Research Studies in Music Education, Ahead of Print.
This article explores community-based rock music education as a site for strengthening social cohesion in a context of postwar, interethnic divisions. Focusing on small and incremental changes, it examines the practices of Music Connects, a project in the Western Balkans, and its goals of revitalizing rock culture in support of a more inclusive social life and greater freedom of movement in the region. The article explores the ways that an organizational and participant focus on aesthetic practices and artistic goals can still contribute to social goals. It highlights three key tasks connected to rock music education and revitalization, captured in the novel conceptual constructs of rehearsal space, the incubator, and the expansion of normal. Drawing upon qualitative data gathered in 2019 and 2021 from 40 participants, the article tells a story of small social changes through music-making that added up to significant developments in the region, musically and socially.

Research Studies in Music Education, Ahead of Print.
Professional development, typically initiated by administrators to improve student achievement outcomes, is often irrelevant to the needs of early career music teachers. As music teacher educators, we were concerned about issues of importance to early career music teachers as they entered the music teaching profession. We explored conversation as a conduit of reflection and professional learning by convening a conversation group of five early career music teachers who gathered over six, one-hour-long meetings. Guiding their discussions were topics they identified in questionnaires administered before and during the study. Data included audio-visual recordings of the meetings, questionnaires, and researcher memos. Four themes emerged from our analysis of their conversations: (a) educating administrators and mentors, (b) knowing their place, (c) overcoming a lack of resources, and (d) giving students lifelong musical skills. We interpreted these findings through the lens of Snow’s principles of symbolic interactionism. The conversation group facilitated the music teachers’ move from the initial shock of sedimented school culture to a position of agency. The freedom of conversation around chosen topics of professional and personal importance provided the early career music teachers with choice, self-direction, collective support, and agency—key components of professional learning.

Research Studies in Music Education, Ahead of Print.
Embedding musicians’ occupational health training in music education curricula is widely recommended due to the well-documented high prevalence of performance-related health problems (PRHPs) among musicians across their lifespan. A scoping review was conducted to examine the range of evidence from implementations of musicians’ health education programs, regarding the maintenance of hearing, musculoskeletal, psychological, and vocal health, as well as injury prevention strategies to minimize the risk of PRHP. Eligible sources of evidence included published and unpublished studies reporting occupational health education programs (which may have incorporated information on physical or psychological health, exercise, or somatic movement training) implemented with pre-tertiary and tertiary music students and teachers. Studies reporting stand-alone psychological health education were excluded. Key characteristics from included studies were extracted and charted. Data charts outline commonalities across the reported results, including physical, psychological, educational, and behavioral change outcome measures. Out of 46 records included for data extraction, 35 reported programs with tertiary-aged music students, seven reported programs with pre-tertiary-aged music students, two reported programs with music teachers, and two reported systematic reviews. Reported benefits from this research with both pre-tertiary and tertiary music students suggest that musicians’ health education and injury prevention strategies reduce self-reported playing-related pain and music performance anxiety. However, future implementation studies need to address identified challenges such as effective behavior change and the enablers and barriers to the long-term adoption of strategies for optimal music performance and health outcomes. This review highlights the need for further research into designing and embedding musicians’ health education into all music training settings, including more implementations with pre-tertiary music students, as well as training to support the professional development needs of instrumental and vocal teachers.

Research Studies in Music Education, Ahead of Print.
Much has been written on the different learning paths of classical and popular musicians and the view that popular musicians can be marginalized within the musical hegemony. Adopting Lucas, Claxton, and Spencer’s creative dispositions model, this article explores the extent to which this might occur when popular musicians learn to become secondary classroom music teachers. Data were collected through a series of semi-structured interviews from three popular musicians on a Post-Graduate Certificate of Education (PGCE) Secondary Music program. Utilizing a qualitative approach, the findings suggest that popular musicians innately demonstrate imaginative, inquisitive, and collaborative creative musical capacities. However, learning to teach seems to significantly impact their pedagogic identity as they experience underlying performativity cultures and hierarchical relationships in schools. This article considers the risks associated with undervaluing the creative dispositions of popular musician teachers, including minimizing their potential to reconceptualize pedagogic expertise at a time of significant education reform in Wales.

Research Studies in Music Education, Ahead of Print.
Music performance is an intensive sensorimotor task that involves the generation of mental representations of musical information that are actively accessed, maintained, and manipulated according to the demands of the performance. Internal representations and external information interact through feedback and feedforward processes that adjust the musician’s motor behavior to optimize a musical performance. This study aimed to examine the relationship between altered sensory feedback and performance errors. Seventeen experienced pianists aged between 33 and 54 years performed Hanon Exercise N°1 from memory under four different conditions: (1) normal (normal sensory feedback); (2) closed fallboard (altered haptic and auditory feedback); (3) blindfolded (altered visual feedback); and (4) combined (blindfolded and closed fallboard; altered haptic, auditory, and visual feedback). Performance errors were quantified based on a video analysis of the performances. Results indicated that compared with normal performance, participants made significantly more note errors in the blindfolded condition and more bar-adding errors per trial in the closed fallboard condition. The comparison between the normal condition and the three altered sensory feedback conditions revealed the impact of altering sensory feedback in musical performance. These findings are discussed in the context of music learning.

