Designing a Musical Performance Educational Web Portal for Music Students: The Web Concert Hall

The focus of this paper concerns designing and creating the Web Concert Hall (www.webconcerthall.com), an interdisciplinary learning portal, for musicians. The paper discuss on how the use of the web and its multi-modal presentation capability and an appropriate utilization of instructional theory can be of particular value in addressing problems of information delivery for the acquisition of advanced knowledge promotion in classical music for music students and ordinary viewers.

The Web Concert Hall attempts to achieve this by utilization of Cognitive Flexibility Theory in its designing and offering dynamic content extensible information archive and scalable infomatic paradigm for the musicians and viewers that offers an opportunity for them to experience the insights and wisdom that come from the relevant genre of thoughts that is interconnected with the piece of music. Leonardo da Vinci felt he could not paint a body unless he knew its skeleton; the skeleton of a piece of music is understanding the worldly knowledge that it is interconnected to -- literature, art, and other music.

The goal of the Web Concert Hall is to lead music students to an understanding of how the world is interconnected and interdependent while using music as the core of its study. For example, the learner will see the relationship of the music to historical events and other art works of the time of composition was written. Authors believe that offering how other studies are interconnected with another, such information can provide the basic intellectual competencies that are needed to deal effectively and responsibly with reality of performing a musical composition.

The remainder of this paper discusses three parts in connection with the Web Concert Hall. In Part one, it identifies some previously unsolved problems of performing arts education in a typical music conservatory. In Part two, it suggests and identifies an appropriate instructional theory used in designing and developing the site. And in part three, it illustrates the problem solutions developed by using web features to precisely address these unresolved problems.

Music is an expression of some emotion and/or vision from the past. On stage, it is the performer's responsibility to communicate these ideas in an orderly fashion, just as the composer arranged them. Therefore, learning to perform a piece of music requires three distinct cognitive operations: 1) possibly re-living and recreating a part of the history by which the music was shaped; 2) understanding both historically and culturally how the piece of music connects to diverse genres of thought; and 3) translating this cognitive experience into an action, that is, using technical dexterity to reflect one's learned knowledge.

When a performer is weak in one or more of the cognitive operations described above, he or she is likely to have an oversimplified and unbalanced emotional understanding of a piece and thus be unable to express an appropriate level of musical understanding. Today, performances that display incongruent emotional expressions of thought are common among conservatory students because the curricula offer minimal interconnectedness between a piece of music and the social ideas and movements that influenced the composition (i.e., ideas and movements as reflected in history, science, philosophy, literature, painting, etc.).

A typical conservatory training largely ignores delivering an educational experience that involves the insights and wisdom that come from all the relevant genres of thought connected to the piece of music that students are learning. It offers a limited learning experience in a static learning environment that has limited capability of delivering relevant information and cultural resources and mentor-ship that requires for a music student’s cognitive development.

Most music instruction takes only limited account of the cognitive development of the students in related intellectual activities, such as the interconnectedness and interdependence of all genres of thoughts with a piece of music. A typical instrumental teaching method relies heavily on a fixed body of information. Often, the pedagogical materials are repetitive and cognitive activities are limited, if not non-existent. For example, an opportunities for students to interconnect between harmony, analysis, art works, and other social documents that may be related and would aid the students to attain a better awareness of a piece of music is seldom emphasized. Today, such disconnection tends to be absolute for most music education; students and instructors make little effort to relate relevant background information to the learning process.

In the last decade, educators have increasingly emphasized the importance of developing educational environments that enhance thinking and independent learning (Bransford et. al. 1989; Bransford et. al. 1990; Bransford & Vye, 1989; Bransford & Johnson, 1972). One reason for this concern is that a field that is highly specializes in a narrowly defined area such as, performing and visual arts and sports, tends to focus less on the ability to think and reason at the academic level. Interdisciplinary experience is much less emphasized and developed in their education due to an excessive emphasis on technical and other quantitative measurements of the students who are in a narrowly defined area.

