The Global Musical Subject,Curriculum and Heidegger's Questioning Concerning Technology

Subjectivity and identity are newly configured within cyberspace and technologically mediated environments. The global musical subject is thus defined and framed within global empires and techno‐culture in ways not unrelated to political interests. ‘Being musical’ becomes a critical issue. The New Zealand music curriculum resonates with reflections of global ‘progress’, and music educators, as cultural workers, therefore require an awareness of political and strategic conceptions of musical knowledge as well as a familiarity with the discourses through which the work of music education is enframed. Where technology enters hegemonic discourses of musical knowledge, the relationship between global communication and technology requires interrogation, and unquestioned past and present curriculum ‘certainties’ come under scrutiny.     

Challenges to Values Education in Hong Kong School Music Education

This study deals with the issue of incorporating values education in music education in Hong Kong's primary and secondary schools. It includes the development of the state's cultural and national identity since its handover from the United Kingdom to the People's Republic of China (PRC). Thirty primary and secondary school music teachers were interviewed in order to understand how notions of “musical values” and “non-musical values” have been addressed in the curriculum. In particular, this study focuses on music teachers' perspectives on teaching world music, traditional Chinese music, the PRC national anthem, and non-musical values. This paper questions the effectiveness of existing curricular and pedagogical attempts to encourage the students' musical experience and extra-musical education. It concludes that values education must have clear conceptions of “values”, “musical cultures”, and “national identity” in order to maintain unity amidst the intensifying plurality of ethnicities and cultures in Hong Kong.     

中国钢琴曲的艺术气质及在跨文化音乐教育中的运用

通过钢琴曲《浏阳河》艺术气质的解读,探讨了其"中国风格"。在文中的教学案例中,对非音乐因素的介绍不仅能使学生了解音乐的历史背景,而且更能加强学生对于中国历史的了解;再通过听唱歌曲、分辨不同地区的五声音阶、在演奏中寻找"不习惯"等环节让学生进一步了解中国音乐;最后通过创编五声音阶的旋律并即兴为其编配和声,将前面的知识真正做到"活学活用"。     

Paid Educational Leave in Scotland

Same language subtitling (SLS) refers to the idea of subtitling motion media programmes (television and film) in the ‘same’ language as the audio. This simplest of additions in existing television programmes, especially film songs and music videos, can make a quantum contribution to the improvement of reading skills of over 325 million neo-literate people in India. Song videos are watched with great passion all over India, in every state and major language. Earlier work on SLS reported that it was found to enhance the entertainment value of televised songs for both literate and neo-literate viewers. This paper discusses a controlled experiment to ‘measure’ the impact of SLS on the reading skills of disadvantaged school children. The results confirm that SLS of film songs leads to reading skill improvement, thus reaffirming the enormous potential of this simple and economical approach for mass literacy skill development in India.     

解析学前教育专业音乐欣赏课的重要作用

学前教育专业的学生音乐方面专业知识储备不足,对音乐知识体系没有整体概念。在有限的课时中,极大提升学生的音乐素养,培养良好学习兴趣非常重要。开设音乐欣赏课程,可以从清晰的感性认识上帮助音乐理论知识学习,欣赏不同流派、不同风格音乐大师的作品,培养和提升音乐欣赏水平。在音乐欣赏中,拓宽学生的视野,将多学科知识引入教学中,相互渗透相互补充。     

Music theatre: at the crest of music education's third wave

In the United Kingdom, curricular music education has seen two main waves of development and is in the process of shaping a third. Ideas from the second wave have maintained theoretical dominance to the present day, despite the concerns expressed by some about their practical implementation. This paper suggests that problems with the implementation of second-wave ideas have been caused by hermeneutic complexities inherent to the word ‘music’ as well as by an ongoing ideological debate about the proper purpose of music education. It is proposed here that by approaching musical learning in the emergent third wave through the sub-discipline of ‘music theatre’ – and by conceiving that term in its broadest sense – this interpretive difficulty can be avoided whilst many practical advantages may be reaped. The notion of music theatre as a key component of music education's third wave is explored alongside its theoretical prerequisites, and a number of questions are identified for further consideration.     

Perversity of enjoyment? Preschool music activities go neoliberal

There is a lack of empirical studies that examine the influence of neoliberal ideas in preschool music and teaching. Neoliberal ideas have primarily been studied in a broader educational perspective and related to preschool policy reforms. The aim of this paper is to study preschool teachers’ rhetoric concerning music contents and music activities related to neoliberal ideas. Data consist of group conversations with preschool teachers and of video observations of daily music activities, at one preschool in Sweden. Discursive psychology has been used as a micro-sociological methodological approach. The findings show that music in this preschool is characterized by popular music, and varied consequences for knowledge content and early childhood learning are highlighted and analyzed. Also, it is argued that neoliberal ideas, in varied ways, determine the establishment of music content. For many reasons, rhetoric concerning the choice of musical content is of great importance to the field of preschool education. For example, it is essential to music education research and to preschool teachers’ everyday work, as it can improve teaching and learning qualities and become a knowledge contribution in society at large.     

Uprooting music education pedagogies and curricula: Becoming-musician and the Deleuzian refrain

Based on the British choralism movement of the nineteenth century, the historical legacy of music education in Canada and the US is one of social control. By the twentieth century, North American music educators used choral singing and music listening to teach music literacy skills to groups assumed to be in need of ‘improvement’: the working class, immigrants, and school-age children. Deploying so-called good music to improve moral character and instill national pride, their goal was to create docile citizens content with their place in society and committed to hard work. Exclusions, stereotyping, and arbitrary standards in music education still construct acceptable musics and musical behaviours along lines of race, gender, class, and sexuality that support the status quo and maintain social order. Uprooting music education practices from these manifestations of the Deleuzian refrain that constrains the profession opens spaces for transformative musical and educational potentialities.     

Mind the gap: privileging epistemic access to knowledge in the transition from Leaving Certificate music to higher education

In recent years, music at Leaving Certificate level has come under increasing focus in media and higher education discourse as an easy option. In particular, scant attention has been paid to the musical knowledge and skills needed in the transition to higher music education within the Irish context. This paper addresses the perceived gap in knowledge through an examination of documents and student and lecturer experiences in higher music education. Findings reveal that students who have access to private music tuition because of their greater cultural, social and economic capital have a distinct advantage in higher education over those who have relied on the state for music education. Moreover, there would appear to be a shift in emphasis from practical to theoretical knowledge in the transition to higher education. More critically, the paper argues for a reappraisal of curriculum and knowledge at both levels in light of the implicit privileging of epistemic access to ‘powerful’ knowledge in private music education.     

The Generic Fallacy1

The ‘music appreciation as contemplation’ paradigm of traditional aesthetics and music education assumes that music exists to be contemplated for itself. The resulting distantiation of music and music education from life creates a legitimation crisis for music education. Failing to make a noteworthy musical difference for society, a politics of advocacy attempts to justify music education. Praxial theories of music, instead, see music as pragmatically social in origin, meaning, and value. A praxial approach to music education stresses that appreciation is seen in use; thus, it seeks to ‘make a difference’ that students and society find musically noteworthy.     

Educational videos from a film theory perspective: Relating teacher aims to video characteristics

Teachers are increasingly using video in their lessons, with various aims (eg, to raise students’ levels of conceptual knowledge or interest). Videos that can be used for educational purposes are numerous, ranging from instruction videos to fiction films. Such videos have different characteristics, for example regarding the amount and structure of information, and the audio-visual presentation. However, guidelines on which video characteristics can help to achieve specific teacher aims are lacking. As a first step towards composing such guidelines, we added a film theory perspective to educational research on videos. The study included seven science teachers, 13 videos, and 233 students (aged 13–18 years). We used teacher interviews, video analyses, student questionnaires and a cross-case analysis connecting all the data. Data analysis followed a grounded theory approach, including open and axial coding to structure the data, and the constant comparative method to interconnect them. The results showed that videos that posed questions were associated with an increase in students’ interest, and that highly informative videos with authoritative speakers were associated with an increase in students self-reported conceptual knowledge gains. Moreover, teachers often did not have explicit aims for using a particular video, and they selected and used videos in their lessons intuitively. Stimulating teachers to use videos in a more aim oriented way may make video usage more effective. From these findings, we developed a framework to assist teachers in selecting or making videos that match their aims, and a model of possible connections between teacher aims and film types as a first step towards guidelines for teachers using educational videos.     

Globalization,values education,and school music education in China

This paper examines music education’s legitimation of values as a means of preparing students for entry into the new ‘knowledge society’ of the People’s Republic of China in a global age. It explores the ways in which values education relates to the teaching of both musical and non‐musical meanings in the dual context of nationalism and globalization, and discusses some problems that values education faces in school music classrooms. It examines the ways in which globalization has pressured values education into resolving the apparent contradiction between national identity and national unity in the ever‐changing play of Chinese history and politics. It concludes with a discussion of how music education might juggle three pairs of apparently contradictory relationships in the curriculum: between contemporary cultural and social values on the one hand, and traditional Chinese and Communist ideologies on the other; between collectivism and individualism; and between national and global cultures.     

Powerful knowledge: insights from music's case

This paper examines Young and Muller's elaboration of Michael Young's concept of powerful knowledge and considers music's alignment with the characteristics theorised as distinguishing this type of knowledge. Consideration of the concept in relation to music may be timely as music teachers continue to grapple with the problem of knowing what knowledge to include within the parameters of a school curriculum. The concept of powerful knowledge may provide us with a fresh way of considering what school music may have to offer in such a noisy and musically heterogeneous world. This curricular challenge, however, is by no means unique to music, even though it may be exacerbated in music which is so open to the forces of cultural change. I argue that access to this knowledge occurs by placing abstract concepts at the centre of curriculum conception as the means to mediate the space between everyday knowledge and the more vertical discourse of school knowledge. It is in this ‘academic’ space that students can come to understand and utilise music as a form of powerful knowledge, when epistemic understanding illuminates the experiential and aesthetic dimensions of musical experiences.     

民间传统音乐调查的理论和技术准备

传统音乐学是研究音乐与其所处文化环境共生的科学。它的研究目的首先是要阐明各民族、各地区音乐发展的规律,从各民族、各地区的现实音乐状况出发,探索它的起源、形成、繁荣、发展、演变等问题,从而达到对人类音乐文化发展规律的认知。传统音乐的实地调查作为音乐学研究（案头工作）的第一步,要求研究者在资料的搜集、整理和研究上更趋科学和系统,从而能够更加自觉、更加成熟地走向各民族丰富多彩的社会音乐生活。     

A Comparative Sociology of School Knowledge

Despite a recently renewed theoretical interest in both North America and in Britain in the sociology of school knowledge, we still have little, if any, comparative empirical material from these two continents. This paper reports the findings of a sociological study, designed to replicate the previous English empirical work by Vulliamy, into music teaching in Ontario high schools. Unlike in England, no overt culture clash was found in Ontario schools between ‘school’ music and ‘students’ ‘ music, both because of the wider scope of ‘what counts as school music’ in Canada and because music is not a compulsory school subject there. However, by focusing upon the deep structure of the pedagogical process, as opposed to surface features of classroom interaction, it is argued that particular ideologies of the dominant musical culture are transmitted in very similar ways in both contexts. What is shared is a conception of music as equatable with musical notation. The ideological significance of this is pinpointed in an analysis of the structurally homological relationship between different musical languages and the social/‐cultural contexts of their creation. The processes of school music teaching not only contribute to the legitimation of a dominant musical ideology, but also to much more pervasive ideological assumptions underpinning capitalist societies.     

对未来中国音乐发展的思考

随着科学技术的迅速发展,国际文化交流日益频繁,作为一个音乐文化创作有素的东方民族,理应拿出本民族音乐的独创作品奉献于世界,共同为丰富世界乐坛而努力。     

Music video as persuasive form: The case of the pseudo‐reflexive strategy

This essay examines music video as a media form designed to persuade television viewers to purchase musical recordings. By associating performers and their songs with strategically selected visual images, video makers hope to evoke impressions which might lead viewers to desire the recordings produced by the performers featured in video clips. One specific production strategy, “pseudo‐reflexivity,” involves employing imagery that demystifies some, but not all, of the aspects of the video making process in order to both draw audience attention away from the promotional motives underlying video production and enhance the anti‐commercial stance typically adopted by hard rock musicians.     

On being musical: Education towards inclusion

Abstract

This article questions educational practices that undermine ‘being’ musical. Where Western misconceptions about the nature of human musicality distance many individuals from meaningful engagement with an intrinsic part of their humanity, I challenge the status quo to argue for an inclusive educational practice which gives everyone an opportunity to ‘be’ musical. Despite evidence from neuroscience now supporting the understanding that humans are a musical species, the widespread neo-liberal oriented focus on vocational training fails to recognise music as an essential aspect of healthy human being. Where current polarised music education provision supports a discriminatory system that leads to widespread underdeveloped musicality, I draw on Gadamer and Dewey to explore how musicking integrates cultural development and to question the value of a practice that leaves many of us musically disabled. Including examples of teaching practices that engage and transform, I argue the case for an enriched, broader curriculum that no longer sees music as a ‘frill’.     

小乐器与音乐课堂教学整合策略探研

小乐器与音乐课堂教学整合,能丰富音乐课堂教学形式,激发学生学习兴趣,调动学生学习的积极性,提高教学效率和教学质量,提升学生音乐素养。文章以口琴为例,从小乐器走进音乐课堂的价值、小乐器与音乐课堂教学的整合、口琴与音乐课堂教学整合的注意事项三方面,对小乐器与音乐课堂教学整合策略进行探研。     

论钢琴教学中音乐表现能力的培养

提高音乐的表现能力应该从培养学生的读谱能力、想象力、理解力、敏锐的听力等音乐综合能力方面去着手.只有学生的音乐综合能力提高了,才能完整地表现音乐作品,才能使钢琴演奏更具有魅力.