Musik som nav i skolredovisningar

Music as a hub in school presentationsThe aim of the study is to elucidate how making meaning is constituted when lower secondary pupils play music when giving accounts of other school subjects than music. The empirical material consists of four presenta- tions in the subjects of physics, religion and Swedish, which were filmed during ordinary lessons in a lower secondary school. In addition the data consists of nine filmed stimulated recall interviews with the pupils and their teachers, which were also filmed.Social semiotic multimodality constitutes the study’s theoretical and methodological point of departure. The perspective enables investigation of the pupils’ playing of music and music in its multimodal context, and of how different dimensions of meaning are constructed. The filmed presentations were transcribed into music scores in order to visualise the multimodal events of the presentations. Three different categories of meaning were used, ideational, interpersonal and textual meaning, to analyse how music relates to other modes of communication.The results show how the temporal functions of music serve as frame- work and motor, what the music narrates in relation to the subject content and what interpersonal relations the music communicates. The young peo- ple’s knowledge of music manifests itself in the different accounts as an ability to use and adapt musical knowledge to a context where another sub- ject than music is in focus. The presentations of Swedish are travesties of well-known songs and the pupils stick to the given form. In the other presen- tations the pupils themselves had compiled the music and the result was a form of musical works where the music does not follow any model or certain genre. The informants think that this working method implies that the work is experienced as meaningful both to themselves and to the audience