Transparency in Research

 This week we talked with Module Two's about principles around ethics when conducting research studies. One word I used a lot in this session was that of Transparency. In this context I refer to allowing people to see a clear process of what happens from the moment they give you data through a survey or interview or other method up to writing your final investigation/inquiry/report. 

Overtime we have seen personal data privacy grow as a topic of greater importance. The advent of social media has started us rightly asking questions about what kinds of information we are handing over to others and how is it being used. We have seen a wide range of scandals where we have seen huge social media companies sell our data to companies to market products. Many thoughts social media was built for positive social change, allowing us to connect across borders, but this trust has been breached and led many to question whether really it was all a model for data mining and selling data as a business model. 

These challenges in something so close to many of our lives, social media, have led to a general distrust in data collection. This makes it more important to ensure when doing data collection as a researcher that you can engender trust through openness and transparency. 

Think about your process of data collection and how it goes from you interview or survey and ends up in your final piece of work. Maybe even draw a process chart of the stages you go through from transcription to coding to re-contextualising in themes. Look at the process and think 'Am I doing anything I need to hide form my participants?' if you are you need to change this. You could also share a process chart as part of your participants information sheet. 

Tracing a Lineage of Practice

 A few weeks ago when discussing the diagram of module 1 in our introductory zoom session Helen, Pedro and I talk about the idea of the lineages of practice. The idea of tracing such lineages are to recognise the practice developed before us and where we can find histories of the inspirations behind us.

 My practice originated out of jazz music which has an incredibly rich heritage and my lineage must be rooted with recognition and respect of it's origins. It is also important for me as a white man to respect that jazz comes from African-American roots and to recognise the important understanding of the tensions that exist in my performing such a music. 

My starting points for exploring this heritage has been the incredible book Hear Me Talkin' To Ya which is a collection of interviews with some of the most important founders of jazz music from Louis Armstrong to Ella Fitzgerald to Billie Holiday. Author Nat Shapiro, himself a famous jazz producer, acts more as an editor filtering through his interviews and pasting together exerts to tell the story of jazz. I marvelled in the stories of the artists' humble origins, for example did you know Louis Armstrong as a young lad work cleaning and sweeping at a New Orleans Brothel. The book also talks about practice and approaches to music and how the musicians learnt doing sit ins on sessions and building up their skills. Having read about this route into playing I'd realised I had done the same and followed such a route. 

My next course of personal inquiry was to specifically focus on my instrument, the clarinet, and see who was out there. I was interested to look at who were the main performers I could borrow and take inspiration from. The two main clarinet inspirations I found were Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw. Both had similar backgrounds as the children of Jewish immigrant who moved to America from Lithuania and Austria and had experienced anti-Semitism in their youth. They found an affinity to jazz as a music against oppression and develop their own virtuosic styles as well as going on to lead their own big bands. It is however important to acknowledge that these man could be more successful due to being white musicians in a segregated nation where their skin colour afforded them opportunities black clarinettists never really had. 

Benny Goodman's style very much captured the golden age of swing with his driving rhythms that turned the dance floor form something traditional and convention to something fiery and chaotic. This is capture well in his version of 'Sing Sing Sing' in which he plays a high octave solo that stretches the clarinet to the extent of its capabilities. 

Artie Shaw on the other hand was more reserved and about style, panache and class. His crowning virtuosic performance is his big band's version of Cole Porter's 'Begin the Beguine' where his use of vibrato creates such a warm glow and rich tone full of grace, space and technique. His style is that of Broadway composers playing in ways that would not be out of place in a Gershwin Rhapsody. 

I've learnt from Goodwin how to groove driven and chaotic and form Shaw the importance of space and technique to develop. Since these two virtuosos there has been a huge gulf in jazz clarinet talent replicating the style, standard and innovation. Bebop didn't really have a place sonically for the clarinet and modern jazz is so sax driven. Despite this the clarinet has found it's way back into post-modern conceptions of jazz with the instrument being used to create a timbre of nostalgia. 

My most recent clarinet influence is Chloe Feoranzo who has gained fame through her performances with the group Postmodern Jukebox who take modern pop tunes and turn them into jazz standards. Chloe is a pioneer of a postmodern style referencing Goodman and Shaw but with attitude and a warm tone that intertwines with voice for a gorgeous repartee. She shows the dialogue clarinet can have in music. 

