The article seeks to find ways to re-imagine music-educator professional self-understanding beyond tendencies and constraints created and imposed by neoliberal politics. This involves exploring the conditions for music-teacher professionalism in the Nordic countries today through the position of competency nomads, as well as searching for…

With a hundred years (1912-2012) of Norwegian master's and doctoral theses written within the field of music as a backdrop, this article reports from an extensive study of the academisation of popular music in higher music education and research in Norway. Theoretically, the study builds on the sociology of culture and education in the tradition…

In this article, we argue that music teachers working in a fast-changing society could focus on envisioning their students' imaginary spaces for engaging with music and equipping them for leaping into what for the students would be the musically hitherto unexplored. Taking Christopher Small's writings as a point of departure, we contest his…

The aim of this article is to explore how immigrant students experience and enact musical agency inside and outside the music lessons in three Nordic lower secondary schools. The research was designed as a multi-sited ethnographic study and the data were collected in Helsinki, Stockholm and Oslo through classroom observations and interviews with…

Societal and technological progresses have created a multitude of new ways for people to engage with music, and as a result music can nowadays be learned from an ever-expanding variety of sources. In this article, we engage in a theoretical exploration of the underpinning societal forces that have enabled this expansion, as well as its…

This article reports on a survey of Norwegian compulsory school music teachers, in which 293 teachers from 239 schools participated. In addition to providing demographic information, the teachers were asked what kinds of music their students listened to, sang, played, and created during lessons, and what activities this music was part of. We…

This article presents the results of a survey among rectors of schools of music and performing arts in Norway. The aim was to map the schools' offerings in terms of musical genres and related instruments and ensembles, and to determine how the availability of different genres was distributed demographically and geographically. A questionnaire…