Book Reviews: The Instrumental Music Teacher

I don't think there is any shame in being a music teacher,’ says one of Kerry Boyle's interviewees. Writing against the idea of instrumental teachers as failed performers, Boyle explores instrumental teachers’ professional identities, shedding light on their everyday working lives. This quote illustrates the central question that Boyle's book, The Instrumental Music Teacher, explores: why do instrumental teachers call themselves musicians rather than teachers, even when all or most of their income comes from teaching?

Based on her PhD research, Boyle's book draws on a survey of 388 respondents and case study interviews with 18 instrumental teachers in the UK. Teaching, for the vast majority of those in the study, is just ‘one of a range of professional roles’ within their ‘portfolio’ career. Boyle is upbeat about such portfolio careers, arguing that high levels of autonomy lead to high job satisfaction (this question wasn't, however, explicitly explored in her survey or interviews). Not only that, she suggests, but portfolio careers allow for agency and ‘resilience’ whereby musicians ‘are able to accept and overcome challenges’.

As a result of this positive take, Boyle doesn't explore alternative ways of organising careers, other than describing a trend towards teaching co-operatives where teachers have ‘employed’ status, a development that deserves much more discussion. Perhaps if the book had been written during the COVID-19 pandemic, then these claims might have been more circumspect; the last year has been devastating for musicians and hugely challenging for teachers and shows the limitations to this approach. There is only so much adversity that can be overcome by individual resilience.

I also wanted to know more about the ways in which these portfolio careers can systematically disadvantage some groups over others, as Christina Scharff has found in her research on the classical music profession. For example, careers that rely on networking in order to gain professional opportunities mean that those who are less able to network – such as those with caring responsibilities or disabled people – lose out.

The book also covers teachers’ engagement with training and CPD. The findings here are illuminating in understanding one of the perennial problems of music education: that teachers teach how they were taught, and unless teachers engage in training, their practice is unlikely to reflect wider changes in music-making practices. According to Boyle's findings, this picture has not changed; the majority of survey respondents started teaching without any training at all, nor had they done any formal CPD during their careers. This is, perhaps, in keeping with some music teachers’ understanding of themselves as musicians rather than teachers.

Notably, some of Boyle's survey respondents said that if they did engage in teacher training, they preferred a master-apprentice model, relying on a familiar practice from classical music education. This finding reflects the apparent predominance of classical musicians within the study; while Boyle doesn't analyse genre differences between her interviewees, the majority appear to have followed classical training routes.

But it is among those who had followed non-classical routes that interesting differences in approach are visible. The two self-taught musicians among Boyle's interviewees seemed to have a distinctive approach to teaching. Theirs was much more pupil-centred than those who had followed classical training routes, who instead focused on teaching notation and technical progression ‘through predominantly Western classical styles’.

Indeed, early in the book Boyle identifies ‘technical ‘rationality’ – ‘focus on and value attributed to purely practical skills’ – as a value of instrumental music education. This value system is also one that is linked primarily to classical music education, and together these findings suggest that more focus on genre as shaping practice and wider attitudes would be helpful.

Boyle's recommendations for change centre around the training of future professional musicians and destabilising the hierarchy of performers over teachers. However, within this rich descriptive account of instrumental teachers’ identities, I was curious to know more about what Boyle thinks about the implications of her findings.

For example, the high levels of autonomy that instrumental teachers enjoy in their working lives seem to stem partly from the minimal or non-existent regulation of the profession. But if instrumental teaching is to gain in status, as she is advocating, isn't it inevitable that more regulation will be needed to provide some assurance of teachers’ status and expertise?

Such professionalisation would also require teachers to engage in more systematic, accredited formal training; but how could this be incentivised in order to increase the status of teachers? As this is very much an academic study, perhaps Boyle will address these questions in future work that is aimed at a wider, non-academic audience.

As the music education profession opens up much-needed discussions of how to make change in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement, more space for reflection on such questions would be very welcome.