Music in Secondary Education: Predictors of Music Subject Choices and Associations with Academic Achievement

This paper investigates the relationship between music qualification choice and academic performance in secondary education in England at Key Stage 4 (KS4; usually at age 15 and 16). We analysed data from 2257 pupils at 18 educational settings in a city in the southeast of England. Two regression analyses with clustered errors modelled KS4 music qualification choice and GCSE academic achievement in English, Mathematics, and other English Baccalaureate subjects, while controlling for a range of demographic, academic, and socio-economic variables. Choice of music as a subject at KS4 was positively associated with the total volume of KS4 qualifications entered for examination and was also predicted by coming from an affluent neighbourhood. Furthermore, this choice of music at KS4 was associated with greater academic performance on English Baccalaureate subjects above and beyond other significant predictors (gender, language, prior academic achievement, total volume of KS4 qualifications, and neighbourhood socio-economic status; local Cohen’s f-squared = .09). These results point to a small but significant additive effect of studying music at KS4 in relation to performance on core GCSE subjects. We also found that schools with KS4 music qualification choice greater than the national average were higher in overall academic attainment, in the proportion of pupils attending extra-curricular instrumental lessons, and in our composite measure of school’s engagement with a local music education hub. The results are interpreted in light of sociological theories of education in an attempt to better understand the underlying systemic factors affecting youth music engagement.

Life satisfaction and adolescent music making: A comparison of youth choirs and bands in Spain

Adolescents who are members of youth music groups learn music and develop other skills such as group work and conflict resolution. These skills and feelings may represent socioemotional factors underlying increased life satisfaction, leadership capacity, and academic motivation, together with the acquisition of emotional skills. The aim of the research was to determine the degree of life satisfaction reported by a sample of 660 Spanish adolescents who were members of a youth band or choir. It also aimed to examine correlations between life satisfaction, leadership capacity, academic motivation, and emotional development. Potential differences between these variables attributable to participants’ age, gender, type of youth music group, and musical instrument played were explored using a cross-sectional survey comprising four standardized questionnaires. The results show that the participants were highly satisfied with their lives. There were strong positive correlations between the variables studied but also some significant differences between the two groups (choirs and bands), and between players of different instrument families. These results are in line with those other studies, confirming the positive influence of group music making on adolescents’ social and emotional growth.

Rock-discourse as the reflection of Perestroika

Цель статьи – выявление реформаторского потенциала рок-музыки, который проявился в ходе Перестройки. Гипотезой исследования стала мысль о том, что молодежная музыка была не столько двигателем процессов изменения советского общества, сколько отражала намерения власти и ход реальных реформ, служила для апробации реформаторского дискурса. Исследование проведено на основе анализа нарративных интервью с очевидцами событий, музыкантами и людьми, близкими к рок-культуре в конце 1980-х гг., публикаций в прессе описываемого периода, неопубликованных документов. Появление и развитие описанного в статье дискурса указывает на использование рок-музыки в качестве индикатора изменений и инструмента для забрасывания камней, то есть апробации радикальных идей и решений. The aim of this article is detection of reform potential of rock-music during Soviet Perestroika. Hypothesis of research is idea that youth music was not so much a support for changing of the Soviet society, but it was a mirror, which reflected intentions of power and process of real reforms. Rock-music was used for the testing of reform discourse. The forming and development of this discourse indicates the use of rock-music as an indicator of changings and instrument for check of discourse field or for testing radical ideas and decisions.

Polish Youth Music Groups in the Vilnius Region. Generational Rebellion or Manifestation of Patriotism?

Poles in the Republic of Lithuania are the best organized Polish minority abroad. They are represented at various levels of government, in the media, organizations, and there is an extensive system of education in their mother tongue. The cultural sphere is an important area of their activity. It is mainly focused on folklore. At the same time, there has appeared a number of youth groups performing various styles of music and functioning on the Lithuanian music market, which is, however, marginally covered in the press. Their work does not principally refer to the problems of the life of the Polish community, and it sometimes expresses critical content. However, these performers introduce the Polish language to a wide cultural circulation and strive for a slightly different shape of relations with the Lithuanian majority than the older generations perceive it. They also contribute to the integration of youth communities. Undoubtedly, the generational rebellion, which was often noticeable in the activities of the Polish musicians of young generation, was a response to the challenges of adulthood and, at the same time, constituted a form of patriotism.

Building the youth music industry in South Wales, 1996–2020

This article shines a light on the tailored and targeted popular music provision provided by Sonig, Rhondda Cynon Taf County Borough Council’s (RCTCBC) long-standing music industry programme. Over a twenty-year period, Sonig has successfully engaged with young people in disenfranchised areas of South Wales, many of whom have never experienced a way of accessing the music industry. Through workshops, masterclasses, performance opportunities, mentoring, networking and signposting career pathways, Sonig has become a new gateway for young talent. Creating these pathways is key to an equality of access and furthermore, enabling young people to reach their creative potential, through developing confidence, self-esteem and raising their aspirations. This article tracks the history of Sonig and provides a focus on how its constant evolution has positively intervened in the lives of many young people living in Wales.

