Learning, Teaching, and Musical Identity: Voices Across Cultures (Counterpoints: Music and Education)

In connecting the formation of musical identity with the ways that musical skills and knowledge are taught and learned, this exciting new study illustrates how complex, multifarious, and fascinating questions of musical identity can be. Each chapter features a different case study situated in a specific national or local socio-musical context, spanning twenty different regions across the world. Each study is grounded in qualitative data gathered through interviews, observations, and other ethnographic methods. Discussions consider how research participants construct their musical identities in relation to their experiences of formal and informal music teaching and learning. Participants are both older and younger and range from Ghanaian or Balinese villagers, festival-goers in Lapland, and children in a South African township, to North American and British students, adults and children in a Corfiot brass band, and Gujerati barbers in the Indian diaspora.