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This paper explores the fundamental tenets of Plato's philosophy of education, particularly his views on a practice of great educational potential: communal musical participation. According to Plato, music can attune the individual and the community to cosmic harmony and this, in turn, is the only way to form and maintain a community. The paper explores how the concepts of ethos and nomos are utilized to explain music's role in community cohesion. It argues that Plato's understanding of the power of immediate and pre-reflective participation in music can provide valuable insight for contemporary philosophy of music education. The concept of nomos, in particular, allows music educators to take this frame of thought to better understand the role of music in creating communities. Keywords: Plato, pre-reflective, ethos, nomos, community, A PRELIMINARY METHODOLOGICAL REMARK Contemporary research in music often delineates music as an object of experience within an epistemological framework based on principles taken from the human sciences about the [...]

Geoffrey Baker: Rethinking Social Action through Music: The Search for Coexistence and Citizenship in Medellin's Music Schools (Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2021) If indeed there exists, as Geir Johansen [...]

Author's note: This essay was originally issued on August 1, 2020, as my 'In Conversation with the President' column of the newsletter of the College Music Society. This is a [...]

Project Spectrum's graduate student committee discussed the future of higher-education music studies in North America. The conversations were held and recorded on April 6, May 4, and June 15, 2022. [...]

Working with students in ways that emphasize creativity and improvisation presupposes a posture of openness and self-regard for all stakeholders. The teacher in such a setting can neither impose an ideology nor fix expectations for growth. The students, composing and improvising collectively, will encounter opportunities to test beliefs and practice reflective thinking. Many questions are unresolved. How do students develop criticality in an open classroom? What assurances are there that they will choose projects that address justice, repair, and belonging? In this essay, I grapple with the limitations that confront a truly creative and open-ended music classroom. I fear that I cannot ensure criticality, though other rewards may attend its risk. Keywords: Constructivist music teaching; democratic music education; social justice., Most of my teaching career has been the awkward, stumbly search for a pedagogy of emancipation, that fugitive arena in which outcomes are determined more by the learner and less [...]

This essay explores new avenues towards challenging inequity in these dark times. In these dark times, neoliberalism has coopted discourses that once challenged inequality and systems of power. Social justice, diversity, and identity politics--once powerful discourses that challenged inequality--have now been adopted by those in power to sustain neoliberalism and systemic inequalities. Using the concept of 're-sistence' rather than 'resistance,' I argue for new forms of resistance. Rather than standing firm, relying upon common areas of focus, including identity politics, music educations interested in social justice might look for new forms of resistance, adapting to the changing terrain of neoliberalism and its cooption of previously subversive discourses. Using the work of musicologist Jacques Atalli's description of noise, I explore how this has sonic aspects, and how music educators might address these issues through curriculum and music making. Keywords: music education, noise, identity politics, resistance, neoliberalism, 'Every rise of Fascism bears witness to a failed revolution.' (1) As this quote attributed to Walter Benjamin by Slavoj Zizek suggests, these dark times are, in part, a matter [...]

It is difficult to overstate music's persistent and uneasy relationship with homosexuality in Western society. Associated with femininity for centuries, particularly in North America, participation in music has been believed to emasculate and thus homosexualize men and boys. The linking of music to women and emotion (as opposed to men and reason) contributes to the conflation of misogyny and homophobia in North American society generally and music and music education particularly. One effect of music's conflicted relationship with and to homosexuality for lesbians and gay men is to 'disappear' them in both professions. As a function of disappeared positionalities, subject positions of homosexualities and potentialities of creating lives worth living are also disappeared. I explore ontological effects of disappeared in the world and music and music education, and reconceptualize 'disappeared' in terms of Jacques Derrida's concept of 'under erasure'--sous rature--in ways that may signal other ontological potentialities., It is difficult to overstate music's long, persistent, and uneasy relationship with homosexuality (1) in Western society. Associated with femininity for centuries, particularly in North America, participation in music has [...]

The abstracts were edited by section leader, Marie Cassar. Determining the Defining Characteristics of Basic Level Scenes. Matthew G. L. Margres, Erich William, Jaclyn Reckow, Jillian Peyerk, and Jennifer Zirkle, [...]

New technology and multiculturalism has diversified the instruments found in music class. More schools are teaching musics from non-western civilizations. In addition, technological advances are making instruments smaller and there are more electronic instruments.

Musical talent development in a child is a prolonged process requiring adult assistance of both large investments of time and financial resources. To understand the motivations of parents who support their children's music training, often initiating and sustaining it for a substantial period of time, a survey was sent to four music organizations on the east and west coasts. Parents whose children were attending precollege music programs (N=203) responded to 14 statements regarding reasons for supporting their child's music lessons. A major finding is that these parents reported more intrinsic than extrinsic reasons and expectations relating to the benefits of music training. Moreover, these parents believe that music training nurtures many desirable characteristics in their children including discipline, diligence, academic performance, and intelligence. The results are discussed in the context of cultural values and beliefs underlying the development of a specific talent., Musical talent development is a prolonged process that is highly demanding in terms of financial resources and time investment (Bloom, 1985). How this process is initiated and sustained (or terminated) [...]

For Brazil, perhaps it's the obvious solution: violence has become endemic, but many people find music and dancing more compelling than hostility. Every hour, 13 Brazilians are murdered. Maria Helena [...]