Inquiry progress

We have been exploring the question "How does music shape students' identities and how does this musical identity shape their experience in music education?" To this end, we interviewed four students and the instrumental music instructor at East Side High School in Newark. And as we are coming at this from the point of view of music educators, we have tried to find existing literature on this subject within the music education community.

The first thing we've found is that there is an extreme lack of discussion and research on this subject within the music education community. There has been some research done on students' listening preferences, but none we could find that asks about the role music plays in students' lives. Discussion with teachers and academics has revealed mostly an assumption that music would be important to students in a high school music program. This is perhaps because of the fact that in the great majority of high schools in New Jersey, students entering high school have had instrumental music in elementary or middle school. This is not the case at East Side High, however, so we were interested in exploring how important music was to high school students just starting an instrument.

One thing that was common to all the students we interviewed was the large role of family music preferences on their own preferences. All the students expressed a generally positive view of the music they heard growing up. All of them also told us that music was listened to a great deal in there homes. They all used the phrase "all the time" to explain how much music was listened to in their homes. This phase was also used to explain how much they listened to music themselves.

Another thing we were surprised at was the variety of music students listened to. Based on discussions with the teacher, we assumed all of them would listen to hip-hop or rap the most. This was not the case. All the students listened to various Latin musics. One student liked classic hard rock and"screamo," a very hard style of rock music. Three of the four listed jazz as a music they listened to, and two of them listened to Western classical music.


Based on the limited research we were able to find, high school students tend to show stronger opinions about music than students in grades 4-8, which are the grades when most students begin playing instruments. All the students we interviewed expressed strong opinions about music, especially when talking about music they liked. However, they all said that playing an instrument made them like and appreciate music more. Moreover, playing an instrument fundamentally changed the way they thought about and listened to music. While they all stated that music was important to them before they started playing, all the students said that music became an even larger part of their life once they started playing. This was true whether they had been playing for four years, or two months.

Another thing that was striking was how they described listening to music. They all talked about it not just in terms of opinion or emotion, but analytically. They all talked about differences and similarities between different musicians or styles, and about how the music was put together. Listening wasn't just a passive activity, it was doing something. They all attributed this to playing an instrument, and said that they didn't think about music like that before they began playing. One student even said he doesn't listen to the lyrics anymore! So it was clear that playing an instrument had fundamentally changed these students' musical identities. While we went in asking how their identities affected their experience in music education, it became clear that music education changed their identities. I feel that this doesn't happen in such a striking way to students who begin playing earlier in life, or that it at least isn't as evident. This could be why the question rarely comes up within the music education community.