From these experiences I can learn where my sounds come form and understand how to use my instrument within a piece of music and how to approach technique.  

You are the Expert!

 As we start the term I felt compelled to write a post about the concept of expertise and how in fact all of you on this course have it with particular regard to your own practice. The word expert itself come from the past participle of the latin word experiri which means to try or to test, the past participle being expertus having tried and having tested, and this is what we do throughout practice. These trials and tests that we face whether in creating a new piece of work, adapting to someone else's work or indeed in doing a degree and processes through which expertise is forged. 

Having both studied academic qualifications as well as gaining practice experience I have experienced the different ways expertise is forged and find myself sitting at an interesting intersection between academic and practice expertise, a place, which by the end of this course, you will join me at. Degrees are quite formal processes in appearance, you have a syllabus with learning outcomes that you study and as you progress you are tested in your development of knowledge and once these tests are taken, and you have been through a state of expertus you will be deemed an expert. But this standardised format is not the only way your expertise is forged. 

You are all already experts in your fields through the various experiences you have forged, but above that you are experts in yourself and your capabilities in relation to your disciplines. You have already tested and tried practice from the first note made or first step taken through your training, your practice and rehearsals. Everything done in your discipline to this point, the start of your BA in professional practice, makes you an expert this course is to give you the framework to fully realise this expertise you hold and to gain new levels of expertise in the process.

For those of you starting at Module 1 you have all of your practice up till this point to draw on in your critical reflection assignments. You can employ your expertise in your own journey and drawn on the expertise of others to dissect and analyse practice to this point to determine what can be drive forward. 

To those of you in Module 2 you will learn how you can start to structure your own expertise in an academic form picking up the crucial foundation tools of a study. The research proposal is your chance to determine how you can use your skills in practice to explore a further deepening of an area of investigation, the literature review allows you to engage with the expertise of others to deepen your thoughts and the ethics form can show you how to structure the moralities of investigation and practice.  

Module 3 will help you solidly an expertise in academia, investigation and reflection. You will finally realise a fully fledged academic study of an area of your practice, conduct a full investigation collating the literature you gather, primary data collected through methods such as surveys and interviews and triangulating them with personal expertise and experience. 

This week the staff team were asked to share our routes into practice, which in effect led all of us to consider where does our expertise come from. I shared with some of you my formative experiri. When around the age of 14 or so I began playing clarinet at jazz jam nights. I dug up an old photo I had on social media of one such performance when I was about 16 playing at the pub on Pannal train station in Yorkshire. I would often go there and play with the house band the Watermelon Men standards like Autumn Leaves, Blue Monk or some Benny Goodman. In this experience I tested out and tried improvisations and how to perform with a band. After many years I had expertise in this as a result of such experiri. Perhaps you could share an example of experiri in your practice in the comments below! 

A Summer of Practice

 Welcome! or Welcome back! As we head into autumn and the leaves fall off metaphorical and literal trees it is a great time to reflect on the old and and begin to grow the new! For creatives we are slowly being allowed with the easing of restrictions to return to performing practice, in many cases with precautions in place, but the feeling of being able to perform has for me been quite cathartic and rejuvenating. The group I perform with Me & My Friends have played several festivals this year, each of which being a valuable experience. 

The first festival we did, Camp Kin, was a chance to perform line the music we had made in lockdown live for the first time. It was interesting seeing which live arrangements resonated with a festival audience and which didn't and seeing audiences relearn their role in the transaction of performance starting a bit wary and nervous to dancing by the end of the set. It felt as performers we had to give them permissions to dance and become involved and bring them into the empty space in front of the stage, it was fascinating to see them relearn how to have such experiences. See a short clip of that performance here: https://www.instagram.com/p/CSeCvgTC8kc/ 

The second gig we did was at the Landworkers Alliance skills festival which was a weekend of workshops about sustainable agriculture with music thrown in. We arrived on a Sunday which is always a tough day to play as many people have checked out and ready to go home but his crowd had a relaxed desire to embody the music in any way possible. Before we played a Celidh band were performing and calling out set dances then they had a festival closing ceremony which bizarrely involved burning a wicker statue whilst people did random dancing around it, so they were already warmed up. Noticing this we adapted our set to what we call a 'bangers set' with all high energy tunes, this paid off with audiences dancing as can be seen here. We also played on a specially adapted truck that folded out into a stage which was a really cool concept. 