The lack of interdisciplinary experience may give music students limited experience in critical thinking and in the mental processes of connecting worldly knowledge with the learning material. For example, similar to professional athletes, typical conservatory students concentrate on the "technical outcome," often a somewhat ad hoc affair that does not lead to the student becoming a self-evaluator. Most of the time, the majority of the information presented in a private music lesson covers isolated facts that cannot be reliably recalled and used in other domains. Such a lesson rarely covers information relating to other fields of knowledge to expand the learning experience. Instead of spending the majority of their time attempting to memorize music for a technically perfect performance, these students should be encouraged to explore interdisciplinary studies. This will make well-rounded musicians and develop valuable skills for those who will not be professional musicians in the end.

The general result for music education is that students undervalue learning anything beyond their instrumental skills. The distinct insights and wisdom that can come only from understanding varied genres of literature, scientific principles (e.g. the science of acoustics, science of body movement), and relevant perspectives on history are generally not integrated in the conservatory student's education. Such distinctly limiting effect on the cognitive development will limit the students becoming well-rounded, emotionally effective performers.

This artificial separation of the subjects on the theoretical level may have a direct impact on conservatory students' interpretation of a piece of music during live performances. For example, at Carnegie Recital Hall, in 1998, two advanced music students from prestigious conservatories in New York City premiered a Suite for Violin and Piano composed especially for the concert. The piece consisted of two movements, "Rapture" and "Celtic Dance." Technically, the performance was acceptable; the musicians had rehearsed the piece itself adequately. However, the mood created and the emotional expression of the composition were unsatisfactory because the performers had only a very limited understanding of the cultural background of the composition. In particular, they had not researched the background of the work adequately, such as, listening to similar types of folk music (i.e., Irish or Welsh dances) or read relevant texts beforehand. As a result, the performance did not convey an adequate emotional understanding of this composition and left the audience unmoved.

One can often hear the kind of intellectually, emotionally, and technically unbalanced performance from advanced conservatory students and even from professionals when they are performing a piece without having attained sufficient background knowledge about the cultural context from which it comes. This is due to a combination of (1) limited time spent on research, (2) minimal acquisition of personal research skill, and (3) limited access to historical information and cultural resources. Because of the importance of these problems, each of these three factors will be elaborated below.

(1) Limited time available for research: A great deal of time is required for performers to develop proficient technical skills on their instruments. As a result, performers often invest little or no time in learning about the cultural background of musical composition, which is not seen as directly relevant to their development as musicians and is not required by the conservatory.

(2) Limited institutional emphasis on developing research skills: Teaching research skill is not seen as a primary educational goal of a typical conservatory. Therefore, music students do not learn those skills, which would enable them to explore on their own new materials, which could inform their interpretation of the music. Far from teaching these students on how to become inquisitive learners, the conservatory approach gives them a false sense of confidence based on the mistaken idea that their only responsibility is to master their instruments technically.

(3) Limited availability of research materials: Conservatories generally provide a large collection of recorded sound materials (e.g, CDs of musical performances). However, library resources on the liberal arts and other related intellectual materials, such as, commentaries on these recordings and structural guides to relevant data are much more limited. This represents an additional obstacle in terms of finding information on these important background matters, even before beginning the difficult and time-consuming work of integrating and applying intellectual materials to one's interpretation of music.

A decline in the amount of world knowledge that music students possess is evidenced by the stories faculty exchange. A violinist, Yoon-il Auh, asked a group of advanced violin students at the Aspen Music Festival in his master class, "Who influenced the work of Paganini? The students looked at their feet, the floor, or anything else to avoid embarrassing eye contact. A musicologist, Gustave Reese at New York University, asked his music class, "When was the Renaissance?" When was the Roccoco period?" How is Roccoco different from Baroque?" Finally, one brave student asked, "Who's supposed to teach us these things?" At this point, we have to wonder how students understand what they play and/or read when they do not have an instructor with a comprehensive education nearby to answer their questions.

