The debates of music historians, composers, and performers on difficulties in understanding the 20th and 21st Centuries international classical music and the reasons have been ongoing for years. The opinions of music education students on this matter and their interests in music of these periods are a matter of curiosity. With this research,…

This study examined popular music and school music education as cultural constructs of teenage students amid the shifting cultural and social dynamics of contemporary China. Data were drawn from questionnaires completed by 6,780 secondary students (mainly ages 12 through 17) from three cities--Beijing, Changsha, and Shanghai. The survey results…

This article explores how group playing by ear (GEP) through imitation of recorded material and opportunities for inventive work during peer interaction was used to support first year undergraduate western classical music students' aural, group creativity and improvisation skills. The framework that emerged from the analysis of the data describes…

In 2011, a collaborative effort began between the Texas School for the Blind and Visually Impaired (TSBVI) and Austin Classical Guitar (ACG), a local 501(c) nonprofit music organization. The idea behind this collaboration was to start a small guitar program that would provide TSBVI students with quality classroom guitar instruction. At that time,…

Psychological and spiritual effects of music on people have been revealed by various studies and still continue to be investigated. The sound which has existed since the first formation of the universe; and music and music therapy which are as old as the history of mankind have constituted one of the treatment methods widely investigated at…

The Toronto Symphony Orchestra presents a series of youth concerts each year to introduce and attract younger audiences to the symphony. Music teachers often attend these concerts with students, and the importance of such experiences is frequently emphasised and normalised. This article explores the historical roots of the following relations,…

The purpose of this study was to examine if there is any relationship on reading comprehension when background classical music is played in the setting of a 7th and 8th grade classroom. This study also examined if there was a statistically significant difference in test anxiety when listening to classical music while completing a test. Reading…

This study investigates the compositional and contextual thinking of composer, Stuart Greenbaum, and the preparatory thinking, and teaching experience of pianist, Yvonne Lau, in the preparation of the solo piano work, "First Light". Adopting a practice-informed interview approach with questions drawn from the researcher's own preparation…

The purpose of this study is to determine the perceptions of prospective music teachers towards Traditional Turkish Art Music course by means of metaphors. Phenomenological design, one of qualitative study methods, was used in the study. The study group of our research consists of juniors and seniors studying in the Music Education Division,…

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…

For many years Gunther Schuller was at the center of the classical music world, as a player, composer, conductor, writer, record producer, polemicist and publisher for new music and jazz, educator, and president of New England Conservatory. His book, entitled, "Musings: The Musical Worlds of Gunther Schuller: A Collection of His…

A short piano piece was prepared by undergraduate and graduate piano students (N = 15) without guidance from their piano teachers. Temporal parameters were analyzed in several time frames, from a phrase-to-phrase level to an interonset interval. At a macro level, local tempo was shown to be a crucial parameter that divided the students into two…

"Die Zauberflöte" is simultaneously one of Mozart's most accessible and most complex operas. Yet while this duality makes it a potentially valuable cultural artifact for the language classroom, students' unfamiliarity with both its operatic genre and Enlightenment context can pose a challenge to teachers. This article functions…

Perceptual Learning Style theory (PLS) claims that the presentation of information in either a visual, auditory or kinaesthetic format will improve the learning of selected individuals due to the dominance of one or more modality in their information gathering. The modality dominance of six Western classical pianists in higher music education was…

Effective teaching in a music conservatoire needs a continual quest to find new and better ways of delivering excellence. The challenge is to keep the work innovative. In this article I argue that, for a classical musician the communication of personality is a vital component of excellence in performance and I give reasons why an authentic,…