Empowering piano students of Western classical music: challenging teaching and learning of musical interpretation in higher education

This study aimed to empower piano students and explore their understandings of how teaching and learning of musical interpretation of Western classical music could be developed to foster autonomy and a personal, authentic artistic voice. Two research questions were formulated: How have students experienced teaching and learning of musical interpretation? How do students envision a meaningful organisation of such teaching and learning? The empirical material, created during a participatory action research project with 4 piano students within an artistic bachelor program, was hermeneutically analysed, and narratives were created and twice negotiated with the students. Their education was described as backwards-looking and not preparing for autonomous learning and musicianship. In contrast, a meaningful organisation was envisioned as collaborative, dialogical, characterised by openness, humility, honesty, and mutual understanding where musical interpretation is viewed as a complex, ongoing, open-ended process, allowing for multiple, incompatible views, breaking from the master–apprentice model and the current restrictive ideology.