International Journal of Music Education

Substantial efforts have been made since the Khmer Rouge regime to revitalize traditional Cambodian music genres. While they have met with some success, local circumstances still present many difficulties for the transmission of traditional music to the younger generations. This study explores the challenges in learning and teaching traditional Cambodian music, as well as incentives, from the viewpoint of a group of students, teachers, and master-artists involved in the transmission activities of one non-governmental organization (NGO). Better understanding the challenges may help policy-makers, NGOs, and artists themselves to overcome them; better understanding the factors that encourage young people to learn (and older people to teach) may help safeguarding efforts at a critical juncture in the future of these art forms. Based primarily on interview and observational data from fieldwork in 2013 and 2014, the findings of this study underscore three challenges in particular to the transmission of traditional music genres in contemporary Cambodia: musical and technical difficulties, the changing social function of the genres, and economic pressures. In addition to intrinsic motivation, participants identified economic gain as a key incentive for young people to learn these genres. The author makes suggestions for overcoming the challenges and further motivating young people to learn traditional Cambodian music.

The purpose of this study was to develop a valid and reliable rating scale to assess jazz rhythm sections in the context of jazz big band performance. The research questions that guided this study included: (a) what central factors contribute to the assessment of a jazz rhythm section? (b) what items should be used to describe and assess a jazz rhythm section performance? (c) how should the items be categorized? (d) what differences among jazz rhythm sections exist at three performance achievement levels? and (e) what criteria best predict group membership into three performance achievement levels? Items were gathered from research and literature related to the assessment, teaching, and general discussions related to the jazz rhythm section. Twenty-nine item statements were paired with a four-point Likert scale. One hundred and twenty-two responses were gathered from 41 volunteer raters. The results of the data were factor analyzed and yielded a two-factor structure including rhythmic support/drive and style/clarity. The 16-item scale accounted for 79.23% of the variance and the alpha reliability was estimated at 0.986. The rhythmic support/drive factor contributed most to discriminating between overall group differences. More specifically, five out of the 16 items contributed most to discriminating between groups.

The purpose of this research was to investigate the causes attributed by undergraduate music students to situations of failure and success in public music performance. Attributional Theory has been used in this research as the theoretical framework to understand how situations of success and failure are interpreted by the person of the activity. The analysis was conducted from an Intrapersonal perspective of motivation, i.e., how the attributions made by the students doing an undergraduate course in music revealed their notions and beliefs. The methodology used included a non-probabilistic survey and the data were collected through a self-administered questionnaire involving 130 undergraduate music students of southern Brazil. The results show that in situations considered to be successful, the most frequent attributed causes are effort (77.7%), persistence (65.4%), and interest in the performance (63.1%), whereas in situations considered to be failures the most important aspects are emotional (60.8%), difficulty of the task (36.2%), and lack of effort (30.8%). This research shows that students who have more musical experience regard their performances as good or excellent, whereas those that have little experience do not view themselves in this way. The data reveal that the greater the importance that is attached to an activity, the more time is spent on preparing for it; in the same way students tend to be more engaged with musical activities and devote more time to them when they are aware of their skills and value them. Music students feel responsible for their results, which shows that they are engaged in their learning and seek to satisfy an inner need to achieve success.

This qualitative research study seeks to examine definitions of Singapore music, music by Singapore composers and musics of/in Singapore through the eyes of tertiary music educators in a local institute of teacher education, and to determine pedagogical implications of such definitions in the space of the music classroom. Extensive informal interviews with seven tertiary music educators (key informants) serve as the methodological base for this phenomenological study. Findings suggest that music educators should give focus to the historical, socio-cultural and musical characteristics of the lived and living musical practices that comprise Singapore while being cognizant of contradictions brought forth by recent migratory flows and the emergence of a global city identity.

This study investigated the routine procedures employed by nine undergraduate piano students at a Brazilian university while learning and performing memorized pieces and the procedures employed using Chaffin’s performance cue (PC) protocols. The data were collected in two phases. In Phase I, each participant selected one piece that he or she had previously studied and memorized in the preceding academic semester. For Phase II, the students were introduced to Chaffin’s PC protocols, and they were allowed 10 weeks to memorize another piece of their own choosing. Thereafter, a second semi-structured interview with specific criteria was carried out, and the performance of the memorized piano piece was recorded. In Phase I, there were frequent references to structural and expressive cues. In Phase II, the employed PCs were shown to be related to the nature of the style of each piece, which in turn may indicate that explicit memory (content-addressable cues) seems to be associated with the deliberate expression of a given piece’s stylistic structure. Furthermore, tempo also seems to modulate the frequency of the PCs necessary to guarantee a successful memorized performance, for example, a faster tempo results in fewer PCs being employed.

In 2008, Brazilian legislators approved a law that added music on a mandatory basis to the basic national school curriculum. Despite the possibilities afforded by this legislation, music educators affirm that many questions remain due to its ambiguity. Given the 2012 deadline for the implementation of this law, there is a need to understand how it was enacted across diverse settings. This study considers the implementation from the perspective of music teachers. Thus, in this interview study, we seek to understand the status of music education throughout the country according to the perspectives of music educators from private and public schools. Such perspectives are situated within reviews of educational history, legislation, policy, and research. Findings point toward the need to (a) address a shortage of music teachers; (b) better define the preparation of professional music educators; and (c) identify pedagogies which are likely to have the greatest impact in implementing this new law.

Even though there are demonstrated benefits of using online tools to support student musicians, there is a persistent challenge of providing sufficient and effective professional development for independent music teachers to use such tools successfully. This paper describes several methods for helping teachers use an online tool called iSCORE, including embedded online support, targeted email messages, webinars, and face-to-face workshops. Using contemporary frameworks for characterizing continuing professional development, the success of each of these teaching approaches, separately and in combination, is considered through an examination of teacher feedback, uptake of the tool by students, and the interview data from an advisory board made up of teachers, educators, software designers and developers, publishers, and business leaders. Inherent tensions and difficulties in designing appropriate professional development are discussed.

This case study explored the potential for using a synchronous online piano teaching internship as a service-learning project for graduate pedagogy interns. In partnership with the university, a local music retailer, and a local middle school, three pedagogy interns taught beginning piano to underprivileged teenaged students for 8 weeks. All instruction took place in the synchronous online environment using acoustic Disklavier pianos, Internet MIDI, Facetime, and traditional method books. As a result of the experience, the students demonstrated musical understanding and the pedagogy interns developed teaching techniques, displayed improved comprehension of course content, learned about current distance teaching technology, and considered the role of music education in society. Based on these results, it might be feasible to provide piano lessons to underserved populations in remote locations while offering meaningful internship experiences to pedagogy students through distance service-learning projects.

This article presents findings from an action research project that investigated instrumental teachers’ strategies for facilitating children’s learning of expressive music performance. Nine teachers and 14 pupils (aged 9–15) participated in this project, which consisted of 10 weeks of teaching. At the beginning and end of this period pupils’ concerts were held and performances were audio-recorded. Participating teachers used various strategies for improving students’ expressive performance: teacher’s enquiry, discussion, explanation of expressive devices, gestures and movements, singing, imagery, modelling, “projected performance” and listening to own recordings. According to teachers these strategies had been useful in lessons. However, analysis of assessments of students’ performances did not show a significant improvement. Four out of five pupils who did improve their expressiveness were taught by teachers who used enquiry and discussion of musical character and instruction about modifying expressive devices. This project influenced the practice of participating tutors as they focused more on teaching expressive performance.