Every music institution instructor has substantial anecdotal evidence, which shows that students do not know very much about general music history. This is not only the case in music. In other domains, there have also been a significant number of reports indicating that students have limited knowledge about the world. The National Endowment of the Humanities report, American Memory: A Report on the Humanities in the Nation's Public Schools, cites data from a survey funded by the NEH that indicate that "more than two-thirds of the American 17-year-olds were unable to place the Civil War within the correct half-century. The evidence of deficient background information and the inadequate readings that result from this deficiency is pervasive and alarming in all domains. When students lack world knowledge, their ability to read and their resulting facility for learning from text can suffer.

All art, -- music, painting, literature, etc. -- is an intellectual model of inclusive synthesis and abstract vision which reflects the world at an altered angle, which offers a new way of seeing the past and/or the present. Art is inherently interconnected and interdependent with thinking about the world. To be an artist, one must become a spectator of all things. Therefore, learning to perform a piece of music cannot be an isolated process. To be able to understand and perform a piece of music requires a systematic investigation of the cultural context in which it created it, and that information must be taken from various available sources.

How can knowledge about literature and related fields help musicians develop their performance skills? It is believed by many that being creative, innovative, and be able to express oneself externally is the key to performing effectively. Plato suggests that emotion without knowledge or education can only produce an incongruent emotional expression of thought (Scolnicov, 1988). To apply this idea to the performing arts education, a performer's interpretation of a piece of musical work can be oversimplified if he is performing when he has insufficient background knowledge of the piece of music at hand. The composition of a piece of music is based on certain structures and forms that express congruent ideas. It is the performer's responsibility to express and communicate these ideas in an orderly fashion, just as the composer intended and as they are reflected in the composition. When a performer lacks sufficient cultural background knowledge, it is believed that he or she is likely to have an unbalanced emotional understanding of a piece of composition and to be unable thus to communicate an effective understanding of the emotional content of the work.

This interconnectedness of distinct disciplines is true not only in the arts but in all fields. This is reflected in the current state of educational research where, in an attempt to solve problems in the last two decades, institutions and educators have turned to psychology, cognitive science, and new technologies in order to better understand the principles of innovative learning experience. Although such approaches might seem at first to diminish the importance of philosophical approaches to education in favor of more empirical methods of inquiry, philosophical problems continue to occupy the center of educational concerns, as educators and citizens are confronted with inescapable questions about the value, meaning, purpose, and justification of education.

The design principles that underlie the Interdisciplinary Learning Environment will rely on a philosophical point of view to explicate the authors' belief about music education. This is because the authors believe the philosophy of education can still trace its roots back more than two thousand years to ancient Greece -- not because ancient Greek philosophers had the right answers, but because they believed that most questions could be addressed and understood through rational thought.

The lesson to be learned here is that many cultural experiences and a good deal of cultural knowledge can be translated and transformed from one field to another, from painting or literature to musical performance, for example. When music is performed as it should be, that is, with an understanding of the whole sphere of the composition, even a musically unsophisticated audience will feel what is happening and will feel a sense of suspense, a tension, and a deeper sense of art. One does not always need to impress the audience with superficial technical brilliance, which inevitably becomes boring if it is not accompanied by a palpable sense of human emotion.

An ideal way to overcome the problems associated with the student’s cognitive development in the performing arts education would be to expose students to one or two key pieces of music that are comprehensively discussed in symposium format by experts in music theory, performance, music history, and the humanities. However, creating such a learning environment that uses human experts would be logistically and economically unfeasible. Thus, much of the information relevant to the music which students study and the cognitive activities which ought to be a part of their preparation for becoming whole artists are generally missing from a conservatory education. Dr. Robert P. Taylor at Columbia University Teachers College outlines the utilization of technology in education: "the greatest benefit of such technology would be if it could be used to solve a problem that has proven difficult or impossible to address via traditional media. One key way to do this would be to use computers to enable students to "construct" their own musical knowledge and view of the world through active and "authentic" learning experiences."

