It can be difficult to navigate the tasks of repertoire selection and part assignments in a way that produces a successful performance product while also being educationally beneficial to all students. However, researchers have explored methods of ensuring these goals through repertoire selection. In this article, I present ideas for how educators…

William Frederick ("Fred") Cardin served as a director of instrumental music in the Reading, Pennsylvania, School District from 1930 until his retirement in June 1960. An accomplished performer and composer, Cardin studied at the Curtis School of Music and the Conservatoire Américaine in Paris, France. He is remembered as an outstanding…

Recognizing that music teachers may struggle to implement songwriting activities in a classroom, and that iconic notation provides an opportunity to increase access to school music for all students, the purpose of this article is to share one model of songwriting activities in a music technology class using chord diagrams, beat grids, and keyboard…

The recent increase in popular music education in K-12 school music programs is in part due to the expansion of modern band programming throughout the United States. Modern band is a term used to describe school music ensembles that include popular music instruments and focus on performing music that is meaningful to the students while…

Despite its rich heritage and enduring popularity, country music has historically been marginalized in American music education, usually in favor of more "high-brow" musical practices. This article explores potential explanations for this imbalance within the context of a general overview of cultural and social considerations and…

Creating, performing, responding, and connecting are often central foci in the development of music education curricula. While these meta-organizers provide a sense of direction for planning instruction, greater depths of knowledge and skill could be achieved if these actions were viewed as means rather than ends in music education. The profession…

The purpose of this study was to determine if participation in a composition competition influenced four K-12 students' self-concepts as musicians. Research questions explored motivations for these four students to enter into a composition competition, influences of the competition on students' self-concepts as musicians (if at all), and effects…

This column offers the personal reflections of the author on being a member of the band Touch, an iPad performing ensemble composed of music education faculty members and doctoral students at the University of South Florida. The ensemble primarily performed its own arrangements of popular music selections from a number of genres including, but not…

This article looks at the iPad's role as a musical instrument through the lens of a live performance ensemble that performs primarily on iPads. It also offers an overview of a pedagogical model used by this ensemble, which emphasizes musician autonomy in small groups, where music is learned primarily through aural means and concerts are…

Kindergartener and Dalcroze teacher, Heather Gell (1896-1988), brought music to thousands of Australian children and adults. The community touched by Gell was vast: it included her classes in studios and teacher training colleges, "listeners in" to her radio programs, viewers of her television programs, Dalcroze trainees, and people in…

For the Tower-Tannerts of Texas, music education runs in the family, and that's been the case for more than 100 years. Matriarch Mollie Gregory Tower is a lecturer at Texas State University and a former elementary school teacher, textbook writer, music supervisor, and president of the Texas Music Educators Conference (TMEC). Her daughter Debbie…

Teachers may be apprehensive about commissioning, and frequently directors do not see it as realistic for their programs. It took the author a while to commission a piece, even though he is often on the composer side. The author asserts that there's already plenty of high-quality literature out there to keep teachers busy, but a bigger factor is…

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791) was the ultimate child prodigy. It is said that Mozart, after attending a service at the Vatican, wrote down an entire sacred piece of music after one hearing. There are countless examples of the amazing feats that Mozart accomplished through his childhood, not to mention his huge compositional output through…

The City of Melbourne's ArtPlay is open to children and young people aged 3-13 years, and provides a wide range of artist-led programs that serve a broad community within and outside the municipality. Its sister facility, Signal, caters for young people 13-22 years. An Australia Council of the Arts funded Creative Community Partnership Initiative,…

In the past few decades, the steel band art form has experienced consistent growth and development in several key respects. For example, in the United States, the sheer number of steel band programs has steadily increased, and it appears that this trend will continue in the future. Additionally, pan builders and tuners have made great strides in…