Recent research has explored gender ratios in orchestras but not specifically in brass playing, a historically masculine field. Three studies investigated gender ratios in a variety of brass-playing situations. Public domain and questionnaire data were analysed using descriptive statistics, and a chi-square test found a significant effect of instrument size on gender ratios. The highest percentage of female brass players was found in youth ensembles, followed by the freelance workforce, semi-professional brass bands and then professional orchestras, indicating a leaky pipeline effect. These results show that women are still under-represented in most brass-playing contexts, particularly the most prestigious positions, and that more can be done in music education to change this.

In the 21st century, we are increasingly exposed to music created entirely on computers. This article shows how pioneering music teachers approach the challenge of teaching music on the laptop computer in the context of one-to-one musical instrument lessons. Interviews and observations with five laptop teachers in Norwegian secondary schools enabled the authors to explore characteristic challenges in this field. This study explored two research questions: What are the instructional strategies, content and ‘repertoire’ in music lessons on laptop computer? How have teachers experienced the laptop’s evolutionary process towards legitimation?

Music teachers in secondary education tend to undervalue the professional competence of creating music, in response to educational models that prioritise the development of musical interpretation skills. The aim of this research is to identify the factors that contribute to this belief among teachers in Spain, by analysing the results of the Professional Competences of the Music Teacher questionnaire (n = 112). Significant differences were found between age categories, as well as significant linear correlations between teachers’ perceptions of their preparation during initial training, their practical skills and habits, and the professional importance they attached to their competence in musical creation.

Operetta, with its well-structured production systems, constituted a dynamic sphere of activity that stretched across Unified Italy. This activity was rarely acknowledged by the representatives of so-called ‘high culture’, even as it stimulated the growth of the social structures that would later give rise to cinema and other forms of mass entertainment. Though in recent years scholars have focused on the foreign influences on light music theatre in Italy in the years following Italian unification, little attention has been bestowed on Italian operetta. This article concentrates on the origins of this genre, offering a detailed analysis of the dialect theatre tradition from which the first French-style operetta productions in Italy emerged. Specifically, I examine the urban contexts of Milan and above all Rome, a city of crucial importance in the diffusion of operetta in dialect, whose highly local (even parochial) connotations would exert a significant influence on the formal, social and cultural evolution of operetta right up to the turn of the century.

This article explores the potential barriers for emerging composers to constructing and maintaining a career in the field of composition in Scotland, viewed through the lens of both those early in their careers and the experience of others who have worked professionally for many years. Thirty-nine composers responded to a survey that highlighted the role of educational mentoring, the need for monetary stability and the challenges faced by female and older emerging composers. The professional lives of current Scottish composers have been seldom studied, and the purpose of this investigation is to explore, inform and provide suggestions for future consideration.

Slightly over a decade ago, as part of a special issue of this journal devoted to twentieth-century Italian opera, I published an article that began by asking ‘What happened to verismo?’1 The answer, somewhat in the manner of its time, involved apparitions, ghostly echoes and the uncanny magic of wireless technology. This current issue of the Cambridge Opera Journal – which, needless to say, focuses on repertoire undiscussed and largely unknown back in 2012 – provides a rather different response to the question, suggesting that, in the years around the First World War, the aggressive materiality of operatic realism instead gave way to the even more visceral and immediate pleasures of Italian operetta. As Marco Ladd and Ditlev Rindom observe in their introduction, the leading lights of the verismo movement all went on to embrace the new genre: Pietro Mascagni with Sì (1919), a work that in fact begins with a distinctly un-uncanny chorus of telegraph operators; Umberto Giordano with Giove a Pompei (1921); and above all Ruggero Leoncavallo, author of Prestami tua moglie (1916) and A chi la giarrettiera? (1919), as well as many other less-memorably titled entertainments for audiences in Italy, New York and London. The Sonzogno publishing house followed its operatic concorso of 1888, which famously introduced Cavalleria rusticana to the world, with a similarly conceived operetta contest in 1913. In this context, Giacomo Puccini’s embrace of ‘Silver Age’ conventions in La rondine (1917), a work whose generic fuzziness has long puzzled listeners, may seem less an outlier than an acknowledgement of larger shifts in taste and value.2

This article discusses illusions of ‘three hands’ in the circle of Joachim and the Mendelssohns, arguing that manifestations of ‘three hands’ at play created an aesthetic both in dialogue with the Golden Age of Virtuosity, and going beyond it. Though techniques alluding to three hands or multiple performing bodies diminished sharply in popularity after 1830–50, violin and piano music from the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries remained highly virtuosic and often ‘unplayable’ in other ways. The difference between before and after the half-century mark is that later examples tended not to celebrate so overtly such special effects, because doing so would revive the no-longer-tenable principle of ‘virtuosity as a reward in itself’. Rather, double-stop harmonics, left-hand pizzicato, three-hand techniques and their related sleights of hand were largely escorted off the stage into a pedagogical realm. As this article shows, Joachim helped to exorcise the spectre of Paganini, and to sweep effectively out the door the residual confetti of the Golden Age of Virtuosity. Following in the footsteps of Mendelssohn, Joachim did so with Clara Schumann, viewing himself, Clara Schumann (and, we might add, Brahms) as a cohort of artists seeking to reverse the tawdry display of virtuosity. It was precisely Joachim's acute historicist perception, solidified during the 1850s, that allowed his musical aesthetics to turn so sharply from his openness to, tolerance and acceptance of dazzling violinistic tricks in the 1840s, to their absolute rejection in his later career.

This Participatory Action Research (PAR) investigates the integration of informal music learning in Macau’s educational context, guided by the Model of Generative Change (Ball, 2009). Engaging the participating college students (N = 41), this study explores how learners perceive the formal–informal learning continuum (Folkestad, 2006) through the four stages of informal learning experiences: awakening, agency, advocacy and efficacy (Ball, 2009). Through multiple data collection methods and qualitative analysis, students experienced (a) autonomous learning, (b) joyful peer learning, (c) creative exploration and skill development and (d) resilience through challenges. Moreover, the study highlights the stages of awakening, introspection and critique from the students’ perspectives. Notably, a subset of students, predominantly those with prior formal instrumental training, expressed critiques concerning informal learning, predominantly regarding its perceived lack of systematic structure and foundational skills. These insights suggest a need to further embed informal music learning in Macau to foster a dynamic change towards generativity and a ‘multileveled cultural world’ (Law & Ho, 2015). The implications point to a broader pedagogical shift that values diverse learning experiences, which may enhance the development of a more adaptable, innovative and well-rounded musical skill set within the student population in Macau.