Music Education Research, Vol. 5, No.

3, November 2003

Negotiating Borderlands: a study of music

teaching and learning in Ghana, West Africa

CAROL P. RICHARDSON, School of Music, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor,

MI 48109, USA (E-mail: richpete@umich.edu)

The first duty of a lecturer—to hand you after an hour’s discourse a nugget of
pure truth to wrap up between the pages of your notebooks and keep on the
mantlepiece forever.
(Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, 1929)

The great thing about giving a keynote address is that it allows the mid-career academic
to pause for a moment and take stock: to wonder humbly, ‘What do I know that is
worthy of these good people’s time?’ So having paused and taken stock, I want to focus
on the fact that, in recent years, music education research has begun to evolve as
researchers negotiate the borderlands between monolithic research genre categories that
were our heritage. There are many such borders for researchers to negotiate, beginning
with the ruling dichotomies of our trade: positivist/postpositivist, etic/emic, quantitative/
qualitative, significance/believability, experiments/fieldwork, psychology/anthropology,
and even ethnomusicology/music education.
Negotiating such borderlands is not unique to music education researchers. Indeed, the
metaphor of boundary crossing was used by ethnomusicologist Kay Shelamay (1996) to
describe the hazards and benefits faced by researchers in her own discipline when they
adapt methods drawn widely from research traditions outside ethnomusicology, such as
anthropology, music theory, and cultural studies. The particular borderlands that I am
referring to here are more ‘virtual’ than actual, and as metaphors do, exist only in the
heads of those steeped in music education research traditions. The boundaries/categories/
dichotomies historically served for some researchers as powerful barriers to pursuing
potentially meaningful and revealing studies, and I am happy to note that the recent trend
is not just the work of a few adventurous researchers but a general shift in perspective
on the part of the profession. A comparison of two landmark publications of our
profession, the 1992 and 2002 Handbook of Research on Music Teaching and Learning,
attests to the fact that we have moved beyond the traditional border camps of the
USA/UK and Europe/Australia to a world view of the profession, from inward-looking
to outward-looking. New sections on sociological and cultural contexts; connections
between public arts institutions and schools; and neuroscience, medicine and music
indicate the broader perspective that resulted from developments in related research
disciplines during the 1990s. My work as co-editor on the 2002 Handbook brought me
face-to-face with the difficulties involved when negotiating research borders, such as
asking authors from the fields of psychology, sociology, and education to co-author a
ISSN 1461-3808 print; ISSN 1469-9893 online/03/030275-09 ©2003 Taylor & Francis Ltd
DOI: 10.1080/1461380032000126364
276 C. P. Richardson

