At most any performance today, you will be notified to turn off your cell phone. The smartphone has become such an integral tool in our daily lives that turning it off is tantamount to severing our connection to our community and challenging the way we view and negotiate the world. Many audience members, particularly young ones, will be looking at…

Traditional methods of teaching music are largely subjective, with the lack of objectivity being particularly challenging for violin students learning vibrato because of the existence of conflicting theories. By using a computer-based analysis method, this study found that maintaining temporal coincidence between the intensity peak and the target…

Our inquiry centres on a hopeful tale about creative teaching and learning, trusting one's teaching intuition and processes, caring for children, and believing that children will respond to opportunities to learn music when they are invited with thoughtful care. Though the process of writing, both our young student and ourselves, we evoke the…

Early in my teaching career, my goals were to teach students to play their instruments beautifully and to help them correctly and independently interpret music notation. However, many of my students were missing the internal musicianship skills that enable high-level music-making. As we teach instrument technique and notation, we sometimes…

A short piano piece was prepared by undergraduate and graduate piano students (N = 15) without guidance from their piano teachers. Temporal parameters were analyzed in several time frames, from a phrase-to-phrase level to an interonset interval. At a macro level, local tempo was shown to be a crucial parameter that divided the students into two…

In higher education music instrument teaching, there is a strong tradition of high-level performers being recruited to teach advanced students within the private studio despite the fact these educators often have no training in pedagogy. The studio environment also continues to be dominated by the one-to-one lesson format and the master-apprentice…

As the number of adults seeking to learn the piano increases, so too does the need for piano teachers to understand how to better facilitate their learning. Self-direction is an oft-cited requirement of adult learning, but one that is often absent from piano studios. This practitioner-based research investigates the role of the teacher in…

Perceptual Learning Style theory (PLS) claims that the presentation of information in either a visual, auditory or kinaesthetic format will improve the learning of selected individuals due to the dominance of one or more modality in their information gathering. The modality dominance of six Western classical pianists in higher music education was…

The purpose of this case study was to describe how one band director used pedagogical content knowledge while working with beginning-band students to help them develop the skill of playing brass lip slurs. Data were generated from (1) video recordings of each class over two different weeks during the school year, (2) "think aloud"…

This study was designed to explore differences between instrumental music teachers' self-perceived comfort and competence ratings, using a 7-point Likert scale, on 15 choral teaching skills presented through a researcher-developed survey. Participants, identified through the National Association for Music Education membership list, were contacted…

This article focuses on the role of access to music education as an agent of social change and as an important way of empowering previously disadvantaged learners, putting this forward as an argument against the proposed downscaling of music in schools as advocated by the government. This narrative inquiry shed light on the perceptions of…

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of Laban Effort Action (slash) instruction in an undergraduate conducting class on college wind ensemble member's ratings of conductors' gestural clarity. Participants--undergraduate and graduate wind ensemble members (N = 28)--rated 32 videos of eight undergraduate conducting students who had…

Little is currently known about the possible benefits of using networked technology to enhance ensemble performance. This study explored whether the introduction of specially devised technology -- networked tablets using traditional music notation -- to a primary school orchestra would enhance the experience of ensemble music. Particular emphasis…

The purposes of the present study were to identify the teacher behaviors that preceded learners' active participation in solving musical and technical problems and describe learners' roles in the problem-solving process. I applied an original model of problem solving to describe the behaviors of teachers and students in 161 rehearsal frames…

This article presents findings from an action research project that investigated instrumental teachers' strategies for facilitating children's learning of expressive music performance. Nine teachers and 14 pupils (aged 9-15) participated in this project, which consisted of 10 weeks of teaching. At the beginning and end of this period pupils'…