This issue – the first of our 21st anniversary year – has two clear themes: the teaching and learning of world musics, and the assessment of musical performance and understanding. Within these themes, the papers present accounts of research at all levels of music teaching, from nursery to higher education, and range across diverse geographical contexts: Australia, China, the UK, the USA and Zambia. There is evidence here of a wide-ranging research community in music education, which would have been hard to imagine when the British Journal of Music Education was founded in 1984.