single chapter on their own specialty with another author from the music education
discipline, in order to bring their divergent perspectives to bear. The result mirrors the
currently vibrant state of research in our field and offers ample proof that we are
negotiating previously unexplored borderlands.
Here a little background is in order. Those of us of a certain age, who received our
graduate training in the 1980s at major research institutions in the USA and elsewhere,
were ruled by the positivist paradigm. We learned to formulate research studies by
defining our variables in the narrowest possible terms that could be measured by a small
range of research techniques that best fit the desired outcome. We would dream up
research problems that captured the richness and complexity of the daily occurrences in
our lives as music teachers: and then we learned to break them down into observable,
quantifiable constructs that would lead us to definitive results and objectively determined
conclusions. There was offered, at the University of Illinois School of Education, where
I did my doctoral study, an ‘alternative’ research techniques strand, taught by the guru
of qualitative educational research. Because he would not allow us to sample one or two
courses from this strand, it was not open to the curious from my program in the School
of Music, where we were allowed only one or two research methods electives: we were
left to our own devices. Indeed, I was left to rely on my love of the written word and
the exquisite turn of phrase in order to interpret qualitative studies back then. It took me
a long time to see how such ‘stories’ could qualify as ‘research’, how making meaning
(knowing the ‘results’) actually came from the process of reading and understanding the
researcher’s story. I am still not entirely convinced by Elliott Eisner’s argument that a
short story, novel or film should be considered valid formats for arts education doctoral
students to use to represent their data, in place of a written dissertation document. I must
admit, however, that memorable research results do not have the same power over me
as do well-crafted stories. In fact, in recent years I have assembled a collection of some
of the most compelling, evocative, beautifully crafted prose about the human musical
experience. Each of my examples comes from contemporary fiction, however, not from
research journals or research handbooks. (One example: the short story titled ‘Happy
Diwali’, by Australian writer Jeanette Turner Hospital, 1995.) I share these exquisite
examples of writing with my graduate students to inspire their imaginations and to give
them permission to consider the aesthetic possibilities of the English language. I try to
bring home the point that anything they write, any presentation they create, has aesthetic
potential that can grab the reader or audience, and actually help to convey their message
or research results. This seems to raise the bar for them, and they usually respond
favourably by putting more creative energy into their writing, or at least worrying that
they should be doing so. My point: if we do not teach them to take pleasure in their
writing, who will do this for them? And if we do not show them that writing, even
research writing, can be artistic expression, who will create the papers that will excite
us?
I have no regrets about my one-sided research training, as it provided a conceptual
framework on which to hang everything I’ve learned about research in the intervening
years. However, the adage that first learning is the most powerful rings true. For
example, I still hesitate to use the first person when formulating prose related to my
recent research, even though I fully subscribe to Denzin’s notion (1989) that interpretive
research begins with the researcher’s personal history and characteristics, or as Glesne
and Peshkin (1992) punningly, playfully put it, the researcher’s ‘I’. The blatant
subjectivity of first person used to make me worry that the requisite sense of objectivity
had not been achieved by the researcher in designing the study.
 Negotiating borderlands 277

So, in my allotted 45 minutes, I hope to extract for you one of Virginia Woolf’s
‘nuggets of pure truth’ about one direction in which music education scholarship has
ventured during the last ten or so years, and show how this development played out in
my own research and research teaching.

Background for this Study

There is a curricular notion prevalent in the USA, and hinted at in the 1994 National
Standards for Arts Education, that the ideal music curriculum should portray all the
musics of all Americans as vital, integral features of the American musical landscape.
In the nine years since this standards document was released, Boards of Education in
many states (including my state, Michigan) have added to their music teacher
certification tests questions covering repertoire from various musics drawn from outside
the Western European art music canon. Music teacher education programs across the
USA are pressured to ensure that music teachers entering the field have musical
competence across multiple musical genres, styles, and cultural traditions, and that their
curricula have covered the ‘right ones’: those that are on their state’s certification test.
This is known as the multicultural mandate. Those of us in music teacher education have
responded by providing our methods students with new curricular content: musical
materials (such as octavos of traditional music, books of songs, and resource lists) as
well as cultural information (print materials and videotapes). We have not changed our
core curriculum requirements or offerings, nor reassigned the credit load to the ‘other
music’ since our faculty colleagues in other departments are typically not aware of the
multicultural mandate and continue to teach what they have always taught well: the
conservatory repertoire with jazz thrown in for good measure, European musicology and
common practice counterpoint.
The fact is that we have not been successful at producing multi-musically competent
music teachers, for several reasons. The great majority of the musical materials we have
provided from the ‘other’ traditions are ignored by both the teacher educators and their
students since it is often extremely difficult, if not impossible, to learn this music from
the printed page rather than from a live person, as happens in the traditional culture. The
print materials themselves are most likely not what the traditional musician actually sang
or played, due to the limitations of Western notation, and the traditional musician who
taught it to the Western musician who transcribed it was typically not acknowledged or
paid when the Westerner’s arrangement of the piece was published.
In this political and academic context, I began learning Ghanaian traditional music 5
years ago at a week-long workshop focused on a newly published curriculum for
secondary general music designed to get students involved in drumming. Though the
curricular materials were drawn from many musical traditions, we spent each morning
studying traditional Ghanaian music with Sowah Mensah, a Ghanaian drummer who
teaches at Macalaster College in Minnesota. We learned to play a range of repertoire on
a variety of drums, metal percussion, gourds and xylophones as well as to sing traditional
songs in a few of the 32 languages spoken in Ghana. I was completely bowled over by
this music and by my inability to make sense of it. The multi-layered percussion parts
did not fit together as they should, at least to my ears, and I never could figure out when
my entrance should happen, relying on the rest of my section to start at the right time.
Though it may sound as though each instrument is playing its own improvised part, in
fact the opposite is true: each part is played exactly as prescribed, over and over again
until the next section of the piece, when a new prescribed part is played by each
278 C. P. Richardson

