Music education discourse is marked by frequent comparisons of music to language, and of music notation to written language. However, the role played by writing, as opposed to reading, is often overlooked in that discourse, as well as in classroom practices and workbooks. Consequently, far too many students can read music notation but not write…

This essay will address the question of the value of string education by first examining arguments offered on behalf of string education in schools, and noting their somewhat mixed value. Then a set of arguments will be presented that may have greater promise. The focal point will be the establishment of excellence in string teaching and playing.…

This essay offers a critique of the dominant music education paradigm by challenging the myth of the musician as the locus of music making. Exploring the concept of the "musician" through three different ways of conceptualizing the arts, the essay offers a strategy for recasting the fundamental assumptions that underlie music education as a…

In this article I will discuss the originally German term and concept of Bildung. The reason why I, as a Scandinavian, find such a discussion both interesting and important is that the trend of instrumentalism in modern educational politics and pedagogical thinking (at least in Scandinavian countries) is problematic; that is, looking on knowledge…

Reflecting upon Simone Weil's conception of beauty as food, this essay proposes musical hunger as a metaphoric way of understanding a particular species of "cultural miseducation" as conceived by Jane Roland Martin, that disadvantages children musically and perhaps therefore also spiritually. It examines such musical miseducation with regard to an…

The relation between music pedagogy as a field of research and the practice of music education is characterized as a continuum ranging from remoteness through cooperation to full integration. A typology is drawn up (the where the relation is separate, co-operative, integrated, or parallel). All these types of relationship are considered necessary.…

Issues of desire in music education are integral and anathema to the profession. Constituted of and by desire, we bodily engage music emotionally and cognitively; yet references to the body are limited to how it may be better managed in order to produce more satisfactory (desired) sounds, thus disciplining desire as we focus on the content of…

This paper examines how significant musical moments, occurring within singular contexts, may be performative to the development of community. While community is often viewed within music education as an unequivocal good, I argue that this result may not always be beneficent. In this paper, I look at one unique performative moment through the lens…

This essay examines control discourse in and out of educational settings, arguing that illusions of control are among the means by which governance is accomplished in domains far from schools. The tactical productivity of such illusions in non-school settings "necessitates" and explicates their prevalence in education. The first installment of…

When women take up the work of music education, of the university, and become nomadic, engaging Deleuze and Guattari's war machine, all kinds of things happen. As nomads in music education, women traverse borders and boundaries that would otherwise limit and constrain them as they initiate alternative possibilities related to teaching and learning…

Burnout is a risk for many music teachers, particularly the highly successful and effective teachers. Burnout is more than a personal feeling of discomfort or fatigue. It is an attack on professional efficiency and personal integrity. Burnout is affecting male and female music teachers in different ways, because women tend to react to stress in…

Women music educators in the USA have been active in public and private schools, churches, and community organizations. In the nineteenth century, Julia E. Crane founded the Crane Institute of Music, the first institution to train music supervisors; and women developed kindergarten programs throughout the US. In the "private sphere," women taught…

This paper will examine the transformative possibilities of liminal space as described by Victor Turner and Isabel Clark in the musical experience. It draws on the author's previous phenomenography of musical experience an analytical frame based on the liminality of musical experience using the notion of difference-in-relationship drawing on…

The article deals with various aspects of justifying music historically. In Matti Huttunen's opinion Western music culture has been strongly historical since the nineteenth century. The article attempts to elucidate the historical nature of music, as well as the canon of music, the selective nature of music history, and the influence of aesthetic…

The article addresses the justification of music-structural claims, that is, any statements that assign a structure to a musical passage or a work. It is suggested that a theorist T is justified in making such a claim to the extent that (i) T is able to specify a rule that takes a given musical passage as its input and produces the claim as its…