Research Studies in Music Education, Ahead of Print.
Relationships with music are at the core of music education. However, they are rarely studied from learners viewpoints—especially those of exceptionally motivated, advanced students—as they are incorporated into the theoretical underpinning or methodological stance of research in instrumental education. In this research project we follow the musical lives of ten advanced, mastery-oriented adolescent instrumentalists. The focus of this first report of our narrative ethnography is on how their relationships with music manifest in written narratives on the role of music and instrument learning in their life. While corroborating findings of previous research, the results demonstrate many idiosyncracies in the trajectories of our participants, including critical events. The results show that studying relationships with music and their development may reveal complex ecological systems in instrument learning and interconnected theoretical concepts, such as self-regulation, self-efficacy, agency, autonomy, identity, and metacognition. These phenomena—which can be challenging to differentiate, adapt, and apply in terms of learning practices—may seem far-removed from everyday musical practices, but can be consolidated when looking at relationships with music as gateways to the learning of musical instruments.

Research Studies in Music Education, Volume 46, Issue 1, Page 3-3, April 2024.

Research Studies in Music Education, Ahead of Print.
In this article, we explore how deafness challenges the hierarchy of senses in music education. As part of a larger three-year research project focusing on memories of Finnish state schools for the d/Deaf, “Voices of a Silent People—Renovated Bodies,” this article concentrates on experiences of music education. The methodological starting point of the research project is sign history, with a focus on d/Deaf people’s signed memories. The interview data for the whole research project (N = 116) were collected by interviewing d/Deaf people in group discussions and individual interviews. There were 61 participants who produced the transcribed interview data related to the third substudy on music education (n = 61). Our critique of the hierarchy of senses in music education is based on Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological thought and, more specifically, the criticism of the mind–body, self–other, and subject–object dichotomies in the listening process. The results suggest that d/Deaf people can feel sound with their bodies. Sound is experienced holistically through different channels: body, touch, vision, and for some, through hearing or feeling bass frequencies. Sound is not categorized into perceptions of one sense. To conclude, four dimensions that make it possible to formulate more inclusive and multisensory music education are presented.

Research Studies in Music Education, Ahead of Print.
This framework synthesis investigates how notions related to expanding professionalism have manifested in recently published literature on popular music voice teaching. The reviewed literature was selected from a systematic mapping review conducted previously by the first two authors. The scope for the publication years was 2014 to 2020, and the included literature incorporated 64 titles of peer-reviewed articles, academic book and handbook chapters, and doctoral dissertations. The initial framework considered scholarship on expanding professionalism, and the directive themes for coding included forms of expertise and knowledge building, social and societal responsibility, and agency related to change. The data were examined from individual, societal, and institutional perspectives. The findings showed that notions related to expanding professionalism are used as means of legitimizing the academically emerging field. However, the professional development work results mostly from the agency of individual practitioners. Thus, support from higher music education institutes and professional organizations is needed to enable the professional sustainability of such practices and further the societal relevance of these institutional actors. This study contributes to the recent scholarship on expanding professionalism in music and music education. The emergent framework resulting from this synthesis can inform further empirical studies.

Research Studies in Music Education, Ahead of Print.
This article reflects on the “Hiddenness Index” we developed, implemented, and evaluated for Concertgebouworkest Young (Young), the youth orchestra of the Dutch Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra (Concertgebouworkest) for musicians with “hidden talents.” “Hiddenness” alludes to various barriers that young musicians aspiring to a career in Western classical music may face, due to their social identity and positioning. These barriers may cause their talent to remain underdeveloped, invisible, or undiscovered; that is, “hidden.” We developed the Index in response to Concertgebouworkest’s request for an “evaluation and learning tool.” Informed by intersectionality theory, it is an alternative to quantitative research into arts and culture, which takes a single-axis approach to the explanation of inequality in access to cultural production and participation. The first phase of our design-based research consisted of a theory- and practice-based mapping of the dimensions of “hiddenness.” The outcome was that Geographical, Socio-economic, Family networks, Ethno-cultural, and Confidence-support dimensions should form the basis of the Hiddenness Index, which was constructed as a composite indicator. In the second phase of research, the Index was applied to the backgrounds of Young participants. The evaluation of the Index’s strengths and weaknesses was central to the third phase. Complementing qualitative research, the Index offered a statistical way to evaluate the extent to which Young participants’ talents were hidden and which dimensions of hiddenness were most prevalent at the group level. The Index affirmed and illustrated intersectionality theory, including the way two or more dimensions can compensate or reinforce one another. Through the use of the Index, the Young team gained a better understanding of intersectionality, which enabled them to fine-tune the selection process for future cohorts. The Index helped the team members to check their preconceptions (unconscious bias) and made them more aware of and able to attend to the different needs of individual participants.