Computer technology allows the creation of learning environments that can deliver much of the information described above without requiring the presence of human experts. It is the creation of such a learning environment using the Web technology that is the central purpose of this paper and development of the Web Concert Hall. The Web Concert hall attempts to alleviate the problems described above by providing information that may be useful to advanced music students. With the Web Concert Hall, knowledge that was previously accessible only in a linear manner through formal processes (i.e. books, lectures, museum artifacts, or static media) is now available for asynchronous electronic instructional delivery. The creation of the Web Concert Hall should affect not only the way in which information is communicated to the learners, but also the way in which the learners make sense of the information which is presented and the way in which they use this information to construct new knowledge.

It is authors belief that when performers are placed in a rich, powerful, and structurally guided learning environment, they should be able to make the connections which are necessary to a deeper understanding of music. By presenting students with concrete models for imitation and new modes of expression for interpreting music, their performance should be affected.

The Internet is the largest and most diverse and extensive information resource in the world today. And the Web Concert Hall has taken its full advantage of existing resources and the use of Cognitive Flexibility Theory to its advantage both technologically and educationally. Technologically, the Web Concert Hall combines the advantages of multiple media formats such as images, video, sound, and hypertext technology to deliver information to the users. Educationally, the Web Concert hall orderly incorporates the wealth of information available on the Web to many domain or interest that may be related to support the understanding of musical work. The next section discusses the Cognitive Flexibility Theory and its use in the construction of the Web Concert Hall.

Cognitive flexibility means allowing the learner to spontaneously restructure his/her knowledge, in many ways, in adaptive response to radically changing situational demands (Spiro, 1991). The theory is largely concerned with transfer of knowledge and skills beyond their initial learning situation. For this reason, emphasis is placed upon the presentation of information from multiple perspectives and use of many case studies, criss-crossed link of subject matter and models that present diverse examples.

The theory specifically address issues of advanced knowledge acquisition, where knowledge is often nonlinear and complex and, therefore, inappropriate for simple hierarchical organization. Therefore, Cognitive Flexibility Theory can act as an "antidote" to the different types of learning failure associated with advanced learning in ill-structured domains, such as music, when traditional instructional strategies are employed (Spiro et al. 1991). Jacobson (Jacobson et al. 1996) outlines the features of Cognitive Flexibility Theory as follows:

A great advantage of Cognitive Flexibility Theory is that it has been devised especially to be used with hypertext, such as Web-based instruction. From the point of view of constructing mental models, this theory would appear to be highly appropriate as its use would result in the formation of a very complete, well-linked model.

The Web Concert Hall hopes to set music students on a course, to give and provide them with a new conception of where they are going and what to look for, and how they got here and why. The Web Concert Hall does not attempt to offer knowledge or information to the student for the sake of providing all possible knowledge. Rather, it attempts to offer guidance by some exemplary information that may support a deepening understanding of selected repertoire and provide assistance for music students in interpreting music. Like a good teacher, it sets the student on a course, gives a new conception of where student is going and what to look for. With a talented musician, this may be all that is necessary as a starting a process.

For example, in the Web Concert Hall, a student who wish to learn about Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3 in D minor, the learner can listen to a piano performance of Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3 in D minor (Fig.1); read life story about the composer (Fig.2); explore and see various Art works created during the time of Rachmaninoff’s 3^rd piano concerto was in progress(Fig.3, Fig.4 and Fig.5); read about the composers who have influenced Rachmaninoff’s composition, such as Tchaikovsky (Fig.6); read poems or social documents that were written during the composer’s time from various geographical location (Fig.7 and Fig.8); read the background about the soloist who are performing the composition(Fig.9); discuss and exchange thoughts with other musicians and experts using email and the soloist who performed in the Web Concert Hall(Fig.10 and 11); listen to and discover newly recorded performances of other musicians (Fig.12 and Fig.13); and read about the solo instrument itself (About Piano – Fig.14).


