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.

The British Journal of Music Education has always aimed to offer a variety of perspectives on musical teaching and learning, and in this issue the diversity of researcher and participant voices is wider than ever before. Most notably, we hear from a 12-year-old researcher, Eleanor Denny, whose project on extracurricular musical participation was carried out at the Children's Research Centre at the Open University. As John Finney says in his response to Eleanor's work, equipping young people with research skills leaves them ‘empowered to ask ever more interesting, challenging and sometimes uncomfortable questions’. The growing literature on ‘pupil voice’ in educational research invites us to consider, not just the views of the young people involved in musical learning, but also our own position as researchers and our responsibilities to those who inform our research and writing.

This article explores music conservatoire undergraduates' career aspirations and notions of their pedagogical training, through biographical interviews with 16 students from the School of Wind and Percussion, Royal Northern College of Music. Findings suggest that pedagogical training, which begins in the second college year, serves as a catalyst for changes in career orientation. Students begin, however, with limited intention of teaching. Performance is commonly their focus at the outset. Furthermore, boundaries are perceived between conservatoires which offer elite performance training, and those with a broader curricular base. The practicalities of attracting future students, whilst offering apt and substantial pedagogical erudition within a performance-centred arena, are explored.

This article looks at the way music education policy is realised in three curriculum contexts: the formation of the official music curriculum, its implementation by music teachers and its reception by students. Working from within the field of education policy studies, I have collected data on music education in Cyprus in order to explore what music teachers and students might expect from a music curriculum and have compared this with what the official music curriculum actually prescribes. The findings constitute distinct sets of educational ideologies and indicate areas of fragmentation between the three contexts. I discuss some implications and make suggestions for conceptualising music education policy. I conclude that music education policy needs to be construed as a polydynamic process which is polyglot, polycentric and polymorphic in its nature.

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with Greek Cypriot elementary school children in urban and rural areas of the Republic of Cyprus, the author describes and analyses the ways in which national musical identity is constructed in and out of school in connection with Cypriot traditional music. Findings reveal the development of fluid and often insecure, ambiguous and contradictory national musical identities as a result of the ideological messages children receive from their musical enculturation contexts. In addition public music education not only fails to assist pupils to become familiar with the tradition's inherent meanings and processes of creation and performance, but enhances children's contradictory ideological understanding and construction of an ambiguous national musical identity.

School students' immersion in a rich entertainment media environment has implications for classroom listening. Increasing interaction among media, design, games, communications and arts fields has led to a growing trend in the creative alignment of music and moving image. Video sharing sites such as YouTube are assisting in the proliferation and dissemination of such material, and are a source for the stimulation of creative and artistic activity from which music education can benefit. In this article I explore some of the possibilities of cross-media listening, which considers music from (variously) aural, visual, spatial and kinaesthetic orientations. Cross-media listening centres on visual musical works, pieces from moving image genres that are structured according to the codes, materials, devices and processes of music. Grounded in sound pedagogical principles and expounded through a series of analyses, cross-media listening advocates a reintegrated, multi-domain approach to encountering music in educational settings.

Despite recent moves toward a more collaborative relationship between the academic pursuit of music analysis and the practical pursuit of music performance, there remains a gulf between the two disciplines. This is partly because attempts at collaboration have generally focused on the use of music performance as a way of teaching music analysis rather than the use of music analysis as a way of teaching aspects of music performance. This article describes the development of a resource for teaching musical awareness using analytical techniques and assesses how this relates to teachers' own concerns and practices.

Despite three decades of research, gendered participation in music continues to be problematic. While many aspects of Western society maintain a patriarchal stance in the workplace, it is apparent that girls have made some significant changes in their musical choices. Males, it seems, are maintaining the same preferences for instruments as they did 100 years ago, avoiding ‘gentler pursuits’ like singing and playing the flute. This paper seeks to investigate the continued existence of stereotyping of musical participation and to discover some of the underlying reasons for this in the musical choices for boys through the literature. Furthermore, themes arising from existing research are investigated through fieldwork recently conducted in Australia.

During 2003/4 a team from the University of Central England in Birmingham (now UCE Birmingham) undertook an evaluation of student perceptions of their music courses as part of the Birmingham and Solihull Learning and Skills Council review of music in the area. As well as identifying the wide range of courses available in the locality and students' perceptions of the teaching and learning they undertook, the research uncovered some significant issues about the nature of musical learning for those aged 14+ and the pathways and guidance that they received both before and during their courses of study.

