Conceptualising music education in England as an ecosystem was central to the 2022 National Plan for Music Education. Provision spans in-school and out-of-school settings, delivered by schools, Music Hubs, charities and specialist providers. Local specificities and a complex patchwork of providers mean that there are multiple different stakeholders in helping young people to develop musically. Drawing on a decade of research, this paper reconceptualises the ecosystem by centring the young person. The proposed model is intentionally open to critique to stimulate discussion and refinement within England and in international contexts with similarly complex, multi-provider music education systems worldwide.

This article aims to articulate the conceptualisation of inclusion and exclusion through Utu, a theoretical approach emanating from Kenyan Indigenous Communities (KIC), and the implications it has for music education. It argues for a new approach to understanding the relationship between inclusion and exclusion based on the principle of belonging in African thought. This principle underpins the rights of all to participate in life as a part of their aesthetic of life (Katingima Day, 2024) and an aesthetic education that employs aesthetic discernment to human experience. The implications for music education are then explored.

Music and vocal play may be highly motivating and essential to the well-being of individuals with profound intellectual and multiple disabilities (PIMD). However, few frameworks have been developed to support non-music specialists to facilitate music-making opportunities for people with PIMD. This research considered how the implementation of playful music-making sessions, the Musical Play Framework, affected the attitudes of non-music specialist teaching staff towards music-making for students with PIMD in two UK educational settings. Findings highlighted the barriers staff encountered, the positive experiences of staff and the benefits of reflective practice when implementing novel musical approaches and developing staff skill sets.

This special issue, Music and Inclusion: Philosophies, Practices and Possibilities, brings together international scholars and practitioners to interrogate what inclusion means within contemporary music education and participation.

This reflection explores the context of the emerging field of adaptive music education and the use of music adaptation plans (MAPs) to demystify adaptive pedagogy used for pupils with physical disabilities. It explores the themes that connect the ingenuity and creativity of adaptive instruction across the study of various musical instruments, highlighting three key areas: pupil considerations, adaptive considerations and pedagogical considerations. MAPs offer a structured approach, enabling teachers to adapt techniques and apply creative solutions to connect music education to a historically excluded population of pupils.

This paper develops entangled musicianship as a theoretical and conceptual orientation that rethinks inclusion at the intersection of music education, digital musical instrument (DMI) design and human-computer interaction (HCI). Drawing on findings from an Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) funded network, it interrogates how disconnections between pedagogy, technology and access are sustained by humanist and cognitivist paradigms. Through a posthuman and diffractive methodology, the paper foregrounds relationality and intra-action as central to both musical learning and digital design. Entangled musicianship emerges as a provocation toward more ethical and responsive approaches to inclusion, offering a significant contribution to interdisciplinary discourse across music education, DMI and HCI.

Musical experience can reveal dimensions of the self, relationships and flourishing that can challenge assumptions about the lives of people with disabilities. The Adaptive Music Bridging Program engages students aged 8–14 years with a disability in ensemble-based instrumental lessons, cultivating musical skills and literacies through weekly participation. A case study explores participatory pedagogies that promote self-regulation, the meeting of students’ musical goals, empowerment from participation and community music engagement. The study challenges music teachers to approach their profession with access and equity at the heart of what they do, who they teach and what they aspire for their students.

Embedding formalised procedures into music – whether through mathematical, semantic or even gamified approaches – has been a well-documented practice since the first half of the 20th century. Many such practices have since fallen under the collective moniker of ‘algorithmic composition’, which encompasses an array of rules-based approaches to music and sonic arts. Nevertheless, there is a realm of algorithmic composition that is often overlooked; musical practices that interact with the more-than-human world often contain innate algorithmic properties. Such properties, however, subvert orthodox categorisations in that their axioms are not of human origin. In other words, music created in conversation with the natural world will often acquire algorithmic properties from the natural world. This article questions whether a phenomenological distinction should be made for algorithmic properties such as these, arguing that their distinction within algorithmic composition is theoretically and ethically sound. The neologism, vibrant algorithm, is proposed as a blanket term for this practice, and its operational features are defined. In doing so, several diverse musical examples are discussed, prompting further ethical queries both within and beyond music about the sentience and agency of the living environment – including entities that have not been conventionally regarded as animate by Westernised and urbanised worldviews.