While most of the students who graduate each year from the Royal College of Music (RCM) in London build performance-based portfolio careers that include some teaching, very few of them enter secondary school class music teaching. This article describes how young musicians' concerns about the career of secondary class music teacher develop as they move from sixth former to first year RCM undergraduate to third year undergraduate, and proposes some ways in which these concerns may be addressed. RCM students often agree strongly with statements consistent with a positive attitude to teaching, such as feeling a sense of achievement when pupils learn, and considering that teaching is about helping pupils realise their musical potential. However, they also tend to think that secondary class music teaching is not ‘doing music’. Successful secondary music teachers may take a different view, and the effect on RCM students of working with such teachers is reported descriptively.

Participation in an ensemble is a significant aspect of tertiary music experience. Learning and assessment practices within ensembles have rarely been investigated in Australia and the perceptions of staff and students as to how they learn and are assessed within ensembles remain largely unexplored. This paper reports on part of a larger project that investigated learning and assessment practices within ensembles at an Australian Conservatorium of Music. Ensembles contribute to approximately 25% of student work in each semester, and the assessment contributes to a final grade for the semester. Using a case study methodology, four music ensembles were studied. The data generated were coded into themes including assessment practices and processes; collaborative learning practices; the development of the professional musician; and communication and transparency between participants and the institution. Findings revealed that both staff and student participants in this study perceived ensemble participation to be valuable to the development of a professional musician, but that assessment procedures did not always support this goal. Institutional demands were found to be an inhibiting factor in the assessment of ensembles, and both students and teachers had problems with current assessment procedures, resulting in confusion and lack of transparency about how ensembles are assessed. Approaches to the development of the professional musician became a dominant discussion point and a substantial finding of the research. By examining dominant and subjugated knowledge in this domain, institutional power relations were interrogated, existing practices were challenged, and assessment practices rethought.

This study analyses 10 Swedish music teachers’ descriptions of how a new music syllabus and a new credit scale have influenced their practice. In the new curriculum, grading is introduced in year 6 and not, as previously, in year 8. We have therefore focused on the effects of this change on school years 5–7. The new syllabus is much more precise and explicit than the earlier one, and it is reported to have strongly affected both teachers’ and pupils’ work in the classroom. Teachers are facing a number of dilemmas when trying to combine the demands of the syllabus with their conceptions of quality in music education.

Research into student experience in Higher Education has largely focused on students' role as learners. However, the student experience encompasses a much wider range of behaviours and beliefs than can be captured through a focus on teaching and learning alone. I report the findings of a research project which explored student experience in the music department of a British red-brick university. Music presents a particularly interesting case study given the presence of extra-curricular musical activities, the opportunity for social interaction between staff and students outside the formal context of the lecture or seminar room, and perceptions of Western art music as a form of ‘middle-class’ culture. Analysis of survey and interview data reveals the centrality of musical performance activities, and in particular the development of a performer identity, to students' experience of belonging and achievement. The influence of students' socio-economic background is also considered: social class was largely invisible to respondents within the departmental context, possibly because it is an invisible norm, within larger contemporary discourses in which social class is equated with financial difference rather than cultural difference. However, the research revealed an association between socio-economic background, term-time employment and academic achievement. The implications of these findings for teaching and learning in music in Higher Education are considered.

The encounter – and sometimes confrontation – of music with various cultural backgrounds challenges many preconceptions and prejudices on music making and learning. The rise of what is now often called ‘world music’ has not only brought new sound worlds to Western ears, but digs deep into existing systems of belief. In discussing both Western classical and world music, concepts such as tradition, authenticity and context are often used with firm conviction. On closer examination, however, they are applied with ambiguous or even contradictory meaning. A cross-cultural exploration of these concepts reveals that they are not nearly as clear, stable and value-free as they may appear. A more dynamic interpretation of these terms is needed to understand contemporary realities of music making and education at all levels, and to enable teachers to apply these concepts to everyday studio and classroom practices.

Instrumental teachers in higher music education in Norway and elsewhere traditionally organise their teaching as individual lessons with one teacher and one student. This paper takes a closer look at how a horn teacher at the Norwegian Academy of Music has organised her weekly teaching in individual, small group and master class lessons with all her students. The project being described in the paper has since been extended to other instruments, but this paper concentrates on the horn model. The main focus is on small group lessons where the students themselves play and comment on fellow students’ performances. The evidence suggests that a combination of teaching in individual, small group and master class lessons is the best way of educating students as responsible, reflective and professional musicians.

