With a heavy dominance on its technical/empirical aspects, the segmented performance, pedagogy, and assessment of Western classical music is undermining its goal of creating art with precision, style, and expressive beauty. This segmentation has its roots in the quantitative assessment processes found in music education and in the note-perfect…

The simultaneous sound of several voices or instruments requires proper tuning to achieve consonance for certain intervals and chords. Most instruments allow enough frequency variation to enable pure tuning while being played. Keyboard instruments such as organ and piano have given frequencies for individual notes and the tuning must be based on a…

Musical theatre is one of the great genres of music, yet very few community theatres use live music to accompany their productions. Sadly, many community theatres that formerly employed pit orchestras are replacing them with electronic music. Some producers would welcome live music, but they worry about the potential cost. There are so many…

The aims of this research were to identify the ways in which parents may most constructively support their children's musical development, and to ascertain whether styles of parent-teacher and parent-pupil interaction would influence the extent to which parents engage in different types of supportive behaviours. A model of parent involvement as…

The present study aimed to investigate the current music practices and teachers' needs for teaching music in public preschools of South Korea. The data were obtained from the public preschools in South Korea, where 66.7 percent (n = 606) of the total sample (N = 908) responded. The online survey consisted of 42 questions: Likert-type scales,…

The purpose of this study was to examine and describe the environmental factors that influence an undergraduate music education major's investment in instrumental techniques courses taught by a graduate teaching assistant. Each participant (three undergraduate music education majors and three teaching assistants) submitted to being interviewed…

Music learning and music performance involve all aspects of the individual: cognitive, emotional, social, and psychomotor. John Feierabend shows that music requires a special kind of intellectual process that is unique to the discipline. Brain density reaches its peak in a child's first few years of life; hence, as with language, music learning…

Prior research has revealed that non-music specialist trainee primary school teachers lack confidence in teaching music in spite of changes to teacher training and the introduction of music in the National Curriculum in England. The current study investigated the effects on non-music specialist trainee primary teachers' confidence to teach music…

As a framework for our study, a broad set of themes related to the retention of students in music programmes are presented to enhance our understanding of how to retain band students. Data were collected from grade seven students comprising four focus groups. We used ethnodrama, an arts-based educational research approach, to represent results as…

In this article, the author presents John Philip Sousa's all time hit, "The Stars and Stripes Forever". It is one of the most recognizable pieces of American music. Wherever John Philip Sousa and his band appeared, this march was likely to be played. According to American poet and educator Eli Siegel (1902-78), who first articulated the…

Certain aspects of European art music occupy a middle ground between the two cultures described by C. P. Snow almost fifty years ago. Analogies exist not only between mathematics and the ratios underlying musical notation and intervals (i.e., the distance between pitches) but also between computer science and counterpoint (simultaneous melodies):…

A thorny problem faced by many middle school band directors is teaching a large ensemble of students who have a wide range of rhythm-reading abilities and who have studied music using a variety of rhythm-reading methods. Since school schedules usually allow very little time for working with students in small groups, the director must try to bring…

This article describes middle school mathematics activities that relate measurement, ratios, and geometric sequences to finger positions or the placement of frets on stringed musical instruments. (Contains 2 figures and 2 tables.)

This article discusses a number of techniques that can help teachers attract and keep general music students in their music program. These include: (1) a piano lab; (2) a chime group; and (3) intensive contact with the community.

Suggestions are made for using the brainstorming approach in improvisational music with students. Examples of approaches used with primary students as well as with beginning instrumentalists are cited. (CL)