With the introduction of the new Revised Higher Grade Examination in Music, the proposed Certificate of Sixth Year Studies in Music and the plethora of modules and short courses available from the Scottish Vocational and Educational Council and the Scottish Examination Board, teachers now have the opportunity to tailor courses to suit individual student needs. Those involved in planning have been meticulous in ensuring that performing, inventing and listening are present at all stages of certification. This ‘comprehensive musician’ approach ensures that students have breadth of experience in playing more than one instrument and that they are all involved in inventing – improvising, composing or arranging. In addition, having adopted a concept-based approach to the acquisition of knowledge and understanding, the whole process is very clearly associated with the philosophy of the ‘spiral’ curriculum.

This article uses case-study research to examine approaches to adoptive parenting, with particular reference to children's musical instrument learning. Drawing on video and interview evidence, we consider the effects that family narratives about adoption, genetic inheritance and environment have upon different family members' perceptions of themselves and of each other. We conclude that the supportive parenting style demonstrated in our case-study family provides an environment in which musical learning can flourish, and we draw parallels with research in the psychology of music, to illustrate the importance of family support for young musicians.

I enjoy composing and feel able to write songs that I like and which feel significant to me. This has not always been the case and the change had nothing to do with my school education or my degree. Composing at secondary school did not move beyond Bach and Handel pastiche. I did not take any composing courses during my degree. What did influence the change in me was the fact that I made a friend of a songwriter.

Effective teaching in a music conservatoire needs a continual quest to find new and better ways of delivering excellence. The challenge is to keep the work innovative. In this article I argue that, for a classical musician the communication of personality is a vital component of excellence in performance and I give reasons why an authentic, confident personality should be nurtured as part of conservatoire training. I also examine in detail one approach to this issue that I explored in my action-based research and teaching at London's Guildhall School of Music & Drama: that is the practice of music students learning certain acting techniques and collaborating with actors (drama students) on specific projects that were designed to widen the musicians' range of expression. The article focuses on a two-year study which involved musicians working alongside actors on two devised performance projects: Storytelling and Circus. It describes the process in which the musicians were prepared for the eventual performances. I set out to explore exactly what musicians could learn from working with actors and what impact this might have on their normal sphere of performance. The projects demonstrated that, even a year later, some of the musicians manifested noticeable benefits in their mainstream playing, including greater levels of confidence, creativity and presence. The article also discusses some of the difficulties and shortcomings of this approach.

This article explores the opportunities that the aesthetic experience of music offers pupils in their developing awareness of the subjective self and its relation to the objective universe of which it is a part. How does creatively produced music, having challenged the local frameworks or ‘conceptual spaces’ within which it is defined, remain intelligible to its audience? It is suggested that a principle of intelligibility that transcends this formally defining framework rests on a direct and unified perception of affective, subjective reality, shared by human beings; a perception that embraces both composer, performer and listener. This realisation is developed through the relationship that we have, as subjective individuals, to the objective universe of which we are a part. Aesthetic experience gives rise to a sense of transcendent reality, within which the subjective individual and objective world are unified, and which is identified as a central element in our sense of the reality of God.

Neoliberalism and neoconservatism are two political ideologies that currently shape state directives for education in many countries. In this article, I describe the confluence of neoliberal and neoconservative ideologies that led to the introduction, by the English state department for education, of a Model Music Curriculum for schools. I describe how neoliberalism has transformed the music education ‘ecology’ in England and created an environment that was receptive to the introduction of a curriculum on neoconservative principles. I consider the current position of progressive music education and why it seems unable to mount a sufficiently persuasive challenge. I make a case for the importance of analysis that explicitly focuses on political ideologies and their present-day rhetoric and discourses. Finally, I point to the general early years sector in England as an illustration for how to respond to state interventions in curriculum that might be emulated by the music education sector.

The essay sets the context and identifies some possibilities this music educator/feminist theorist currently finds in music, whilst applying the framework of sociologist Dorothy Smith's standpoint feminism to music as constituted within the ideology of particular institutions and practices. Contributions of feminist musicology, in terms of documentation of women's experience in and with music, women's status, and perspectives of feminist music criticism, are summarized. Considering these contributions and framework as a basis to this contextualized critical stance leads to further questions. For example, just as feminist musicology provides music education with the possibilities of new content, is it not likely that feminist criticism in music education could assist musicology in coming to terms with making musical sense, collectively, through cultural institutions? In beginning to work with such a question of criticism, it is suggested that institutional issues of power, as played out through who teaches and sexual harassment of student, are evident and require attention.

Curriculum design is a domain that infrequently forms a discrete element of initial teacher training, or continuing professional development for music teachers in English secondary schools. Classroom music teachers, teaching Key Stage 3 (KS3) learners (11–14-year olds), are, however, required to design their own curriculum. Teachers are accountable to school leaders for curricula they implement, and the outcomes from their selected approaches. This article discusses classroom music curriculum practices and their significance in music education. The research project was conducted with music teachers from schools in the East and West Midlands of England, utilising questionnaires and semi-structured interviews. Research findings are conceptualised in a model of music curriculum activity. The research thereby facilitates discussion of unacknowledged complexities and tacit teacher planning practices in music curriculum design.

Affordance refers to the properties or designs of a thing that offer the function of the thing. This paper discusses the affordance of Braille music in terms of three notions: mediational means, mastery and appropriation, and focuses on answering the following three questions: (i) How do musicians with visual impairments (MVI) perceive Braille music and what does it reveal about the characteristics and limitations of Braille music? (ii) What are the traits influencing the affordance of Braille music and how does it fit the needs of MVI? (iii) What are the conditions that make Braille music more affordable? To qualitatively investigate these topics, we interviewed nine music teachers and their seven students with visual impairment at a school for the blind in Korea. We found that learning and mastering Braille music is not an easy task, and that blind musicians tend to depend more on auditory input and memorisation. These findings suggest that the current level of development, diffusion and employment of Braille music is not satisfactory in Korea. In order to promote the affordance of Braille music, the adaptability, learnability/usability and availability of Braille music must be enhanced.

