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,…

Musicians are acknowledged to lead complex working lives, often characterised as portfolio careers. The higher music education research literature has tended to focus on preparing students for rich working lives and multiple identity realisations across potential roles. Extant literature does not address the area of work-life balance, which this…

Technologies such as YouTube, mobile phones and MP3 players are increasingly integrated into secondary school music in the UK. At the same time, the gap between formal and informal music learning is being bridged by the incorporation of students' preferred music into class activities. We conducted an ethnographic study in two secondary schools in…

This paper presents findings from action research in a conservatoire (the Guildhall School of Music & Drama) which focused on teaching and learning effective breathing in playing the oboe. A range of approaches and techniques emerged from a literature review. These were implemented in practice with oboe students at the Guildhall School, and…

This article presents the results of research into methods and scorings for jazz assessment in Trinity College of Music, London, focusing on the possibility of introducing group assessment. It considers the advantages of group assessment methods, contrasting these with the more traditional approach, firmly established in conservatoires, of…

While most of the students who graduate each year from the Royal College of Music (RCM) in London build performance-based portfolio careers that include some teaching, very few of them enter secondary school class music teaching. This article describes how young musicians' concerns about the career of secondary class music teacher develop as they…

This article was motivated by a staff development session when the brass faculty of a conservatoire were invited to share and discuss their approaches to teaching. It presents the results of interviews with six well known woodwind or brass players who have also taught at one or more conservatoires in London for periods of between one and 40 years.…

The purpose of the study is to examine, through interviews and observations, the extent to which 8-10 year old children in a London primary school replicate gendered musical practices and experience gendered musical meanings, and how these may affect their expectations and the specific practices and products of their composition. I also consider…