This paper reports an action research study of teacher and pupil talk about composing. Data were collected through video and audio recordings of composition lessons in a secondary school. Qualitative analysis of the data led to the development of a ‘typology of pupil talk about composing’ which distinguishes between six main types: exploration, description, opinion, affective response, evaluation and problem solving. The results of the study suggest that as children engage and empathise affectively and acquire ownership of their work, they appear to be able to talk more confidently about it. As children make sense of their work, they may well be able to understand more than their talk reveals. The role of teachers in nurturing talk about composing work in the classroom is considered in relation to the findings. By designing appropriate composing tasks, they may be able to promote the development of more mature forms of evaluative talk in younger children, and of their critical listening and appraising skills. The development of more mature, ‘higher’ forms of evaluative talk in younger children might be promoted by teachers in designing composing tasks.

This article explores the theoretical concepts of ‘apprenticeship’ and ‘reflection’ in Initial Teacher Education music mentoring. It presents two case studies of Secondary music mentoring and relates these to the theoretical concepts. The article argues that a more integrated view of music mentoring might be provided with reference to Kolb's (1984) theory of experiential learning.

Academic study has become a more significant part of a conservatoire education in recent times, but it has not always informed performance as effectively as it might. There is a need for further development of an academic curriculum that is specifically relevant to performers, in which the links between theory and practice are made explicit rather than expecting students to construct these for themselves. This article reports on research into the integration of theory and practice at Leeds College of Music, UK, using jazz improvisation as a case study. Pilot teaching sessions within two modules explored ways in which students can be encouraged to engage actively with an appropriate academic curriculum that is embedded within a holistic learning experience.

For the majority of undergraduate classical music performance students, ‘musotopia’ is a place where performance ambitions are realised with an international performance career. However, given that so few musicians achieve this ambition, should this ideal be redefined? This paper investigates instrumental musicians' careers by exploring the realities of professional practice. A detailed study which incorporated interviews, focus groups and a lengthy survey, revealed the multiplicity of roles in which most musicians engage in order to sustain their careers. The findings call into question the concept of a musician as a performer, positing that a musician is rather someone who practises within the profession of music in one or more specialist fields. The diversity of roles pursued by practising musicians is not reflected in the majority of conservatorium curricula, thus the enormous potential for the transfer of music graduate skills into the broad cultural industries setting remains largely unrealised. Acceptance of, and preparation for, a more holistic career will enable many more graduates to find their own musotopia.

The first British patent describing an educational game designed for musical ‘amusement and instruction’ was granted in 1801 to Ann Young of Edinburgh, Scotland. The authors' discovery of Young's game box has prompted an examination of the nature and purpose of the six games she designed. Ann Young's patent is discussed in the context of her cultural environment, the history of women inventors, and eighteenth century educational theory. The activities are compared with musical instruction games recently patented in the UK and the USA.

Calls to improve congregational psalmody in 18th century England strongly influenced early music pedagogy. In the first decades of the 19th century English music educators, concerned with psalmody and music in charitable schools, looked to Germany for models of successful practice. The Musikalisches Schulgesangbuch (1826) by Carl Gotthelf Gläser (1784–1829) influenced the music materials designed by Sarah Anna Glover (1786–1867). These, in turn, directly influenced John Turner (dates unknown), William Hickson (1803–1870) and, indirectly, John Curwen (1816–1880). It is illuminating to explore how influential a small collection of German didactic songs could be during an early and very active phase of the development of English school music curricula.

This study aims to explore and investigate the factors that contribute to effective instrumental teaching and to understand the interdependence and interactions between these factors. The study obtained data using qualitative research tools from a series of individual and group instrumental teaching observations and a semi-structured interview with an instrumental teacher operating in a variety of teaching contexts. Findings from the study suggest that a great number of factors are required for instrumental teaching and learning to be effective. These factors interweave with each other and form a creative teaching style for the subject. The research indicated that it is helpful for the teachers to focus on pupils' learning processes rather than only on their learning outcomes. When real learning occurs, it is a positive experience for both teachers and pupils with long-term benefits in other areas of learning.