Rosen's main concern is to help the children to fulfil their potential to the full and thereby to become confident, happy, creative people. From the start, he builds on the strengths and interests of his students - encouraging them to explore their own ideas, work in groups and express their individual and collective thoughts and personalities through their music.
He starts from four main premises:
In comparison, schools normally still teach music as a minority part of the timetable, concentrate on music written a century or more ago and rely entirely on acoustic instruments for performance. One consequence of this last point is that the technical quality of any music the students produce tends to be quite low - acting as a negative stimulus in an age where near-perfection is the accepted norm. More importantly, though, such music is seen by many young people as remote and irrelevant to their immediate every-day experience.
Rosen's joint aims are to bring music in his school into the same prominence it holds in the leisure hours of his students and to allow the students to grow in confidence and ability by making music which is familiar in style and performance practice. Computers play an important part in this process.
His rooms are equipped with a number of identical student computer workspaces with music notation and sequencing software and MIDI synthesis equipment. There is also a MIDI drum-kit as a separate workstation, a studio with acoustic drums and a stage with full lighting, microphone and amplification equipment and video cameras. Everything can be controlled, monitored and co-ordinated from a teacher console.
These facilities are housed in a building slightly separate from the rest of the school and it says a lot about Rosen's attitudes that there is also a small kitchen and sitting room for use by the students who are allowed, under supervision, to work late into the evening. It is highly typical of the man and his ideals that he designed the entire set-up and installed it himself during a summer holiday. These virtually ideal facilities now allow him to teach with more ease in the manner he has developed over many years.
His first step is to familiarise the students with the sight and sound of themselves performing. They start by speaking into a microphone connected to a video recorder and work up to recording Karaoke-type performances of familiar pop songs. They are similarly eased into original performance and composition through a series of graded tasks. The initial phase provides them with an accompaniment against which they can try out melodic ideas. It is here that the computers begin to be of real use, as Rosen uses software to generate on-the-fly accompaniments from chord sequences. At first, he provides chord sequences for them to work with - later, they write their own and, eventually, make their own instrumental arrangements, working and performing together as groups.
Incoming students are of widely differing musical abilities and experience. Some students never gain a great musicality but still manage to perform to an accompaniment worked out with Rosen and implemented with the help of the computer. Students who have no previous musical experience often choose to start out as drummers for the student groups. The emphasis amongst the others tends to be towards singer/songwriters and keyboard playing. By the end of their time in the department, the groups are happily performing their own material, from memory, on stage. Everything is recorded throughout so that the students can review their own progress and judge the performances of their peers.
Music at Sigtuna is not, of course, confined to the music/computer room. Rosen's unaccompanied choir featured in a New Year's outdoor concert broadcast live on Swedish television and the benefits of his techniques were clearly visible in the confident way in which the students sang a demanding programme from memory under the glare of the TV lights.
Old music is not forgotten among the new - there is a medieval manuscript and a painting of Mozart on the walls and conventional instruments in the practice rooms - but the emphasis at Sigtuna is clearly on the present day and on an idiom with which the students themselves are at ease.
The assessment comments, the rules and their explanations are in Swedish, as is the manual, but translation is planned, and the program should eventually be available commercially in an English edition. The use of MIDI (rather than internal sound) is also planned for future versions.
At Uppsala, I also met Dan Malmstrom who for many years has been developing a notation package called 'Bella M' for the IBM. Basically it is a text-based graphing program similar in look and feel to early versions of SCORE, but with sound output via MIDI and printed output to a plotter. Not only the user interface but also the mnemonics for the notes, tempi, etc. are in Swedish, making the program difficult to translate. It is commercially available (price about £200) and an English version is planned, some day. It is clearly very flexible and Malmstrom says it is easy to use - but did an author ever say otherwise?
Bjarne Nyquist teaches sound recording and acoustics and is also a technical editor and software reviewer for a popular music technology magazine in Sweden. He is particularly interested in multimedia development, distance learning and the uptake of IT in education. Since my visit he has organised a major Swedish conference on these topics at which Diana Laurillard gave a keynote address. He and a group of colleagues have bid for money to write multimedia materials for music education incorporating high quality digital sound and video. They intend to produce the CD-ROMs themselves.
The composers at the college, as one would expect, make extensive use of computers. They are Macintosh-based and Per Lindgren and his colleagues have developed a Studio Guide in HyperCard, providing tutorials on general studio techniques and specific information on how to use their particular studio set-up. In addition, they have developed several composition tools for their own use, including calculators for temperaments and harmonies, toolkits for playing and manipulating data (both MIDI and spectra etc.) and a tool for analysing sound by chosen musical parameters such as dissonance.
Out of the studio, Lars Ekstrom teaches composition using his own orchestration software and programs for melody and rhythm generation by Henrik Strindberg. Leo Nilsson is another composer who teaches acoustics at the College. His main interest is in the human side of acoustics and psychoacoustics - music perception and music psychology.
Karl-Arne Eriksson is a Music theory lecturer specialising in church music and is skeptical about the usefulness of computers to learning, feeling that there are still fundamental differences in the ways that people and computer programs tend to approach a subject. Whilst for most people the natural progression of thought is to move from feeling to overview, through logic to detail, Eriksson feels that many computer programs are built in such a way that they move from detail towards an overview - providing a non-intuitive and potentially unhelpful path through the concepts. He is also writing a notation package with a user-friendly graphical interface. (I'm sure there must be a good joke somewhere to be found about what would happen if all the home-developed notation packages in the world were laid end to end...)
While I was in Stockholm I was privileged to meet Ulf Ahslund, known professionally as Ulf Goran, who was Media Project leader at the College and has since retired. Ulf is a guitarist and teacher with a vision of universal musical education. He is known as the man who taught all Sweden to play the guitar, a project which grew from his huge enthusiasm for music and for people, and which he realised through the medium of television shows. He was the founding father of the use of computers at the College. His energy and enthusiasm, coupled with his close links with the music technology industry enabled him to put digital pianos and Atari computers into the very heart of the college's teaching facilities - and then to encourage the staff to make full and inventive use of these new resources.
The implementation of his ideas and the integration of computer-based materials into the curriculum has largely been achieved by Anders Oman. The technology is used in a variety of ways and one thing that I found particularly interesting is the amount of the teaching materials which have been developed entirely in-house. Their aural training work, for example, does not use commercial aural training packages, but adaptations for computer of methods developed by Per-Gunnar Alldahl, who has developed a vast library of graded exercises taken entirely from 'real' music. Similarly, improvisation exercises are created by teaching staff using commercial sequencing, notation and harmonisation software. This ensures that the teaching styles and methods are those which the college tutors would have used anyway - the technology clearly affects the teaching method but does not determine it.
The students that I spoke to, most of whom intend to become teachers, were enthusiastic about the college's use of computers and will, no doubt, use them themselves in their professional lives.