Research

From the musician to the teacher, the learner and the wider music-education landscape

My research is concerned with a broad but interconnected question:

How can music education support people in developing meaningful, sustainable and increasingly independent musical understanding?

Over time, this question has led my research through different but closely related areas — from the emotional experience of the performing musician, to the lived experiences of music teachers, and increasingly towards the ways in which learners develop musical literacy within diverse educational contexts.

Across these areas, I am interested in the relationship between musical knowledge, experience, identity, teaching, access and practice.

My research does not treat music literacy as simply the ability to read notation or complete written theory exercises. Rather, I understand musical literacy as a multidimensional capacity to hear, experience, recognise, interpret, represent, reason about, create and communicate through music.

This broader understanding now provides an important foundation for my work in Repertoire-Based Music Literacy Education (RBMLE).

The Musician: Performance Anxiety and Emotional Intelligence

My early research focused on the performer and, particularly, on the relationship between Music Performance Anxiety and Emotional Intelligence.

Musical performance involves considerably more than technical preparation. It places cognitive, emotional and psychological demands on the performer, and musicians may experience these demands very differently.

My Master's research investigated the role of emotional intelligence in music performance anxiety and resulted in both theoretical and empirical research.

This work explored the ways in which emotional awareness, emotional regulation and related dimensions of emotional intelligence may interact with musicians' experiences of anxiety in performance contexts.

Although my later research moved increasingly towards music education and music literacy, this earlier research established a principle that continues throughout my work:

musical development involves the whole person.

Learning, teaching and performing music cannot be separated easily from emotion, motivation, identity, confidence, prior experience and human relationships.

The Teacher: Music Literacy Education in South African Schools

My doctoral research shifted the focus from the performer to the music teacher.

My PhD study, Investigating the Music Literacy Conundrum in South African Secondary Schools, examined how teachers experience and negotiate the teaching of music literacy in very different educational environments.

South African music education provides an especially important context for this research because music teachers work across considerable differences in learner preparation, institutional resources, curriculum provision, musical traditions and educational opportunity.

The study showed that music literacy cannot be understood solely as a curriculum-content problem.

What happens in the classroom is shaped by a complex interaction between:

curriculum expectations;

learner backgrounds and prior musical knowledge;

teacher experience and expertise;

available resources;

school structures;

musical traditions;

institutional support;

and teachers' own beliefs about what meaningful music education should involve.

The research therefore increasingly drew my attention towards the role of the teacher as an active educational decision-maker.

Teacher Agency and Sustainable Music Education

One of the major strands emerging from my doctoral work is teacher agency.

Music teachers do not simply implement a curriculum.

They continually interpret it.

They adapt it to their learners.

They develop resources where resources are absent.

They create pathways between different kinds of musical knowledge.

They establish ensembles and programmes.

They compensate for gaps in previous learning.

They negotiate institutional limitations.

And, in many contexts, they create the very conditions under which sustained music education becomes possible.

My current research therefore explores the ways in which teachers exercise agency within uneven educational environments.

I am particularly interested in how teachers:

accelerate access to foundational musical knowledge;

mediate between different musical literacies;

build educational and programme infrastructure;

develop integrated approaches to teaching;

and construct meaningful entry routes into formal musical learning.

This strand of my research asks not only what teachers teach, but also what teachers make possible.

The Learner: What Does It Mean to Be Musically Literate?

My research has increasingly moved towards the learner and towards a fundamental question in music education:

What does it mean to become musically literate?

Traditional music-theory education often separates musical concepts into individual topics: note names, rhythm, scales, intervals, terminology, keys, chords and so forth.

These are important components of musical knowledge.

However, the ability to complete a written exercise does not necessarily mean that the learner understands how that knowledge functions within music.

For this reason, I am interested in the distinction between knowing about music and being able to use musical knowledge meaningfully.

Musical literacy develops when learners begin to connect what they see, hear, perform, understand and create.

My developing conceptualisation of musical literacy therefore includes several interconnected dimensions:

hearing;

feeling and experiencing;

identifying;

reading and representing;

interpreting;

reasoning and applying;

creating;

and communicating and performing.

Seen in this way, notation and written theory remain important, but they form part of a much larger musical process.

Repertoire-Based Music Literacy Education

These questions have led directly to my current work in Repertoire-Based Music Literacy Education (RBMLE).

RBMLE begins with the premise that music itself can become the primary context for developing musical literacy.

Instead of introducing musical concepts predominantly in isolation and only later applying them to repertoire, a repertoire-based approach also asks:

What can learners discover about music through music they already know, hear, sing, play or value?

Within RBMLE, repertoire becomes the point of connection between different areas of musical learning.

A single piece of music can provide opportunities for:

listening;

aural development;

rhythm;

pitch;

notation;

theory;

musical vocabulary;

interpretation;

improvisation;

composition;

and performance.

Concepts are therefore not encountered as disconnected pieces of information. They are progressively discovered, named, understood, practised and applied within meaningful musical contexts.

The longer-term purpose is not simply to help learners complete musical tasks correctly.

It is to help them become increasingly independent musical thinkers.

From the Music You Know to Where You Want to Go

A central principle within my current research is that learners do not arrive in music education without musical knowledge.

