Music is a powerful process and resource that can shape and support who we are and wish to be. The interaction between musical identities and learning music highlights school music education's potential contributions and responsibilities, especially in supporting young people's mental health and well-being. Through the distinctive stories and drawings of Aaron, Blake, Conor, Elijah, Michael, and Tyler, this book reveals the musical identities of teenage boys in their final year of study at an Australian boys' school. This text serves as an interface between music, education, and psychology using narrative inquiry. Previous research in music education often seeks to generalise boys, whereas this study recognises and celebrates the diverse individual voices of students where music plays a significant role in their lives. Adolescent boys' musical identities are examined using the theories of identity work and possible selves, and their underlying music values and uses are considered important guiding principles and motivating goals in their identity construction. A teaching and learning framework to shape and support multiple musical identities in senior secondary class music is presented. The relatable and personal stories in this book will appeal to a broad readership, including music teachers, teacher educators, researchers, and readers interested in the role of music in our lives. Creative and arts-based research methods, including narrative inquiry and innovative draw and tell interviews, will be particularly relevant for research method courses and postgraduate research students.

Music is a powerful process and resource that can shape and support who we are and wish to be. The interaction between musical identities and learning music highlights school music education’s potential contributions and responsibilities, especially in supporting young people’s mental health and well-being. Through the distinctive stories and drawings of Aaron, Blake, Conor, Elijah, Michael, and Tyler, this book reveals the musical identities of teenage boys in their final year of study at an Australian boys’ school. This text serves as an interface between music, education, and psychology using narrative inquiry. Previous research in music education often seeks to generalise boys, whereas this study recognises and celebrates the diverse individual voices of students where music plays a significant role in their lives. Adolescent boys’ musical identities are examined using the theories of identity work and possible selves, and their underlying music values and uses are considered important guiding principles and motivating goals in their identity construction. A teaching and learning framework to shape and support multiple musical identities in senior secondary class music is presented. The relatable and personal stories in this book will appeal to a broad readership, including music teachers, teacher educators, researchers, and readers interested in the role of music in our lives. Creative and arts-based research methods, including narrative inquiry and innovative draw and tell interviews, will be particularly relevant for research method courses and postgraduate research students.

Recorded Music in Creative Practices: Mediation, Performance, Education brings new critical perspectives on recorded music research, artistic practice, and education into an active dialogue. Although scholars continue to engage keenly in the study of recordings and studio practices, less attention has been devoted to integrating these newer developments into music curricula. The fourteen chapters in this book bring fresh insight to the art and craft of recording music and offer readers ways to bridge research and pedagogy in diverse educational, academic, and music industry contexts. By exploring a wide range of genres, methods, and practices, this book aims to demonstrate how engaging with recordings, recording processes, material artefacts, studio spaces, and revised music history narratives means we can promote new understandings of the past, more creative performance in the present, and freer collaboration and experimentation inside and outside of the recording studio; enhance creative teaching and learning; inform and stimulate reform of the institutional processes and structures that frame musical training; and ultimately promote more diverse music curricula and communities of practice. This book will be of value to educators, researchers, practitioners (performers, composers, recordists), students in music and music-related fields, recording enthusiasts, and readers with a keen interest in the subject.

Relating to both the practice of teaching media studies and also to theoretical questions within media and cultural studies, this study examines pop music, media studies and the micro-cultural politics of adolescence. It argues that media education has neglected pop music, and that, as something of enormous significance in the lives of young people, it merits a serious place in the field.; The author provides accounts of media studies in action, including detailed accounts of classroom discussions, interviews with students and teachers, examples of students' work and their biographical reflections. He links this to broader debates both within cultural studies and around the place of pop music in young people's lives.; "Teen Spirits" should be of interest to students of media and cultural studies, as well as to practicing teachers, and readers with an interest in questions of youth and identity.

Growing Musicians: Teaching Music in Middle School and Beyond focuses on teaching adolescents within the context of a music classroom, regardless of content area (orchestra, band, choir, or general music). It provides a look at the importance of music courses in the lives of adolescents as they navigate the path between being a child and an adult. As every music student is completely unique, there is no one-size-fits-all prescriptive way of working with this age group. Rather, music educators must approach adolescents with high musical standards and aspirations to learn and achieve within music; a willingness to honor the individuality of each adolescent musician; a sense of structure, but an ability to be flexible; a desire to foster and promote a safe classroom environment where students feel empowered to be themselves and speak openly about what they think and believe; an understanding that music classes are not only safe places where students learn how to become better musicians but also better people through musical experiences focused on humanity and empathy; and a dose of humor, or at least the ability to acknowledge that adolescents are extremely funny whether or not they realize it. In addition, this book encourages pre-service and practicing music educators to mindfully examine and better understand their own teaching practices.

“Since singing is so good a thing,I wish all men would learne to sing” (William Byrd, 1588) Over the centuries, there has been reluctance among boys and men to become involved in some forms of singing. Perspectives on Males and Singing tackles this conundrum head-on as the first academic volume to bring together leading thinkers and practitioners who share their insights on the involvement of males in singing. The authors share research that analyzes the axiomatic male disinclination to sing, and give strategies designed to engage males more successfully in performing vocal music emphasizing the many positive effects it can have on their lives. Inspired by a meeting at the Australian symposium ‘Boys and Voices’, which focused on the engagement of boys in singing, the volume includes contributions from leading authorities in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the United States and Europe.

Music is a tremendously powerful channel through which people develop their personal and social identities. Music is used to communicate emotions, thoughts, political statements, social relationships, and physical expressions. But, just as language can mediate the construction and negotiation of developing identities, so music can also be a means of communication through which aspects of people's identities are constructed. Music can have a profound influence on our developing sense of identity, our values, and our beliefs, be it from rock music, classical music, or jazz. Musical identities (MacDonald, Hargreaves and Miell, 2002) was unique in being in being one of the first books to explore this fascinating topic. This new book documents the remarkable expansion and growth in the study of musical identities since the publication of the earlier work. The editors identify three main features of current psychological approaches to musical identities, which concern their definition, development, and the identification of individual differences, as well as four main real-life contexts in which musical identities have been investigated, namely in music and musical institutions; specific geographical communities; education; and in health and well-being. This conceptual framework provides the rationale for the structure of the Handbook. The book is divided into seven main sections. The first, 'Sociological, discursive and narrative approaches', includes several general theoretical accounts of musical identities from this perspective, as well as some more specific investigations. The second and third main sections deal in depth with two of the three psychological topics described above, namely the development of and individual differences in musical identities. The fourth, fifth and sixth main sections pursue three of the real-life contexts identified above, namely 'Musical institutions and practitioners', 'Education', and 'Health and well-being'. The seventh and final main section of the Handbook - 'Case studies' - includes chapters which look at particular musical identities in specific times, places, or contexts. The multidisciplinary range and breadth of the Handbook's contents reflect the rapid changes that are taking place in music, in digital technology, and in their role in society as a whole, such that the study of musical identity is likely to proliferate even further in the future.