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This chapter focuses on the subjection of improvisation in medieval music practice. It argues that if ‘improvisation’ with its modern overtones is not properly medieval, if instead medieval music was produced through methods of composition that do not differentiate ‘written’ and ‘oral’music — or writing and oral process — which do not differentiate methods of composition or characteristics of the product, then we must also try out a different conception of music writing, as a contingent, not a constituent aspect of the music-making complex, an aspect with some autonomy, with its own aims, values, purposes, prestige, reciprocating with its own influence on music, not as something ancillary and merely utilitarian.

Historically, music listening became a part of music education curricula when broadcasting and recording made both live and recorded performances widely available to school students. David Elliott claims that the most expert form of listening is listening within the act of making music. This chapter explores where Elliott places music listening in the context of the praxial philosophy he articulates in his 1995 book Music Matters: A New Philosophy of Music Education, the implications of his writings about music listening for music educators and music students, and other models and thinking that can contribute to the professional dialogue about music listening. Throughout his book, Elliott emphasizes actions — specifically, the actions of making music, which he labels “musicing”. He states that listening is “a covert (or internal) form of thinking-in-action and knowing-in-action that is procedural in essence”. One of the challenges in reading Elliott's work with respect to listening is that procedural knowledge is not the equivalent of music making.

Mounting evidence indicates that making music, dancing, and even simply listening to music activates a multitude of brain structures involved in cognitive, sensorimotor, and emotional processing. It has been hypothesized that such activation has beneficial effects on psychological and physiological health, but there is still a lack of systematic high-quality research confirming such hypotheses. To lay out the basis for such research, this chapter focuses on the neural correlates of music-evoked emotions, and their health-related autonomic, endocrinological, and immunological effects. It starts with the question as to how music actually evokes an emotion, and some thoughts on the different routes through which music might evoke emotions.

Musicality is an inherited biological predisposition that is unique to the human species. This chapter argues that music learning (whether structured or informal) happens very early, and long before we used to believe, and that it takes place as a result of children's innate propensity for learning. Indeed, children's spontaneous music making, from the first mother-infant musical interactions to playground rhymes and jeers, is the springboard of music learning. However, the contexts in which early musical experiences occur are critical, and adult interventions require balancing challenge and skill to achieve musical focus and self-growth in young children, as David Elliott suggests teachers should do at all ages. This chapter examines children's musical understanding, memory, and spontaneity, early childhood music education and its relation to Elliott's praxial philosophy, musical experiences based on context, “flow” in early childhood music experiences, multiculturalism in early childhood music education, music making and music listening in early childhood, and musical creativity in children.

In his 1995 book Music Matters: A New Philosophy of Music Education, David Elliott argues that music is inherently multicultural. Elliott synthesized elements of a post-positivist epistemology emerging in education, cognitive studies, aesthetics, and musicology with the musical and cultural inclusiveness of ethnomusicology. This chapter examines some core concepts and definitions and presents a number of counterexamples and arguments to soften Elliott's position on musical performance and listening. In addition, the chapter problematizes notions of authenticity and multiculturalism in order to avert simplistic models in the actual delivery of music education. Before considering the practical, pedagogical applications of Elliott's praxial philosophy, its conceptual foundations are first discussed, beginning with a definition of the term “music”. The notions of mind and body in music making as well as authenticity, context, and representation are also explored.

This chapter has two main topics: Firstly, music-making (in terms of singing and playing instruments) is described as an activity that has to be seen in the context of the general human (musical) development and that is subject to specific changes during the course of life. Secondly, the connection between music-making and health is portrayed as an interaction in which music affects health and vice versa, music-making exerts an influence on health. The effects and the extent of this interaction depend largely on the kind and context of music-making.

In his praxial philosophy of music education, David Elliott argues that music education must embody the essence of music as a worldwide array of social-artistic practices, as something that people everywhere “do” musically (as listeners and makers). This is especially the case in the education of children. Young children do not separate thinking, listening, doing, playing, and learning. Many approaches to childhood education stress the active participation of children in music making prior to learning theoretical concepts about music (Elliott's “formal knowledge”). This chapter examines the varied and dynamic world of elementary music education in relation to selected principles in Elliott's 1995 book Music Matters: A New Philosophy of Music Education. It discusses Elliott's praxialism and its compatibility with many traditional approaches to elementary music education, teaching children about musicianship, composition, arrangement, and improvisation in music, use of technology in music education, conducting, movement, music listening, and myths about the education of children.

This chapter suggests three broad perspectives of community music: community music as the “music of a community,” community music as “communal music making,” and community music as an active intervention between a music leader or leaders and participants. This book covers the third definition. The chapter outlines four questions: What is community music? What are the histories of community music and what can we learn from them? Where are the illustrations of practice? and Can a theoretical framework be developed that would help describe and understand community music practices? The book is divided into two sections. Firstly, “Inheritances and Pathways” presents three main themes: a historic perspective through which to understand the emergence of an international field; a consideration of what makes community music a distinctive enterprise; and illustrations of practice from across the world. Secondly, “Interventions and Counterpaths” utilizes the practice of community music to reveal philosophical strategies that enables an approach to analysis, discussion and understanding. Finally, Chapter 12, “Another Opening” explores future implications and directions for community music teaching and learning, employment, and practice.

