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The quality of parental support is recognized as a crucial factor in the early stages of a student’s development, and particularly in instrumental music education. At the start of 2020, the outbreak of a global pandemic crisis posed new and unprecedented challenges to education, forcing families to stay at home to prevent contagion. This investigation was conducted during the period of a COVID pandemic lockdown in Portugal. We explored whether parental support, provided during the lockdown period, was associated with their child’s achievement as reported by their instrumental music teacher. For this study, 39 parent–teacher dyads of first-grade students of an instrument music course were recruited from two public music conservatories. Parents supplied information on the frequency in which they provided student-support-related attitudes and actions in the home context. Simultaneously, teachers provided information about the student’s achievement during the lockdown compared with the previous in-person performance period. Results indicate a strong relationship between parental support and musical achievement, with students who received higher levels of supportive parental involvement performing better than before the pandemic crisis. The findings are discussed in relation to the importance of parental involvement in a child’s instrumental music education.

Creativity studies have traditionally tended to focus on the evaluation of products generated by creative people, which are categorized in various ways according to their reception and impact on society. This orientation has been advanced in various ways by including factors such as process, personality, and cultural pressures. While these approaches have produced many important insights, the types of creativity involved in music performance involve additional aspects. Musical performance necessarily entails developing forms of bodily skill that play out in real-time interactive contexts. These contexts involve other people, musical instruments and technologies, acoustic spaces, and various socio-cultural factors. Accordingly, some scholars have recently posited relational, environmentally distributed, and cooperative models that better capture the complex nature of musical creativity in action. In this chapter, we review some key approaches to creative cognition, with a special focus on understanding creativity as it unfolds in the real-time dynamics of musical performance. In doing so, we introduce a number of concepts associated with recent work in cognitive science that may help to capture the adaptive interplay of body and environment in the co-enactment of musical events.

This chapter begins by discussing prominent learning theories that contextualize development and then drills down to individual components that are relevant to learning to perform music. Developmental factors, such as distinguishing giftedness from talent, predispositions to learn, sensitive and critical periods, and perceptual abilities are discussed. A section on physical maturation provides information on how to match students with instruments, including factors influencing these choices such as motor development, teeth alignment, sex differences, and gender biases. We strongly advise against using so-called standardized measures of musical aptitude to predict future success and detail some of the ways these types of measures are flawed. In the final section dealing with practical applications, we return to the broader definition of readiness as a “healthy state of mind” to provide a set of principles that can be used to guide the types of environments, approaches, and beliefs that we believe best cater for the individual needs of each child. One of the main points we stress is that there are no definitive rules for when a child is ready to learn an instrument or voice. Determining readiness is highly contextual and will vary from child to child.

Synchronous online learning, teaching, and performing in music is a fast-emerging innovation within the global higher education (HE) system. Advantages for including videoconferencing as a means for communication via high-performance networking technologies are: the expansion of international collaborations through live performances and masterclasses; possibilities for remote rehearsals in advance of events; development of new forms of teaching, learning, and performing; and lowered costs and reduction of carbon emissions due to decreased air travel. These benefits are recognized not only for music, but within the wider context of arts and humanities. Entry-level platforms, such as Skype, Zoom, and FaceTime, enable musicians to work from home. None come without challenges. Issues of latency, audio and video quality, acclimation to the technology, presence, communication, and adapting alternative teaching approaches are important issues that need to be addressed. This chapter provides a brief timeline on the emergence of the technology; outlines the substantial influence on teaching, learning, and performance from teacher, student, and professional performers’ perspectives; and highlights the necessary setup considerations for use in HE with practical examples from around the world. The chapter closes with the exploration of technology innovations that will soon be within reach for use in HE music.