Abstract
Over the past few decades, school music education has seen a marked change in curricular provision for, and classroom practices inclusive of, popular music and musicians. Regardless, the hegemony of Western art music has been maintained, resulting in a division between the types of instruction offered in schools according to a perceived informal - formal divide. Yet, the mechanisms maintaining this situation are complex, varying internationally and nationally, manifesting in the metalanguage of curriculum, down to micro-level classroom interactions. To investigate, an instrumental case study was undertaken in Australian school music education, with Legitimation Code Theory (LCT) from the sociology of education serving as an overarching explanatory tool. The research was undertaken on two levels. The first exposed the emergence and orientation of a 'code division' in curriculum documents, supported by relevant literature, and matriculation statistics spanning a 60-year period through to the present day. The second examined this 'code division' from the ground up, via classroom research implemented at a school in Sydney, New South Wales. The results from this level revealed a spectrum of knowledge and skills spanning the code distinctions, yet, teaching and assessment practices which maintained the code divide. By making knowledge practices more visible, the underlying mechanisms maintaining division can be both acknowledged and new possibilities considered.
LCT is a sociological framework used for research and for challenging and changing practice. A practical, multi-dimensional toolkit, LCT develops and integrates the relational thinking of Pierre Bourdieu's field theory, and the conceptual tools of Basil Bernstein's code theory. Currently, there are five dimensions to LCT, each conceptualising a different form of legitimation code. A particular code may determine the basis of achievement, but may not be universally recognised. During the 1960s and 1970s, revisions were made to the school syllabus to include more options for the study and examination of instrumental music. School curriculum writers had attempted a dual purpose: to acknowledge two distinct but interrelated forms of power and status. As successful completion of the task required an understanding of both fugue form and style traits, further tensions arose when students misunderstood the detailed instructions, or objected to the number of rules imposed, and hence, lack of compositional freedom.