Music educators commonly agree that the primary purpose of general music education is to enable young people to progress musically by acquiring skills and understandings through musical experience itself. The praxial philosophy of David Elliott offers direct assistance to general music teachers because its concepts of music making and listening take into account the primarily embodied nature of music and offer clear guidance for musically educating children. The praxial view of general music education affirms the complexity of children as reflective music makers and validates listening, performing, improvising, composing, arranging, and conducting as interdependent forms of creative doing. This philosophical acknowledgment of the musical wholeness and complexity of children as reflective music makers is to be applauded. What matters in general music, then, is that music teachers affirm children's musical potentials and capabilities, widen their musical access, and strengthen professional practice. This chapter makes explicit how practical applications of the praxial philosophy can enhance the quality of general music programs.

This chapter investigates the locations and modes of musical performance in the residences of the nobility in seventeenth-century Rome, indicating the differences between this period and the Renaissance. In particular, instances of music-making in the courts of princes and cardinals are identified and described, in relation to considerations of etiquette, social conventions and anthropology. This research, based on first-hand documentary research in the archives of Roman noble families, has revealed unexpected locations for music-making, which cannot always be justified in terms of acoustic or aesthetic criteria. Particular attention is paid to the places where instruments were stored, as recorded in inventories, and their typology.

David Elliott argues for a multidimensional and contextual view of musical creativity. He proposes a dialectical process between the standards and traditions of a musical style domain, the music makers and listeners who make up the domain's human field, and individual music makers as performers, improvisers, composers, arrangers, and conductors. Elliott's concept of creativity goes far beyond traditional notions of creativity as composing to include all forms of music making including composition and improvisation. This chapter examines the relationship between Elliott's praxial philosophy of creative experience in music education and the findings of a range of current research studies investigating children's creative processes, products, and achievements.

This chapter examines the role of creativity in learning and teaching through research on how flow is experienced in music activity. Engagement in tasks whose challenges invite a person's best efforts generates flow. In order to sustain this optimal experience, skills must improve to meet new challenges, and in turn, challenges must improve to continue attracting enhanced skills, thus creating an ideal learning situation. This dynamic interaction, also known as emergent motivation, is self-perpetuating: as an individual's skill level improves through practice, challenges must become increasingly complex. The chapter adopts a model of creativity involving an individual's active construction of musical meaning through responsive interaction with [culturally understood] musical materials. Music-making is interpreted as creative action, a framework evolving from a focus on the function and pervasiveness of music in the lives of young children and the unfettered, honest quality of their interactions with music.

This chapter examines David Elliott's definition of musicing based on his praxial philosophy of music education and argues that a primary reason for music making is identity affirmation. In his 1995 book Music Matters: A New Philosophy of Music Education, David Elliott is mostly concerned with technical and performative aspects of musicing, which offer musicers limited identities. Because context is the playground for identity formation, Elliott's discussion of context is considered and some extensions are given. Several examples that suggest diversified issues for Elliott's theorizing are provided. These issues are discussed from the perspective of feminist politics, which celebrates and recognizes difference. The chapter also considers the question: When will music education theorizing catch up with and recognize the last twenty years of theorizing in other disciplines.

A different approach to music-making in groups is that of community music, a form of musical activity that is designed to transform and mobilize communities. This approach has many similarities to other forms of community art, and has considerable potential to achieve more than purely musical goals in terms of identity, health, and wellbeing. This chapter considers in more detail what is meant by the term community and how it connects with community music. It explores a number of examples from diverse settings, and looks at the short- and long-term impact of community music on the participants and the wider community.

This chapter considers the potentially deleterious effects on performers of making music. These have been shown to include occupational stress, musculoskeletal disorders, and non-musculoskeletal disorders including performance anxiety. Such problems seem to be attributable, in part, to performers' lifestyles when they were students, according to the findings of research exploring music performance students' attitudes to health, health-promoting lifestyles, self-reported experiences of ill health, and levels of fitness. While many music colleges and university music departments recognize that it is important for health promotion to be prioritized within the curriculum, the chapter argues that the changes in training for musicians should be made from the earliest stages, so that they learn not only to prevent injury and avoid other disorders, but also to enhance their health and wellbeing.

In his 1995 book Music Matters: A New Philosophy of Music Education, David Elliott argues that music is a form of intelligent action and knowledge. More specifically, he considers music (and the other arts) as modes of thinking and knowing. This chapter examines Elliott's praxial philosophy on composition and improvisation in relation to two central themes: composing and improvising as intentional activities capable of engaging students in reflective musical thinking; and the processes and products of composing and improvising as inseparable from the contexts in which they are situated. The more promising conception of music in Elliott's praxial philosophy of music education is grounded in an awareness of the importance of critical reflection in (not merely about) human action. Elliott conceives music making (which, he insists, always involves listening) as unfolding “thoughtfully and knowingly” through the intentional actions of “selecting, deploying, directing, adjusting, and judging”. Elliott also contends that composing and improvising are “situated”, meaning that they should be taught in context.

This chapter presents some of the theoretical formations and research that supports the work of qualified music therapists in promoting healthy and secure attachment between parents and infants where disruption to a secure relational bond has occurred, or is vulnerable in some way. It considers the characteristics of the innate musicality of the very young infant, and discusses the mutual regulation potentials of music making between caregivers and their developing infants. For the purposes of this chapter, and indeed this book, the definition of infant used is the broadest possible; from birth until three years and eleven months of age.

This chapter discusses the gap between the arrival of American musical romanticism and the emergence of musical modernism during the first few decades of the twentieth century. Unlike previous reports, it introduces Los Angeles as the center of music in 1910, due to the fact that there were more musicians and music teachers working there than any other city in America. The chapter then goes on to explain the various topics studied in this book, which is concerned with music making and popular music during the Progressive Era, as well as the experiences and careers of several musicians. It also provides a brief overview of the three main parts of the book.