This year, Regina Murphy and Martin Fautley replace Pamela Burnard and Gary Spruce as the Editors of British Journal of Music Education (BJME). In their first Editorial, Regina and Martin pay tribute to their predecessors and outline their view of the journal’s role in music education.

We write in times of great significance internationally in music education – on the one hand, the limitless possibilities for learning and pedagogy through, for example, technology and social media, whilst on the other, the increasing demands on the education sector for evidence such learning is contributing directly to the economy. We will not shy away from confronting these competing tensions head on. We are aware that in so doing we may say things which are at times uncomfortable, confrontational, and opinionated. Having acknowledged this, it is thus in the spirit of wanting to do a service to music education that we will use the privileged position of the editorial as a platform for our views, and, hopefully, for causing our readers to pause awhile in thought.

We also want to carry on with the great tradition of the BJME in promoting the highest standards in music education research publication. We make no apologies for wanting to uphold these standards as established by our predecessors. Music education is a wide and eclectic domain, and we are keen to maintain this breadth, and welcome articles which are of relevance to our audience. We appreciate that there are pressures on academics internationally to publish, and we want to continue to be at the forefront of creating impact internationally. At the same time we are very aware that the many voices in music education – whether the small, individuated and marginalised, or the large and corporate – can have important things to say and we will promote those which we believe deserve to be heard above the clamour.

We are also mindful of the fact that the journal contains the word British in the title. We (like our immediate predecessors) represent two rather different cultures where the word contains different baggage, in our cases Martin Fautley from England, and Regina Murphy from Ireland. We want to maintain the notion of a journal based in Britain, but which has an outward facing and international worldview. This does not mean that we will ignore the local, but that we want to locate it within a greater setting. In the context of the Global Village, we wish to be the location for discussion round the Parish Pump!

We are excited by the prospect and the future for BJME, and hope to take the journal on as the twenty-first century consolidates itself in this second decade. New ideas will lie alongside the old, but the place of music remains central as a human endeavour, if not the human endeavour that distinguishes us as a species.

To view the latest issue of BJME, click here.

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