As part of our first week of the “Visual Thinking” class I am taking, we were asked to used a quad chart (presenting your idea in four different modes) to brainstorm ideas for what kind of artifact we’d like to achieve by the end of the class. Artifact being a catch-all terms for a vareity of deliverables that is not limited to an academic paper or a presentation, but will still be evaluated based on demonstrated learning. I submitted two ideas — both music related — but it seems I will be pursuing the one centred around the idea of musicianship.

There is an incredible amount of Do-It-Yourself videos available online, many of them pertaining to learning music. That’s how my boyfriend got his guitar fix after exhausted my knowledge of the instrument after a few days. I provided my own guidance in addition to the videos, and while no one is going to be looking for personal encouragement and coaching from an online video, I noticed a total lack of a broader subject in music education, namely that of musicianship.

If you want to learn how to fix your dripping faucet, butterfly a whole chicken, there are videos for that. There isn’t much to master, and if you followed the clear instructions properly, you will achieve the end result. However, music learning is an iterative process, much like cooking, or drawing, or public speaking. In addition to the obvious things that you learn so that you ‘look’ like a cook, or an artist, or an orator, there is an underlying layer of sensibilities and intuitions that come with mentorship, coaching, and experience. Consider pursuits like a formula one driver, or a boxer, physical and mental fitness are a general and basic requirement for participants, but the refinement of those skills is what training is ultimately about.

Musicianship is the set of skills that is being developed unconsciously as you learn a new instrument or new songs, but at some point it becomes a conscious effort. These skills include pitch recognition (either perfect or relative pitch), temporal sensitivities (global and local rhythmic structures), motor and physical skills (hand-eye co-ordination, breath control), memory training (both musical and muscular), all of which culminate into more complex skills such as performance (mental and psychological) and active listening (of both yourself and others as performers). It all sounds a bit complicated, but these are the cognitive skills that are relevant to musicians all over the world, regardless of culture, history, musical forms, or genre. I specifically left out notation reading as a musicianship skill, even as it is a pre-requisite skill in western music, because it is not universally applicable.

I outlined what qualifies as musicianship above to show the depth and complexity it represents, having not even taken into account what musicianship means to musicians of different capabilities. And yet, musicianship is something they are all concerned about, regardless of their experience or background, and there is always room for development and improvement. Imagine, that a brilliant violin player has been working on a subset of musicianship skills that are directly relevant to their instrument and repertoire, but you would not expect them to be able to play a french horn or a marimba with the same ease as they do with a violin.

In a very broad sense, the different aspects of musicianship are a set of concepts that are not exclusive to the domain of music (mechanics often use pitch and rhythm to gage if an engine is running well, a surgeon requires very refined motor skills, etc.), but when put together, they map out the essence of what makes a musician, a musician. Mapping this in some kind of model is useful in a couple of ways.

First, existing musicianship training materials are based on tried and true methods, but are the students themselves fully aware of their own level of musicianship skills? If they feel inadequate in some ways, while they are trying to tackle difficult and new repertoire, how can they self-assess the areas in which they are lacking? At the very least, how can they visualize their own musicianship, so they get a different perspective on their own musical development?

Second, the DIY phenomenon online is spawning a legion of music students who learn by imitation, which can only get you so far in your musical development. When such students hit a plateau, is there a way for them to self-assess? I am not sure what a DIY musicianship assessment tool looks like, but certain its foundation requires a modelling and mapping of musicianship in a way that’s similar to the way I’ve described it above. I am not an expert on concept modelling and other modelling methods, but Lyanne from my class has agree to collaborate with me on this topic. All she’s seen so far is the quad, and this post is essentially what I will send her to get a conversation going. Let’s see where this shall lead.