"Music from the backyard" Hagström's music education

Abstract: "Music from the backyard": Hagström's music education, is a PhD thesis that investigates the music education that the company Hagström ran from 1946 to 1983. The aim of the thesis is to investigate and recreate Hagström's music educational history from a Deweyan pragmatist point of departure. The study searched for answers to the following questions: What were the societal and educational settings in which Hagström's music education took place? How did Hagström's music education develop, and what led to its rise and fall? What educational content and pedagogical ideas constituted Hagström's music education? How can Hagström's educational enterprise be understood with the help of Bourdieu's theories of symbolic capital? Because of the historical nature of the study, the availability of empirical material was limited. Hagström had some archived material which I was given access to, and there were a great deal of periodicals from the time with articles  about music education on people's spare time. Additionally, the Hagström course books were important documents, since they were the only centralized document to govern the directions for Hagström's music education. The pragmatist perspective of the study led to a desire to highlight parts of the human experience that constituted the history. Based on a snowball-sampling strategy, I traced down eleven persons from Sweden and Norway which were interviewed. The results of the analysis became a story about Hagström in the society - a story that revealed an entrepreneur whose company grew quickly and represented other values than the better parts of the cultural establishment in Sweden. The company rested on several pillars: The production of accordions, and later on even guitars, basses, organs and amplification systems, import of music merchandise, as well as the largest chain of music retail shops in the Nordic countries. The music education started in 1945 in Växjö, and in 1946, the rest of the country. In the beginning they taught accordion and guitar, but laterdeveloped to include electric bass, organ and keyboard as well. The courses were organised as group education with a duration of ten weeks in a semester. Geographically they were spread all over Sweden as well as around Oslo, Bergen and Copenhagen. All in all there were close to 100 000 pupils attending Hagström's music education. Hagström's music education was, despite new ideas such as group education and that the student should be able to play a melody as quickly as possible, a fairly traditional master-apprentice kind of education. The teacher demonstrated what he considered to be the correct technique and musical performance, and the student imitated. The pupil had little or no opportunities to influence the content of the education. On a macro level however, Hagström's music school was important in the process towards a more democratic music education in Sweden. Hagström helped to increase the availability of music education through their geographical dispersion as well as the affordability of attending the  courses. An important difference from the other agents on the market that aimed to refine the students' musical preferences, was that Hagström had no musical agenda. Hagström might have contributed to Sweden's strong position on the global popular music scene.