To Örebro University

This compilation thesis is positioned as a critical discourse study on higher music education in Sweden. The overall aim is to critically examine and explain how higher music performance education with a classical musicstudy orientation is discursively (re)constructed. Higher music education sits at a unique juncture between conservatoire traditions and university ideals, and the study discusses conditions for educational reproduction and transformation. The theoretical framework assumes that discourse bears marks of social structures whilst constituting a site for struggle. This implies that the (re)construction of music performance education includes conflicts of interest and power relations. Included in the thesis are four empirical substudies that draw on various texts which emanate from institutions for higher music education. The empirical material consists of interviews, multimodal web texts, and master’s theses.

Results show how (re)construction centres around musical craftsmanship. Conservatoire ideals are reproduced through constructions of a traditional belief and knowledge system together with harmonising subject positions. The study confirms an individualistic education and discloses how an introspective focus excludes critical, ethical, and collectivist perspectives. Contrary to expectations, the study finds that there is limited explicit resistance towards the education being influenced by neoliberal thinking and university practices. Whilst market principles are incorporated in (re)construction as immutable conditions, university practices such as research and writing are constructed as alien to music performance education. Despite a lack of antagonism, discursive struggles and contradictions arise. Concepts and practices previously foreign to education are recontextualised in ways that favour a reproduction of institutional traditions. Inequalities, in relation to classical music, are disregarded through constructions which highlight diversity and openness. Findings indicate how and why formal power, exercised through for example laws and regulations, is delegitimised and institutional traditions prevail, at the same time exposing resistance and potential seeds of change.