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.

The need for effective continuing professional development (CPD) in music education is outlined and literature on CPD for generalist teachers and teaching assistants is reviewed. A small qualitative study is then presented that took advantage of a music-making project led by folk musicians in six special schools in England. This study focused on the generalist teaching staff who actively supported their pupils to participate. The staff reported that their own confidence in working musically had increased, as had their awareness of the importance of music for children. It is suggested that these outcomes were achieved through incidental CPD, potentially paving the way for further, deliberate CPD.

This study was of adolescent males about their musical self-perceptions and experiences in one Austrian school’s choral music programme. Participants who sang continuously in the school choir reported experiences consistent with flow theory. In contrast, participants who withdrew said that their school choral experiences lacked challenge levels commensurate with their interests and skills and that they wished for greater opportunities for autonomy and control. Participants who never sang in school choir lacked older male singing role models, an element consistent with the theory of possible selves. The study findings reflect those of previous research at The London Oratory. The article closes with implications for research and pedagogy.

The period 1974–1999 were transition years for government school systems in Australia and New South Wales (NSW), where government agencies issued numerous policies and documents to influence and manage education and resultant classroom pedagogy. During those years, many music syllabi were produced for enactment in NSW, placing multiple demands on teacher accountability. This paper forms part of a larger study involving three generations of music teachers representing different career stages and experiences and presents the voices of the group of experienced music teachers (EMTs), exploring the impact of syllabus change, teacher identity, pedagogical skills, and eventual flourishing as confident teachers.

Informal music learning, pioneered by Green (2002, 2006, 2017), presents an alternative approach that integrates students’ interests in popular music, bridging the informal and traditional styles of Western music education in schools. We conducted a scoping review adhering to the PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses) guidelines to investigate informal music learning. Our scoping review encompasses 28 empirical, peer-reviewed articles published from 2006 to 2023. First, we analyse the diverse contexts, methodologies and geographic locations in which informal music learning has been investigated. Second, we explore how different stakeholders perceive and engage with informal music learning in various educational settings. Lastly, we summarise the implications derived from the analysed studies on informal music learning. Our findings reveal that across various educational contexts, informal music learning has consistently demonstrated its positive impact in motivating students. We also find that researchers have extended their investigations from programme reform to exploring pupil and teacher’s musical identities. Recommendations for future research include exploring informal music learning in ensembles and elementary music classrooms and employing quantitative or mixed methods to assess its effectiveness and impact.

El Sistema and Sistema-inspired programmes have become increasingly popular community music education and social welfare initiatives that aim to benefit socially and economically disadvantaged youth. The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic significantly disrupted many of these programmes. The purpose of this research was to investigate how eight Canadian El Sistema and Sistema-inspired programmes adapted to the COVID-19 pandemic. We interviewed eight teachers and eight administrators and found that their programming was impacted in relation to four themes: (a) an increased emphasis on social curricula, (b) pedagogical shifts, (c) inclusion of diverse musical voices and (d) adopting anti-racism perspectives. The COVID-19 pandemic response served as a significant catalyst for change for Canadian El Sistema and Sistema-inspired programmes, utilising the disruption to rethink and address participant needs.

Teaching is a highly complex act, and learning to teach in an educational era that combines both teacher-centred and student-centred approaches presents additional challenges. Conducting demonstration lessons (DL) is one of the methods aimed at enhancing teachers’ instructional skills. This study examines the features and functions of this unique type of lesson from the perspective of music demonstration teachers in Guangdong, China. Through observation and interviews, the findings not only reveal the prevalence of DLs as performance-based lessons in Chinese teachers’ professional lives but also explore their distinctions from regular school teaching and their potential for improving teachers’ pedagogical abilities. Concerns and issues related to this type of lesson, along with possible solutions, are also discussed to provide recommendations for incorporating DLs into teacher training programmes in higher education institutions.

Widespread research over four decades has shown that musicians suffer physical and psychological injuries that can begin during childhood and early adulthood. A survey of 268 Australian tertiary music students revealed their perceptions of the importance of health education as part of their education. While students rated health knowledge as highly important, they considered its inclusion in their education to be less significant. Thirty-six percent reported current physical pain or injury, and 41% reported current psychological health issues. Significant correlations emerged between students’ reported injury history and prioritisation of health education and particular health topics. This has implications for tertiary music education providers regarding policies for the integration of health education into the curriculum.

This study investigates teachers’ musical abilities in Shandong kindergartens in China, making a comparison between public and private kindergartens. For this research, five public and five private kindergartens were selected within the same city. The methods of non-participant observation and semi-structured interviews were used to collect data. The findings show that the overall musical abilities of public kindergarten teachers were greater than those of private kindergarten teachers. This study reveals that leadership and government policy are important factors for influencing the results, and puts forward recommendations for making changes in policy to improve teachers’ musical abilities in private kindergartens.

