Zack Moir

Following popular exposure in France to the proto-jazz of James Reese Europe and his 369th “Harlem Hellfighters” Infantry Regiment during the latter years of WW1, the jazz bug took hold and, in the period that followed, spread throughout Europe. This new mu- sic from the USA, drawing on the ethno-cultural melting pot of New Orleans, provided a soundtrack to the new order that was forged following the two world wars. Its spread marked the beginning of Europe’s complex relationship to jazz, a music associated vari- ously with exoticism, vice, youth, cultural decay, liberation, US imperialism, civil rights, nuclear disarmament, and intellectual elitism.
During the past century, the cultural status of jazz has gone from popular to specialist, from entertainment to art, and in Europe, from an imported to an appropriated and repur- posed music form. The initial eagerness by European musicians to emulate the American founding fathers of jazz has over time given way to national and regional reinterpretations of the genre. Examples of emergent European sensibilities in jazz creation and perfor- mance can be heard in the German free scene of the 1960s, and the “Nordic tone” as- sociated with the ECM label in the 1970s. These departures from the genre’s American narrative, traditionally so intrinsically intertwined in its understanding, have necessitated the revisiting of the ontology of jazz in its post-globalisation context.
Continental Drift: 50 years of jazz from Europe took place in Edinburgh, Scotland on the 16th and 17th of July, 2016. A co-production between Edinburgh Napier University and the Edinburgh Jazz & Blues Festival, the conference was conceived to reflect the fes- tival’s theme, a celebration of fifty years of European jazz. The notion of European jazz as divergently distinct from the genre’s American conception constituted the basis for inves- tigation through a series of panel sessions.
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vi INTRODUCTION
The conference welcomed eminent panellists and presenters from across Europe and the United States drawn from academia, creative practice, and industry to interrogate and unpack the origin story, development, and emerging practices of jazz from Europe. The proceedings opened with ECM recording artist Marcin Wasilewski in interview with Haftor Medbøe as an introduction to the four themed panel sessions respectively titled “People and Histories”, “Places and Events”, Scenes and Networks”, and “Futures”. The chaired sessions probed themes of provenance, authenticity, hybridity, and innovation as applied to Europe’s contribution to the global jazz scene. Video and podcast legacies of these panel sessions are available from the conference website: www.continentaldriftconference.co.uk
On each day the conference gave the floor to contributors on a variety of specialist top- ics. These took the form of 20X20 slide presentations and provided the basis for lively audience discussions. The conference organisers subsequently invited contributors to ex- pand on their presentations, and the resulting papers are collated in this publication.

Popular music is a growing presence in education, formal and otherwise, from primary school to postgraduate study. Programmes, courses and modules in popular music studies, popular music performance, songwriting and areas of music technology are becoming commonplace across higher education. Additionally, specialist pop/rock/jazz graded exam syllabi, such as RockSchool and Trinity Rock and Pop, have emerged in recent years, meaning that it is now possible for school leavers in some countries to meet university entry requirements having studied only popular music. In the context of teacher education, classroom teachers and music-specialists alike are becoming increasingly empowered to introduce popular music into their classrooms. At present, research in Popular Music Education lies at the fringes of the fields of music education, ethnomusicology, community music, cultural studies and popular music studies. The Ashgate Research Companion to Popular Music Education is the first book-length publication that brings together a diverse range of scholarship in this emerging field. Perspectives include the historical, sociological, pedagogical, musicological, axiological, reflexive, critical, philosophical and ideological.

This article reports on a qualitative study of four undergraduate students specializing in popular music composition, and examines links and overlaps between three related areas: participants' interpretations and definitions of the term 'composition'; their use of music technology; and how they describe their professional identities and roles in the creation of popular music. Findings suggest that the concept and practice of popular music composition are intrinsically tied to music production and the creation of a sonic product or artefact. Participants describe their roles in the creation of their music as multifarious, and report that usage of music technology involves them simultaneously engaging in activities associated with music composition, engineering , production and, especially, performance. Consequently, the authors (both lecturers in popular music composition) suggest that teaching, learning and assessment in this area of popular music education should be based on understanding popular music composition as performance-centred practice.

The presence of popular music in schools, colleges and universities has grown considerably in recent decades, in many parts of the world.  While the authors are encouraged by the increase in popular music in formal music education, our roles as HE popular music educators, coupled with our experience as instrumental tutors in schools, allowed us to witness, first-hand, the lack of alignment between secondary level music curricula and undergraduate courses in (popular) music.  This lack of alignment often results in a situation where school pupils are essentially obliged to complete additional qualifications in music theory and instrumental/vocal studies, and involve themselves in extra-curricular musical activities that take place in their leisure time, in order to prepare for university applications and auditions, etc.

Although we firmly believe that the inclusion of popular music in formal education should be encouraged, the current situation in Scottish schools is that popular music is typically treated simply as ‘content’ in otherwise traditional music courses, leading to something of a square peg in a round hole situation and dissatisfaction amongst pupils interested in pursuing this area of study in higher education.  Thus, the increased presence of popular music in formal education is no guarantee of meaningful experiences and appropriate popular music pedagogy. The authors believe that more research is required to fully understand links between popular music practices, autodidacticism, secondary music curricula, and higher popular music education (HPME) if we, as music educators, are to develop innovative, exciting and relevant educational experiences for students of popular music.

The aim of this research is to increase our knowledge of the pre-university educational experiences of undergraduate popular music students and their relevance to undergraduate HPME.  In gaining such an understanding we will be in a position to impact on music education by (a) developing our institutional approach to course design and popular music pedagogy, and (b) working in partnership with government to develop suitable curricula for popular music in secondary education.

This presentation will report on a recent research project which probed the experiences of 14 first year undergraduate music students studying in Scotland and England (by way of individual semi-structured interviews), with particular regard to their secondary music education as a route to, and preparation for, undertaking a music degree. Findings pertain to pathways to tertiary education, experiences of formal music education in school, extra/co-curricular musical activity, autodidactic practices, musicianship and professional competencies.

Increasingly, many of our daily tasks are carried out ‘virtually’ via digital networks, including Skype-calls, video tutorials, and collaborative editing of documents via the ‘cloud’. While these tasks can be undertaken using normal domestic internet connections, issues of latency and poor internet connection make meaningful, real-time musical collaboration problematic and impractical to the point of impossible. However, using Gigabit connections onto National Research and Education Networks such as JANET and GEANT engineers are able to establish extremely high bandwidth and low latency links. This, coupled with LOLA (a low-latency, videoconferencing system) means that engineers and musicians are beginning to find ways to facilitate real-time live performances with remote performers, across long distances.  While this has been achieved successfully in a number of cases, the process is still nascent and more research is required to understand the implications, functionality, and limits of such a workflow. This is particularly important, given that companies such as AVID are leading us towards cloud-based music production.

The authors, in their capacities as musicians (Moir and Smith) and sound-engineer/producer (Ferguson) are currently conducting research into the the experience of collaborating musically using LOLA. Our research investigates the impact of this means of working on the musical experiences of collaborators, in a variety of musical contexts. We are exploring the potential for live performance, audio/video realism, integration into future workflow for record production, and teaching/education applications. Additionally, we are interested in exploring the limits of this system by way of understanding how it may be better deployed and developed for future use. This paper will report on a qualitative study in which the authors present accounts of their musical experiences of remote rehearsal (in Edinburgh, London, and mainland Europe), pre-production, and recording using LOLA, and will discuss implications for future use in remote, real-time, collaborative record production.