David G. Hebert

Wind bands and cultural identity in Japanese schools

Foreword.- Part I: A social history of wind bands in Japanese schools. Chapter 1: Introduction: The worlds finest school bands and largest music competition.- Chapter 2: Where are these bands from?: An historical overview.- Part II: An ethnography of wind bands in Japanese schools. Chapter 3: An invitation to the Tokyo middle school.- Chapter 4: The band rehearsal ritual and its participants.- Chapter 5: Instruction in the Japanese school band.- Chapter 6: Scenes from the 50th AJBA national band competition.- Chapter 7: Winning in the band: Views from beneath and within.- Chapter 8: Winning in the band: Views from above and beyond.- Chapter 9: Japanese composers and wind band repertoire.- Chapter 10: Leadership and duty in the ensemble.- Chapter 11: Cooperative learning and mentorship in band.- Chapter 12: Organizational training of the Japanese band director.- Chapter 13: Corporate giants: Yamaha and the Tokyo Kosei Wind Orchestra.- Chapter 14: Metaphors of a Japanese band community.- Chapter 15: Musical identity in the band: Social class and gender.- Chapter 16: National identity in the Japanese school band.- Chapter 17: Ensemble ethos: Theorizing cultures of musical achievement.- Chapter 18: Conclusions.- Afterword.- Glossary.- Bibliography.- Index

Please, give me space: Findings and Implications of the GLOMUS Intercultural Music Camp, Ghana 2011.

Folk music programmes have been a major feature of higher education music departments across the Nordic region for several decades. Still, programmes that offer the opportunity to deeply study non-European music (other than jazz) are very rare in most of Europe, and programmes in music education that offer such opportunities at anything more than a superficial level had been virtually non-existent until the launch of the international collaborative Nordic Master of Global Music (GLOMAS) programme at WOMEX in 2009. This article is based on observations and interviews with participants at the GLOMUS1 camp, an intensive post-graduate music course affiliated with the GLOMAS programme that was first held in Ghana (3–13 April 2011), as well as questionnaires administered at the beginning and end of this unique event and examination of the first five master theses produced by GLOMAS students. The findings suggest that the camp was largely successful in terms of advancing creative artistry, intercultural understanding and pedagogical competence via both traditional and experimental fusion musicianship that transcends cultural boundaries. The conclusions illustrate how similar programmes might be implemented in other settings to enhance the diversity and relevance of music teacher training.

Technology and arts education policy

This special issue on technology in arts education policy features the inside view of those who have personally developed the framework for new policies. Assessment standards for a new school subject called “media arts” were recently approved by the U.S.-based National Coalition for Core Arts Standards, and this development is the main topic discussed in the first three articles of this special issue. Media arts is proposed as a new subject for U.S. schools that is distinct from, and equal to, the traditional subjects of music, drama, dance, and visual arts. The issue begins with Daniel Albert’s interview of arts administrator Richard Burrows regarding his experiences in developing these new Media Arts Core Standards for U.S. schools. Burrows describes in rich detail the precedents and rationale for creation of these standards. Burrows acknowledges that “there is not currently a media arts education national organization,” and therefore, the committee that developed these standards “wasn’t responding to, at the time, any particular research that had to do with the advocacy of media arts or that it’s a burgeoning new field,” but he cites two states and two cities in the United States that previously had media arts standards (one of which he had personally developed, in Los Angeles). Burrows acknowledges the role of the “technical education” field as an impetus for the media arts education movement, but he also claims that “you can do media arts without technology” and that he personally disagrees with “administrators who think that media arts is arts education on the cheap.” Burrows suggests that the media arts standards movement is still looking to “find our passionate disciples who will carry it forward.” When asked about any resistance to the media arts becoming more firmly established in U.S. schools, Burrows directly responds, “I don’t think there are any challenges.” Still, Burrows admits the existence of some opposition that he merely characterizes as “those who can’t keep up” and are associated with “old opinions and old ways,” but confidently asserts that “media arts is already ten steps ahead.” This interview is followed by “A Technological, Pedagogical, Arts Knowledge Framework,” a reflective article by drama education scholar Amy Petersen Jensen, who along with Borrows may be credited as one of the prominent advocates and creators of the new Media Arts Standards. In this article, Jensen suggests that “thriving technology education classrooms are important models for aspirant media arts classrooms.” Indeed, a central tenet of Jensen’s position is the integration of arts education with technology education: “I am arguing here that arts educators (specifically media arts educators) should begin to identify ways in which they can work together with technology educators to create learning spaces where both technology and arts knowledge are taught in cooperative environments.” Jensen concludes with the suggestion that arts educators be more proactive toward this objective: “Arts educators should take the initiative and begin now to share the facts, principles, and experiences of their field with technology educators, and vice versa.” Next is “Keeping Up With Our Students: The Evolution of Technology and Standards in Art Education,” by Ryan Patton and Melanie Buffington, who also reflect on development of the media arts standards, but more specifically from the perspective of visual arts. They openly acknowledge the deep influence of technology corporations in production of the Partnership for 21st Century Skills, whose recommendations for arts shaped the direction of the Media Arts Standards. Patton and Buffington also argue that visual art is “the best discipline to support media arts education,” and its educators are “the best equipped to support media arts standards.” They also recommend that university educators “revise our technology classes to meet media arts standards,” since it is assumed that colleges of education at universities will consent to aligning with the new media arts standards proposed for K–12 schools. Each of these first three articles features the perspectives of individuals coming from a different arts field and working in a different state in the United States—

