Jonathan Vaughan

Jonathan Vaughan

Professor, Principal

Personal profile

Research interests

Jonathan joined Guildhall School in 2007 as its Director of Music, and was appointed Principal in 2022.

He attended a comprehensive school in a heavily industrial part of the Midlands and attributes his career to the free music lessons he received at school which were provided by Leicestershire’s outstanding music service. After studying double bass and piano at the Royal College of Music he became a member of the London Symphony Orchestra for ten years, where he was elected Chairman in 1999.

He went on to become Director of the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain for five years, before joining Guildhall School. 

Jonathan is currently studying for a PhD on the subject of ‘Artistic Citizenship and Performance Excellence in Music Conservatoires’. He is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and of Guildhall School, and was conferred the title of Professor of Music at Guildhall in 2021. He has been a Governor and board member for many arts organisations, and currently sits on the Young Classical Artist Trust and the Mendelssohn Boise Scholarship Foundation.

Research interests

Abstract

Within the artistic, pedagogical, and intellectual discourse there is a widespread belief in the power of music, not only as an intrinsic experience for its own sake, but as an instrument for the ethical pursuit of transformational change in communities and the empowerment of individuals therein.

 

The phrase Artistic Citizenship is often used to allude to this ideal but to what extent is it formally taught within the conservatoire sector, how relevant is it within degree programmes and what aspects of practice does it actually encompass?

 

In the search for answers to these questions my research has taken me on a virtual tour of 24 different institutions around the world. From Japan to the US, Finland to Austria I have collated and compared information relating to socially engaged practices within conservatoire settings in an attempt to form a picture of how important Artistic Citizenship is to 21st century performing arts training.

Research Question

As a result of the above considerations, the following main Research Question was formulated:

How do conservatoires effectively train Artistic Citizens in order to create current and future generations of artists who are equipped and willing to intelligently engage with the current dialogue around ethics, social justice and well-being in order to define their own lives as 21st Century Artists in Society?

This leads to a number of subordinate questions:

  1. What skills and learning are conservatoires giving their students to prepare them for engagement with the social dialogue? (see 2.3 for definitions of Arts-based, social dialogue)
  2. To what extent do students themselves feel prepared for this by their institution?
  3. To what extent are students exposed to socially diverse settings on their learning journeys?
  1. What wide-ranging principles could be extracted from this research to inform a robust and scalable curriculum, which involves as many students in an institution (at all levels) as possible, and relevant to the widest range of socially engaged projects?

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