Learning Experiences of Expert Western Drummers: A Cultural Psychology Perspective

Abstract

This chapter explores the perceptions of the formative music learning experiences of a subset of expert popular music instrumentalists – drummers – and how the effects play out in the subsequent creative actions of the participants. It starts from the presumption that the experience of musical learning undergone by individuals who later develop as internationally recognized performers might warrant examination by virtue of the proven success of its outcomes. Most studies that focus on musical learning have done so within the context of Western classical music (Barrett 2011a, 265) and within that of student or early-career practitioners on pitched instruments. The learning experiences of high-level, peak-career experts on unpitched instruments in non-classical traditions have been much less examined, and it is the perceptions of such a group that provide the setting for this analysis. Evidence provided here will help demonstrate that a) informal learning may be more productive in some areas of music practice than formal learning; b) calls for the refocusing of the notion of practice to accommodate something more than solitary confinement with the instrument should not go unheeded; c) the somewhat under-sung value of non-deliberate practice demands equivalency with the acknowledged value of deliberate practice; and that d) parental involvement in learning may have both negative and positive impacts. Elements of action theory are used to situate learning in the context of drummers’ “community of practice” (Wenger 1998), itself embedded in a cultural system characterized in part by the unpitched nature of the instrument (Boesch 1987, Cole 1996). The community both shapes practitioners’ engagement and colours perceptions of action-choices.