Amongst the most fascinating discoveries made in recent years was the identification of the Egyptian songstress Iti (2450 BC) as the first woman composer to have been mentioned by name in musical history. This paper examines the status of professional women musicians in Ancient Egypt, their role in society and their contribution to various aspects of life and death. Reviewing the range of styles, practices and variety of instrumental and vocal ensembles in which women took part as composers, performers and instructors, the author traces the development of a musical tradition which would appear to throw light upon some long standing prejudices, and to have important implications for music education in multi-cultural schools today.

We have become used over the years to a growing literature addressing the question ‘What's wrong with school music?’ Recently there has been a well-publicised addition to the debate in the form of Sir Peter Maxwell Davies's Royal Philharmonic Society lecture, given on 24 April, 2005, and entitled ‘Will serious music become extinct?’

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.

The writers highlights the difficulties relating to the provision of music education in schools for the emotionally and behaviourally disturbed – formerly labelled maladjusted. Often considered un-teachable within junior and secondary schools, such children are assigned to EBD schools or units where, musically speaking, they seem to fall between the two stools of mainstream and special education, unable to reap the benefits of either. The case is argued for the inclusion of music within a programme of therapeutic education based on the writers research within these schools, and recommendations are made as to how music may be made more accessible within this context.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In this paper, we provide a reflection upon the influence of the Swanwick–Tillman (ST) model (1986) from the perspectives of music research in Aotearoa New Zealand. In this paper we take stock of where music education in New Zealand currently sits in relation to the Swanwick Tillman theory of musical development. We examine the strengths and the weakness of the model 35 years on to ask what it might still offer music educators in a context where issues of culture and colonisation have taken centre stage. We also reflect upon the impact of a visit to New Zealand by Keith Swanwick in 1989. Despite the postmodern or colonial critiques we might make now, we consider if the model may still signify a holistic way of conceiving music development and might still have implications for curriculum design and curriculum making in the 21st century.

COVID-19 presented many challenges while the shift to online learning also provided unexpected opportunities for music teachers. During the pandemic, two researchers who are teacher educators undertook a composing project with music teacher education students in Scotland and Australia in response to the theme: My Life in Isolation: A World Apart or Same Difference? Turino’s (2008) theory of participatory music making will be drawn upon to analyse this collaborative online music and video creation project. What participation means as a music-maker will be discussed. The paper argues for greater attention to the affordances of digital collaborative music technology tools to build the confidence of pre-service teachers to facilitate real-world composing projects to promote participation, collaboration and social interaction.

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.

Group teaching is rapidly spreading across the world, but little research has been conducted to investigate its impact on students’ musical abilities in comparison to inclusion in group tuition contexts. This article investigates how music teachers from the classical orchestra instrumental tradition discuss group tuition. Three focus group interviews were conducted with participants from one Art and Music School in Sweden. The results show a tension field between progression and inclusion as well as different views on the definition of these concepts. These differing views on teaching quality imply a balancing act for the different agents within the profession.

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.

The role of extracurricular activity in higher education is receiving increasing international attention as a means for developing social and cultural resources for steering social and employment networks. The focus of this paper is on a post-1992 English university partnership with an orchestra, enabling students to attend free concerts. The initiative aspired to extend the student experience, break down barriers, and encourage students to try a new musical experience. This study explores students’ experiences and contrasts these with the aspirations of the vice chancellor. In view of studies establishing relationships between extracurricular activity and inequality of opportunity, this paper also investigates whether financial subsidies widen participation.

The purpose of this study was to explore musicians’ approaches to performance during practice and identify the factors that underpinned their approaches. We hypothesised that musicians would be able to recall their focus, knowledge and thoughts of their own repertoire during music performance and that such data would reveal musicians’ cognitive behaviours during the performance. By analysing musicians’ retrospective verbal protocols, we found that musicians used four main reasoning processes – study, static analysis, intuition and performer’s analysis – in their approach to music performance. The findings show that musicians utilise multiple cognitive behaviours for music performance. The implications for instrumental music teaching are discussed.

Guided by three theoretical frameworks in vocational psychology, (i) theory of work adjustment, (ii) two factor theory, and (iii) value discrepancy theory, the purpose of this study was to investigate Turkish pre-service music teachers' values and the role of fit between person and environment in understanding vocational satisfaction. Participants were 85 students enrolled in the department of music education in a Turkish university. The Minnesota Importance Questionnaire (MIQ) was used to examine the participants’ values in six dimensions: achievement, comfort, status, altruism, safety and autonomy. Results revealed that the pre-service teachers value achievement most followed by autonomy, which suggests that they would like to have a sense of accomplishment and control in their future job. The degree to which their values fit their predictions about future work environment was found to be highly correlated with vocational satisfaction. These results provided evidence that the vocational theories used in the current study offers a helpful and different perspective to understand the pre-service teachers' satisfaction with becoming a music teacher in the future. We believe that researchers in the field of music education may use these theories and MIQ to examine the role of values in pre-service and in-service music teachers' job satisfaction.

Stirrings of change in secondary education in general, and in music in particular, were taking place in Scotland towards the end of the seventies. Reports published at that time suggested that a deal of thinking on curriculum, and on methods of assessing pupils' achievements, was required. The authors record that, ten years later, the many discussions and trials that have taken place have borne fruit. In this article they describe the planning of the new examination in Music at Standard Grade, and take a brief look at its requirements.

Progress is a two-edged sword; for some it releases new and enriching opportunities, while for others it cuts away hope. We are all too familiar with the effects of mass unemployment, deadening the spirit and damaging the self-respect of so many people – particularly the young. Curiously, society's institutions of government and education appear reluctant tograsp a particular nettle – the by now pressing need to reappraise the concepts of ‘work’ and ‘leisure’. Even so, some enterprising young people, in various parts of the country, have shown considerable initiative in developing community music workshops where they meet to play rock music. For them this is an important work activity, even if it is not one that brings conventional monetary rewards. This article introduces three of these workshops, and examines the motivation of those who organize them.

The case is put for improvisation as the basis for world music, with special reference to flexibility of the blues and the gamelan. An overview of the impact of society on music leads to a general survey of the status of improvisation in pre-industrial Western European culture. Improvisation is contrasted with composition and consideration is given to the problems of providing education in improvisation without destroying its vitality and communicative power.