Improvisation is an area of interest to both music education researchers and music educators alike. The purpose of this literature review was to examine extant studies related to improvisation at the elementary level. Selected research included the nature of improvisation, the amount of instructional time and activity type used, the development of…

This article presents a study investigating musical learning among 9th grade adolescents in a Swedish lower secondary school. The adolescents collaboratively composed songs for a self-written musical, which they taught to their peers. The purpose of the study was to explore the ways in which adolescents acquire musical knowledge in this specific…

Theoretical approaches to learning in practice-based jazz improvisation contexts include situated learning and ecological perspectives. This article focuses on how interest-driven, self-sustaining jazz learning activities can be matched against the results of a recent Swedish investigation based on extensive qualitative interviews with jazz…

The purpose of this study is to explore the verbal communication that three 7-year-old children are engaged in when given the task of composing music together. The data consist of a video-observation of the activities that unfold when they try to manage a composition task using a keyboard and two novel technologies called "MirorImpro"…

The style of a set of nursery tunes are described in terms of a generative rule system. It is found that there are many parallels between music and sentence structure. These parallels may reflect man's perceptual and cognitive capacities. (Author/DEP)