The conference CREATIVE IDENTITIES IN TRANSITION focuses on the learning cultures and curricula designs at higher music education institutions, the multifaceted ways of transition and the career trajectories and employability of musicians. Higher music education institutions aim at helping students to acquire skills and knowledge and to develop specific personal attributes to negotiate the initial stages of their careers as musicians and to attain employability and life-long learning. However, the learning cultures and practices of artistic valuation at music universities and conservatoires are hardly explored and employability is poorly defined and hard to measure, especially in the face of changing relations between study and work. The process of becoming a musician is thus not simply about sequentially passing through particular stages of development. Rather, it entails the negotiation of significant and complex rites of passage increasingly associated with a heightened responsibility for constructing one’s own career and identity. Moreover, transitions from study to working life are shaped by gender, race, class and sexuality and include dilemmas in weaving together established normative and personal meanings. As a result, career trajectories remain, in many cases, “permanently transitional”. However, musicians and artists have also established initiatives such as “Help Musicians UK”, “#MeToo”, “Time’s Up”, “We Have Voice” or “art but fair”. These initiatives encourage discussions around musical labour, fight discrimination and exposure to racism, sexism and homo-/transphobia and aim at bringing about social change within music labour markets and in broader society. At this conference, we will discuss these issues with regard to the changing roles of higher music education institutions and professions.

This is a chapter from the e-book Building Interdisciplinary and Intercultural Bridges: Where Practice Meets Research (edited by Pamela Burnard, Valerie Ross, Helen Julia Minors, Kimberly Powell, Tatjana Dragovic, and Elizabeth Mackinlay). It includes two studies that provide a brief observation of interdisciplinary literature and samples of student voice from two Higher Education institutes in Liverpool over the course of the last two and a half years. The first study provides findings from a 2014 study conducted for a Master’s dissertation which utilises online surveys with aims to gain an understanding of how current Higher Education music students feel about the representation of women in Western art music curricula in the UK, and the second a semi-structured interview-based reflexive study conducted for on-going PhD research that observes the potential influences gender may have had on a music student’s journey leading up to Higher Education. With significant changes occurring in the way we go about teaching music as 2016 marks the first year several female composers and songwriters are included in the A-level music syllabus in one of the UK’s top exam boards, how do students feel about these changes, and do they think they are necessary? The findings presented in this chapter include discussions on how a sample of students feel about the influence of gender, and whether or not they think female composers warrant inclusion in Western art music curricula.

The article aims to highlight the dependencies and consequences that can be learned from the development of popular music education in Great Britain. The primary goal of this study is to understand the framework of popular music education and its history in Britain, as well as its limitations, and through that, ideally, the meaning of such phenomenon. Discussion will focus on issues that have impacted and still continue to influence popular music education and its framework in Great Britain, such as: the acceptance of popular music into academia, the methodology and approaches, historical framework and a brief overview of university courses offered in Britain at the moment, the problems definition, problems of studying popular music, issues of nomenclature, and future prospects concerning the efficiency and quality of preparation of both industry professionals and academic researchers of popular music. In conclusion this article will present a framework for a modern well-integrated and interdisciplinary popular music studies curriculum approach.

[opening paragraph] Let us begin with semantics. The only reason we might use the term ‘popular music degree’ is to differentiate its content from that of a ‘music degree’ – not ‘classical music degree’, but ‘music degree’. That is to say, the default semantic in higher music education is to assume that ‘music’ means ‘classical music’, despite the fact that the Western Art- music/classical canon represents a only a tiny proportion of the music that global society consumes today, and an even smaller proportion of what has been produced historically. Specialized music education in the developed world is dominated by the Western classical music tradition, and in higher education this is historically characterized by the ‘conservatoire’1. In the seventeenth century the primary function of the earliest French and Italian music schools developed out of the church’s need for composers to write music, and singers to perform it. As the demand for secular instrumental music expanded, what we might call the ‘Naples model’ of selective conservatoires spread across Europe2; their primary raison d’etre was to train instrumental and vocal performers to achieve sufficient expertise to play the music of the day (Nettl, 1995; Papageorgi et al., 2010; Parkinson, 2013; Stakelum, 2013).