated with earlier generations. Liu wrote:

Contemporary pipa music arises from a long and rich musical heritage. Yet it depends upon the concept of chuancheng 传承 (inheritance or transmission). Oral transmission is the traditional way of teaching the instrument and still plays an important part in modern ways of teaching. Through it, students often come to imitate the teacher’s artistic personality – drawing on understandings gained through systematic and face-to-face tuition mostly conducted at the teacher’s home. Teachers are like parents in the traditional way . . . I had seven wonderful pipa teachers (. . .) I remembered that to be able to master one single right-hand technique, [Professor Zhang] would stay in the practice room and play along with me repeatedly over a hundred times. Up to a point, I felt that I completely lost the connection with the instrument and pipa music itself. I felt that I was just a music technician; I would never produce the fast notes as fast as my teacher, and I would never have the power of a male performer . . . Most importantly I lost the “getaway” feeling I had when I first fell in love with the pipa!

Chambers also spoke to her traditional and systematic training as a young classical musician in Canada: “I started formal lessons at around 6 years old. As I learned to read music, I also internalized an understanding that part of doing ‘a good job,’ was correctly executing the rhythm, notes and markings on the page.” However, she began to see the situation differently through some challenging experiences: “After I left the institution and began life as a professional performer and teacher, I began to deeply examine my relationship with musical excellence and these standards – to consider . . . how many of these standards were imposed upon me by the systems and institutions in which I was educated.”

Ambivalence and Reflection

Garcia-Cuesta offered the following reflection from his Bachelor degree studies:

My teacher told me that with my current level I would fail ear-training, and I would have to repeat the third year of my bachelor in jazz performance in Dublin (. . .) I had no money left to live an extra year in Ireland, and no job that I could take while studying full-time would be enough to repair and survive even for another semester. All my effort would have been for nothing. The worst part is I knew that even if I could somehow afford to stay and pay for one more year, I would most likely not be able to pass that subject even if I tried a million more times. I had worked really hard on improving, I had spent eight hours a day (beyond the time used for lessons, piano practice, etc.) just trying to practice and improve my ear training but nothing had worked (. . .) as he said that I would fail, I could see in his eyes the same look of pity that my choir teacher gave me years ago. I had a knot in my throat as I asked “what can I do?” He just said, “Maybe it is for the best. . . Maybe music is just not for you.” It felt like a betrayal (. . .) that very same week I had received amazing praises from critics for my music in a videogame whose soundtrack I had composed.. . . now this university was saying that they would not recognize me as a musician because I did not conform to whatever they thought an excellent musician should be, because I was cut from a different cloth than what they deemed ideal . . .

Looking back on this experience, Garcia-Cuesta notes how external standards of excellence can clash not only with one’s own perceived artistic excellence and enjoyment, but also cause one to question institutional legitimacy. In this case, his self-perceived ability as a composer aligned with the feedback from the reviewers of his compositions but clashed with the rejection from the conservatory, creating ambivalent feelings that transformed into confusion, dissonance, and disruption.

Despite her love for both music and the flute, by the time she reached doctoral studies, Chambers sensed some ambivalence about the emphases and methods in higher education:

I want to clarify that I do not view my classical music education entirely through a negative lens. Being a musician who was willing to continually strive and often meet the standards set before me boosted my self-esteem throughout my childhood. As a misfit young person seeking belonging, these standards also created a defined “in-group” through which I was able to feel acceptance and connection — all of us bonded by a shared experience and understanding of striving for similar goals in the same system.

Regarding cultural identity and folk music traditions, Tchirkov mentioned the following:

I am often asked about folk music in Russia. My answer is that I have no idea about what counts as folk music in Russia. The reason is simple – there are many nations living in this part of the world, and they have their own traditions, which cannot be generalized as “Russian folk music.” On the other hand, there is a certain consensus. I believe, this consensus draws from (1) oversimplification and reduction of the variety of local traditions, and (2) Standards imposed by nearly 70 years of the Soviet Union. And this is only within one country, even if it is a big one! I am also skeptical towards unreflective promotion of what counts as underrepresented culture today. The key word is “unreflective” by which I mean the danger of labeling marginalized or underrepresented groups and claiming that one’s identity is limited by association. The question of identification is a very personal and individual one, which means that the standards of excellence are also individual.

Acceptance and Belonging, Despite Intercultural (Mis)Understandings

For multiple authors, there have been issues with finding acceptance in the academic music community and sensing that they are viewed as “belonging” in higher music education, and some have even taken extended breaks from music studies to explore other possible careers and life paths. Moreover, there are enduring issues in how music performances are adjudicated in this context and the attitudes associated with how certain individuals come to be recognized as extraordinary talents (Zoanetti & Champion, 2016). “Belonging” can be defined as being accepted, respected, and valued, or as “the subjective feeling of deep connection with social groups, physical places, and individual and collective experiences” (Allen et al., 2021). Belonging is not only an important aspect of education, and artistic participation, but even a fundamental human need. Moreover, belonging does not happen in a vacuum, for it “is facilitated and hindered by people, things, and experiences of the social milieu, which dynamically interact with the individual’s character, experiences, culture, identity, and perceptions” (Kern et al., 2020, p. 709).