This work aimed to analyse factors related to conceptions and beliefs about expressivity in music among students and teachers. A questionnaire with 11 Likert-type items was developed covering the main factors included in the literature of teaching-learning of expressivity and emotion in music. Through exploratory factor analysis three factors were identified: expressive technique (ET), emotional expression (EE), and self-learning of expressivity (SLE). Comparisons between teachers and students showed that teachers had significant higher scores in EE with no differences in ET or SLE, although the effect size for SLE was high. The three factors are proposed as a tool for the assessment of conceptions of expressivity and its learning in both teachers and advanced students of music for teaching and research objectives.

This article discusses music service teachers' notions of pedagogical competence and occupational prospects as they approach mid-career. Respondents were drawn from a comprehensive life history study of 28 Local Education Authority employees. Of this larger cohort, 20 individuals contributed to findings discussed here. Data were collected and analysed between October 2002 and March 2004. Findings suggest a critical phase between 36 and 42 years of age. The episode entails reaching a professional apex, plateau or crisis in light of high pedagogical efficacy and career limitations. It culminates in a transformation of self-identity. Owing to respondents' unease about this period, the career structure of music service teachers is questioned.

In Scotland, assessment procedures tend to dominate the teaching and learning of music. Teachers are concerned that the recording and measuring of pupils' output against set criteria are achieved at the expense of engaging them in meaningful, creative experiences. The authors have proposed elsewhere (Byrne & Sheridan, 2000) that music educators should consider the use of Csikszentmihalyi's ‘flow’ model (Csikszentmihalyi, 1992) as a possible reflective tool for monitoring, regulating and assessing learning in music.

This paper explores recent developments in relation to doctoral research training in music. Drawing on the findings of a case-study of a recently established practice-led doctorate at an Australian conservatoire, we offer insights into the attributes of its expanding cohort. We interrogate a blended research training structure of academic supervision, coursework, web-based tools and administrative resources in order to reveal the obstacles to, and opportunities for improvement. The paper concludes by arguing programme design refinements which contribute to a deeper understanding of practice-led doctorates in music while inviting readers to similarly consider their own experiences.

Creativity in human endeavours is being discussed and promoted in many fields and venues throughout the Western world. In this paper I discuss reasons for the current emphasis on creativity, especially in music education. I also describe some philosophical, psychological, cultural, and political/social/economic factors that have worked for and against the teaching of creativity in school music programmes, while recognising that technology also plays an important role.

No poet shall compose anything in contravention of the public standards of law and right, honour and good…

–Plato (Laws: VII: 28)

Informal learning has become a prominent theme in music education literature in recent times. Many writers have called for a new emphasis on informal knowledge and pedagogy as the way forward for music education. The position taken in this paper is that a central issue for music education is the accommodation of a tension between types of knowledge and the ways of knowing strongly associated with popular and classical of music – socially acquired informal knowledge and socially developed but formally acquired disciplinary knowledge. Approaches to curriculum conception and realisation observed in a recent series of case studies in New Zealand secondary schools suggest that a key factor in student engagement is the degree to which teachers can create links between informal and formal knowledge so that students’ understanding and conceptual abilities can be extended across these knowledge boundaries. The teaching approaches of two recent graduates in rock music are discussed to support the social realist argument that a ‘progressive’ approach to curriculum involves creating links between informal and formal knowledge rather than replacing one with the other or dissolving the boundaries between them. Through seeing the two types of knowledge as necessarily interconnected within educational contexts, the epistemic integrity of classroom music is maintained. In this way students are able to recognise themselves and their aspirations while also recognising the potential and power of the foundational knowledge of the discipline.

This article explores music conservatoire undergraduates' career aspirations and notions of their pedagogical training, through biographical interviews with 16 students from the School of Wind and Percussion, Royal Northern College of Music. Findings suggest that pedagogical training, which begins in the second college year, serves as a catalyst for changes in career orientation. Students begin, however, with limited intention of teaching. Performance is commonly their focus at the outset. Furthermore, boundaries are perceived between conservatoires which offer elite performance training, and those with a broader curricular base. The practicalities of attracting future students, whilst offering apt and substantial pedagogical erudition within a performance-centred arena, are explored.

Examination criteria, as distinct from guidelines regulating content and presentation, are problematic as applied to musical performance. Given the epistemological gap between musical and conceptual thought, forms of words are not readily available to distinguish objectively between the good and the mediocre performance. Criteria need therefore to be designed to complement the examiner's subjective response rather than substitute for it, and analytical concepts prove to be less reliable than ‘aesthetic terms’ (Sibley). In the context of Western art-music, the ‘good’ musical performance will be one that proposes its own ‘possible world’ (Bruner), situated within the larger ‘world’ of culturally contingent aesthetic values. Aesthetic terms provide the best means we have of access to the experiential world of performed music.

