A biopsychosocial approach to tertiary improvising vocalists' functional and stylistic training

Abstract

Classical and jazz voice are taught widely in academies around the world, yet compared with classical vocal pedagogy, the study of vocal jazz and Contemporary Commercial Music (CCM) pedagogy is a relatively new and emerging field of inquiry, often overlooked in research studies. Jazz/CCM and classical vocalists prepare and perform differently, yet musical and technical adeptness are required in both cases. A significant stylistic and pedagogic difference is that jazz/CCM vocalists are expected to exploit the harmonic and rhythmic aspects of the music as part of the requirement to improvise. These additional musical demands warrant a specialized, emblematic, and holistic approach to training, one that satisfies the specific cultural, musical, and vocal parameters of the chosen idiom.

The aim of my research is to develop a student-centred, flexible pedagogical framework for improvising jazz and CCM vocalists. This framework seeks to update current thinking and institutional structures in order to address the acquisition of improvisational fluency, technical proficiency, and artistry, alongside functional freedom, and vocal efficiency. Significantly, this research also sets out to redress and recontextualise pervasive singer stereotypes, specifically those aimed at the female, or "chick" singer, that create tension and discord between singers and instrumentalists in performance and education settings, underscoring the need for educational equity and facilitating innovative and inclusive pathways to creative musical artistry in any idiom and on any instrument.

Believing that tertiary music institutions have a pivotal role to play in shaping and changing music culture, this investigation centres around the Australian tertiary music education sector. A qualitative methodological approach has been employed, involving semi-structured interviews to render first-person experiences with teaching, learning, improvising, and the navigation of various musical domains with their inherent cultural practices, expectations, and biases. Participants include leading Australian vocal (eight) and instrumental (five) improvising pedagogue practitioners and a human learning and movement science expert. Interview transcripts were coded and analysed using inductive coding to identify themes and significant trends. Interview data has been synthesized with evidence collected from a focus-group discussion with five professional female vocalists, a review of established instructional methods, and literature pertaining to vocal pedagogy, voice science, improvisation, brain sciences, and jazz and gender. Personal experiences and observations have been added in the form of analytic autoethnography. (Anderson, 2006)

The most salient and distinctive factors influencing the training of jazz and CCM singers are elucidated, and significant pedagogical trends are identified among expert participants. Themes emerging from the investigation include self-efficacy, gender bias, stereotype threat, hormonal influences, educational equity, musicianship skills, functional voice knowledge, the singer's role, and cognitive processes in singing and improvisation. These findings indicate the need for an innovative student-centred pedagogical framework that considers the voice as not only a musical instrument, but also a physiological and psychological tool that is shaped by a person's experiences, emotions, and environment and considers the location of the voice as an organic, invisible instrument, within the body and of the body.

The proposed framework consists of six guiding values (student-centred, educational equity, student autonomy, evidence-based, self-efficacy, and respectful relationships), and a collection of recommended pedagogical methods and practical pedagogical tools that are applicable to jazz and CCM voice instruction but also have relevance for improvisation instruction across all instruments and styles of music.