This paper is based on a five-year research project looking at the work of music teachers in Northern Ireland. It considers the original inspirations for their choice of career and investigates which aspects of their work continue to motivate them. It discusses the tensions that can arise between their aspirations and the realities of the classroom, and suggests that the reasons for these may often be found in their own élitist background, in the importance they attach to the musical as opposed to the educational aspects of their work and in their general lack of vision for future career development.

Recent research on musical practice has focused on metacognition and the strategies that musicians adopt in their preparations for performance. This study explored the development of metacognition and performance planning strategies in musicians from novice to professional level. Twenty-two professional musicians and fifty-five novices were interviewed about their practising. The novices were also tape-recorded learning and performing a short piece. The professional musicians demonstrated extensive metacognition in relation to their preparations for performance encompassing technical matters, interpretation, and issues relating to learning itself, e.g. concentration, planning, monitoring and evaluation. Although there were similarities in the strategies adopted there was considerable variation because of individual need. In the novice musicians, there was a complex relationship between the development of expertise and the use of planning strategies.

This paper presents an overview of boys' and girls' musical learning inside and outside school. This involves a sampling survey of 877 pupils (414 boys and 463 girls) in nine Chinese secondary schools. The paper argues that patterns of gender stereotyping associated with music among Hong Kong students have some similarities with those in the Western world. The impact of gender beliefs was most evident in types of instrumental learning, types of music activities, and listening and singing preferences. The subjects' attitudes towards the promotion of popular and Western classical musics in school emerged as statistically significant, while their attitude towards Chinese classical music was non-significant.

This article reviews research regarding the question whether presenting music live, audio-visually or only aurally makes any difference for listeners' experiences. Most factors that characterise live performance could be supposed to enhance listeners' cognitive, affective and evaluative experiences. However, it is often hard to predict the exact influence of the visual stimuli that relate to audio-visual, and mostly also to live musical presentation. Many studies show that live music has positive effects on listeners' experience. However, there is little systematic research that compares live music with other modes of presentation. Studies comparing the effects of audio-visual and aural presentation have yielded rather mixed results. There is an obvious need for well-controlled studies on the effects of live music and on audio-visual music presentation based mainly on musico-psychological rather than visual-artistic principles. The research needs to take account of the variables that are crucial for understanding the effects of different modes of presentation.