Melissa Lesniak, the executive director of the Greater Miami Youth Symphony, discusses how much she enjoyed reading the responses to her "El Sistema" article and appreciates the opportunity for healthy dialogue and debate. In response, she states that there are many common goals and objectives across all music education programs that can…

A powerful and eulogistic narrative has evolved around the Venezuelan National System of Youth and Children's Orchestras, better known as El Sistema. Recently, however, critical perspectives have begun to emerge from the academic sphere. Nevertheless, researchers have faced an acute shortage of documentary resources relating to the programme's…

All musicians should be evaluated in a fair, accurate, and objective manner. It is imperative for solo evaluations to be objective since preconceived expectations about musicians and their performances, spurred by gender and behavioral stereotyping, may lead to biased evaluations. This study will investigate the possible gender and behavioral…

Research investigating links between academic achievement and active music instruction has not previously differentiated between different types of instruction. In the current study, 155 seventh- and eighth-grade middle school band students were divided into two groups. Both groups received 2 months of instruction in jazz phrasing, scales, and…

Focusing on a YouTube performance by an emergent Finnish Somali rapper and the audience responses it has generated, this paper looks at ways in which rap music engages with the issue of belonging. Drawing on recent theorizations of belonging as a multi-dimensional, contingent and fluid process, along with sociolinguistic work on globalization and…

Interpersonal and collaborative activity plays an important role in the social aspects of self-regulated learning (SRL) development. Peer, teacher and group interactions facilitate support for self-regulation, co-regulation and socially shared regulatory processes. Situated and experiential interplay facilitates personal, co-constructed and…

In 2011, the directors of the Phoenix Symphony came up with a bold plan to improve and expand their community outreach programs. Inspired by the growing movement to integrate the arts with the other subjects in the K-12 curriculum, they created a thriving program called Mind Over Music, which pairs professional musicians with local elementary…

Expert skill in music performance involves an apparent paradox. On stage, expert musicians are required accurately to retrieve information that has been encoded over hours of practice. Yet they must also remain open to the demands of the ever-changing situational contingencies with which they are faced during performance. To further explore this…

This study investigates the compositional and contextual thinking of composer, Stuart Greenbaum, and the preparatory thinking, and teaching experience of pianist, Yvonne Lau, in the preparation of the solo piano work, "First Light". Adopting a practice-informed interview approach with questions drawn from the researcher's own preparation…

I am a Chinese-Australian musician-educator of over three decades. In this autoethnography, I act as an agent of change by presenting my life as a social project. This assists understanding of a larger relational, communal and political world that moves us to critical engagement, social action and change. Evolutionary psychology asserts that…

The Guitar is a very popular instrument that is commonly used by many musicians. This study focused on the factors that made the guitar more appealing to the youth in comparison to other instruments. A semi structured, open ended questionnaire was used to collect the data essential for this study. 50 male and 50 female college students were…

The Internet has inspired musicians to explore technologies to produce recorded music performances. Social media sites like YouTube provide spaces for musicians to share their works, and the advances of technologies that afford venues and opportunities for performers to share their crafts. As amateur Internet musicians develop practices to create…

This purpose of this study was to uncover the nature and value associated with involvement in "Modern Band" (rock band), the primary, not supplemental, means to music education in one US school. The values that emerged--music, community, identity, teacher, and classroom management--overlap considerably with the benefits and values…

The employability of graduates is of concern across further and higher education, but it is particularly problematic in the Creative and Performing Arts disciplines. Understanding the journey to work for arts graduates requires collaborative action from multiple agencies, particularly the collection and reporting of nuanced statistics on higher…

Introduction: This paper explores the relationship between musicians' information seeking behaviour and their personality traits within the context of musical creativity. Although previous research has addressed different socio-technological and behavioral aspects of music information seeking, the role of personality characteristics around…