This article attempts to identify and evaluate the contribution made by Ferdinand Pelzer to English music education. Since the mid-nineteenth century Pelzer's work as a music teacher has largely been neglected; yet research into contemporary accounts suggests that his method of teaching singing was comparatively more successful than those of Mainzer, Wilhem and Hullah.

Dr Button also explains Pelzer's method, setting it against a background of growing interest in vocal music, the establishment of the first national system of education, and the adoption of the Wilhem–Hullah music system for use in elementary schools.

This article is concerned with the role of kinaesthesis and bodily movement in promoting musical memory. Seventy-two first-year secondary school children were randomly assigned to experimental and control groups. They were then asked to listen to short extracts of music ranging from jazz through western classical to the Indian tradition, with a view to conveying to a deaf child the import of the music. Results indicated that a kinaestheic strategy significantly affected achievement on an unexpected recognition test taken one week later.

This is a study of the leadership qualities inherent in the staging of a school musical production. The development of the idea, from a hazy suggestion through to reality encapsulates many leadership issues which occur in a school over a long period of time. The leadership qualities this event required are compared and contrasted with those of other leaders in schools; particularly the Head and his or her deputy. The role of producer was completed largely intuitively. Now, with the aid of hindsight and a sounder knowledge of the theoretical basis of leadership skills, it is possible to evaluate fairly objectively the main issues involved in accomplishing this task.

Music can communicate between human beings across barriers of time and space because it emanates from the very origins of human existence. It expresses the totality of all aspects of human life. Hence music education should be of primary concern and availability to everyone, not simply the ‘musical’. Increasing specialisation and fragmentation has reduced music to either utilitarian service or mere entertainment (muzak), whilst music education habitually misses the faculty of communication. This is happening at a time when, amidst the mounting alienation of society, people hunger for communication. The exclusive pursuit of brilliance, itself alienating, has eclipsed the real purpose of music education – the recognition and cultivation of the human soul.

This paper is an attempt to see whether lofty ideals of sound education are being achieved in primary education since music is a sine qua non. It defines primary school in Nigeria and the general objectives of primary education. It reflects on the type of education the Nigerian child received both in the traditional society and in the colonial era, and the methods used. What role did music play? Furthermore, it looks at the state of music now, and how things went wrong in the middle. It underscores the importance of music in the primary school curriculum and makes recommendations on improvement.

Laura Campbell's article (Vol. 5, No. 3, November 1988) seems a little ambivalent. On the one hand she proposes a ‘method’ for harmonising chorales in the style of J. S. Bach; on the other she seems to suggest that this is not in any case an appropriate task for the student.

By implication this raises once again the whole question of the value of ‘imitative’ work as an agent of musical education. Does it teach anything other than knowledge of the particular style involved and if not, does it matter? To take a style even more remote from everyday musical experience, that of Palestrina, I am sure that those of us who devoted a good deal of time to it as students did gain much useful practice in the writing of smooth vocal lines applicable in fields as distant from the idiom of Palestrina as the arrangement of modern light music. In the same way the budding composer can learn from Bach-style chorale harmonisation something of the way in which harmonic considerations interact with the writing of interesting vocal lines, and the compromises that have to be made in the process of fusing the two together. It is true that the principal benefit of this activity is knowledge of Bach's methods in chorale harmonisation, but the same is true of what is now known as ‘pastiche’ work in any idiom; the idea that one can learn a sort of all-purpose abstract harmonic language which can be applied mutatis mutandis to all tonal music from the Baroque to the late Romantic era has now fallen into disrepute. It is worth noting that Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Bruckner all considered it worth their while to work at Fux's Gradus ad Parnassum, a sort of archetypal ‘pastiche’ method. Figured bass, incidentally, is not primarily a method of teaching, but a shorthand performing notation.