This essay interview with Joan Tower is a meditation on the importance of composing, understood as a process larger than the making of new sound combinations or musical scores, suggesting that the compositional act is self-educative and self-forming. Tower's musical life, one of teaching and learning, one of composing and self-composing, is an…

This article examines the educational function of the North American wind band program. Issues such as band education's methodological control, perceived lack of self-reflection or inquiry, its insecurity concerning program legitimacy, and the systemic fear that seems to permeate its history provide the framework for this exploration. With a…

Each of the four philosophical models that Estelle Jorgensen has put forth contests, adheres to, or adjusts the hierarchical relationships between dualities, specifically the theory and practice of musical learning. Moreover, models of polarity, according to Jorgensen, accommodate dualities by buffering edges, emphasizing the interconnectedness of…

A close reading of Gradgrind's opening monologue of Hard Times by Charles Dickens will provide the starting off point for an examination of the role and place of philosophy in the music curriculum. The Gradgrind philosophy finds easy parallel to current thinking in American education. In the fundamentalist imagination, sources of ambiguity must be…

Believes that learning must have meaning for students and some promise of application to the real world. Maintains that music teachers cannot educate their students successfully through the traditional methods of instrumental instruction, but must teach by improvisation in order to appeal to each individual student and assist in the…