The history of female piano teachers, especially those working with children, remains largely unstudied. Estelle Philleo (1880-1936) is one example from the early 20th century who specialized in group lessons for beginners. A New Woman who never married, she began as a junior piano teacher at the Michigan Female Seminary before graduating in 1902.…

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…

Scott Joplin was an African American composer and pianist of singular merit and influence. This article is the second in a three-part series considering the biographical, artistic, and cultural contexts of Joplin's life and work. "King of Ragtime Composers," focuses on Scott Joplin's artistic processes, including his structuring of…

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…

A mode is a socially and culturally shaped resource for making meaning. Examples of modes include written and oral language, visuals, audio, and gestures. In music learning, multiple modes may be used to help students develop greater musical understanding and achievement. This article details the three steps utilized in Project Stomp, a systematic…

Much like an effective speaker, a flexible musician is competent across multiple settings. The sociolinguistic theory of code-switching can be a useful tool to better understand how musicians acquire a set of skills and knowledge to support music-making in a range of activities in and outside of school and throughout society. In this article,…

National Core Arts Standards require students to use feedback from peers to refine both their performances and their compositions in the artistic processes of Create and Perform. When asked to give feedback to a peer, many students stop at comments like "It sounds good," and do not naturally give specific, meaningful feedback. Therefore,…

This article presents the composer Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971) as an historical educator in the context of the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures on Poetry at Harvard University (1939-1940), published as "The Poetics of Music in the Form of Six Lessons." As music professors at North American institutions of Christian Higher Education, the…

This article discusses a pedagogical and creative approach to designing a mixed-media, live dance performance. By involving undergraduate students in the process, the authors were able to examine the contemporary phenomenon of selfies and the effect of the "online self" and "mediated self" on dance performance. The performance…

This article describes a project in which contemporary music is studied and created in primary-school classrooms in the presence of a composer. Listening to and analyzing a composer's works fosters musical creation processes in students, who subsequently present and discuss their works in a meeting with the composer. Finally, the students' works…

As the U.S. population has become significantly more culturally diverse, many music educators have acknowledged the necessity to implement culturally diverse musics in music curricula. One of the challenges in teaching culturally diverse musics is designing a balance between performing-based activities and other activities such as listening,…

Work produced during a course of study in the creative arts may differ from assessment in other disciplines in the following ways: (1) it is non-text-based: work may consist of a performance, video recording, digital or interactive work, music composition, audio recording, or physical artefact; and (2) it is creative: works demonstrate individual…

In classical music composition, whatever thematic or harmonic conflicts may be engineered along the way, everything always turns out for the best. Similar utopian thinking underlies performance: performers see their job as faithfully carrying out their master's (the composer's) wishes. The more perfectly they represent them, the happier the…

Multicultural choral music has distinct characteristics in that indigenous folk elements are frequently incorporated into a Western European tonal system. Because of this, multicultural choral music is often taught using Western styles (e.g., "bel canto") rather than through traditional singing techniques from their cultures of origin.…

In an increasingly connected world, our students are listening to and making music outside the school context. As music educators, we need to better understand the media they use and incorporate this technology in our daily teaching to enhance music literacy in our classrooms.