The Skills and Knowledge Gap in Higher Music Education: An Exploratory Empirical Study

Abstract

Research claims that entrepreneurial skills and knowledge are important for the careers of musicians (Bennett, 2016; Breivik, Selvik, Bakke, Welde & Jermstad, 2015; Coulson, 2012). Alumni of higher music education (HME) report “a gap between the perceived importance of such [entrepreneurial] skills and their acquisition” (Miller, Dumford & Johnson 2017, p. 11). As a response, institutes of HME have integrated arts entrepreneurship education to help music students acquire these skills and knowledge to a greater extent (Beckman, 2005, 2007). Yet, specifically which entrepreneurial skills and knowledge (Lackeus, 2015) arts entrepreneurship education helps students acquire lacks empirical support and articulation. In this exploratory pilot study, I create, disseminate and use exploratory data analysis (Tukey, 1977) to understand the descriptive statistics of survey IJEA Vol. 21 No. 10 http://www.ijea.org/v21n10/ 2 responses from teachers and students of HME in Norway. Respondents rated the perceived importance and acquisition of a variety of skills and knowledge while considering students’ future careers. Students also reported to what extent they felt they learned entrepreneurship through their current study program. Consistent with previous research, the findings show a “gap between the perceived acquisition of skills and the importance of such skills” (Miller et al., 2017, p. 11) in HME. The largest gaps in this study are for the following specific skills and knowledge: sales/marketing, market/industry, financial, social media, and business planning. Additionally, as students report they felt they learned entrepreneurship to increasingly larger extents, this gap is closed and narrowed. This shared tendency between the increased extent of entrepreneurship learned by music students and the perceived increase in the acquisition of various skills and knowledge is new insight for the field. Implications for arts entrepreneurship practitioners are discussed in addition to some ideas for future in-depth research. Music Careers and Enforced Entrepreneurship Students in the performing arts will often have “portfolio” careers which consist of a neverending, self-managed series of simultaneous and overlapping employment engagements (Cawsey, 1995; Teague & Smith, 2015). These engagements vary according to the spectrum and diversity of employers, but also to the type of work undertaken. Musicians, for example, often maintain portfolio careers as music teachers, freelancers, and performers, in which they depend on a set of entrepreneurial skills to network, recognize opportunities, and maintain a livelihood (Bennett, 2016; Breivik et al., 2015; Coulson, 2012). Over 42 percent of surveyed musicians in Germany claim their career is made possible through self-employment (Dangel & Piorkowsky, 2006); musicians in Australia on average held more than one music industry role and often “don ́t know any musicians who do only one thing” (Bennett, 2007); over 90 percent of the studied UK musicians hold a secondary occupation; and in Denmark, 6 percent of music graduates worked solely in performance, with half of them working in both performance and teaching (Traasdahl, 1996). Being selfemployed and generating their own work means that individuals have to use various skills beyond the scope of the “conservatory model” in higher music education (HME), where the main focus of training has been teaching “music through instrumental skills” (Orning, 2017, p. 3). This model is “narrow and extremely focused on the skills of performing.” (Cutietta, 2010, p. 13). This may be considered a problem if music graduates often maintain portfolio careers consisting of a patchwork of professional roles and become “enforced entrepreneurs” upon graduation (Bennett & Bridgstock, 2015, p. 263). Toscher: The Skills and Knowledge Gap 3 Arts Entrepreneurship Education Since “most artists find themselves entrepreneurs by default immediately [when] they begin searching for work” (Bennett, 2009, p. 323), it may be understandable why the “increasing importance of professional development is one of the most dynamic trends emerging in the arts within higher education. Publicly funded institutions in particular are increasingly relying on entrepreneurship as a means to prepare students for musical careers” (Beckman, 2005, p. 13). Beckman first wrote about this trend in 2005 and later conducted a study which mapped at least 37 U.S. higher education institutions offering arts entrepreneurship education (Beckman, 2007). Integration of arts entrepreneurship in the U.S. has increased since then: In 2016, Essig and Guevara (2016) mapped 372 offerings by 168 institutions in the U.S. Arts entrepreneurship education is also offered in countries outside of the U.S., such as Australia, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, and the UK (Brandenburg, Roosen & Veenstra, 2016; Pollard & Wilson, 2013; Thom, 2017; Toscher & Bjørnø, 