instrument. I was clearly out of my comfort zone: a trained pianist and singer, not a
percussionist, with minimal hand and mallet skills. But this music still grabbed me,
perhaps because it seemed difficult and inaccessible, initially. So began my quest to learn
more. I have spent the last 5 years learning Ghanaian traditional repertoire drawn from
many musical genres from a variety of teachers both in the USA and in Ghana. Last
summer, I was accompanied by students from the University of Michigan on a
three-week music study trip to Ghana where we studied with several teachers in different
locations.
During this same period, I dove into the ethnomusicology literature, particularly
writings about musical learning in traditional cultures. I recommend to you two scholars
in particular whose treatment of the methods used to teach the music they studied was
rich in detail and depth: Paul Berliner’s The Soul of Mbira: Music and Traditions of the
Shona People of Zimbabwe (1978) and Timothy Rice’s May It Fill Your Soul:
Experiencing Bulgarian Music (1994). This literature helped me formulate the idea that
perhaps if music education researchers could move beyond the ethnomusicologists’s
approach and actually focus investigations wholly on documenting and understanding
traditional teaching methods, rather than on collecting their musical materials, we might
discover a better means of bringing traditional musics to our teachers-in-training, and
also be able to teach these methods of teaching to them. I wanted to take a serious look
at the traditional teaching methods, relying on my skills as an observer of music teachers
as a source of data. The following set of questions provided a focus for this aspect of
the study:

1. How does the instilling of musical expertise occur in this particular culture/genre?
2. What are the typical relationships in which musical learning develops?
3. How would you characterize the teaching/learning transaction within this culture/mu-
sic?
4. Are there particular parameters/traditions for the two genders?
5. Are there guiding metaphors for musical learning in this cultural context?
6. What is the role of the teacher? Student?
7. What characterizes the pedagogy: personal relationship? Rote learning? Indepen-
dence?
8. What are the sources/settings in which learning occurs?

I also wondered if there might be something unique to the learning process in the
aural–oral tradition. The ethnomusicology model of going to a setting and bringing back
the music did not quite suit this study, nor did the ethnographic model of focusing solely
on the context and setting. Though I was ‘bringing back the music’, I never attempted
to transcribe it: I was after a different kind of knowing. I wanted to document the ways
and contexts in which musical learning happen, particularly for the musical learner
coming from another musical culture. So I began to study my own musical learning,
adapting methods from auto-ethnography and personal narrative, keeping what I called
a journal of music learning, recording my thoughts and reflections after each lesson.
The following eight questions guided my inquiry:
1. How does learning this music differ from previous music learning experiences?
2. How do I know when I ‘know’ the new music?
3. How do I represent the new music to myself? (Visually? iconically? kinaesthetically?)
4. What do I find myself paying attention to when learning a new piece?
5. Do/Did I find myself counting?
 Negotiating borderlands 279

6. Do I give up counting? If so, at what stage of learning a particular piece?

7. Is/Was knowledge about the piece important to my learning? If so, how?
8. What role does not understanding the language have in my learning the piece?

This study has forced me to realize that there is no other way to proceed but to work
from my own experience and perspective. In this study, I existed in multiple categories:
researcher, music teacher educator, learner/student and colleague, no longer hidden in the
blissful obscurity of the third person. Merton (1972) explained that individuals have not
one but multiple social statuses and group affiliations, and that these interact to influence
their behaviour and perspectives. From Merton’s perspective, my multiple roles could
both influence and enrich my results in ways that adopting any one of them exclusively
could not. As learner/student, I provided the emic, insider’s perspective (‘How do I learn
this music?’), while my role of researcher provided the etic, outsider’s perspective (‘How
does music teaching happen here?’). My role as music teacher educator enabled me to
carefully consider the personal qualities and teaching mechanics and style of each of my
teachers, while at the same time sharing with them my expertise as a teacher of teachers,
if asked to do so. I also found myself in the role of colleague, particularly when
accompanied by my own students in Ghana. This role provided opportunities for
occasional conversations with my teachers focused on the difficulties of doing one’s job
and the challenges of the student/teacher relationship. In each of these roles, my teachers
and I entered what Bresler calls the interpretive zone: ‘a space where the knowledge,
experiences and beliefs of outsiders and insiders interact to create new understandings’
(Bresler, 2002). Though I have yet to fully mine the data I’ve collected, I will share some
preliminary findings here.

