Are jazz or classical musicians the most dedicated to music?
Jazz and classical music are both very different styles; jazz is much more modern music while classical is older, but still as good. When it comes to studying, research has shown that ‘’Classical training is a great place to start in music – a strong foundation of sound, technique, and reading benefits musicians for a lifetime.’’[1] It is very hard to start playing an instrument with jazz music because the style requires a background of complex theory. Jazz musicians are asked to be able to improvise on different changes of chords that are uncommon for the classical musicians. As for the technique, most of jazz players have a very accurate way of playing and are able to swing, while classical musicians do not swing. Although, classical musicians have skills with music reading. They can read hard music sheets really fast and are able to play those pieces almost perfectly the first time they see it. Also, those who study classical music have a tendency to go further in their studies because of the playing ability such thing requires. Another point is that jazz musicians are more open-minded towards different styles of music. They listen and play popular music, funk and R’n’B, soul, blues, rock and roll, country, folk and latin music.
Different schools offers program that can develop students’ abilities to play and understand classical or jazz music. For example, Berklee is one of the best music school in North America. It offers a program that forms jazz students, based on their different requirements to improve as a musician, such as sight singing, jazz theory, instrument playing, songwriting, etc. Also, you have the opportunity to play with other students in jazz bands and record songs in a studio. Classical schools offer programs that form the students’ ability to play with an orchestra and their ability to read music.
Our hypothesis is that jazz students, as we said earlier, are more open-minded towards different genres. Furthermore, both classical and jazz students are as dedicated, but jazz students are more passionate. Finally, classical students have a tendency to go further in their studies. This brings us to the results; that will show if our hypothesis is right.
First, we had to find a way to compare jazz and classical music players. Since we already live in a context already filled of interaction with other musicians, we decided to limit our survey to music students from the CEGEP, which we thought was realist, but still representative enough. The point was to find twenty jazz student and twenty classical students so we could compare them, but give a very “objective looking survey”: we wanted them to be honest and tried to remove any form of possible “competition-making” words from our quiz. (ex: Jazz vs. Classical) We took care of the titles and made sure nothing would allow them to answer with dishonesty and competition. Only after that we started to find out the right questions which would allow us to truly and efficiently discover which of the two is more dedicated to music. Of course, we already had some particular questions to ask. (ex: “How many hours per day do you spend on instrumental practice?” or “What level of study do you want to reach in music?”) Nonetheless, we had, in a way, to disguise the survey with lighter questions (ex: “Do you listen to radio broadcasting music?”, “What kind of music do you prefer?” and “What kind of music do you play the most?”) which still would be useful to our later results, but would not necessarily enter as the main comparative points of our future analysis.
Second, in this paragraph, we will show who of the classical or jazz students are more dedicated to music. We asked these two groups various questions on the subject and here are the results. For their favourite music styles, the classical students tend to listen to less genres of music when the jazz students tend to be more open-minded. What was surprising is that the classic students listen to more metal music than jazz students. However, it is unsurprising that the jazz students tend to play different styles of music than the classical students. It was expected because of the “DEC Technique”, which is only available to jazz students; requesting them to play many genres of music. In fact, in the class called “Studio”, they need to play and record two pieces of music per two week. At every two weeks, the style changes. Also, something unexpected because of the previous results, is that the classical student, on a scale from one to ten of their listening of the music on the radio, (one means never and ten means always), tend to be at seven or eight, when jazz students are at three.
In the other part of the survey, we have asked the students: “at what age did you start playing or learning music?” In jazz, all of them answered before 15 and four students on twenty said that they started before the age of five. In classic, none of the students have started before the age of five and five on twenty wrote that they started between fifteen to eighteen years old. For their musical aspirations, only one classical student answered that he had no musical aspiration when none have said yes to that category in classic. The results show that eight people want to teach music in their lives in jazz and classical. The only surprising information is that double of the jazz students want to be part of a musical formation. We have eight in classical when it’s fourteen in jazz. The other results where the same, whether they didn’t know what they wanted to do or if they wanted to become an autonomic musician. Specifically, most of the students in the two groups want to be interprets. Also, most of the students plan to reach the bachelor level of study in university. All of the students allow the same time to their practice.
We can now disproof our hypothesis. In fact, jazz and classical students tend to have the same level of dedication towards music. Jazz students are barely more open-minded than classical. The two groups expect to get the same level of education. From our results, classical students seem to be more passionate to their style of music, when jazz students tend to like and play more styles.
In conclusion, even though our survey seemed quite complete, we lacked on certain points which would have allowed us to get more accurate results. For example, it would have been different if we asked the same questions in various regions of the world: Jazz music is more popular in United-States than here, while the attraction pole of classical music takes place in Europe. But in the context, it wasn’t really realist to consider distribute worldwide survey, by evidence... Also, our sampling was not wide enough; we should’ve asked more musicians (at least twenty-five from each group instead of twenty). At last, even though we took grand care of the presentation of our survey to diminish the risks of “cheating”, we know that some people probably not answered the truth concerning, for example, the amount of practice they dedicate to their instrument per day. It is so inconstant that we cannot always judge properly by ourselves, and some probably didn’t want to admit they lack practice (not only to us, but also to themselves). Finally, we did not present our information sources. In the context, it is forgivable because we somehow are “living sources”: we are experts in our domain and got all our knowledge from a so wide number of sources that they can’t be named, but it would still have been better if we could have named some of them. We think, though, that our results still represent quite well the reality of jazz musicians and classical musicians, which in the end have a somehow an equal level of interest in playing music.
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