The final festival we did was at Purbeck Valley Folk festival, the big learning curb from this experience was the importance of preparation for sound tech. At the two previous festivals we had as long as we liked to sound check, get PA and monitor levels but at this festival we only had 30 mins which is not a lot of time at all especially when you have temperamental instrument mics for clarinet and cello. Throughout the set the sound kept cutting out in monitors and we lost cello sound front of house throughout causing the sound engineer to run on stage and switch cables. This can be really dejecting as a performer when it isn't going well! It was interesting to see how the band individually responded to the moment with some telling jokes, some acknowledging the issue and waiting for its resolution. It made me consider coping strategies around technical issues. They were eventually resolved to a passable level where we could play a bonanza of 6 high tempo songs in a row winning the crowd over but I couldn't help but feel disappointed with the performance and the lack of technical checks offered. As it wasn't great we didn't take any video on stage. 

Finding My Perspective and Voice through Literature Reviews

One of the most difficult things in research is finding your research territory to plant a flag in and claim it. It can be challenging sometimes to find an original perspective on issues many people have written about and there's no real set formula on how to contend with this. This is why a literature review becomes a friend and a tool to do this!

Literature reviews are the chance to check what's out there, acknowledge who has come before you and work out where your place is in your field. In a literature review you can really get to grips with what has been written and find those academic on your team agreeing with your perspective and those to argue with and feel challenged to disprove. It is a weird ritual we academic go through but by running the gauntlet of a literature review can show that our ideas can stand up against other scholarly work. 

It can sometimes be difficult as practitioners to realise the value of engaging with academic literature and what it can add to our work, but what academics often can do is to observe the things that are so habitual to our own practice we hardly we are doing them constantly. Many artistic practices have been observed by researchers and given names to things we have done every day in our performance space. As it is often difficult to step out of our own practice and reflect on it these scholars are a good place to start such an introspective conversation. 

Literature can also create frameworks and approaches for us to do research. Scholars have written about how to do good interviews and ask the right kind of questions, others on how to create an unbiased environment of observation and others how to quantify the scale of what we get up to. 

This week I've been talk to a lot of students on module two about the literature review exercise and why we do them. So wanted to share these thoughts on how it is a tool to help you begin to reflect on your own practice and to step out of it to find new perspective in what for you is day to day activity. 

When you start to pull together a literature review really explore what a source can do for your thinking and self-reflection and use it to feel out a methodology that will allow you to explore ideas situated in your practice. 

 

The PDX Music Scene Project Panels I chaired in 2014

This week I have spent a bit of time reflecting on my PhD research and looking at what parts of it could be something to share with you to imagine new perspectives on your practice be in performative, somatic or pedagogical. At the suggest of Helen and Adesola I thought I could talk about building communities of practice as both an act of collaboration as well as an act of sustainability. 

As I musician over time I have built communities of practice around me of people I would collaborate with for a variety of reasons. There are producers I go to if I want my music to sounds a certain way, people who's playing style I like to have on recordings and people I like to sit down and write with. I also socially have many practitioner friends who I know I can communicate with to exchange ideas, seek reassurance on my approaches and to help me step outside the box and innovate. This was something I never did consciously until I studied the music scene in Portland. Seeing how the musical communities in Portland would interact and resource music making to ensure its sustainability was fascinating to connect with. 

Across the city of Portland many kinds of musics are made from Bhangra and Filmi to Balkan Brass bands but only certain genres are successful around the world, most notably jazz and indie rock. As a researcher naturally I wanted to find out why and if it was to do with community structures. 

Jazz had been deep rooted in Portland, mostly because of the migration of African-American workers to work on grand infrastructure projects in the city. The city used to be spilling over with jazz clubs with whole quarters of venues. When I visited the city for fieldwork I could see jazz culture was well rooted with jazz venues, jam nights and also school education programmes specifically developing jazz talent. This led to the success of jazz artist Esperanza Spalding who had been through several jazz programmes for young people. Older successful artist would invest in young talent and pass on their skill to a new generation to ensure potential was fulfilled, many felt it their duty to do so to ensure jazz would carry on in the city. 

