In his recent monograph, Chris Higgins (2011) offers a remarkably original, thoughtful, and provocative argument for "an ethics of professional practice" for teachers. His study brings together a wealth of ideas and authors not often discussed in relation to each other, and it draws out elusive themes and ideas often overlooked in most…

This article provides general music teachers with resources they can use in their class to: (1) introduce the instrument to their students; (2) energize and reshape their students' attitudes toward the instrument; (3) show older students who are very musical recorder and low flute players who share their love of the instruments through podcasts…

Tradition has it that the best way to familiarize oneself with a musical work is to attend a live performance. Teachers urge promising students to frequent concert halls, clubs, or stadia. Musicologists typically adopt the perspective of an ideal concert-goer when arbitrating matters of interpretation or evaluation. In this article, the author…

For the past century and more, music education in the United States has focused primarily on Western European music traditions. Despite considerable efforts to include music from other regions and peoples in the curriculum, traditional music from world cultures is still not greatly represented. The benefits of a curriculum that incorporates…

Over the last forty years, popular music in America has consistently shown great variety, originality, and evolution. While American music has clearly flourished and evolved over the last several decades, it is difficult to say the same for American music education. Although there are important reasons to preserve long-standing traditions of…

Peter Schickele, whose stage persona is P.D.Q. Bach, discusses such subjects as the musical influences on his childhood, humor, creativity, and what he wants to be when he grows up. (CS)

In this article, the author contends that in order to fulfill music education's purpose of developing a child's capacity to make and experience music, attention must be paid to developing listening in performance ensemble classes. Music educators cannot assume that being involved in the refinement and performance of music contributes to becoming a…

The purpose of this study was to review the spectrum of musico-aesthetic attitude tests by categorizing several according to their approach and the attributes they attempt to measure. (Author)

Author discusses a humanistic route to music learning that will make people feel better about themselves and that will enable them to interact with music with the full confidence that man's creation of music was meant for man. (Author/GB)

Discusses ways to prepare children for their first concert. (GB)

The results of this paper are drawn from interviews with the school principal and the music teacher of a secondary school in Shanghai, China, together with an analysis of 24 seventh-grade students' written assignments entitled "I and Music." These assignments reveal rich and varied connections between the students' social contexts and…

Although the traditional idea of general education has been that there are certain things every civilized man ought to know in order to be "cultivated", there is no longer an ideal taste in music or a particular set of understandings about music that all people must acquire. (Author)

Author developed a program of classical music and induced young musicians to perform successfully to an audience. (Author/RK)