A recent report by UNESCO placed Scots Gaelic on a list of 2500 endangered languages highlighting the perilous state of a key cornerstone of Scottish culture. Scottish Gaelic song, poems and stories have been carried through oral transmission for many centuries reflecting the power of indigenous peoples to preserve cultural heritage from…

Popular music is pervasive in our culture and in the lives of our students. Its inclusion in music education curricula requires authentic approaches through collaborative informal learning processes. It has been our experience that college students may be notation dependent and while they may recognize and utilize informal processes outside the…

This article presents an action research study into how trainee music teachers in England use a structured discussion process called "Collegial Consultation" to learn about teaching. The research shows that, in Collegial Consultation, trainees learn from each other by offering several solutions to a problem, offering reasons for their ideas,…

Census data from the USA and other countries project that people over the age of 65 are expected to account for one-fifth of the population by 2030 and will double to 88.5 million people by 2050. Retirees (third-age) are pursuing lifelong-learning activities as they search for meaning and purpose during the post-professional years. Many third-aged…

The purpose of this study was to compare the effect of cognitive chunking techniques among first-semester group-piano music majors. The ability to group discrete pieces of information into larger, more meaningful chunks is essential for efficient cognitive processing. Since reading keyboard music and playing the piano is a cognitively complex…

In academic education, undergraduate students develop musical knowledge through the preparation of a repertoire within the western classical music tradition during a certain period of formal music practice. During the practice, the student makes choices and deals with personal strategies that assume forms of thinking and, therefore, differentiated…

This paper reviews the empirical evidence relating to the effects of active engagement with music on the intellectual, social and personal development of children and young people. It draws on research using the most advanced technologies to study the brain, in addition to quantitative and qualitative psychological and educational studies. It…

The use of data mining for the analysis of data collected in natural settings is increasingly recognized as a legitimate mode of enquiry. This rule-inductive paradigm is an effective means of discovering relationships within large datasets--especially in research that has limited experimental design--and for the subsequent formulation of…

The purpose of this study was to explore the phenomenon of musical improvisation within two contrasting musical genres--jazz piano and liturgical and concert organ. While improvisation is well documented in both genres, there is little literature relating the two forms and, in particular, the process of improvisation. The aim of this study is to…

This research draws a comparison between the School of Music at the University of Illinois, USA and the Faculty of Music Education at Helwan University in Cairo, Egypt (the researcher's academic appointment is at Menofia University, but she teaches on the faculty of Helwan University). The research answers two important questions: (1) What…

Originally aimed at young learners, Robert Schumann's maxim that "There is no end to learning" also applies to increasing numbers of people beginning and continuing to learn music as adults. This article presents a discussion on how researchers in the field of adult education discuss the adult learner and learning. Topics include: (1) adults'…

This article envisions a new, cross-modal approach to classroom music listening, one that takes advantage of students' rising screen literacy and the ever-expanding archive of music-related visual material available on DVD and on video sharing sites such as YouTube. It is grounded in current literature on music performance studies, embodied music…

Finding new repertoire poses endless obstacles for musicians. Often the search for an unknown piece or composer presents such an unforeseen challenge that the actual aesthetic and technical success of the work becomes secondary. A major contributing factor is the lack of an accessible and centralized database. Many notable bibliographic reference…

The Central Queensland Conservatorium of Music (CQCM) has maintained a partnership with Hamilton Island Enterprises (HIE) since 2002. As a part of this partnership, the Bachelor of Music (jazz & popular) students visit Hamilton Island (HI), an island resort located off the Australian east coast, four to six times annually to engage in 3 to 10 days…

The purpose of this study was to examine the classroom observation ability of pre-service music teachers in Greece (N = 62). Two groups of undergraduates, one near the beginning and one near the end of a two-year course sequence in teaching methods that included in-class and in-school training in observation ("juniors" and "seniors",…