This study examined the nature of inclusion for female and black and minority ethnic (BME) young people in elite-level classical music in England. By contrasting the numbers of female and BME students taking part in elite youth orchestras and music schools with the representation of female and BME compositions in the professional classical music…

Persuasive arguments have been made for the existence of pedagogical discourses that invoke gender as a factor in the ascription of quality to musical compositions, and previous research has shown that some music teachers ascribe "maleness" to the characteristics that they regard as markers of high quality. Drawing upon Lucy Green's…

This study examined trainee music teachers' judgements of the musical creativity of secondary age students. Nine pieces of music composed by Year 8 students (13 years of age) were evaluated by 17 postgraduate, trainee teachers. These musical pieces were sorted into a diamond-shaped formation according to how creative they were perceived to be with…

"Music is both a creative and a performing art" (Hallam, 2006, p. 70). Many musicians and music educators maintain that composing and performing, although related, are essentially different aspects of musical activity. In the professional musical sphere, composition and performance are almost invariably separated; academic studies have…

This article reports the results of research into teachers' practices concerning the assessment of composing at Key Stage 3 in the National Curriculum for Music in England. It finds that many teachers are using NC levels for assessing individual pieces of work, a process for which they were never intended. It also finds that teachers find it…

This article applies Bourdieu's notion of "cultural capital" to historical, documentary research which investigates the construction of a scholastic canon within England's A-level music examinations. A digest of the ways in which this canon evolved between 1951 and 1986 is presented in support of the idea that examiners' responses to…

This paper explores secondary school music teachers' current practice with regard to the organisation and assessment of composing at Key Stage 4. It draws on research undertaken on a nation-wide basis in England, via the use of two online surveys and face-to-face interviews. In terms of the organisation of classroom composition, the study found…

This article reports on a particular aspect of a PhD study into pupil composing in music classrooms with information and communications technology (ICT). Two case studies based in England investigated the work of two groups of pupils in different phases of education, one aged 12-13 (secondary) and the other 10-11 (primary). A theoretical lens that…

This article investigates computer-based music composition using the CD Rom "Dance eJay" with pupils from a secondary school setting (13-15 years). Three issues are explored: the extent to which participants adopted different strategies during the composition process, how the strategies differed with respect to prior experience of formal…

Investigates how accurately children, ages 6-9 from England, Japan, Korea, Spain, and the United States, could match eight animal drawings to excerpts from the well-known concert music, "The Carnival of the Animals" by Charles Camille Saint-Saens. Indicates a mean correct response of 40% without instruction. Discusses two extension…

In this article, case studies of teacher interventions in the composing processes of school students aged 11-14 in generalist music classes are described and discussed. The study finds that music teachers have developed their own strategies for formative assessment, unaware that these are valorized by external agencies. (Contains 3 figures.)