As Niknafs explains, an ideal shared among many professionals is that “music education is a lifestyle, a positive way of thinking about the world: loving the music but loving the people even more—not a thing to do but a thing to be” (Niknafs, 2020, p. 3). While speaking about a significant ensemble performance in her recent professional life, Chambers noted how through performing finally without a preoccupation with perfection, her “feelings of accomplishment were much more collective than individual – I was proud of us, of the group for persevering, for what we had created and for what we had been able to offer to the members of this community.” Chambers’s story also showcases how expectations of competence and skill can turn what were freeing and positive musical encounters into disruptive un-belonging experiences. In reference to the experience of her final undergraduate recital, a performance which she had felt was a success, only to receive the opposite critique from the jury As Chambers recounted: “I questioned what this meant about my prospects as a professional musician — that my first impression of that evening had been so far from the experts in the room. I struggled to make sense of that shock and dissonance. . ..it remains a sore spot in my memory.” In contrast, Garcia-Cuesta’s experiences showcase how lacking these normative competences to belong can produce marginalization, alienation and isolation in music education contexts: “I could hear the whispers and giggles of the other children, and I could hear in the way that the teacher scolded them, that I had done abnormally bad, that there was something to be ashamed of,” leading to the kinds of feelings that could potentially even prevent a young person from pursuing a musical career: “because I did not conform to whatever they thought an excellent musician should be (. . .) because I could not hear what others could (. . .) I should just give up.”

Multiple authors of this CAE report that the kind of music they perform (e.g. electronic music composition for videogames), or even their specific instrument (e.g. accordion, pipa, etc.) is not fully appreciated or well understood in the context of higher music education. Scholars worldwide are increasingly aware of the need to develop intercultural artistic practices with more diverse cultural content. One fruitful approach is Bartleet’s (2016) exploration of the significance of love as a key concept in both theory and practice in the intercultural space, which sheds light on its role in fostering meaningful intercultural engagement. Liu’s journey toward attaining a permanent academic role in Chinese music at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, was based on pioneering new intercultural understandings in unfamiliar settings. For years, Liu actively sought opportunities to foster dialog and dissolve boundaries through collaborations with colleagues, aiming to diversify the music canon and curriculum through intercultural exchange. As part of these efforts, she not only premiered new pipa works by contemporary Australian composers but also taught and mentored students from diverse backgrounds. This only came to Liu after periods of struggle and uncertainty:

I returned to China where for the next six years I entered the business world. During this time, I removed myself from music and had absolutely nothing to do with the pipa. I wanted to have another life. After this long break from playing, I was able to be more objective about my involvement in music, released from the expectations of the conservatory. I was more relaxed, I started to play music from my heart, and for the first time I felt great enjoyment. I had no particular expectations and no longer cared about being judged by others. I felt free and performing became “play.” I began to discover a true love of involvement in music and understand that music should come from the heart and not simply the hands (Liu, 2019).

Toward Revised Definitions of “Musical Excellence”

The common notion of excellence refers to “an inherently norm-based and merit-based concept” (Dai, 2013). The concept of excellence in music, when institutionalized, can often become disconnected from societal expectations (Gaunt et al., 2021), as well as from individual creative aspirations (Bucura, 2021). Moreover, our stories also suggest a struggle in the experiences of developing musicians between: (1) a recognition that they are musically achieving something privately (often while “in the practice room”) that is not fully recognized in the social or institutional spheres, and (2) a sense that the kinds of virtuosic technical musicianship that earn public recognition often differ from what brings personal fulfillment when musicking alone. Ethnomusicologist Killick (2006) developed a theory of “holicipation” that seeks to explain how solitary music making can be a fulfilling activity even without any need to communicate with an audience beyond oneself, yet we sense this is a rather uncommon way of thinking in higher music education, which causes us to reflect on how “musical excellence” is defined and promoted by institutions. Indeed, Chambers observed that eventually, once she finished her institutional training as a performer, that as she was able to “release my tight grip on the ‘should be’ and the ‘correct way’ – and push past the fear of not being able to meet what I had accepted as the playing standards for a ‘great performance,’ I began to feel free in a way (. . .) I muted my critical mind, I let go, I created, I connected, and I experienced joy.”

Concluding Remarks

The decolonial critique of our CAE has determined that to ensure a more inclusive and responsive system, music institutions should regularly reassess their definitions and measures of “excellence.” For example, the notion of excellence can be more reflectively contextualized depending on specific settings and situations (Bucura, 2021), as this may prevent “a lack of non-Western cultural representation, which equates to a significant cultural misalignment with wider society” (Chilvers & Liu, 2024, p. 4). Rakena (2019) describes the challenges of “training conservatory educated performers to be community music facilitators,” a common problem would surely be less of an issue if higher music education was better contextualized in local communities (Hebert, 2010). Additionally, it is worth noting how the Norwegian Agency for Quality Assurance in Education (NOKUT) requires that “excellence” be understood as multidimensional, recognizing an array of contextual factors (Helseth et al., n.d.). To ensure individual creativity and align with societal values and expectations, the concept of excellence can also be reassessed in terms of focusing on artistic responsibility for creating a shared musical outcome (Gorton & Östersjö, 2016). We find that the notion “artistic citizenship” entails promising approaches in this regard that arguably call for deeper consideration in higher music education (Garcia-Cuesta, 2024).

As a limitation, we note that while technically not generalizable to a larger population, these cases nevertheless give us a clearer picture of some of the kinds of experiences that doctoral students in general may face in higher music education, particularly as we consider experiences and impressions that are shared across the authors. On a hopeful note, these narratives showcase how un-belonging and disruptive experiences can be the spark that inspires a will for change. Our disruptive experiences collectively show how reflections on personal development can help teachers to understand a need to transform the world, which requires not only adapting existing systems and structures to become more inclusive but transforming them into structures that potentially would not have excluded in the first place. We anticipate future studies that similarly address these issues in other contexts, particularly the Global South, for which this CAE may serve as a useful basis for comparative reflection.