“The Atmosphere Was Entirely Good Humoured”

This chapter considers the use of cinemas as venues for live performance of pop music in 1950s and 1960s Britain. Following the “rock ‘n’ roll riots” that took place at showings of Blackboard Jungle and Rock Around the Clock, it is often assumed by music historians that cinemas were inappropriate settings for the new kinds of youth music that emerged in this period. In fact, this chapter argues, cinemas played a central role in the development of British popular music in this period. They provided both a space for young people and a space for the live performance of young people’s music; British teen pop music can therefore be understood as an aspect of cinema culture. The emergence of rock in the 1970s led to cinemas losing their central role as live music venues, though rock concert films continued to be significant for the rock economy.

Vocal stylistics in rock music: dialectics of general and special

The article aimed to identify the specific features of vocal style in rock music. This issue is considered in a complex way proceeding from the integral system of vocal intonation in its origins and evolution. It is noted that the vocal component in rock music is a synthesis of diverse origins, among which the primary and comprehensive is the song beginning, presented in all the diversity of its manifestations. Being assimilated into the forms of professional music-making, which include rock music and its historically closest source – jazz, the song component in rock music becomes the basis of meaning expression, takes the stage forms of representation, supplemented with various visual and acoustic effects and comes out to the stadium spaces with audience of many thousands. For the first time, the article proposes a systematization of those dialectical processes that were resulted in vocal rock stylistics and determined its fundamental pluralism – verballinguistic and musical-intonation, combined with social indication characteristic of rock aesthetics The article supports the idea, that vocal stylistics is a two-component concept in which two levels of terminological generalization are combined – general (“stylistics” as a set of techniques and methods, by which a music composition is created) and specific (“vocal”, which is determined by the genus of the music and its performers as a functional basis of genre). Any stylistic phenomenon, despite its concreteness, is characterized by the qualities of a meta-system, which is reflected in such concepts as “historical stylistics”, “genre stylistics”, “national stylistics” (E. Nazaikinsky). The specific stylistics, derived from the “style of any kind of music” (V. Kholopova), has the same qualities. Among them there is the vocal style which is associated with the musical implementation of the speech line, including such different forms of intonation as recitative, declamation, cantilena, also the song itself as a musical genre that incorporates all the features of “musical speech” (B. Asafiev). Therefore, the song, as the primary genre in the system of vocal intonation, was produced in the syncretism of playful forms of musical art, which included music, dance, and ritual (J. Huizinga). Keeping the quality of “conservatism” (O. Sokolov), the song on the way of its historical and evolutionary development acquired wide range of forms, being performed in different stylistic conditions and in different genre interpretations. The most general unification of multiformity of the song culture is the theory of three layers (V. Konen), in each of which it is presented as primary vocal intonation. However, despite its general origins, arising from the formula “a voice is a person” (E. Nazaikinsky), vocal art within each of the three layers – folklore, academic and the “third” – is distinguished by a number of specific features. A certain differentiation is also observed within each stratum, which also applies to the “third”, which is distinguished as something middle between folklore and academic. In the most general terms, “non-academic” vocals are distributed between such types of “third” music (V. Syrov) as jazz, rock and pop music. This article offers a comparative characteristic of the peculiarities of the varietyized forms of vocal style in rock music and jazz. Along with the general aesthetic, communicative and technological aspects, significant differences are observed here. The main one is the dominance of the vocal beginning in rock music and instrumental in jazz. At the same time, having emerged on a semi-folklore basis, as well as under the influence of entertaining forms of dance youth music of the 50s of the last century (rock & roll, youth protest songs, soul, funk, etc.), rock music has developed its own system of vocal intonation, which is distinguished by: 1) the priority of word over the music; 2) a special approach to improvisation, the role of which is less significant in rock compositions than in instrumental jazz (the exception is scat improvisation); 3) the tendency towards the revival of the genre of “poems with music”, which is peculiar to the academic song culture of Europe in the late 19th – early 20th centuries. The article proves that the “whateverism” of rock (V. Zinkevich) is not only in the variety in the “intonemas”, which are used in it (E. Barban), but also in all kinds of “splitting” of the vocal and the instrumental rock compositions into genre and stylistic subspecies. Acceleration of the processes of assimilation and modification of the intonation complexes, due to the system of musical mass culture, allows observation, since the second half of the XX century, the different hybrid varieties (jazz-rock, folk-rock, etc.) and the relatively new forms of vocal and speech music (freestyle, fusion) making with the connection of dance and theatrical components (disco, hip-hop, rap, R&B). On this basis, the vocal rock style is formed, which, however, has its own specifics. It always tends to the synthesis of music and words, and the word is often a priority and defines the ideology of rock as of a system of ideological and artistic communication. Based on the abovementioned, the conclusions are about the presence of processes of dialectical interaction in the vocal style of rock of the general (patterns of vocal sound, forms of the relations between music and word, genre origins of prototypes) and the special (their realization, at the level of aesthetics and poetics, – rock as a “way of thinking” and “lifestyle”, according to V. Zinkevich). It is noted, that the study of these processes supposes referring to specific samples – styles and compositions of rock bands confessing different points of view due to their art and the role of the vocal component in it. As the perspective, the national aspects of vocal rock stylistics need the studying, including such a little researched one as the Ukrainian.