Amateur and professional music-making at Dartington International Summer School

Music summer schools play a significant role in both amateur and professional music-making in the United Kingdom. For the amateur, they are a holiday opportunity for ‘serious leisure’ (Stebbins 2007); their residential status permits an escape from participants’ everyday life (Pitts 2005) both in terms of social and musical activity. For the aspiring professional and conservatoire student they give the opportunity to receive high level tuition from established professionals in the company of their peers. The majority of summer schools exist in distinct spaces for either the vocational or avocational musician. Dartington International Summer School, founded in 1948 as the first summer school in the UK and with the stated aim of providing opportunities for every type of musician, is anomalous in its combination of vocational and avocational musicians. It is attended by amateur, aspiring professional and professional musicians, many of whom have been participating over an extended timeframe. Drawing on Pitts’ work on musical participation at the COMA summer school in which the amateur and professional occupy separate spheres, the chapter uses data from a qualitative case study of Dartington which has taken part over the last two years. It uses theories of leisure as symbol, play and the other (Borsay, 2006) and Bahktin’s theory of the ‘carnivalesque’ as lenses to view the differing experiences of the participants and the potential impacts on their identity both within and outside the summer school. Mantie’s concept of the learner-participant dichotomy (2012) is also used to shed light on the clashes and complementarity arising from the differing intentions – musical learning or leisure activity – of the participants. The chapter discusses how the leisure-learning context of the summer school impacts on participants’ musical identity, and can serve both to challenge and reinforce hierarchical status relationships between vocational and avocational musicians.