Harald Jörgensen: Research into Higher Music Education

The RAIME conference started with an opening paper by Harald Jörgensen, Norges musikkhögskole: "Research in and about higher music education: an overview". The speaker had made an impressive investigation of a vast amount of studies in the field, recently published (2009) in the book "Research into higher music education: an overview from a quality improvement perspective".

This research field is quite young - more than 90% of the studies have been published after 1980! There is a complete dominance of research from the US. The second most productive country is Great Britain. A big problem is that studies published in smaller languages unfortunately will be invisible in an overview like this. The author had, however, included studies in Norwegian;-)!

The speaker urged his colleagues to treat the reports and assessments the regularly do as research, by adding theory and reflection - then publish them. Institutions must establish and encourage research within their own walls. Sadly it turned out that several participants shared a common experience, namely that the management of the conservatoires simply does not want such research to be carried out. Especially not if it is critical to the work of the institution.

In his speech Harald Jörgensen was actually focussing on what topics have been neglected by researchers so far. Most studies concern processes taking place within institutions, but there are almost no studies of the institution's missions and goals. The list of topics was quite long - apparently there is a lot of more work to be done. This is good, I guess, since the research community is growing drastically year by year.