Preliminary Results
According to the stories I heard from my teachers, musical expertise is passed on in
Ghanaian culture through a variation of the teacher/student relationship as we know it.
The student goes to live with the teacher and takes on a role in the teacher’s household,
perhaps as a farm worker. The student works alongside the teacher all day, and waits for
that magical moment at the end of the workday when the teacher might begin to play
the instrument that the student hopes to learn. No direct instruction is given, but the
student is allowed to watch, and then is allowed to put the teacher’s instrument away.
This was not the case for me, as I had the quick ‘European (brune) version’: as many
hours of instruction as I could afford to pay at the agreed-upon price, with the teacher’s
undivided attention so I could get the most out of my busy itinerary. I did meet a young
man in Kumasi who is the student of Opoku Mensah, a 111-year-old bamboo flute player
whom I interviewed at his home. I asked the student if he would like to play for me,
since he had been studying with the venerable teacher for 2 years. The young man said
he still could not play, though he had begun to learn how to harvest the right kind of
bamboo branch from which the flute is created by peeling back the outer layers of the
branch and carving the holes. Opoku Mensah is the last of his generation of flute players
who served as court musicians in the asantehene’s (Ashanti chief) palace in Kumasi, and
this repertoire exists only in his memory, for it is not being performed currently. I
wondered if the young man was simply showing respect for his teacher in declining my
request that he play, or if he had not yet actually learned to play the instrument. I did
not ask my interpreter to pursue the point.
280 C. P. Richardson

I did witness a novel teaching technique, also based on mimicry. This occurred in a
performance on the second day of a funeral, a major social event in every community.
The novice who wanted to learn a drumming part stood next to a drummer who was
playing the fontomfrom part (a very tall bass-voiced drum played with angled, mallet-
like sticks) with the rest of the ensemble. Every few minutes, the drummer would give
his sticks to the novice, who would then try to take over the teacher’s part. This often
did not work, so the teacher would stand behind the novice and play the part on the
novice’s back just as the novice was to play it, in time with the rest of the ensemble.
As this often did not produce the desired result, the teacher would then take the sticks
back from the novice and resume playing the part correctly on the drum. I asked one of
my teachers about this one day, and she told me that her first drumming teacher had used
this same technique with her. She added, however, that her teacher did not do it just to
help her learn the part through mimicry but that he explained to her that the spirit of his
drumming teacher would actually come to her when he played the part on her back, and
this spirit would then convey the part to her. Here is a perfect example of an alternative
explanation in the interpretive zone, where the difference between our two perspectives
is brought into focus.
I also learned from this teacher that she was raised to believe that if a female played
the drums, she would become sterile. This was a major concern when she began to learn
drumming in secondary school because she was identified by her teachers as a clearly
gifted drummer, and was given extra school time each day to work on her drumming
technique. When she became pregnant at the age of 22, she was overwhelmed with relief
that the taboo preventing women from drumming was just not true, and she now teaches
drumming to both genders in her ensemble. However, the sanction still appears to
prevent many women from learning to drum: I saw only one other woman drum in a
professional ensemble in all my travels throughout Ghana.
One important aspect of the student/teacher relationship that I discovered in Ghana is
that teachers do not have to carry their instruments: their students carry them. This is
significant when you consider the size and weight of some of the instruments, particu-
larly the giant, wooden fontomfrom drums that stand almost six feet high and are at least
two feet in diameter at waist height.
My first teacher prohibited the use of notation as a means to learning, and he also
suggested that counting would not help us learn this music. I followed his direction and
found that if I could just grasp my assigned part and keep it going, I would not need to
count. I found it to be true that aural learning sticks in ways that sight-based learning
does not. Other teachers said nothing about counting, and only one provided written
reinforcement for song lyrics.
One technique that I found particularly troublesome was one that I term the ‘round
robin’ technique. The teacher would model a pattern, then give us a moment to try to
play it together, then have us take turns playing it individually. I never had enough time
to fully grasp the part when taught this way, and always felt inadequate to the task. The
teacher would then smile at me and tell me that I needed to practice.
Three of the teachers used rhythm syllables to teach the drumming patterns, but they
never asked us to use them ourselves. The syllables appeared to my ear to be the Twi
versions of ta and ti, but they sounded much more interesting to me than did ta and ti.
The guiding metaphor for the teaching I observed in my role as learner is the
master/apprentice model. The master carries the wisdom as well as the repertoire, models
it for the apprentice, and the apprentice listens and observes, then tries to mimic the
master’s moves. Since I never saw a single transcription of any of this repertoire, I had
 Negotiating borderlands 281