A learner may already possess sophisticated musical abilities through singing, church music, community music-making, popular music, traditional music, instrumental playing, informal learning or listening — while having had little or no access to conventional notation or formal music theory.

This creates an important educational question:

Can the musical knowledge a learner already possesses become the starting point for further musical learning?

RBMLE is increasingly concerned with creating these bridges.

The aim is not to replace established forms of musical knowledge, notation or theoretical understanding.

Rather, it is to create pathways towards them.

The principle can be expressed simply as:

From the music you know to where you want to go.

For one learner, that destination may be greater confidence in reading music.

For another, it may be directing a choir.

For another, it may be completing an external music examination.

For another, it may be improvisation, composition or arranging.

For another, it may be gaining access to tertiary music study.

The destination may differ, but existing musical knowledge can provide the starting point.

Access, Equity and Music Education

Questions of musical literacy are therefore inseparable from questions of access.

Formal music education remains unevenly available.

Learners may encounter very different opportunities depending on the schools they attend, the communities in which they live, access to instruments and teachers, financial resources, language, curriculum structures and prior educational experiences.

My research is increasingly interested in how music-literacy education can create more accessible and participatory routes into formal musical learning.

This includes investigating how music education can recognise musical knowledge already present within communities rather than assuming that meaningful musical learning begins only when learners encounter formal Western notation.

The challenge is therefore both pedagogical and structural:

How can we create pathways that acknowledge what learners already know while providing access to what they may still wish or need to learn?

This question has particular relevance within South African and broader African music-education contexts.

Curriculum, Assessment and Educational Resource Development

A significant part of my work sits at the intersection of research and educational practice.

I am interested in how research about musical literacy can influence curriculum design, assessment and the development of learning resources.

This involves questions such as:

How should musical concepts be sequenced?

How can new knowledge be introduced without disconnecting it from music?

How much cumulative retrieval and revision do learners require?

How can written theory, listening, repertoire and performance reinforce one another?

How can curricula prepare learners for formal examinations without reducing music education to examination preparation?

How can educational resources support teachers while still allowing professional judgement and flexibility?

My curriculum projects, workbooks and developing RBMLE materials provide a space in which these questions can be explored in practice.

This creates a continuing cycle:

research informs practice;
practice generates new questions;
and those questions lead back into research.

Narrative Inquiry and Teacher Experience

My doctoral work is methodologically grounded in narrative inquiry.

I am particularly drawn to narrative approaches because teaching cannot always be understood adequately through isolated variables or measurements.

Teachers' decisions are shaped by histories, relationships, institutions, professional identities, cultural contexts and accumulated experience.

Their stories reveal how educational circumstances are interpreted and negotiated over time.

Narrative research therefore allows attention to remain on the individual teacher while also making it possible to examine broader patterns across educational contexts.

This methodological interest continues in my work on teacher agency and music-literacy education.

Visual Research Methods, CAQDAS and ATLAS.ti

Another strand of my research concerns qualitative research methodology, visualisation and Computer-Assisted Qualitative Data Analysis Software (CAQDAS).

My work with ATLAS.ti has included the exploration of coding, Word Clouds, networks and other forms of qualitative data visualisation.

I am particularly interested in how digital tools can assist the researcher in recognising patterns and relationships within complex qualitative datasets without allowing software-generated outputs to replace interpretation.

Visualisation can make complexity more visible.

However, a Word Cloud, network or coded dataset does not interpret itself.

Qualitative analysis remains dependent on context, reflexivity, participant voice and the judgement of the researcher.

My methodological work therefore explores the productive space between systematic analysis and interpretive inquiry.

Research into Practice

An important characteristic of my research programme is that I do not regard academic research, teaching and resource development as separate activities.

Research questions frequently begin with problems encountered in educational practice.

Teaching then provides opportunities to explore those questions.

Curriculum and resource development allow research principles to be translated into practical educational structures.

Those structures, in turn, reveal new questions.

This relationship between research and practice is particularly important within music education, where theoretical ideas must ultimately encounter actual music, actual learners and actual teachers.

For this reason, my work increasingly combines scholarship with curriculum development, educational-resource design and the testing of pedagogical ideas in practice.

An Evolving Research Programme

Although my research interests have developed over time, they are connected by a consistent concern with how people experience, understand, teach and learn music.

The trajectory can broadly be described as:

the musician → the teacher → the learner → the educational system.

My early work examined the emotional experience of the performing musician.

My doctoral research explored the experiences and agency of music teachers.

My current work increasingly investigates how learners become musically literate and how educational systems can create more meaningful and accessible pathways towards musical understanding.

These strands now come together in an evolving research programme concerned with:

music literacy;

Repertoire-Based Music Literacy Education;

teacher agency;

access and sustainable music education;

curriculum and educational resource development;

narrative inquiry;

qualitative research methodology and visualisation;

and the lived experience of musicians, teachers and learners.

At the centre of all of these interests is the belief that musical knowledge becomes most meaningful when it remains connected to music itself — to what people hear, perform, create, experience and understand.

Ultimately, my research asks how music education can help people move from the musical knowledge they already possess towards increasingly rich, connected and independent musical understanding.

From the music you know to where you want to go.