The purpose of this qualitative study was to explore how undergraduate music therapy students perceive, describe, and make meaning from their pre-internship clinical experiences. Using a basic qualitative research approach and marrying arts-based methods with reflexive thematic analysis methods, the following research questions guided my…

Grounded in the Rogers (1995) theory of diffusion, this field study applied th? theory to the problem of technology obsolescence within the music scoring industry. Technology obsolescence is important to study because it plays a specific and pivotal role in business success, longevity, and sustainability. The purpose of this study was to examine…

Violin repertoire composed in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries placed new demands on performers. While numerous pedagogues have written etudes and treatises analyzing traditional techniques, far fewer have thoroughly examined contemporary techniques. Many of the existing etudes and exercises inspired by contemporary violin…

This instrumental case study utilized an ABR component to investigate music composition as a pedagogical tool in higher education. This was achieved through three facets: gaining an understanding of undergraduate students' compositional experiences, students' accounts of the pedagogy's impact upon their learning, and through the educator's…

Two dissertation recitals and a piano pedagogy workshop were given in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctoral of Musical Arts in Piano Pedagogy and Performance at the University of Michigan. The first dissertation lecture recital, "Afro-Cuban and Brazilian Dances," was presented in McIntosh Theatre on…

Throughout recent decades, there has been a surge in work to create a diverse classical music canon by finding and promoting works written by composers of underrepresented identities. Despite these efforts, one area that has received little attention is the music written by women during the 18th and early 19th centuries. Reviving the works of…

This multi-study dissertation explored technology and creativity within three different technology-rich creative musical spaces. Through the use of three contrasting empirical methods (qualitative content analysis, intrinsic case study, and phenomenology), I explored the complex ways technology and musical creativity are linked. In the first…

The purpose of this descriptive study was to examine elementary music teachers' planning times. The existing literature on planning time is scarce and the literature on elementary music teachers' planning time is nearly nonexistent. The following research questions guided the study: (a) How many minutes of planning time do elementary music…

The ability to identify errors by sight and sound--commonly referred to as "error detection"--is a musical ability needed in a variety of music professions. Instructors of undergraduate aural-skills courses often agree that strong error-detection skills are an essential outcome of these courses; however, error-detection activities are…

St. Pierre (2015) suggested that researchers consider entering into research through an interest in, and a deep investigation of, a specific concept. Deleuze and Guattari (1994) maintained that a concept is a nebulous structure of a network of ideas that continuously remains unfolding. Therefore, researching a concept becomes an attempt at…

Social cognitive theory was developed to explain how individuals learn, in part, by witnessing the behavior of others. Self-efficacy is a construct within social cognitive theory which indicates the beliefs that an individual can be successful at a task under specific situational demands. The sources of self-efficacy include self-evaluating past…