What would an ideal music education look like? All too often in education research and practice, our vision of how music education might be is constrained by how it is; by the practicalities of funding, teacher expertise, student motivation and curriculum status. Several of the authors in this issue ask us to forget those concerns momentarily, and consider what Dawn Bennett calls a ‘musotopia’ – the ideal that music education might aim for in engaging students with music and preparing them for lifelong involvement. Bennett's interest lies with students in higher education, whose ‘musotopia’ involves adequate preparation for a musical career, rather than the sole focus on instrumental excellence which has characterised past conservatoire models of teaching. Whilst this might be thought of as idealistic, it contains a strong element of realism, with Bennett asking conservatoire tutors to address the diverse skills needed by the next generation of musicians, rather than focusing solely on instrumental excellence.

Despite a global interest in the musical experiences of young children, the everyday musical lives of young New Zealanders remain unexamined. Using data collected through the Growing Up in New Zealand longitudinal study, we explore the early musical experiences of approximately 6,800 infants and toddlers. Data collected from the primary caregivers and their partners pre-birth, when the children were 9 months old, and 2 years old are used to explore five areas: parental singing; active musical play; music listening; involvement in music groups; and participation in wider cultural events. Musical engagement is analysed with respect to various child, parental and family characteristics, including parental education, socio-economic status, and parental knowledge of and appreciation for the arts. The results provide a holistic description of the musical environments of young children in Aotearoa New Zealand.

The value of playing by ear in instrumental learning has recently been well documented. By-ear reproduction of music is an activity which commands a high level of motivation from people of all ages, but it is seldom pursued in the classroom as an exercise in its own right, independent of improvisation. It is, in fact, ideally suitable for group work in the classroom, where it can be both satisfying for its own sake, and a means by which pupils gain essential aural skills.

The development of the guitar in the twentieth century has been sufficiently significant to warrant inclusion at all levels of music education. This article considers the extent and manner of its educational involvement and questions whether the response to the instrument has reflected its true potential.

Under current legislation, the history of music forms a specific strand of listening and appraising at Key Stages 1 to 3. This article discusses some philosophical and practical aspects of these current requirements, together with their implications for further and higher education, as well as attempting an anticipation of future developments in the light of the recent review of the National Curriculum as a whole.

The Percussion Band method is part of our methodological heritage. The method was carefully based on contemporary educational theory and its advocates argued convincingly for its inclusion in kindergarten and school curricula. Critics of the method were heard from the first. This article seeks to examine the arguments for and against the method, the educational beliefs that underlie these positions and to note the influence of the method in the Australian school curriculum.

The term ‘visually impaired’ is applied generally to include those who have relatively good functional eyesight as well as those with little or no perception of images or light. Its use is preferable to the more emotive and frightening word ‘blind’, but nevertheless ‘visually impaired’ still contains a substantial degree of mystery and unknown for those teachers who rarely or never come into contact with children and/or students who have poor vision. This is due mainly to the difficulty of conceiving and appreciating what can and cannot be seen by someone who is visually impaired, and this itself then confuses the reaction to the needs of that person. These requirements are often a subtle mix of practical support, and understandably, most teachers would expect these to be the concern of established support systems. This is, however, not always the case, particularly as more and more visually impaired children are studying within mainstream education rather than at special schools, and as visually impaired students take up opportunities in further and higher education. It is, of course, no reflection on procedures and organizations that are concerned with the visually impaired in education to stress the need for increased awareness amongst teachers in mainstream education. This is particularly important because the most significant developments in technology have occurred within the last 10—15 years, and the cost has reduced so that it has become more widely accessible.

Between 1922 and 1941 Walford Davies linked music in schools with the relatively new media of the gramophone and the radio. His work with the BBC and the Gramophone Company had immense potential. He believed strongly that teachers using the radio and gramophone could contribute to a significant improvement in the musical life of the nation. At the heart ofDavies's educational mission was a belief in the ability of children to compose their own melodies, Davies achieved a high public profile for his work, but was less successful in developing its detail. His teaching method became predictable, and style triumphed over substance. However, it may be more productive to view his work within the context of his notion of fellowship, recovering a sense of community in the arts through the mass media, an attempt to connect different musical worlds.

The position of music history, traditionally regarded as a central element of the music curriculum in higher education as well as in secondary schools, has seemed to be challenged both by recent changes in the curriculum content and by reappraisals of the philosophy and practice of advanced musical study. This article, an expanded version of a paper given in the session on Curriculum Developments in Higher Education at the first British Music Educators' Conference in Huddersfield in July 1989, assesses the impact of these changes and relates them to changing attitudes within the discipline of musicology as well as within other historically based areas of enquiry.

This article is a revised version of a talk given by the author before an international symposium on music education in Hortos, Greece, in 1985. It considers the current state of modern music, suggesting that there have been some important changes in direction since the avant-garde styles of the 1950s and 1960s; and it reflects on some of the implications of these changes for secondary-school music teaching.

Some proposals are made for factors likely to facilitate the success of contemporary music which children hear or perform. In the original talk these points were illustrated with recorded examples, indicated here by numbers in the text. The role of children as contemporary composers themselves is also discussed in terms of the method and motivation by which creative work may be encouraged.

The educational writers on whom the author bases much of his argument are clearly acknowledged throughout the text. Otherwise, opinions derive from experience of teaching and writing music for children in England and in France.

Music is a subject enjoyed by many students with a profound hearing loss. The mainstream music curriculum should be made accessible to profoundly deaf students – to the benefit of all. Careful planning is essential.

The purpose of this article is to contribute to existing literature about how activity theory might be used in music education research. It draws from the author's doctoral action research into the assessment of group composing for New Zealand's secondary school qualification, the National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA). It outlines and explains how activity theory was used to examine three interacting activities: social jamming, group composing and achievement in the NCEA. Analysis revealed a relationship between students’ identities, their achievement in NCEA group composing, and socio-economic disparity.

During the 1980s, the International Journal of Music Education (IJME) ran a series of articles under the general heading ‘Personalities in World Music Education’. Each article was written by an author who was well acquainted with the distinguished personality upon whom the editors, Jack Dobbs and Anthony Kemp, wished to focus. I was privileged to be asked to interview John Paynter whose influence upon musical education in the UK and in many other countries was profound. Among his many positions he was co-editor of the British Journal of Music Education (BJME) at that time. The article about him was published in the IJME number 12 (pp. 28–32) in 1988.

Attend a conference of music educational researchers and you will have entered a field of enquiry concerned to understand and explain the issues and problems identified by those who move within the field of enquiry. The inhabitants of this realm sometimes speak of young people, sometimes reveal the ways in which they have consulted them, probed their ways of seeing and allowed their voice to speak. In rare circumstances the researcher may have negotiated a relationship involving a shared interest enabling the young person to work alongside them as co-enquirer. However, in general, social enquiry has been slow to move from treating young people as objects of enquiry to co-enquirer. The researcher will be speaking from a position of power with the authority to make legitimate some knowledge and not other. It is the adult researcher who poses the questions and presents the problems and who works in response to data and findings that accrue from the efforts of other adult researchers. Beyond this the adult researcher engages in research activities with a particular view of childhood, with a construct of how children are and in what ways they can inform an adult world. While childhood is of course a contested concept, it is suggested that the notion of child as dependent remains the most enduring and durable.