Musical expression is often not explicitly addressed in secondary instrumental rehearsals due to the perception of expression as an obscure concept and the instructional time constraints on music educators. Secondary music educators, however, are encouraged to discuss expressive performance goals with instrumental students from the beginning of…

Listening to, analyzing, and describing music, is perhaps the most difficult standard to present effectively in allotted classroom time. The purpose of this literature review is to better understand what constitutes effective listening instruction by examining students' listening practices, receptiveness, attentiveness, and activities that lead to…

Though jazz has been a part of many school music programs for more than 40 years, relatively little research on jazz education exists. Despite this scarcity, a comprehensive examination of the extant literature could serve to inform practice and guide future studies. Therefore, the purpose of this article is to analyze and synthesize the extant…

This study explores the metaphorical relationship between the process of narrative inquiry and the process of "musical mapping." The creation of musical maps was used as a classroom tool for enabling students' musical understanding while listening to music. As teacher-researcher, I studied my fifth-grade music students as they interacted with…

Studies of the biology of music (as of language) are highly interdisciplinary and demand the integration of diverse strands of evidence. In this paper, I present a comparative perspective on the biology and evolution of music, stressing the value of comparisons both with human language, and with those animal communication systems traditionally…