Inquiry Introduction

Music is an enormous social, cultural, and personal force in people’s lives. Often, the music people listen is tied to who they are and how they see themselves. In other words, music becomes a part of a person’s identity. The main purpose of this paper is to look specifically at how music shapes urban high school students’ identities, and how those musical identities shape the students’ experiences within a music education program. We wanted to know how much music students listened to, how they thought about it in relation to their lives, how they came to like the music they did, and how important music was to them. We viewed this question from the point of view of music educators and as such were interested not just in the cultural and societal implications of the question, but more specifically how musical identities play out within the framework of students learning to play instruments. We are interested in how musical identity shapes how students viewed their music education experience and if it affects their success or failure in learning an instrument. We are looking to see if an understanding of students’ musical identities can help music educators teach more effectively or if it changes the way an instructor teaches. We were curious about this because we have found a relative lack of discussion or research about this question within the music education community and literature.

We interviewed four students in the instrumental music program and the instrumental music teacher at East Side High School in Newark, New Jersey. The instrumental music program at East Side High and at most other high schools in Newark are unique within New Jersey in that most students entering the program have not had instrumental music instruction before coming to high school because of a lack of feeder music programs in the elementary and middle schools. Additionally, Newark has five magnet high schools, one of which is specifically tailored to arts education, and these schools tend to have a higher proportion of students that have had instrumental instruction before high school. This unique situation gave us an opportunity to see how beginning music education at the high school age was affected by students’ musical identities. This was particularly interesting because high school students tend to show stronger opinions about music than students in elementary or middle school (LeBlanc, Sims, Siivola, Obert, 1996), which led us to believe that music tends to be a larger part of their identity than it would be at an earlier age (this is a question beyond the reach of this project and one which we did not explore).


Cited works:
LeBlanc, A.; Sims, W. L., Siivola, C., and Obert, M. (1996). Music Style Preferences of Different Age Listeners. Journal of Research in Music Education 44 (1), 49-59. Accessed 03/29/2009 11:16 PM http://www.jstor.org/stable/3345413