As an experiment, a Balinese gamelan was integrated with a summer music course for the physically handicapped. Two ethnomusicologists were invited to demonstrate playing techniques and to teach pieces of gamelan music which were later performed. This article documents the success of the experiment and describes the very considerable potential of the gamelan in general recreational and educational music therapy. More particularly, the essentially non-Western methods of learning and practising adopted on the course encouraged and engendered a broad range of skills in those with little or no previous musical experience, and significantly extended the abilities of the musically trained. The results of this experiment suggest that both music therapists and music educators may be able to extend the range of their work by drawing on certain non-Western musical traditions.

The author describes an investigation into the use of West African folklore in the school curriculum by means of an African folktale which became the basis for a project in the class music lessons. Starting with research into West African folklore, particularly children's stories and songs, in Ghana and Nigeria between 1979 and 1983, music was composed in a basically African style to go with an adaptation of one of the stories.

The practical work in a London primary school investigated ways of minimising the apparent dichotomy between African and Western musics in the curriculum.

This article explores how group playing by ear (GEP) through imitation of recorded material and opportunities for inventive work during peer interaction was used to support first year undergraduate western classical music students’ aural, group creativity and improvisation skills. The framework that emerged from the analysis of the data describes two routes taken by the students, whilst progressing from GEP to group improvisation and it is compared to Priest's (1989) model on playing by ear through imitation and invention. The article concludes with suggestion on how these two routes could be used to scaffold the development of western classical musicians’ improvisation skills.

Over the past decade, some major changes have taken place in the policies of Britain's symphony orchestras towards the communities within which they operate. Responding to local needs, most have now evolved enterprising educational activities. This ‘community’ brief has itself generated enthusiastic commitment from the participating musicians; but it has also highlighted the new responsibilities of orchestral management to the personal and artistic development of the players who must work in this somewhat different cultural climate. The author, Gresham Professor of Music and Director of the Department of Performance and Communication Skills at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London, examines these issues and their implications for the future of orchestral musicians.

South Africa is undergoing dynamic changes affecting all aspects of life, and legacies of the previous regime have a bearing on these changes. Music educators informal institutions face many challenges. Music-making in the informal sector is extensive, ongoing and relevant. Today, one of the greatest challenges for music educators in the formal sector is to realise the importance and value of developing a philosophy and process of music education that emanates and evolves from musics and musical practices existing in southern Africa.

The writer looks at the meanings of the word ‘play’ and its properties, and draws attention to the common elements and the differences to be observed in the play of young people and adults respectively. He applies these observations to music, giving examples.

He then considers how classroom teachers have used some of the ‘play’ principles in their work, and introduces the idea of drawing instrumental teachers into similar patterns of action – to be fully developed in the other articles in this group. He summarises recent writings on the subject and his own practical contributions over the last few years.

‘Project’ is something of a misnomer for the complicated string teaching organisation which now involves some thousand young string players, twenty ILEA schools in and around the Tower Hamlets area, and 35 qualified string teachers, mostly on a part-time basis. At no time in the early days was any such structure projected: it has grown up as a result of experience and considerable generosity on the part of the ILEA in allowing scope for experimentation and expansion.

The oft-lamented decline of singing in school, like many other reported declines in education (Mills 1996), is probably more imaginary than real. Ask adults to reminisce about singing when they were at school, and their stories of off-task antics during massed renditions of ‘Greensleeves’, ‘The British Grenadiers’ or ‘Nymphs and Shepherds’, of grunters, groaners and pupils asked by their teachers just to mouth the words, do not speak of a golden age of singing in schools. Certainly, any golden age had passed when I started teaching in 1976, and I needed to work as hard as any teacher must now to persuade pupils to sing with effort, concentration and sensitivity, to vary the mood of their singing, when appropriate, from that suited to ‘Football Crazy’, and to cease to use their imagination to produce what they thought were amusing alternatives to printed lyrics. Yes, there was sometimes singing, of a sort, in assembly. And yes, many music teachers ran choirs and other activities for pupils who were particularly interested in singing. But then, as now, it was difficult to draw in boys, and girls whose time was sought also by PE teachers. But the fact that no decline in singing at school is proven does not excuse any complacence about the quality of singing in schools now. To judge from the high standards that may be observed in some schools, they could be much higher generally. This article considers some of the background to singing in secondary school, and describes some of the more successful approaches to singing by pupils aged eleven to fourteen that have been observed by HM Inspectors (HMI).

LEA re-organisation is in many places bringing instrumental teachers into closer contact with people whose background is that of classroom teaching and curriculum development. Initially there may be some suspicion on both sides, but our experience in Wolverhampton suggests that this is potentially an enjoyable and immensely fruitful relationship.

This article reports findings from a study that sought to identify barriers to music and music education in the UK. Emerging from empirical research involving n = 723 participants and clarified by an evidence base of over 10,000 research participants, the key findings presented in this paper relate to pupil and participant voice and involvement, location as a sub-theme of diversity and inclusion, collaboration and transition points. The research is contextualised by twenty years of policy initiatives seeking to address barriers to music learning. The article provides an overview of the research study before presenting the rich data that emerged within each theme reported. Research participant voice is used as much as possible to enable the reader to consider, reflect and interpret the data in a way that is meaningful for their own context. The paper concludes by asking why after 20 years of policy initiatives, research and evaluation the same barriers still exist and, as we emerge from the pandemic, suggests that this research provides a compelling case that now is the time for change.