Beats. Bauen. Lernen.

At the beginning of the 1980s, beatmaking emerged within hip-hop culture in the U.S. - a musical practice based on the creative use of already existing sound material and practiced mainly in informal contexts. In the last 40 years, beatmaking has spread globally in close connection with developments in music and media technology and has become diversified in many ways. Especially in the field of popular music, beatmaking has set decisive impulses in musical-aesthetic and technical-practical respects.
In his qualitative-empirical study, Chris Kattenbeck explores the question of what it means to act as an artistically competent beatmaker, what skills and knowledge are necessary for this, and how these are acquired and developed. In doing so, he provides fundamental insights into a hitherto hardly explored musical practice and the artistic strategies and techniques, aesthetic goals and ideas, forms of knowledge and learning practices associated with it. Among other things, it shows that certain prevailing understandings in music education - of music learning or music theory, for example - are inadequate to adequately capture beatmaking. Therefore, the study offers not least reason to question these understandings and to reconceptualize them in order to be able to deal appropriately with the diversity of musical practices in the future.