2019; Watne & Nymoen, 2017). Despite this, there is no consensus on what an arts entrepreneurship offering is and which specific knowledge and skills it teaches. In 2005, Beckman studied musical entrepreneurship in HME and wrote that they could not find “consensus on how to approach entrepreneurship curricula this environment” (p. 13). Eight years later, White (2013) noted there were still “no formally recognized outcomes for arts entrepreneurship by an accreditation organization” in the U.S. (p. 35). This could be because it is a “transdiscipline,” as Essig and Guevara (2016) describe it; or it could be, because arts entrepreneurship has been specific to the economic, cultural, and educational contexts in which it is taught, a contextual approach which has been advocated for by Beckman (2007). In either case, it may appear that educational institutions have implemented arts entrepreneurship education in response to their interpretation that some general level of entrepreneurial skills are needed for their students ́ careers, yet what these specific entrepreneurial skills are is the subject of continuous inquiry. Even in the broader field of entrepreneurship education there are a variety of curricular offerings with “shifting definition, pedagogical approaches and varying emphasis on theory over practice” (p. 8, Lackeus, 2015). In their paper Entrepreneurship in Education: What, Why, When, How, Lackeus defined entrepreneurial competencies as “knowledge, skills and attitudes that affect the willingness and ability to perform the entrepreneurial job of new value creation” (p. 12). The main goal of most such education is for students to develop a level of these knowledge, skills, and/or attitudes, whether in an offering which is “about, for, or through entrepreneurship” (p. 10). Lackeus then theoretically articulated these specific skills and knowledge and how they relate to a more generalized notion of entrepreneurial skills and knowledge, but empirical data supporting this relation is lacking. IJEA Vol. 21 No. 10 http://www.ijea.org/v21n10/ 4 Empirical research has contextualized and further defined these entrepreneurial skills and knowledge alongside the educational and cultural contexts in which arts entrepreneurship is being offered. In the Netherlands, Brandenburg et al. (2016) determined the “six most essential entrepreneurial skills for Art & Technology students” (p. 25) and evaluated a selection of business modeling methods based on the extent to which they contributed to mastering these skills. Thom (2016) surveyed 208 lecturers of the fine arts (who were also working artists) from 89 higher education institutions in the UK and Germany to rank the 16 most “crucial skills for the entrepreneurial success” (p. 3) of artists. Miller et al. (2017) published a study in the International Journal of Education & the Arts in which 16,317 music performance, music theory, and music education alumni from U.S. higher education institutions rated the perceived professional importance for 16 different categories of skills and knowledge and their perceptions of their acquisition of these skills and knowledge during their music education. They found that: ...the average ratings of importance for business and entrepreneurial skills are quite high across all three majors, with music performance majors rating them significantly higher. This gap between the perceived acquisition of skills and the importance of such skills in the workplace should be a concern for music faculty and administrators. Music students of all major types need increased exposure to business and entrepreneurial skills to be better prepared for the logistic and practical components of work in their field. Trends in the arts economy suggest that since many artists are selfemployed, they need direct instruction in entrepreneurial experiences such as marketing, budgeting, taxes, and strategic planning (Haase & Lautenschläger, 2011). Since we also see that music performance majors are more likely to be self-employed, this is a place where more curriculum reform might aid in the development of music professionals. (p. 11) In a similar study, Skaggs, Frenette, Gaskill & Miller (2017) found music alumni perceived their acquisition of skills were significantly lower than their importance in a similar fashion to Miller et al. (2017), with the biggest gaps being for business and financial skills (-58%) and entrepreneurial skills (-43%). The Need for Further Study While these studies individually inquire into how various entrepreneurial skills are viewed as “essential” (Brandenburg et al., 2016), “crucial” (Thom, 2016), or “important” for artists (Miller et al., 2017) in different cultural, educational, and artistic contexts, they fall short of their potential to provide a more thorough, contextualized exploration of these skills, how they relate to a more generalized notion of entrepreneurial skills, and how arts entrepreneurship Toscher: The Skills and Knowledge Gap 5 education is related to their acquisition. How