An undergraduate music class was examined that incorporated the creation of students' individual original raps. Research was conducted to understand the value of studying rap and its impact upon students' education. This instrumental case study utilised students' individual raps as an art-based research component to address three research…

The notion of the spiral for progression and development is familiar both in general educational discourse and in the domain of music education. This brief article considers the spiral within the context of lower secondary school group composing in England. Through the use of examples taken from two schools in the English midlands, it argues that…

This study examines the learning processes that take place when upper secondary students apply and generate theories while drawing on their preferred music and writing songs of their own. One music theory teacher and two researchers collaborated to design an emergent sequence of lessons focusing on students' interests, questions and creative work.…

Since the late nineties, composition projects inviting artists and contemporary composers into schools and communities became more established and written about in German speaking countries (see for instance Henze, 1998; Schneider, Bösze & Stangl, 2000; Schneider, 2000; Schatt, 2009; Schlothfeldt, 2009; Schneider, 2012). Additionally, music…

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the impact of the Curriculum Design Coherence Model (CDC Model -- Rata, 2019) on the design practice of two music teachers in a middle school music class in New Zealand. The CDC Model proposes that deep learning first requires deep design coherence. This coherence is generated by three interrelated design…

The canon forming the backbone of most conceptions of Western music has been a feature of musical culture for decades, exerting an influence upon musical study in educational settings. In English school contexts, the once perceived superiority of classical music in educational terms has been substantially revised and reconsidered, opening up…

This pilot study analysed the learning strategies of advanced students and professional electroacoustic composers engaged in creating new musical pieces through online collaboration. The participants were divided into three groups and interacted in a virtual setting using synchronous (chat and Skype) and asynchronous tools (forum, compositional…

This article reports on a case study in a Norwegian primary school where nearly 50 fifth-grade pupils took part in a creative music-making project. Facilitated by two professional artists, they created an original piece of music and performed their composition for an audience at the end of the project week. A substantial part of the data consisted…

Recent decades have seen gender and feminist research emerge as major fields of enquiry in musicology and to a far lesser extent, music education. While these fields have increased awareness of the issues confronting women and other marginalised groups, the pedagogical practices and curricular design that might support aspiring women composers are…

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…

Limited consideration has been given to the challenges young composers and performers face when learning to communicate through notation in contemporary classical music, and the specific opportunities presented for peer learning. This article describes a project at a Swiss music conservatory in which two student composers wrote pieces for solo…

Music notation is intrinsic in the composition and performance of Western art music and also in its analysis and research. The process of writing about music remains underexplored, in particular how excerpts of music notation are selected and arranged in a written text, and how that text describes and contextualises the excerpts. This article…

The purpose of this article is to contribute to existing literature about how activity theory might be used in music education research. It draws from the author's doctoral action research into the assessment of group composing for New Zealand's secondary school qualification, the National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA). It outlines…

This study aims to provide new insights on the nature of the embodied and collaborative processes related to the emergence of new musical ideas that occur when children are composing in groups. Data was obtained by participant observation of the teacher/researcher and by ten videotaped one-hour musical sessions dedicated to the development of a…

Existing studies show the value of using visual expression as a means of teaching children to understand and create music. This study aspires to point out an additional valuable aspect, namely, the influence composing via visual expression--whereby children transform their own drawings--may have on children's subsequent compositional processes.…