(Fig.1)	(Fig.2)	*(Fig.3) Monet’s painting The Floating Ice* 1880**	(Fig.4)

(Fig.5)	(Fig.6) Peter Tchaikovsky	(Fig.7)	(Fig.8)

(Fig.9)	(Fig.10)	(Fig. 11)	(Fig.12)


(Fig.13)		(Fig.14)

The Web Concert Hall, in essence, is a learning portal that launches students on their own search. Different minds call for different educational approaches. This is why no books or wall-bound learning environment can teach or create a necessary learning environment that is needed for the type of learning this paper proposes.

A good interpretation of musical composition can be erected from proper training of an instrument and shaping the mind at young age. However, these intellectual models can not be directly imitated at first. A performer must be provided with good models with its justification for imitation. Therefore, providing structural guidance with appropriate information to musicians as examined in the Web Concert Hall is extremely important model for advanced learning and ill-structured domain because the nature of the subject. Using the Web Concert Hall, the knowledge that was previously available only in a linear manner through formal processes (i.e. books, lectures, or static media) is now available for asynchronous electronic instructional delivery. The creation of Web Concert Hall should affect not only the way in which information is communicated to the learners, but also the way in which the learners make sense of the information which is presented and the way in which they use this information to construct new knowledge.

Music institutions are hampered in their ability to provide natural learning because of the amount of individual attention it requires. This is not because of a lack of knowledge about how learning is accomplished, but more the result of economic necessity. It is expensive to get students involved in goals they care about and then to coach them on an as-needed basis. This problem may be significantly reduced by widely available and fully developed interdisciplinary learning environment like the Web Concert Hall. Such learning environments can make individualized attention a real possibility and present students with tasks in which they are interested. Only such systems can offer students the opportunity to become fruitfully inquisitive, exploratory, and the opportunities for doing both learning and accepting failures as part of the process of true learning. Therefore, using a learning portal like the Web Concert Hall, it can offer music students an opportunity to follow the course prescribed by the processes of natural and spontaneous learning.

The Web Concert Hall is an example of solution to problems in musical performance, music education, and communication among music professional that have grown more and more intractable in the last century, even as the need to solve them has become more and more obvious for the musical world. The solutions identified each depends upon the application of one or more salient features of the web to one or more aspects of the problems involved.

It is authors’ belief that when performers are placed in a learning environment that is rich in its content and structurally interconnected from one source to another, the music students should be able to make the connections which are necessary to a deeper understanding of musical works. By presenting students with concrete models for them to experience, it will provide new modes of expression for interpreting music, which performance should be affected.

Readers are again advised to browse the site (www.webconcerthall.com) and review the arguments put forth above, to verify for themselves the degree to which the solutions are appropriate and worthwhile. Work in using the web is only in its infancy and readers and the Web browsers are urged to push forward with their own ideas in this area and to thereby improve upon these ideas or better yet, to contribute new and more powerful solutions of their own.

Robert P. Taylor, Ed.D
- is Associate Professor in the Department of Communication, Computing and Technology Education at Teachers College, Columbia University. He served as the chair of the department from 1991-1998.

Selected Publications by Dr. Taylor

Editor, Science and Art: Preservice and Social Studies and Music: Preservice (ACM SICCUE Outlook).

Coauthor, "The Use of the Computer in Teaching Mathematics" (Journal of Technology and Teacher Education).

Author, "Methods and Dichotomies in Teaching Computing Science" (Informatics and Education -- Birmingham, England).

"The Impact of Telecommunications on Education" (in Greek, Proceedings of the First Greek National Conference on Computing in Education-- Athens)

"Educational Problems and Solutions Incorporating Technology" (in Spanish,Memorias:Il Congreso Columbiano de Informatica Educativa).

Research and Scholarly Interests
Computer-based technology in education, across the curriculum and around the world, including its utility for human survival in a balanced ecosystem

B.A. Denison University; B.D., M.A. University of Chicago; Ed.D. Teachers College, Columbia University