Instrumental group tuition at conservatoire level. A project involving instrumental teachers and students at the Norwegian Academy of Music

Abstract

Instrumental tuition in higher education has traditionally been provided as one-to-one tuition in a master and student setting. Group tuition as a permanent element in the students’ principal instrument tuition has only been tried and evaluated in higher education to a limited extent. With this project I wanted to find out whether a combination of one-to-one tuition and tuition in small groups could be an appropriate teaching model for principal instrument tuition at the Norwegian Academy of Music (NAM). The project evolved into two parts. During the first part of the project I observed one of NAM’s horn teachers, who had designed such a teaching model for her students. Her model resulted in a pilot project involving similar forms of tuition for other instruments – piano and voice. Acting on his own initiative, one of the clarinet teachers also launched a similar project with his students. I also interviewed and obtained information from string teachers who had developed their own group tuition models involving a larger number of students in each group. The outcomes of the project as described in this report have been obtained from questionnaires, face-to-face interviews with the participants, group interviews, audio recordings and observations