Public Policy and Music Education in Norway and Finland

This article applies the Toulmin argument model of rhetorical analysis—which features identification and dissection of the components of prominent enthymemes—to scrutinize concepts within both educational policy documents and relevant music education literature from Norway and Finland across the past decade. Our analysis examines how understandings of “music education” are formulated through the cosmopolitan rhetoric of public policy, enabling rigorous assessment of relationships between the prospective limitations of these formulations and the actual concerns of music teachers evident in professional periodicals since the start of the twenty-first century.

Evaluation and Prediction of Harmonic Complexity Across 76 Years of Billboard 100 Hits

This study applies a novel computational strategy—Jensen Chroma Complexity (JCC)—to develop robust harmonic profiles of music recordings. This feature has been calculated on all US Billboard Top 100 hits across a 76-year period (n = 6,494). Results indicate a clear historical trajectory of harmonic profiles, with strong predictability. From the 1940s is a sustained increase in JCC that nearly doubles, peaking in the 1980s, and gradually decreasing into the 21st century. Each decade was also determined to correlate to a statistically distinctive harmonic profile. The findings presented here corroborate the effectiveness of JCC in generating robust harmonic profiles that enable identification of the approximate year in which a hit song was popularized.

Metaphors of a Japanese Band Community

This chapter examines how a sense of musical community is constructed through the collective use of metaphors in the discourse of Japanese wind band members. Marie McCarthy described communities as “important repositories of symbols, the mental constructs that provide people with the means to make meaning and perceive the boundaries of a particular social group.”1 She also linked this notion of community to music, writing that “The generational transmission of music is a primary site for inducting the young into a group’s musical practices and traditions, and through that process immersing them in communal values and passing on traditions that link the generations, symbolically and musically”2 Expanding on McCarthy’s position, this chapter introduces concepts from the field of metaphor theory in order to demonstrate how notions of community are socially formed through the reification of key metaphorical constructs. This theoretical perspective is then applied to examination of how specific metaphors are used in discourse to construct a unified sense of purpose and meaning within the band community.3

The World’s Finest School Bands and Largest Music Competition

The title of this opening chapter “The World’s Finest School Bands and Largest Music Competition” may at first glance seem overstated and provocative, but it is amply undergirded by data rather than assumptions. Such descriptions are derived from an international rather than Japanese perspective on this subject, and illustrate the perennial challenge of reconciling the local (insider, or “emic”) and global (outsider, or “etic”) perspective within ethnographic research, a problem also illustrated by the choice of title for this book. In the original proposal sent to publishers, the manuscript was tentatively called Buraban, a slang term for “wind band” in Japanese. Many classic anthropological monographs have similarly featured a key term from the local language within their title, but I was concerned that this term might already be in use.

Winning in Band: Views from Above and Beyond

The previous chapter provided the “view from below,” that of actual participants in the All-Japan Band Association national competition. It is now useful to consider how the world’s largest music competition is viewed from above, as seen by an executive of the All-Japan Band Association (who will be referred to as its “Director”). As part of this study, the AJBA Director was interviewed at the organization’s offices in downtown Tokyo on April 15, 2003. The interview provided new information regarding the association and illustrated the objectives of its leadership. Key points have been extracted as part of this discussion.

Organizational Training of the Japanese Band Director

The lens of this narrative is now widened in Chapter 12 to demonstrate how a sense of community is formed and maintained among participants in the Japanese school band system. The process by which community is constructed is both multi-faceted and complex, requiring discussion of its components from various angles.1 I will explore the community of band directors, describing how Kato Sensei and her school band director colleagues learned to direct wind bands (through a form of community apprenticeship, outside formal educational settings), and demonstrating the social structures that have necessitated the development of strong band associations in Japan. This chapter also identifies the role of relevant organizations, determining fundamental objectives, from mission statements and philosophical writings that serve to unite Japan’s band director community.

Where are These Bands From? – An Historical Overview

The end of the world, according to Christian belief, will be imminent when the archangel Gabriel finally blows on his trumpet. Interestingly, it is also thought among Zen Buddhist monks that enlightenment may be achieved through the blowing of a single perfect tone on the shakuhachi bamboo flute – the ideal of ichi on jobutsu – a venerable objective toward which many devote a lifetime of focused efforts. These musical images from two different cultural traditions are both contrasting and complimentary in nature, with their shared acknowledgement of an eternally sacred relationship between human breath, spirituality and musical meaning, as well as divergence on whether such eternally resonating expression constitutes a music that is provocative and externally projected or, alternatively, contemplative and internalized in nature. There are both striking similarities and differences in the kinds of belief systems and worldviews commonly associated with traditional European and Japanese societies, which is one factor that makes studies in the history of such cultural contact so fascinating, and the role of European wind instruments in Japanese history offers a particularly insightful window into such phenomena.