Title:
|
Appreciation of music in relation to personality factors
|
The study falls into two parts, the investigation of what is meant by
musical appreciation' and the investigation of the personality traits that
characterise the musical appreciative.
A review of the literature reveals that there is no agreement as to
what music appreciation is. A practical investigation using a specially
constructed questionnaire, in which 33 musicians were asked to indicate what
they conceived music appreciation to be, confirmed the lack of concensus
evident in the literature.
To investigate the several aspects of music appreciation, the results
of 200 secondary school pupils on a series of music tests and on a
questionnaire concerning musical interests and experience were factor
analysed. The same music variables were analysed using different techniques
and the results of the different agree well. Twelve factors were
identified. While no one factor stood out olearly from the others as a
'music appreciation faotor', eleven of the factors can loosely be described
as relating to musio appreciation. These factors can be classified under
three headings, factors of test ability, factors of performance on an
instrument and factors of musical taste. (The twelfth factor concerns how
musical the home background is.) The 'taste factors' are considered to be
particularly valid, and they are confirmed by an independent study using a
semantic differential technique with the same subjects.
To investigate the personality struoture of the musically
appreciative, one approach was to correlate the school pupils' personality
test results (trom Eysenck's J.E.P.I. and Cattell's H.S.P.Q.) with measures
from a number of musical variables, which were chosen because of their
intrinsic importance and because they represented the 'appreciation'
factors produced in the factor anaqses. A second approach, which yielded
results consonant with the first, made use of the results of E.P.I. and
16P.F. from more than 200 musicians and music students.
Without doubt, 'intelligence' is the trait that most characterises the
musical. However, the musically appreciative are also sensitive and
emotional. It ia suggested that their emotionality reveals itself as the
driving force for any one of many different musical interests or pursuits.
What characterises the musical person is the (musical) end to which this
drive is directed. Why this drive is directed into musicality may be the
result of other personality traits and of home background.
Home background is found to be a more important influence on music
appreciation than personality, though the two are not independent: those
with a musical personality tend to come from musical homes. The magnitude of the relationships between personality and music appreciation and between
home background and music appreciation were determined by multiple regression
analyses and, disappointingly, are found to be rather slight.
The personality characteristics of musically appreciative school
pupils are not entirely the same as for musicians and music students. The
differences are in line with published findings relating personality
variables with the academic achievement of pupils/students at different
levels of education.
With both the school pupils and the adult musicians, some regularly
occurring variations from the basic appreciative personality profile are
recorded; e.g. different personality structures are associated with
different tastes in music; brass players are more extrover; men
musicians are more tough-minded and shrewd than women. The variations are
sufficiently great to accommodate a great variety of personalities among the
musically appreciative •
A number of test instruments were devised for the study. Apart from
the questionnaires and the semantic differential, already referred to, a
test of ability to discriminate oomposers by their style was developed. This
test is promising because 1t appears to measure rather different skills from
those measured by other tests, because it is possibly the first genuinely
objective test in music in which judgements about musical extracts must be
made, and because it is popular with teachers. Although the test does not
yet reach the technical standard required of tests, further research and
development on it are considered well worth while and are planned.
|