Divergent Perspectives on Musical Knowledge, Expertise, and Science

2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 121-134
Author(s):  
Sandra E. Trehub

Abstract I review two recent books on music, both inspired by cognitive neuroscience but differing in most other respects. Isabelle Peretz, an expert in the cognitive neuroscience of music, describes how we perceive and produce music, as reflected in neural and behavioral responsiveness. Her book is intended for general readers who are interested in music and curious about the science behind our musical nature—brains that are prepared for music and changed by active musical engagement. Lynn Helding, an expert in vocal performance and pedagogy, draws on findings from psychology and neuroscience to inform her approach to music learning and teaching. Aimed at musicians, aspiring musicians, and those who teach them, her book focuses largely on the means of optimizing learning and skilled performance.

Author(s):  
Evan S. Tobias

Contemporary society is rich with diverse musics and musical practices, many of which are supported or shared via digital and social media. Music educators might address such forms of musical engagement to diversify what occurs in music programs. Realizing the possibilities of social media and addressing issues that might be problematic for music learning and teaching calls for conceptualizing social media in a more expansive manner than focusing on the technology itself. Situating people’s social media use and musical engagement in a larger context of participatory culture that involves music and media may be fruitful in this regard. We might then consider the potential of social media and musical engagement in participatory cultures for music learning and teaching. This chapter offers an overview of how people are applying aspects of participatory culture and social media in educational contexts. Building on work in media studies, media arts, education, and curricular theory, the chapter develops a framework for translating and recontextualizing participatory culture, musical engagement, and social media in ways that might inform music pedagogy and curriculum. In this way, it may help music educators move from an awareness of how people engage with and through music and social media in participatory culture to an orientation of developing related praxis.


2003 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-44 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrea Creech ◽  
Susan Hallam

This paper considers the literature that may inform our understanding of parent–teacher–pupil interactions in instrumental music. It draws on research directly concerned with instrumental music learning and that from the wider psychological, sociological and educational literature concerned with conceptions of effective learning and teaching; conceptions of effective parenting; and dimensions of interpersonal relationships. Finally, a systemic, dynamic model is proposed which may serve to guide future research in the field.


2016 ◽  
Vol 35 ◽  
pp. 131-201
Author(s):  
Inga Mai Groote ◽  
Dietrich Hakelberg

Recent research on the library of Johann Caspar Trost the Elder, organist in Halberstadt, has led to the identification of a manuscript with two unknown treatises on musica poetica, one a lost treatise by Johann Hermann Schein and the other an unknown treatise by Michael Altenburg. Together they offer fresh insights into the learning and teaching of music in the early modern period. The books once owned by Trost also have close connections to his personal and professional life. This article situates the newly discovered manuscript in the framework of book history and Trost’s biography, and discusses the two treatises against the background of contemporary books of musical instruction (Calvisius, Lippius, or Finolt). The historical context of the manuscript, its theoretical sources and its origins all serve to contribute to and further the current understanding of musical education in early modern central Germany. An edition of the treatises is provided.


Author(s):  
Margaret S. Barrett

This article, which presents an overview by exploring the characteristic features of a range of musical beginnings and the possibilities for learning that are evidenced, demonstrates that much of young children's early music-making is improvised in the moment as a means to communicate with others and self. Such communications, from responses and exchanges in “motherese” or “parentese” to young children's independent invented song-making, may be regarded as the first “oral tradition.” Oral traditions draw on the power of repetition and the human urge to generate and create. Their musical outputs feature elaboration and ideational fluency as well as the acknowledgment of the musical cultures from which the tradition arises.


2020 ◽  
pp. 1321103X2093042
Author(s):  
Lauri A Hogle

The purpose of this phenomenological study was to gain insight into experiences of adults who expressed personal discomfort with singing, either alone or when others might hear them. Singing agency in music learning, one’s belief in one’s own capacity to sing aloud, served as the guiding lens for the study. Narrative analysis of interview data, from 15 adults who self-identified as non-singers, provided understanding of experiences that they believed undermined their capacity for singing agency. Four initial themes emerged as participants described wounding incidents with resultant perceptions of deficit, disability, and shame; personal strategies to enhance or protect singing agency; perceived obstacles to singing agency; and personal definitions of good singing. Findings describe vocal skill development through emotional differentiation, linking singing agency with principles that underlie a social constructivist approach to music learning and teaching and a Universal Design for Learning.


Author(s):  
Evangelos Himonides

This article presents an overview of Section 5 of the Oxford Handbook of Music Education, Volume 2. The section commences a critical but also constructive discourse about the role of “any” technology within the broader fields of music and education. The contributors have chosen different perspectives and foci in instigating this discourse, all of them diverse but, arguably, all celebrating how essential technology is (or should be) in our music infused modus vivendi.


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