The purpose of this qualitative study was to investigate the process of composing educational music. As part of a research project titled "Sound Connections: Composing Educational Music" Canadian composers completed email interviews, responding to semi-structured questions about the process of composing educational music. Using…

The purpose of this case study was to examine the researcher's perceptions of student participants' intercultural competence during rehearsals, focus groups, and interviews and the perceived benefits and challenges when implementing a researcher-designed curricular unit titled "Religious Choral Music from the Christian, Jewish, and Muslim…

Although flow theory is one way of measuring the quality of a student's experience in a music ensemble, the majority of flow research utilizes samples of high school or collegiate level musicians thus causing us to generalize findings to young adolescent (middle school) populations. Using a convergent parallel mixed methods design, the purpose of…

This study examined popular music and school music education as cultural constructs of teenage students amid the shifting cultural and social dynamics of contemporary China. Data were drawn from questionnaires completed by 6,780 secondary students (mainly ages 12 through 17) from three cities--Beijing, Changsha, and Shanghai. The survey results…

The purpose of this study was to determine if participation in a composition competition influenced four K-12 students' self-concepts as musicians. Research questions explored motivations for these four students to enter into a composition competition, influences of the competition on students' self-concepts as musicians (if at all), and effects…

Music can be understood in many ways. This has important implications for music education. The research reported here explored how groups of people conceptualise musical understanding and what they believe supports its acquisition. In this study 463 participants completed two statements: "Musical understanding is" and "You learn to…

The purpose of this article is to use the lens of the author's teaching experience to examine the complexities and understand the difficulties involved in transforming instructional practices in secondary schools in the USA. The study is an autoethnography, which is a research approach that examines personal experiences to understand how beliefs…

The persistence of young men in choral singing activity has been widely studied in North America, with emerging parallel research in Europe (Freer, 2013; Harrison & Welch, 2012). There has been little such research in Asia. This study, of 12 young men enrolled in Singapore's pre-university schools, collected both written narratives and drawn…