to rely on the master for the music as well as the technique for making it. This made
me especially dependent on the master, and seemed to enhance my concentration.

Results for My Own Learning

This aspect of the study is much more difficult to write about, as I began as a struggling
but highly motivated novice. Early on, I found that I could only focus on my own part
if I was to be successful at playing it for the duration of an entire piece without losing
it and having to start again. In this ensemble setting, one has to watch the other players
to stay together, and I learned very early on to trust my section and to watch them. This
took the pressure off me and made me feel firmly embedded in the ensemble.
Each of the different musical genres I have learned brought its own challenges. The
songs were very difficult to learn, as I had no language facility in any of the Ghanaian
languages and did not know how to pronounce the letter combinations. The drumming
technique was difficult to acquire, and for a long time I could not make a decent sound
on the kpanlogo (wooden conga-shaped drum with antelope skin head). The xylophone
(gyl) should have been easier, with my piano skills, or so I thought. The gyl is typically
tuned in C pentatonic, making the intervals seem wrong for someone used to the piano
keyboard. I remember discovering that the third would feel like a second in this tuning,
and that I had been playing my part completely wrong because of this one spatial
miscalculation.
Practice does make a difference—we know this from experience with our home
musical culture, and it translates to traditional Ghanaian music as well. However,
individual drummers do not practice in Ghana: drumming is a social activity because you
need all the other parts to make the piece happen. The xylophone is another story!
Though individuals do not usually play on their own, they do serious individual practice.
The entire process of learning repertoire outside my home musical culture has been
both humbling and enlightening. It has put me in touch with the musical learner I used
to be, back in the days when I had more gray cells firing, and provided fresh insights
to musical learning. Trusting one’s ear rather than one’s old counting habits is difficult,
but you cannot become fully immersed in this music unless you know it with the moving
parts of your body rather than with your head. I discovered that I did not fully know a
piece until I could teach it, just as in any other repertoire I had encountered. Getting to
that point, however, was much more of a challenge than I had ever encountered with any
other music, and I had to face the fact that staying with this repertoire, continuing to
learn and perform this music was not going to be as easy as I had expected. One of my
teachers explained that I did not have to worry about how quickly I was catching on, that
it did not matter to him. This conversation transformed my approach to teaching this
music, though it does not sit well with academic and cultural norms in the USA. I can
take pressure off myself and my students by using the Ghanaian phrase: ‘It takes time.’
This is usually used when the person whom you’ve asked to do something will not do
it any time soon, perhaps ever. It is the admonition to be patient, one of the great
Ghanaian virtues. It is a powerful teaching tool.
I’ve also learned some startling things about musical value systems. At home I’ve
encountered raised eyebrows and surprised looks when I’ve told people about Ghanaian
drumming, and that I spend time in Ghana learning music. The stereotype of the white
drumming circle participant, the twenty-something male with dreadlocks and unusual
clothes, does not fit. So, was I having a mid-life crisis? Involved in a divorce and trying
to find inner peace? The low status of this repertoire within my own institution also
282 C. P. Richardson

surprised me, but I suppose it should not when even sophisticated, well-travelled
musically trained colleagues think it is all improvisation that somehow hangs together,
magically.