Indie rock has been a more recent phenomenon that was closely linked to the more recent cultivation of the city as a DIY kind of place. In Portland there are many makers working in different crafts, citizens will often bake their own bread, grow their own veg and live sustainable lifestyles that outsiders view as 'hipster'. This lifestyle enabled the music that came next with the sheer concentration of creativity feeding into a twee folksy image of the city often referred to as 'Portlandia'. Indie Musicians didn't so much create infrastructure as connecting pre-existing dots and repurposing spaces for their use. Suddenly record labels, record stores, recording studios, venues and festivals were more linked up around the genre. Indie rock from Portland became successful nation wide with people coming to the city to seek a 'Portland sound' bringing in new talent to reinforce and invest in the music. 

Jazz built the roots. Indie rock connected the dots. Hip Hop is the future. 

Whilst indie rock has maintained acclaim it has been Hip Hop that is on the ascent from remarkable circumstances. Hip Hop has faced institutional racism and oppression in the city, and in defiant response the hip-hop community have created their own infrastructure. If venues would book hip hop acts they build venues, if media won't write about them they create their own media and so on. There are film makers, record labels, producers all defying the systematic oppression to make Hip-Hop happen. This infrastructure is connected in a joint mission of defiance. Artists have thrived as a result and have grown success. 

So what can be taken from the lessons of Portland? How might you reflect on this for your own practice? 

The starting point is to take stock of the communities of practice built around you. Why are they there? How were they forged? Do they have a shared/vision and purpose?

Then consider how you can consciously be part of that community building can you share your practice with others? Can you resource your community of practice to keep it sustained? 

Suggested Reading: When reflecting on this I thought of Bourdieu's forms of capital particularly social capital and the idea of investing in connections as well as resourcing them you can check this out here. 

About Me

Hello I'm Dr Sam Murray and I'm looking forward to work with you all as part of the BA Professional Practice Programme. My background is in music as a performer/composer, activist and policy researcher. This first post is really to tell you a bit about me and my background which has brought me to be part of the staff for this programme. 

I have been performing and composing with the group Me & My Friends for over 10 years now and have released 3 albums with this group and have an EP and new album currently on the way, that we are developing at the moment. It has been interesting to compose and work on music through Zoom as all my bandmates are spread across London, Leeds and Bristol so we have massively adapted our group composition techniques. We also have done touring across the UK, France, Germany and Switzerland which has been a fascinating experience to step out of and observe with my researcher brain! 

I have been engaged in cultural activism probably for about 5 years now working on a variety of campaigns around musicians' rights, policy campaigns and campaigns like 'Cardiff without Culture'. I have advised the Culture, Welsh Language and Communications Committee of the Senedd in Wales on key reports about music education and the live industry across Wales. My activism has also led me to run international workshops on the concept of Artivism including workshops in Helsinki and Budapest where I have worked to teaching activists how to use music and other arts forms in campaigning. 

Both these experiences led me into research musical cultures and music policy. My PhD looked at the music scene in Portland, Oregon in the USA where I interviewed over 80 scene members to see how the city works to promote and protect music making. I captured my experience in a Tumblr blog. I also used to work at UK Music as a policy and research officer for a year helping research evidence on a variety of issues from the EU Copyright Directive to helping grassroots music venues get business rate reliefs, as well as research key reports for the organisations on the music cities of Manchester and Sheffield. I also  helped research their annual Music by Numbers report. 

I've also held research posts at Cardiff and Teesside Universities working on creative industry pilot projects connecting academics with practitioners to make new innovations in the creative sector. My favourite project I worked on was connecting a theatre company with computer scientists to explore how to democratise theatre culminating in The Multiverse Arcade project as part of the Great Exhibition of the North. 

It always feels a bit strange to share my career in a post like this but hopefully there will be things in this post you've had similar experiences with and I would love to hear the kinds of work you have been doing in your careers. I often find the creative sector to be an exciting place to work as it is always full of surprises and unexpected turns that make it incredibly vibrant!