Since its publication in 2005, Anne Bogart and Tina Landau's The Viewpoints Book: A Practical Guide to Viewpoints and Composition has provided the received narrative not only for the ways that Viewpoints training is practiced, but also for its history. In their opening chapter, the authors crucially acknowledge that they did not invent this method of training:

In 2010 film and theatre historian David Mayer urged researchers to look to early film for evidence of continuing traditions of Victorian pantomime, arguing its “audiences tolerated, even enjoyed, the same sight-gags and hackneyed routines that amused their Victorian ancestors.” This article is a response to his challenge and in the process explores wider interconnections. The harlequinade was the portion of the pantomime that occurred after key characters from the narrative pantomime opening are transformed into Clown, Harlequin, Pantaloon, and Columbine. These stock figures, originally derived from commedia dell'arte, perform a series of comic scenes via mime, dance, and physical action rather than dialogue. Having been an important feature of Regency and Victorian pantomimes, by the end of the nineteenth century the harlequinade had largely vanished (with certain exceptions such as the Britannia Theatre), causing Clement Scott to lament that it is “a pleasure lost for ever and denied to the generation of to-day.” My contention is that there is a direct line of inheritance from the harlequinade through stand-alone comic ballets to chase scenes in early film. All demand a particular type of physical performance, choreographed fast-paced action, and humor. Uncovering the tradition allows us better to understand this form of popular amusement and see how Harlequin's antics were reinterpreted for new audiences. Starting from a seemingly unremarkable comic entertainment produced in 1871 at a minor London theatre, the Britannia Theatre in Hoxton, and bearing the intriguing title of Ki-Ki-Ko-Ko-Oh-Ki-Key, I trace its heritage as embodied culture, establishing its links to early nineteenth-century pantomime harlequinade and to simian performance, tracking the appearance of comic or dumb ballets in theatres and music halls in Britain, France, and the United States through one family of performers, the Lauris, and finally identifying the legacy of the complex trap work in silent film of the early twentieth century by examining Lupino Lane's Joyland (1929).

With brightly colored papel picado (cut paper banners), tissue flowers, and Latin American flags festooning the performance area at San Francisco's Z Space, David Herrera Performance Company's September 2023 event, ÓRALE!, promised fun and festivity. On its surface, the performance resembled a typical dance program, with an ensemble of ten dancers performing eleven separate pieces choreographed to songs from the catalog of El Vez, the Mexican Elvis, but an exciting hybrid form of movement theatre emerged through the interplay of live music, dance, and El Vez. Built around the music and performances of Robert Lopez, who has performed as El Vez for more than thirty years, ÓRALE! offered an opportunity for an intergenerational community of artists to find themselves in El Vez's work, and for Lopez to see his own vision reflected in the interpretations of the young dancers and choreographers involved. This article considers how ÓRALE! harnesses the creative possibilities of resisting the implied disciplinary borders that too often separate music, dance, and theatre performance. We begin by discussing the creative invitation that El Vez offers, to make clear how he uses his art as a form of world building, using popular culture to critique US American society, make visible the disparate cultural traditions that exist within US American cultural forms, and to envision new ways of being. We then discuss ÓRALE! following two different through lines: process and product. The collaborative process of ÓRALE! was a site of cultural, intergenerational, and geographic exchange, inviting both performers and audience into a genre-defying performance that raised critical questions around intermediality and transtemporality in the arts. As a process very much in development, the collaboration experimented with learning through doing that led to a performance event that was at times messy and at times magical. Following Elizabeth Ellsworth, ÓRALE! was an example of “knowledge in the making,” a fluid experience through which “the self is understood as a becoming, an emergence, and as continually in the making. This . . . moves us beyond a contemporary politics of difference based in semiotics and linguistics toward an experimental ‘pragmatics of becoming’ based on making and doing.” The event embodied a Muñozian process of disidentification to bring into being a utopian present, residing in this space of becoming and of knowledge in the making to reveal the complexities of Latinx subjectivity while rejecting essentialist understandings of race, ethnicity, and culture.

In the summer of 1944, Black modern dancer Pearl Primus searched for authenticity. Over the past year, she had achieved critical success for her modern dance choreography that protested racial injustice in the South, informed by a leftist political mission. However, she thought something was missing. She explained to Dance Magazine, “I had done dances about sharecroppers and lynchings without ever having been close to such things.” In search of that missing component, Primus traveled from New York City, her home since she was a toddler, to the US South. A budding anthropologist, she went to live among Southern communities as a way to retool her protest choreography and make it more authentic. Unbeknownst to them, Southern community members would be recruited by her to provide inspiration for her performances and the leftist political stance that fueled those works. In identifying authentic expressive practices of the South through her anthropological practice, transferring what she found to her choreography, and then performing that repertoire on New York stages, she would further develop her ability to instill in Northern audiences the necessity of leftist activism.