It is a familiar comment from some new beginner music teachers, ‘I'm not a composer, how do I teach composition, I'm not sure about this, I don't feel confident . . .’. Since the work of Paynter (1982), Swanwick (1979), Swanwick and Taylor (1982) and others, whose work has influenced the National Curriculum in England, classroom music-making has focused on the key musical activities of listening, performing and composing, assuming an experiential learning approach which builds on the inter-relatedness of the three activities. Visits to school music departments reveal a range of pupil music-making but often the area which is least confidently facilitated and supported (and perhaps misunderstood) is composing. Why is this and what are the challenges of teaching composing?

This article discusses the use of gesture and body-movement in the teaching of singing and reports on a survey amongst professional singing teachers in Germany regarding their use of gesture and body movement as pedagogic tools in their teaching. The nomenclature of gestures and movements used in the survey is based on a previous study by the author (Nafisi, 2008, 2010) categorising movements in the teaching of singing according to their pedagogical intent into Physiological Gestures, Sensation-related Gestures, Musical Gestures and Body-Movements. The survey demonstrated that Gestures were used by a significant number of voice teachers to enhance explanation and/or demonstration, that a significant number of voice teachers encouraged their students to carry out similar Gestures whilst singing to enhance their learning experience and that another type of essentially non-expressive Body-Movements was also encouraged by a significant number of voice teachers to enhance students’ learning. The paper validates the author's nomenclature and offers some hitherto unpublished insights.

The purpose of this study was to validate a measure of creative identity with a population of pre-service teachers in the USA, to further validate the measure with a Finnish population, and to compare both populations regarding their perceptions of themselves as creative musicians. The researcher developed a tool, the Creative Identity Measure (CIM), based on the work of Isbell (2007) to examine this area. The specific research questions were as follows: 1. What factors can explain creative identity in music? 2. What is the internal consistency within the factors that explain creative identity in music? 3. Do differences exist between the two populations with regard to each sub-scale? Results of factor analysis reveal that the CIM can be meaningfully divided into four sub-scales with a US population (n = 159) and a combined US and Finland population (n = 277). Significant differences were discovered for sub-scales one (Creative Music Making Self-Efficacy), two (Value of Creative Musicianship Areas), and four (Value of Popular-Music Making/Listening in the Classroom), suggesting that the Finnish pre-service music teachers possess a stronger creative identity than their contemporaries from the USA. Significant differences were not found for sub-scale three (Willingness to Allow for Creativity in the Classroom), suggesting that both populations of pre-service music teachers are equally willing to allow time for creativity.

Using Marx as a lens through which to interrogate music methodology, in particular those espoused by Orff and Kodaly, this article suggests that rather than the free play and creativity Orff and Kodaly intended, the implementation of these methods in a strict and unmindful manner, often alienates both teacher and student from musicking. Thus these methods have become more real than the music itself and as such, music making within them is abstracted from the use-value of musicking and consequently exchanged as a commodity. The article explains how methods become a form of production that serves to reproduce systems of domination as well as a very particular form of cultural capital. This lens also allows us to realise that, as we move farther away from the process of inquiry originally embedded in the conception and construction of these musical engagements, the educative process becomes more and more myopic. This, in turn, determines, delineates and narrows possibilities of and for meaningful learning.

This study concerns children's representational knowledge, more specifically, their ‘invented notations’ of music. A small-scale empirical study of four 5-year-old children and their teachers working on the representation of music is reported. The challenges posed by the teachers and how the children respond to these challenges are analysed. The teachers challenge the children to explain their understanding and use contrast to direct children's attention towards distinctions and important terms in the domain of music. The children use coloured geometrical shapes on paper and a sequence of building blocks to represent music. By means of these visuospatial representations, sounding and conversing about them, the children are able to communicate their understanding of the relationship between representation (sign) and sound. The role of external representations in the development of children's musical knowledge is discussed.

This paper presents theoretical perspectives for choral conducting education. A wide range of related literature on choral practice and education in higher education contexts, as well as training in the workplace is reviewed. Whilst various attributes for effective choral conducting practice have been identified by research studies, there has been no systematic research on the process of choral conductor education and the contexts in which it occurs, particularly in the UK. The proposed framework consists of six interconnected parameters: (i) the tutor(s), (ii) the learner(s), (iii) the music repertoire and the singers, (iv) the sequence and amount of training, (v) the learning outcomes and (vi) the socio-cultural context(s), including teaching context(s) where practice takes place. The framework itself offers insights and related approaches for the development of choral conducting education.