The enactment of cultural values and taste-making within contemporary classical music

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The research builds on an established and successful interdisciplinary partnership between research organisations from the complementary standpoints of organizational studies and music practice (St Andrews University Management School (PI)), and music 'insiders' (CI) at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland (RCS), (including artistic research and policy maker partners). It also builds on a track record of successful funded ESRC research among music festivals on which the PI was Research Fellow (ESRC: RES-331-27-0065) and on audience development research (ESRC: RES-187-24-0014) conducted by the PI with one of the proposed partners, the Red Note Ensemble. The PI's background and approach from organisational studies and creative industries brings fresh perspectives to this field; this combined with the 'music insider' CI based at the RCS whose institutional research and Knowledge Exchange activity is centered on music practice results in an unusual and complementary knowledgebase which we hope will add to the Cultural Values project's framework and may be replicated in other cultural and artistic spheres. With the support of Creative Scotland and its networks we will explore whether these innovative methods are replicable across other cultural sectors and art forms.We will employ tried and tested innovative methods in case studies of Red Note and Psappha contemporary music ensembles. Red Note is Scotland's contemporary music ensemble and Psappha is Manchester's new music ensemble. There are similarities between the ensembles in the musical styles but the audience, location, musicians and management teams are all different. This will illustrate that our methods may be replicated and they will produce theoretical and empirical insights that can enhance our understanding intrinsic cultural value. Our methodological approach acknowledges the complexity of cultural value. Within society there are diverse range of values and meanings associated with these values, especially in relation to cultural value. We propose an innovative way of exploring this complexity, and that is through taste-making. Taste-making is a situated activity that rests on learning and knowing how to appraise specific performances of a practice (Gherardi, 2009). In this way music can be understood by studying the social and organisational practices of its creation, performance and communication, as well as its enjoyment; these are all music practices. Taste shapes and is shaped within difference practices and is refined through negotiation and reflectivity, in order to express aesthetic judgments of it (Gheradi, 2009). For example gaining pleasure from music is a form of attachment socially supported by the respective communities of practice, which have developed vocabularies and specific criteria of taste and value in order to communicate, share and refine the ways in which such practices are enacted. This research will involve exploring such enactments of taste-making among the different communities of music practitioners. Our methods and outcomes could clearly contribute to a framework, firstly through the development of a vocabulary and concept of taste making from alternative positions, and secondly the methods to be used for assessing the different forms of taste and processes would help to enable an evaluation of value. The approach explores perceptions and reflections of a cultural experience before, during and after the performance, and this may allow us to elucidate how the different practitioners value that cultural experience. This way of looking at experience deliberately does so from different perspectives and draws in different disciplines. There is no singular experience and hence no singular perceived value, therefore a methodological approach that can capture the richness and diversity and that can produce focused insights is needed. Reference Gherardi, S (2009) Practice? It's a matter of taste! Management Learning, 40(5): 535-550.