Music, Informal Learning and the School


Book Description

The aim of this book is to present a detailed and theoretical analysis of what went on during a research-and-development project which introduced and evaluated new pedagogical methods in the music classroom. The book looks at how things occurred, why and what benefits and challanges the project seemed to offer to music education.




How Popular Musicians Learn


Book Description

Popular musicians acquire some or all of their skills and knowledge informally, outside school or university, and with little help from trained instrumental teachers. How do they go about this process? Despite the fact that popular music has recently entered formal music education, we have as yet a limited understanding of the learning practices adopted by its musicians. Nor do we know why so many popular musicians in the past turned away from music education, or how young popular musicians today are responding to it. Drawing on a series of interviews with musicians aged between fifteen and fifty, Lucy Green explores the nature of pop musicians' informal learning practices, attitudes and values, the extent to which these altered over the last forty years, and the experiences of the musicians in formal music education. Through a comparison of the characteristics of informal pop music learning with those of more formal music education, the book offers insights into how we might re-invigorate the musical involvement of the population. Could the creation of a teaching culture that recognizes and rewards aural imitation, improvisation and experimentation, as well as commitment and passion, encourage more people to make music? Since the hardback publication of this book in 2001, the author has explored many of its themes through practical work in school classrooms. Her follow-up book, Music, Informal Learning and the School: A New Classroom Pedagogy (2008) appears in the same Ashgate series.




Learning, Teaching, and Musical Identity


Book Description

Musical identity raises complex, multifarious, and fascinating questions. Discussions in this new study consider how individuals construct their musical identities in relation to their experiences of formal and informal music teaching and learning. Each chapter features a different case study situated in a specific national or local socio-musical context, spanning 20 regions across the world. Subjects range from Ghanaian or Balinese villagers, festival-goers in Lapland, and children in a South African township to North American and British students, adults and children in a Cretan brass band, and Gujerati barbers in the Indian diaspora.




The Handbook of Listening


Book Description

A unique academic reference dedicated to listening, featuring current research from leading scholars in the field The Handbook of Listening is the first cross-disciplinary academic reference on the subject, gathering the current body of scholarship on listening in one comprehensive volume. This landmark work brings together current and emerging research from across disciples to provide a broad overview of foundational concepts, methods, and theoretical issues central to the study of listening. The Handbook offers diverse perspectives on listening from researchers and practitioners in fields including architecture, linguistics, philosophy, audiology, psychology, and interpersonal communication. Detailed yet accessible chapters help readers understand how listening is conceptualized and analyzed in various disciplines, review the listening research of current scholars, and identify contemporary research trends and areas for future study. Organized into five parts, the Handbook begins by describing different methods for studying listening and examining the disciplinary foundations of the field. Chapters focus on teaching listening in different educational settings and discuss listening in a range of contexts. Filling a significant gap in listening literature, this book: Highlights the multidisciplinary nature of listening theory and research Features original chapters written by a team of international scholars and practitioners Provides concise summaries of current listening research and new work in the field Explores interpretive, physiological, phenomenological, and empirical approaches to the study of listening Discusses emerging perspectives on topics including performative listening and augmented reality An important contribution to listening research and scholarship, The Handbook of Listening is an essential resource for students, academics, and practitioners in the field of listening, particularly communication studies, as well as those involved in linguistics, language acquisition, and psychology.




Music Learning Today


Book Description

Music Learning Today: Digital Pedagogy for Creating, Performing, and Responding to Music presents an approach to conceptualizing and utilizing technology as a tool for music learning. Designed for use by pre- and in-service music teachers, it provides the essential understandings required to become an adaptive expert with music technology, creating and implementing lessons, units, and curriculum that take advantage of technological affordances to assist students in developing their musicianship. Author William I. Bauer makes connections among music knowledge and skill outcomes, the research on human cognition and music learning, best practices in music pedagogy, and technology. His essential premise is that music educators and students benefit through use of technology as a tool to support learning in the three musical processes - creating, performing, and responding to music. The philosophical and theoretical rationales, along with the practical information discussed in the book, are applicable to all experience levels. However, the technological applications described are focused at a beginning to intermediate level, relevant to both pre-service and in-service music educators and their students. This expanded second edition features an all-new student-friendly design and updated discussions of recent technological developments with applications for music teaching and learning. The revamped companion website also offers a new teacher's guide, with sample syllabi and lessons for each chapter.




Music Education as Critical Theory and Practice


Book Description

This collection of previously published articles, chapters and keynotes traces both the theoretical contribution of Lucy Green to the emergent field of the sociology of music education, and her radical ?hands-on? practical work in classrooms and instrumental studios. The selection contains a mixture of material, from essays that have appeared in major journals and books, to some harder-to-find publications. It spans issues from musical meaning, ideology, identity and gender in relation to music education, to changes and challenges in music curricula and pedagogy, and includes Green?s highly influential work on bringing informal learning into formal music education settings. A newly-written introduction considers the relationship between theory and practice, and situates each essay in relation to some of the major influences, within and beyond the field of music education, which affected Green?s own intellectual journey from the 1970s to the present day.




Heartland Excursions


Book Description

In Heartland Excursions, a legendary ethnomusicologist takes the reader along for a delightful, wide-ranging tour of his workplace. Bruno Nettl provides an insightful, sometimes tongue-in-cheek, always pithy ethnography of midwestern university schools of music from a different perspective in each of four chapters, alternating among three distinct voices: the longtime professor, the "native informant," and the outside observer, an "ethnomusicologist from Mars." If you've ever been to a concert or been connected to a university with a school of music, you ll discover yourself--or someone you know--in these pages. "In the music building you can't tell the quick from the dead without a program."--Chapter 1, "In the Service of the Masters" "The great ability of a violin student whom I observed was established when his dean was persuaded to accompany him."--Chapter 2, "Society of Musicians" "Some teachers of music history would accuse students who listen to Elvis Presley not only of taking time away from hearing Brahms, but also of polluting themselves."--Chapter 3, "A Place for All Musics?" At commencement, the graduates "were perhaps not aware that they had just participated in an event in which the principal values of the Western musical world . . . had been taken out of storage bins for annual exercise."--Chapter 4, "Forays into the Repertory"




Women Making Music


Book Description

"Do look after my music!" Irene Wienawska Polowski exclaimed before her death in 1932. And from the urgency of that sentiment the authors here have taken their cue to reveal and "look after" the previously neglected contributions of women throughout the history of Western art music. The first work of its kind, Women Making Music presents biographies of outstanding performers and composers, as well as analyses of women musicians as a class, and provides examples of music from all periods including medieval chant, Renaissance song, Baroque opera, German lieder, and twentieth-century composition. Unlike most standard historical surveys, the book not only sheds light upon the musical achievements of women, it also illuminates the historical contexts that shaped and defined those achievements.




Engaging Musical Practices


Book Description

Engaging Musical Practices: A Sourcebook for Middle School General Music presents numerous ways to engage adolescents in active music making that is relevant to their lives so that they may be more apt to continue their involvement with music as a lifetime endeavor.




The Oxford Handbook of Music Education, Volume 1


Book Description

The two volumes of The Oxford Handbook of Music Education offer a comprehensive overview of the many facets of musical experience, behavior and development in relation to the diverse variety of educational contexts in which they occur. In these volumes, an international list of contributors update and redefine the discipline through fresh and innovative principles and approaches to music learning and teaching.