Gradus ad...? Rethinking musicianship in the training of performers of new music

New music is quite old. However, the institutional training structures that aim to teach those musicians who intend to specialise in its performance are young. These structures have been subject to little scrutiny, and few texts exist to guide and support those responsible for constructing courses and delivering training. This study is intended to help fill this gap. Using a combination of practice research and traditional research methods, I investigate how new music performer training is currently offered. I discover that while trainees have access to a rich store of technical instrumental tuition and project-specific artistic guidance, their instrument- and work-independent (musicianship) needs are not generally being met. I look within new music’s characteristic materials, gestational processes, and professional taboos, to understand why this is the case. Taking a cognition-in-action approach, I then offer a novel practical vocabulary intended to expand the meaning and relevance of musicianship in new music performance contexts. In two extensive dialogues, one investigating pitch and the other rhythm, I sketch how instructors and curriculum-setters might deploy the terms in this vocabulary when interacting with trainees. The dialogues are idealised learning journeys. Since it is not meaningful to set learning targets such as ‘play/sing in tune’ or ‘in time’ without musical context, the dialogues present thought experiments alongside practical musicianship exercises and make no attempt to separate skills of ear and body from skills of thought. While the tools developed here are drawn from and targeted at an existing new music repertoire, they are also transferable between projects and are not limited to specific acts of performance. The immediate envisaged impact of this study is to guide my own practice as performer-pedagogue. It is also intended to lay the groundwork for future developments in this young field.