Children's songs inspire the love of music in children and improve their musical skills and at the same time, teach national values and societal rules, contribute to their personality development, make children feel happier, foster interpersonal communication and particularly contribute to the cognitive and linguistic development of children at…

To better serve students' evolving needs in music, music educators must connect classroom learning with how students use and interact with music in their daily lives. One way to accomplish this is by approaching classrooms with the music user in mind, which can open new possibilities for meaningful music making and remove students from the…

Reviews of literature on music preference may provide music educators with a variety of research on information, techniques, and methods to implement in the music classroom. Calls to widen the types of music used in curricula seem to underscore the importance of research exploring preference using music other than, and in addition to, Western art…

The purpose of this phenomenological study was to describe children's lived experience of enjoyment during musical play. Data sources included class video from 15 weeks of a 24-week extracurricular music class for 4- to 7-year-olds taught by the researcher, parent-filmed video of child participant music-making in home settings during the same…

The overlapping of pragmatic philosophy and the Aristotelian concept of praxis is explored with application to music and music education. John Dewey's philosophy of "Art as Experience" is contrasted with tacit aesthetic assumptions about music that music teachers often hold as a result of the aesthetic meme inherited from their…

This study extends Zimmerman's research on children's music conservation to adult listeners, investigating participants' ability to conserve melody under different harmonic conditions. Specifically, I investigated whether listeners in the study could identify melody when primary, diatonic, and secondary chords were added (Task 1) and when melody…

American popular culture romanticises relationships between sex workers and their customers; novels, films and television depict prostitutes as innocents in need of rescue by a wealthy or powerful man. Miss Laura's Social Club, a restored Victorian brothel in Fort Smith, Arkansas, USA, functions both as an informal house museum and the visitor…

Music is a human action (praxis), guided by intentionality, that embodies sociality. The many significant "social" values of music, however, get lost in high-minded but faulty claims that music's essential value is to promote aesthetic experience. A survey of some basic aesthetic premises demonstrates that claims for "proper"…

In recent years, opera companies throughout the United Kingdom have begun to provide educational programs for children that offer opportunities for "apprenticeship" training in the context of professional opera productions, alongside formal choral musicianship training. This article outlines a qualitative case study of a recently…

Pupil voice research has been recognised in the last 15 years for its potential to re-shape the conditions of learning and help raise child engagement and standards of achievement. In music education, however, there still seems to exist a misalignment between the content of the curriculum and pupils' learning expectations and interests. The aim of…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of songs in different languages on English language learners' (ELLs) music preferences. The participants (N = 62) were Chinese graduate students from a state university in the Midwestern United States. The survey contained nine excerpts from popular songs in three languages: Chinese (the…

This research was performed with the purpose of examining the differences of acclaim, their causes, and acclaim status of original recordings of popular songs and their cover versions rearranged in different styles. The research was conducted using the qualitative research method. The participants were asked to listen to three songs with two…

To mark the centennial of "Music Educators Journal" ("MEJ"), this article explores the relationship of music education and the making of musical America across the century. Several interwoven themes are developed to show changing narratives of American music and music education, using voices from the pages of "MEJ."…

The Thomaston Woods Early Childhood program opened in October 2014, operating one day a week, with a school year that stretched to the end of July. Children of families living in the Thomaston Woods community, ages 3-6, had first choice and attended free of charge. While a one-day-a-week Montessori program is not the typical model, the hope was…

Contemporary African-American classical composers Cedric Adderley, John Lane, and Trevor Weston intertwine strands of culture and individual experience to produce musical works whose distinct designs offer cultural resources that music educators can use to integrate diversity into instructional settings. Of special interest is their ability to…