In this article the author attempts to briefly review styles of research and consider some implications for music education. It is argued that, although research constitutes a limitless range of activities, there are none the less certain essential conditions to be met. General areas for research are identified that seem central to music education. Note. This article first appeared in the International Journal of Music Education, No. 1 (May 1983), and is reprinted with permission of the editor and the International Society of Music Education.

The writer offers an analysis of examples of music (which can be heard on the accompanying cassette tape) composed by pupils as part of their ordinary class music lesson. He suggests that, like any other music, children's compositions can be approached as a quasi-symbolic image of consciousness. The process of skill learning and the act of musical creation are closely connected, even in some sense identical. This way of understanding children's music has implications for the initiation of composition work in class, and for the assessment of that work.

In traditional music education, music history, its appreciation and theoretical understanding, and the playing of music have usually been taught as separate entities. Students are rarely given the chance to combine these elements in one integratedactivity. Thus theoretical points may seem irrelevant, arbitrary and isolated from practical performance, whilst historical developments of style are often not fully appreciated when discussed apart from ‘real’ playing and technicalunderstanding.

This article describes a class for adults of mixed musical ability at Goldsmiths' College, London. Within the School of Adult and Community Studies a number of classes and workshops take place, under the overall heading of ‘Jazzand Pop Musicianship’. This particular class was concerned with two of the most important areas of Caribbean music: reggae and calypso.

The aim of this article is to explore some important issues which music educators have raised concerning our work on the use of popular music in teaching and concerning the sociology of music thesis that underpins this work. Following a brief résumé of our perspective, we shall address four criticisms that have been made fairly generally by a number of reviewers of Whose Music? (Shepherd et al. 1977), and of the Cambridge University Press books (Vulliamy & Lee, 1976, 1982a) and the Routledge Popular Music Series (Vulliamy & Lee, 1982b). These criticisms are, first, that we hold an over-socially determined view of music; secondly that we have overstressed the qualitative differences between various musical traditions, especially in their differing relationships to analytic musical notation; third, that the culturally relative view of music which we espouse is both suspect theoretically and potentially anti-educational in practice; and, finally, that many of our suggestions for a reform of music teaching are impractical. Our hope is that we can dispel some ambiguities in our earlier work concerning these important but complex issues and thus leave music educators in a better position to appraise the relevance of our thesis.

In the music of English ritual dances we have an important though rarely exploited resource for creative work in the classroom. The author examines the range of materials available in the collections of Cecil Sharp and Herbert MacIlwaine, and describes a project in a Lincolnshire Junior School in which children, using Orff instruments, developed their own musical ideas starting from a traditional Derbyshire. Morris tune. They retained the essential characteristics of the tune while, at the same time, making imaginative use of the very considerable possibilities offered for melodic and rhythmic variation.

In January 1982 a research project on the assessment of music was set up in Dundee College of Education. The remit of the Project is to investigate new ways of assessing the teaching of music as a practical subject within the 14–16 age range.

Action research was placed under the direction of Mrs Marion Cameron de Quincey, Senior Lecturer in Educational Psychology. Dr Ian Macdougall a member of staff in the Music Department of Wester Hailes Education Centre, a six-year comprehensive school in Edinburgh, was invited and appointed to carry out the necessary fieldwork.

The Project, originally scheduled to end in late 1984, is – as a result of interest already created – likely to be extended for a further two years.