Two Major Issues Uncovered

The issues of poverty and musical authenticity are just two of many that arose during
this project. That we come from a very wealthy nation to learn the musical riches of a
very poor nation was a reality we had to deal with each day. We adopted the Ghanaian
way sharing the material benefits available to us by establishing links with a school in
Cape Coast and ‘adopting’ children whose families are in need. Each group of students
who travel to Ghana with me perform the repertoire we learned there in an ensemble
when we return to Michigan. Our ensemble takes paying gigs both on- and off-campus,
and the funds we earn are used to send Ghanaian girls to school. Fewer than 60% of all
Ghanaian children attend school, and this figure is so much lower for girls that the
Ghanaian government has instituted an advertising campaign called ‘Send Your Girl
Child to School’. Parents find daughters more useful to keep at home, to help keep the
family fed and cared for. The median annual income in Ghana is $245 per person, so
children are relied upon to help support their families. So far we have committed to
sponsoring four girls for 10 years.
The second issue we had to deal with daily was musical authenticity. My experience
with the ‘traditional’ music of Ghana began in the USA, where my first teacher had lived
for 16 years. When I first went to Ghana, I discovered that there are many permutations
within the traditions I had learned. Musical transformations occur as the practitioners of
a particular musical tradition move to new lands or teach it to people from other lands,
who in then take their understanding of the tradition back to their homeland. As the
traditional musicians themselves move to new locations, they may discover new timbres
or technologies that are then incorporated into the traditional practice. The ease with
which traditional music negotiates borderlands, both literal and figurative, aids in its
transformation. This can prove problematic for the musical learner who is confronted
with multiple permutations of the tradition and who wants to know ‘the real version’ of
a particular song or piece. Or, having learned one version from one teacher, may find it
jarring to discover a recording of the same instrumental ensemble accompaniment but
with an entirely different set of songs sung over it. My answer to the authenticity
question is that I have had an authentic experience in the musical borderland outside my
home musical culture, where the musical practice of Ghanaian musicians, both expatriate
and at home, takes precedence over theoretical conjecture.

Conclusions
Negotiating musical borderlands can be exhilarating, but becoming musically competent
in even one small area of another musical tradition outside your home musical culture
is hard work. If our music teachers-in-training are to gain any multi-musical competence,
we must provide them with first-hand experience with the ‘other’ music. ‘It takes time’
to develop competence as a pianist or singer in Western art music, and this is true of any
musical genre. We must rethink our curricular priorities if we hope to meet the
multi-musical mandate. In spite of its many difficulties, I fully recommend boundary
negotiation to you as a way of life, and urge you to consider pushing your own musical
 Negotiating borderlands 283

or research related borderlands or limits, and, of course, I hope you will recommend it
to your graduate students, too.

REFERENCES
BERLINER, P. (1978) The Soul of Mbira: Music and Traditions of the Shona People of Zimbabwe
(Berkeley, CA, University of California Press).
BRESLER, L. (2002) The interpretive zone in international qualitative research, in, L. BRESLER and A.
ARDICHIVELLI (Eds) Multiple Paradigms for International Research in Education: Experience, Theory
and Practice (New York, Peter Lang).
DENZIN, N. K. (1989) Interpretative Interactionism (Newbury Park, NY, Sage).
GLESNE, C. & PESHKIN, A. (1992) Becoming Qualitative Researchers: An Introduction (White Plains,
NY, Longman).
MERTON, R. (1972) Insiders and outsiders: A chapter in the sociology of knowledge, The American
Journal of Sociology, 78, pp. 9–47.
RICE, T. (1994) May It Fill Your Soul: Experiencing Bulgarian Music (Chicago, IL, University of
Chicago Press).
SHELAMAY, K. (1996) Crossing boundaries in music and musical scholarship: a perspective from
ethnomusicology, The Musical Quarterly, 80, pp. 13–30.
TURNER HOSPITAL, J. (1995) Collected Stories 1970–1995 (St. Lucia, Queensland, University of Queens-
land Press).