How do you become a musician? Why is the master/apprentice relationship still so alive in conservatory music teaching? How can practical knowledge like music making be transferred?
Using three Dialogue Seminar series attended by teachers and students from the Royal College of Music in Stockholm, Sven Åberg develops a view of the conditions surrounding the transfer of a practice.
Aspects addressed include the way language is used in contexts closely related to action, how it is sometimes necessary to "go round" problems with the help of language pictures, and the disagreement that surrounds central concepts like "interpretation".
Another theme is the inherent contradictions, for example planning/spontaneity and simplicity/complexity that both pedagogue and musician encounter in their daily work. The picture of the way an experienced practitioner handles "paradoxical fields" of this kind influences our view of practical knowledge in general.

Sven Åberg has been a professional lutenist since the early 1980s and is a senior lecturer in lute and chamber music at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm.