Engaging Musical Practices

Whether you are a pre-service, newly-hired, or veteran elementary general music teacher, Engaging Musical Practices: A Sourcebook on Elementary General Music offers a fresh perspective on topics that cut across all interactions with K-5th grade music learners. Chapter authors share their expertise and provide strategies, ideas, and resources to immediately apply their topics; guiding focus on inclusive, social, active, and musically-engaging elementary general music practices.

Middle school general music may be a student’s last encounter with school music. A practical book with accessible pedagogical resources on middle school general music is needed for methods courses and music practitioners' use. The book Engaging Musical Practices: A Sourcebook for Middle School General Music presents numerous ways to engage adolescents in active music making that is relevant to their lives so that they may be more apt to continue their involvement with music as a lifetime endeavor. Structured in twelve chapters, the book begins with perspectives on adolescent development and working with students with special needs. Five chapters are devoted to the pedagogy of teaching students practical musical skills such as singing, playing the keyboard, guitar, drums and percussion. Chapters on starting a steel band, using informal and formal music learning strategies, incorporating technology, implementing world music techniques, composing in the classroom, and the use of music-based learning centers lead the reader into implementing musical approaches focused on the doing of making music. The book is filled with musical examples, sample rubrics, and resource lists that take the reader beyond the book’s content. Engaging Musical Practices provides exciting and classroom-tested content that connects in and out of school music making for adolescents, generating excitement for musical participation. This book is a necessity for any practitioner who teaches students in the middle grades or as a text for secondary general music methods courses.

Engaging Musical Practices: A Sourcebook for Instrumental Music is a long awaited compilation of best practices for instrumental music education. This unique book contains practical and pedagogically oriented chapters written by leaders in the field of instrumental music education. Designed for instrumental music teachers or for use in instrumental methods courses, the book covers a wide range of topics, such as: student readiness for instrumental music beginning an instrumental music program teaching instrumental music at the intermediate and advanced levels working with strings and orchestras motivating students incorporating improvisation into the curriculum selecting repertoire based on curricular goals engaging students in assessment marching band pedagogy and techniques integrating technology considering “traditional” instrumental music practice becoming an instrumental music teacher communicating effectively with stakeholders Contributions by James Ancona and Heidi Sarver, Kimberly Ackney and Colleen Conway, Christopher Azzara, William Bauer and Rick Dammers, Brian Bersh, Suzanne Burton & Rick Townsend, Patricia Campbell and Lee Higgins, Robert Gardner, Richard Grunow, Mike Hewitt and Bret Smith, Dan Isbell, Nate Kruse, Chad Nicholson, Alden Snell, and David Stringham.

Engaging Musical Practices: A Sourcebook for Middle School General Music presents numerous ways to engage adolescents in active music making that is relevant to their lives so that they may be more apt to continue their involvement with music as a lifetime endeavor.

Engaging in Community Music: An Introduction focuses on the processes involved in designing, initiating, executing and evaluating community music practices. Designed for both undergraduate and graduate students, in community music programmes and related fields of study alike, this co-authored textbook provides explanations, case examples and ‘how-to’ activities supported by a rich research base. The authors have also interviewed key practitioners in this distinctive field, encouraging interviewees to reflect on aspects of their work in order to illuminate best practices within their specialisations and thereby establishing a comprehensive narrative of case study illustrations. Features: a thorough exploration and description of the emerging field of community music; succinctly and accessibly written, in a way in which students can relate; interviews with 26 practitioners in the US, UK, Australia, Europe, Canada, Scandinavia and South Africa, where non-formal education settings with a music leader, or facilitator, have experienced success; case studies from many cultural groups of all ages and abilities; research on life-long learning, music in prisons, music and ritual, community music therapy, popular musics, leisure and recreation, business and marketing strategies, online communities – all components of community music.

Every day people come together to make music. Whether amateur or professional, young or old, jazz enthusiasts or rock stars, what is common to all of these musical groups is the potential to create communities of musical practice (CoMP). Such communities are created through practices: ways of engaging, rules, membership, roles, identities and learning that is both shared through collective musical endeavour and situated within certain sociocultural contexts. Ailbhe Kenny investigates CoMP as a rich model for community engagement, musical participation and transformation in music education. This book is the first to produce a valid and reliable in-depth study of music communities using a community of practice (CoP) framework - in this case focusing on the social process of musical learning. Employing case study research within Ireland, three illustrations from particular sociocultural, genre-specific, economic and geographical contexts are examined: an adult amateur jazz ensemble, a youth choir, and an online Irish traditional music web platform. Each case is analysed as a distinct community and phenomenon offering sharpened understandings of each sub-culture with specific findings presented for each community.

Engaging Students with Music Education is a groundbreaking book about using DJ decks and urban music in mainstream schools to re-engage disaffected learners and develop a curriculum which better reflects overall contemporary tastes. Many young learners are ‘at risk’ of exclusion; this book argues that for such individuals, the implications of such a shift in the music curriculum could be especially positive. Drawing extensively on the author’s own wealth of teaching experience, and bridging the gap between practice and theory, this book demonstrates through case studies that DJ decks can prove extremely valuable in mainstream classroom situations across the secondary school age ranges. Addressing challenging and crucial topics, combining rigorous theoretical analysis with practical suggestions, the book addresses questions such as: Are DJ decks actually a musical instrument, and are they suitable for classroom teaching? Will Ofsted's school inspectors approve of music teaching involving DJ decks and urban music? If we bring urban music into the classroom, will this further marginalise classical music? Are DJing and MCing skills recognised within examination specifications, at least in the UK? Current teachers will find the practical advice on how to incorporate DJ decks and urban music into their classroom especially helpful, whilst educational researchers will be captivated by the critical discussion of the child-centred tradition and a theoretical approach which stretches from ‘continental’ philosophy to practice-based reflection. With an insistence that the starting point for music education should always be the interests and experiences of the learners, this book is essential reading for those music teachers and researchers interested in the benefits of non-standard music-making in the classroom.

Exploring and expanding upon current understandings of early childhood music education, this book provides a much-needed response to the rapid social, cultural and technological developments affecting children’s experience of music today. Critical New Perspectives in Early Childhood Music returns to the core question of how children engage, participate and learn through music, and how we are to best harness musical resources to their benefit. Chapters move beyond conservative or traditional models of practice and draw upon new and emerging insights from the fields of childhood studies, neuroscience, psychology and sociology. In-depth analysis of research and real examples from practice illustrate the strengths and possible shortcomings of each approach and acknowledge the diverse impacts of digitisation, increased child autonomy, intensive parenting practices, and cultural and economic diversity on the child’s experience of music. An invaluable theoretical overview of current thinking in relation to contemporary musical childhoods, this book will support and challenge students and early childhood music educators as they rethink practice for the present day.