The simultaneous sound of several voices or instruments requires proper tuning to achieve consonance for certain intervals and chords. Most instruments allow enough frequency variation to enable pure tuning while being played. Keyboard instruments such as organ and piano have given frequencies for individual notes and the tuning must be based on a…

The aim of this paper is to define music appraisal and to explore the role that talk plays in the process of helping pupils in secondary school music lessons to develop their appraisal skills. This paper offers a definition of appraisal, and traces its developing role in the National Curriculum in England since the early 1990s. The role of…

In this article, the author presents John Philip Sousa's all time hit, "The Stars and Stripes Forever". It is one of the most recognizable pieces of American music. Wherever John Philip Sousa and his band appeared, this march was likely to be played. According to American poet and educator Eli Siegel (1902-78), who first articulated the…

In 1994, the Australian Society for Music Education (ASME) initiated two related projects supporting and acknowledging composition in schools and offering the opportunity for secondary school-aged students to work with prominent Australian composers. These were the Young Composers' Project and the Composer-in-Residence Project. Both projects were…

Our reception and perception, our experience of music, has been profoundly determined by our technological devices and media. Whatever music we happen to like and listen to, we can hardly experience it today apart from its production and reproduction in and through technology. The effects of technology on making and hearing music require critical…

In this article, the author describes the evolution of a promising practice, his story of how he developed theory out of his teaching experiences. He tells his story in support of educators who struggle to bring meaning, joy, and understanding to children who are currently being stifled by prescriptive and restrictive regulatory mandates that…

An innovative ICT project called "Compose" has been implemented in some New Zealand primary schools in an effort to counteract the lack of classroom composition opportunities. "Compose" combines the use of music software and online learning with attempts to address barriers to primary classroom composition. This article…

Reported discourse--as theorized by Bakhtin, bringing the voices of others into our own writing through quotation, citation and paraphrase, as well as more subtle means--is at the heart of all academic writing, including basic writing. This article, both in its texture and its analysis, demonstrates that reported discourse must be regarded, and…

Writing and speaking are essential means of understanding, studying, and sharing music in the Western art music tradition. The papers presented in this symposium were the outgrowth of authors' dialogue during the summer of 2004. Each of them worked independently, yet each of them was also aware of the direction, the themes, and the ways of the…

Suggests a teaching strategy that sets poems to song in order to stimulate interest in poetic structure and understanding of rhythm and musicality in performance. (JMF)

Based on a conception in which a musical composition determines aesthetic-normative properties, a distinction is drawn between two notions of performance: the "autonomous", in which a performance is regarded as a musical work on its own, and the "intentionalistic", in which it is regarded as essentially of a particular work. An ideal…

The search for band and orchestra repertoire is a quest for quality. It is easy for band or orchestra directors to find lists of music; in fact, the quantity is often overwhelming; professional magazines, free miniscores and CDs, and the constant stream of offerings from publishers bombard the music teacher with the message "buy me." The sheer…

This article describes an interdisciplinary, activity-based lesson plan implemented in a third/fourth-grade classroom. During these activities, students use musical concepts to think about, illustrate, and discuss animal behavior, and they use scientific concepts to motivate musical composition and performance. The lesson ends with small group…

Many current approaches to composing with technology require teachers to spend considerable time showing students how to use the software and hardware. Technologies described in many resources are often costly or require complex procedures to adapt for the classroom. In addition, the majority of approaches to teaching music with technology, center…

With all the music that is available for instrumental performance in the schools, the music of Thailand is under-represented. Yet Thailand has a rich instrumental tradition. This article focuses on the possibilities of adapting the Thai "mahori" and "kruang sai" ensembles to the western instrumentation available in school music…